A playwright crafts the script for West Windsor’s arts council
By: Michael Redmond
Eduardo Garcia of Monroe knows the arts in New Jersey like the back of his hand.
Going back some three decades, Mr. Garcia who was named last year as executive director of West Windsor’s fledgling arts council has been front and center of many significant initiatives in the state’s cultural life.
As executive director of the Monmouth County Arts Council, Mr. Garcia was instrumental in the development of Red Bank’s Count Basie Theater as a regional arts center. At the time, the facilities issue was of prime importance to New Jersey’s artists and arts presenters, whose best efforts were being hamstrung by inadequate venues.
As it happens, the West Windsor Arts Council has a venue issue the transformation of an old firehouse on Alexander Road into a cultural center. Funds need to be raised. Directions need to be charted. Programs need to be developed. An identity needs to be defined.
"A year from now, I want to see us in the firehouse two months ago, I wanted to see us in the firehouse," Mr. Garcia said with a smile, during an interview in the home he shares with his wife, Antonina, adjunct professor of psychodrama at New York University. The couple has just moved there from Plainsboro, where they had lived some 20 years.
The Garcias met while pursuing postgraduate studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. They have a daughter, Alexandra ("Xan"), an actress who lives and works in Manhattan.
Mr. Garcia is genuinely excited by the firehouse project, but he’s quick to say that there’s a lot of work to be done.
"It’s going to be a wonderful challenge for the arts council to run a facility like that, but for now we’re seeking a temporary space, and soon we’ll have news about that, I hope," he said.
"I think we need this temporary facility to convince the community that what we plan to do with the firehouse is something that they’re really going to want. It’s a way to get the community excited by the project, and it also gives us the opportunity to work on our programming, to fine-tune. We can try things out, see what works, see what doesn’t, and assess the kinds of the programs the community responds to."
Mr. Garcia once served as the representative of the National Endowment for the Arts throughout the state. Those were turbulent times, but they taught people in the arts the hard lesson that culture belongs to the entire community, and that social standards and political realities can be ignored only at peril.
Those times also taught that the voices of all of America’s communities have to be heard not just the advocates of the European classical tradition and its American offshoots. A proud Tejano (a Mexican American from Texas), Mr. Garcia is in an ideal position to be sensitive to the concerns of West Windsor’s sizeable Chinese and Indian communities.
Also in the role of executive director, Mr. Garcia achieved a national profile with the Greater Philadelphia Arts Alliance, then turned around and used that experience to help stabilize the Newark Arts Council. While it’s true that he won’t be needing much "street cred" in West Windsor, it certainly can’t hurt.
Under the direction of Ernest L. Boyer of Princeton (1928-1995), U.S. Commissioner of Education during the Carter administration, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a passionate advocate for the arts in education, Mr. Garcia coordinated the work of the New Jersey Literacy in the Arts Task Force, a bipartisan panel charged by the Legislature to assess the state of the arts in New Jersey’s public schools and recommend improvements.
The task force’s 1989 report turned out to be a landmark for arts education and arts-in-education in the Garden State and attracted national attention, besides, influencing similar studies and projects in other states.
Mr. Garcia has also had considerable experience working with the private sector, the primary source of cultural funding in the United States. As manager of the Arts Challenge Fund, a collaborative of 22 of New Jersey’s leading foundations and corporate philanthropies, he facilitated meetings and focus groups throughout the state, identifying key cultural issues and creating a structure for grant applications addressing those issues. In effect, this process identified which cultural institutions and cultural projects it made sense for the private sector to invest in and, more to the point, why.
One of the more striking lines on Mr. Garcia’s resume is his chairmanship of the arts advisory board of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, which he was asked to help create following the untimely death of the former Hollywood star in 1982. He is proud of the role he has played in developing some of the foundation’s more innovative programs specifically those that concentrate on support for individual artists and on theater-allied artisans.
"I’m most happy that the foundation has a special program just for its former grant recipients, more than 500 artists, offering them continuing professional support for travel, for education, for special projects," he said. "And there are very few grantmakers in theater other than Princess Grace where non-actors, non-directors can turn for support costume designers, set designers, lighting designers. You cannot do theater and film without the talents of these people."
Mr. Garcia’s commitment to the needs of individual artists hits close to home. His father, the late Antonio Garcia, was a regional painter of note, whose abstract oils and watercolors and warm depictions of Tejano life grace his son’s walls. And Eduardo Garcia is himself an artist "a struggling artist," he is quick to say whose passion is the theater and whose art is playwrighting. A number of his dramas have been produced off-Off Broadway, and a production in England won the company a prize. "The company won for doing the play but the play didn’t win anything," he laughed.
Mr. Garcia admits that he doesn’t choose easy subjects. A particularly searing play of his explores an incestuous relationship, and "the play I’m working on now focuses on the question of why a person would confess to a crime they didn’t commit. I’m trying to understand this. I’m trying to get into the mind of such a person."
He feels that "being an artist has helped me immensely in being a good arts administrator. And when I’m not doing my art, my work suffers at least I think so and that’s a wakeup call. When I feel I’m not working up to par, I focus on my writing, I go to see an art show. That’s what gives me back my edge."
As American society moves forward into a new era increasingly defined by new media, concerns have been expressed regarding the viability of live artistic experience. Mr. Garcia feels no sense of alarm.
"I think the fears are overblown. Theater is always going to be what it’s always been. Live actors, live audience it’s been around at least 2,500 years now and I think it will always be around," he said.
"Just bring a kid to the theater and if it’s a good show, that’s all you need. A friend of mine was telling me about taking his kids to McCarter for the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ there that attracted so much notice. He said three hours flew by, there were no complaints. Artists just have to adjust to a changing technology, a changing society. We all have different talents and grasp different kinds of things. That’s what’s exciting."
The West Windsor Arts Council on the Web: www.westwindsorarts.org.

