Q&A with Adam Horowitz

Critics PageApril 2015

What is the United States
Department of Arts and Culture?

Adam Horowitz as Norman Beckett, USDAC Deputy Secretary, hosting the People's State of the Union at the Bowery Poetry Club.

The USDAC is the nation’s newest people-powered department, harnessing the power of art and culture to cultivate empathy, equity, and social imagination. We don’t have a federal line item or an office in DC, but that’s no obstacle for an “act of collective imagination!”

Who is Norman Beckett?
How did you decide on that name?

Norman Beckett is the Deputy Secretary of the USDAC, a whimsical bureaucrat conjuring Samuel Beckett and Norman Rockwell/Mailer. Who knows how he got that name? We just happen to look alike...

How can people get involved?

Visit www.usdac.us and enlist as a Citizen Artist. (You don’t have to be a U.S. citizen or an artist to be a Citizen Artist with the USDAC!) And take part in our next action, the 5th of July!

Adam Horowitz is Chief Instigator of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (www.usdac.us). He has worked with numerous organizations at the intersection of arts, education, and social change and traveled internationally as a performer, musician, and researcher of intercultural barter. He’s currently an Artist Fellow with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU and a Process Space Artist-in-Residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.