Peggy Amsterdam: A '60s woman

When Peggy Amsterdam died of cancer Saturday at the age of 60, the Philadelphia Inquirer dutifully recorded her achievements as a local champion of the arts: Since she assumed the presidency of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance in 2000, the organization's membership doubled (to 385 arts and cultural groups); she successfully fought a city proposal to eliminate millions of public support dollars for the arts; she helped re-establish the city's Office of Arts and Culture; this year she successfully battled a proposed state sales tax on cultural performances; she also helped launch the Cultural Data Project, which provides arts advocates with hard facts and figures about the economic value of the arts and how to build audiences.

Peggy's Inquirer obit contained encomiums from no fewer than five public figures, from Mayor Nutter on down, testifying to her vision, leadership, passion, enthusiasm, energy and persistence, not to mention the engaging human touch she brought to her work. But to read the Inquirer's obit, you would think Peggy's life began in 2000, when she arrived at the Cultural Alliance. Even her biography on the Alliance's own website took us back only to 1993, when she was appointed director of Delaware's Division of the Arts.

These biographies neglected to address what to me is the most interesting question about this remarkable woman: Where did she come from? What experiences shaped her determination and her values?

The answer, as Peggy once acknowledged to me without dwelling on it, can be summed up in a single sentence: She was a product of the '60s, in the very best sense.

Toppling LBJ

Peggy Amsterdam was one of the thousands (millions?) of young Americans in the "'60s who— armed with nothing more than idealism, energy and anger at the machinations of old men in high places— took to the streets, first in support of civil rights and then in opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1968, when this groundswell convinced Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election, Peggy was a 19-year-old undergraduate art history major at George Washington University, just a half-dozen blocks from the White House. It was a remarkable demonstration of the effectiveness of non-violent political protest on behalf of a just cause, and she was part of it, albeit a very small part.

Eventually, of course, the Vietnam War ended and all those student activists confronted the new challenge of supporting themselves as adults. Some dropped out; others sold out; but many veterans of "the movement" chose to channel their energies in other creative directions. One result of this postwar release of youthful energy was Philadelphia's restaurant renaissance of the "'70s, led by former political activists like Steve Poses (who opened The Frog and Commissary) and Judy Wicks (at La Terrasse and later the White Dog Café)— innovators who, contrary to the prevailing credo of gourmets and wine snobs, perceived creative cuisine not as an end in itself but as a vehicle for bringing diverse people together.

If age had the energy….

Whether consciously or instinctively, Peggy Amsterdam applied much the same mindset to the arts. With an M.A. in art history, she began as a lecturer in art history at Northern Virginia Community College, then moved in 1975 to the Fairfax County (Va.) Council of the Arts. Within two years she was its executive director. Eventually she spent 16 years at Delaware's Division of the Arts, the last seven as director. She never actually ran an arts organization per se; her forte, like that of her contemporaries Poses and Wicks, was using her chosen field as a vehicle for bringing people together, ultimately for the greater good of society.

"If age only had the energy," goes the old adage, "and youth only had the experience." In Peggy's case, the positive vibrations from her uplifting work sustained her youthful energy and exuberance into the final triumphant decade of her life, in Philadelphia; but now, with the added benefit of maturity and wisdom, Peggy at 60 was a force every bit as formidable as those student demonstrators who drove LBJ from office in '68. And, I would argue, she was a lot more fun to be around, too.

For those of us who hope to leave the world a better place than we found it, the great challenge is this: In a constantly changing world, how do you adjust and grow without sacrificing your principles? Peggy passed that test better than most of us.

A not-so-shocking statistic

One of the eye-opening statistics turned up by Peggy's Cultural Data Project was its finding that 40% of the cultural organizations surveyed were operating in the red, and more than half were in danger of closing. Presumably this information was intended to galvanize arts supporters to save their beloved institutions.

But when you think about it, the same statistics probably apply to all human enterprises, not to mention humans themselves. (The average lifespan of a restaurant, for example, is said to be two years.) One day we are working at Scott Paper or Campbell Soup, reading the Bulletin or the Welcomat, shopping at Bonwit's or Nan Duskin or Wanamaker's or Encore Books, banking at First Pennsylvania or CoreStates, dining at Striped Bass or Susanna Foo, attending plays at the Philadelphia Drama Guild or concerts led by Riccardo Muti, basking in the reflected glow of Anne d'Harnoncourt or Gary Graffman, cheering or hissing Frank Rizzo or Allen Iverson; next day they are gone.

Nothing lasts forever. But communities endure; and the arts provide the adhesive that links a community's past to its future, bringing meaning to our otherwise pointless lives. To Hobbes the life of man was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Peggy perceived that our brief sojourn on this planet needn't be quite so solitary, nasty and brutish, and she showed us one very good way to improve it.♦


To read another tribute to Peggy Amsterdam by SaraKay Smullens, click here.
To read a response, click here.