Nancy Hanks (NEA)

Nancy Hanks (1927–1983) was the second chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). She was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon and served from 1969 to 1977, continuing her service under President Gerald R. Ford. During this period, Hanks was active in the fight to save the historic Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C. from demolition. In 1983, it was officially renamed the Nancy Hanks Center, in her honor, and today houses the offices of the NEA, among others.

Nancy Hanks was born in Miami Beach, Florida on December 31, 1927. She was a distant cousin of Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln, the mother of President Abraham Lincoln. She moved to Montclair, New Jersey, while she was in high school.

Hanks attended Duke University where she majored in political science and was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.

Hanks was the first woman to serve as the Chairman of the NEA and her political skills enabled her to increase NEA’s funding from US$8 million to US$114 million over her eight-year tenure.

Hanks's early work, before becoming NEA chairman, on the Advisory Committee on Government Organization connected her with Nelson Rockefeller. Nelson's brother John provided resources from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to the study of art. This resulted in The Performing Arts: Problems and Projects (1965) related to John Rockefeller's and Hanks's belief that the government should study, but not contribute to, the arts.

Nancy Hanks was the most effective and most successful of all of the Arts Endowment chairmen because she understood politics as well as how to be a diplomat. Hanks was astute at flattering members of Congress and fearlessly took control of the National Council of the Arts: Hanks' relationship to the National Council on the Arts was very different from Roger Stevens', the former chair. Stevens and his first Council members were peers, equals—and their actions and decisions were a true collaboration. Hanks was not from the arts community; she was much more a political than an artistic force. She controlled the Council as Stevens had never tried to do. The Council, in Hanks's years, did little more than ratify the chair, who was very strong in her management of them. Michael Straight describes Hanks's "imposing her will on the issues that mattered most to her.

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