‘A Renaissance man’: Jimmy Carter remembered for contributions to arts

Jimmy Carter will likely be remembered for his contributions to the arts – beyond being a three-time Grammy winner – more than any other US president, and one who is nominated again in 2025 for an audiobook, Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration.

Carter, who died on Sunday aged 100, was well-known for his association with musicians, particularly the Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, Charlie Daniels, and Willie Nelson, who later confirmed he had smoked marijuana on the roof of the White House with the late former president’s son, Chip Carter.

Jimmy Carter won an endorsement from the Allman Brothers in 1975, three months before the Iowa caucuses. His 1976 presidential run, he later said, was helped by the band, which raised $64,000 for his indebted campaign, allowing Carter to double that with matching government funds.

“Gregg Allman and the Allman Brothers just about put me in the White House,” Carter said in 2015.

After his death was announced on Sunday, musicians remembered Carter in posts on social media.

“President Jimmy Carter was a truly extraordinary man and a rare politician who always stood up and spoke out for idealism, compassion and human rights and particularly for the rights of women and those who suffered real oppression,” wrote Peter Gabriel, a longtime friend to Carter.

“Rest easy, Mr President. I’m sad for us, and happy for you. Your and Mrs. Rosalynn’s legacy of love will live forever,” wrote the country singer Trisha Yearwood. Yearwood and her husband, fellow country singer Garth Brooks, helped lead the 2024 Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project with Habitat for Humanity.

In a statement, the Academy of Country Music (ACM) quoted Carter as having said: “Country music is heard everywhere. It is the deepest expression of all that is uniquely American.” He had written those sentiments in regards to the 15th annual ACM awards in 1980.

The ACM’s statement on Sunday read: “On behalf of everyone at the Academy, thank you for your service to others and love for [country music].”

Heart’s vocalist Nancy Wilson called Carter “an incredible bridge between policy and our humanity”. And the actor Jamie Lee Curtis wrote a brief tribute on Instagram that said: “Thank you for teaching us all how to be humans Mr. President.”

The rapper Killer Mike, who was born in Carter’s home state of Georgia, posted to X: “I am honored to say I have known a ‘Good Man’ who truly made a difference in a wicked world.”

But Carter’s contribution to the arts, said Stuart E Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser from 1977 to 1981, made him “as close to a Renaissance man as we’ve had in the White House in modern times”.

In 1978, Carter opened the east wing of the National Gallery of Art, designed by architect IM Pei, at the base of the US Capitol.

“We have no ministry of culture in this country, and I hope we never will. We have no official art in this country, and I pray that we never will,” Carter declared at the opening. “No matter how democratic a government may be, no matter how responsive to the wishes of its people, it can never be government’s role to define exactly what is good, or true or beautiful. Instead, government should limit itself to nourishing the ground in which art and the love of art can grow.”

During the Carter administration, Congress doubled the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). But his liberal standing on expression also contributed to backlash.

Soon after he left office, the Christian evangelical leader Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority to weaponize resentment among southern evangelicals who had voted Carter, the first “born-again”, into office and who voted him out again four years later.

Carter won countercultural credibility when the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson wrote about his successful 1976 campaign against Gerald Ford. Thompson said he had never heard “a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me more” than an address Carter made in 1974 that he called “a king-hell bastard of a speech”.

Carter reportedly caught Thompson’s attention when he cited the musician Bob Dylan for his understanding about what was right and wrong, pointing to Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm, among others. According to the Art Newspaper, Carter counselled Dylan when he considered converting to Christianity.

In the visual arts realm, Andy Warhol travelled to Carter’s home in tiny Plains, Georgia, in 1977 and made three portraits, including Jimmy Carter I, a photo-collage that the Carter campaign sold as a series of 50 $1,000 prints.

The Carter family, Warhol later recalled, “were very normal. We got along very well … Jimmy Carter gave me two big bags of peanuts which he signed. That made the whole trip worthwhile.”

Robert Rauschenberg also contributed to Carter’s Inaugural Impressions, a portfolio that included representations by Roy Lichtenstein and Jamie Wyeth.

But Carter was a painter in his own right, with a package of his old art tools and a print he made bringing in $1m at an auction to benefit the Carter Center in Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.