WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Council on the Arts, the advisory body of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), will meet in a public session on Friday, March 26, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. Members of the public are invited to attend in person or log on to www.arts.gov for a live webcast. The meeting will be held in Room M-09 of The Nancy Hanks Center, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. The meeting will feature a presentation on the NEA's research report The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, and the swearing-in of Irvin Mayfield onto the Council.

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman will open the 169th meeting and swear in Irvin Mayfield as the NEA's newest National Council on the Arts member. Mayfield was nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Arts for a full six-year term until 2016. He will replace outgoing council member artist Jerry Pinkney. Mayfield is a jazz musician, bandleader, composer, arranger, recording artist, and cultural ambassador for his hometown of New Orleans. He is the founding artistic director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, a 15-piece ensemble that won the 2010 Grammy Award for its CD Book One on the World Village label. Mayfield is a professor at the University of New Orleans' College of Liberal Arts and also the founder of the university's New Orleans Jazz Institute.

Following the swearing in, the NEA will present a tribute to Bess Lomax Hawes, the former NEA Director of Folk and Traditional Arts responsible for launching the National Heritage Fellowships program, which honors master artists as living national treasures.

Next, NEA Director of Research and Analysis Sunil Iyengar will present NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2008 Results: Trends and Implications, an overview of the survey and a look at how arts groups and media outlets are using the data. The presentation will also discuss potential directions of the study and the relationships the data reveals between live arts attendance and arts creation/performance, arts learning, and arts participation through media. The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is the nation's largest and most representative periodic study of adult participation in arts events and activities, conducted by the NEA in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau.

Finally, Chairman Landesman will conclude the presentations with an update on his nationwide Art Works tour, which has currently visited a total of 12 cities, including Peoria, Illinois; Miami, Florida; and Detroit, Michigan.