Honoring America's Artists

As Aretha Franklin, Steven Spielberg and August Wilson passed through a White House receiving line, President Clinton was overheard telling one guest, "If I could make Keillor laugh, I knew that I had achieved."

Humorist Garrison Keillor, director Spielberg, soul diva Franklin, playwright Wilson, and 14 others, as well as the Juilliard School for the Performing Arts, were awarded national arts and humanities medals Wednesday, chosen by the White House as American cultural treasures.

The medals go to individuals or institutions supporting the growth and availability of the arts and humanities to the general public.

"It gives America a chance to recognize our sons and daughters who have enriched our lives, made us laugh, made us think, made us cry, lifted us up when we were down," Mr. Clinton said at a White House dinner honoring the medal winners.

Earlier in the day, the president referred to Keillor — a writer and radio impresario best known for his public radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion" — as "our modern-day Mark Twain."

"With imagination, wit and also with a steel trap mind and deep conviction, Garrison Keillor has brought us together," said the president.

He said Keillor's humor and variety show about life in a fictitious small town in Minnesota "constantly reminds us how we're all connected and how it ought to keep us a little humble."

At a ceremony at Constitution Hall near the White House, Mr. Clinton said this year's winners of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal "defined in their own unique ways a part of who we are as a people and what we're about as a nation as we enter a new century and a new millennium."

American Indian ballet dancer Maria Tallchief and folk singer Odetta were among the musicians, writers and arts patrons so honored this year.

Odetta's 50 years of performing American folk and gospel reminds "us all that songs have the power to change the heart and change the world," Mr. Clinton said.

Tallchief helped put an American stamp on classical ballet, until recent decades a primarily European discipline, the president said.

The 1999 winners of the National Medal of the Arts are:

• Arts patron Irene Diamond
  
• Aretha Franklin
  
• Designer and architect Michael Graves
  
• Odetta, the "Queen of American Folk Music"
  
• The Juilliard School of Performing Arts in New York
  
• Writer and director Norman Lear
  
• Actress and producer Rosetta LeNoire
  
• Arts administrator Harvey Lichtenstein
  
• Singer Lydia Mendoza
  
• Sculptor George Segal
  
• Maria Tallchief

• Librarian Patricia M. Battin
  
• Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and journalist Taylor Branch
  
• New South scholar Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
  
• Garrison Keillor
  
• Television anchor and editor Jim Lhrer
  
• Political philosopher and author John Rawls
  
• Academy Award-winning filmmaker Spielberg
  
• Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson

By Joseph Schuman