for unilaterally revoking a grant to Cinco Puntos Press to publish La Historia de los Colores, over concerns that the funding might end up in the hands of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Zapatistas). The grant was subsequently picked up and doubled by the Lannan Foundation. Following government service Ivey founded the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, at Vanderbilt University, serving as director from 2002 to 2012. The Center was endowed by Mike Curb, American musician, record company executive, motorsports car owner, and former politician. He returned to Washington in 2007 as team leader in arts and humanities for the Barack Obama presidential transition. Ivey has written and lectured extensively about the importance of cultural policy and the value of cultural engagement in the pursuit of a high quality of life. He coined the phrase "Expressive Life" to define the part of the human experience shaped by cultural heritage and creative practice. From 2007 to 2018, Ivey was senior advisor for China to the American Folklore Society. has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, Wayne State University, and Indiana University, and is a four-time Grammy Award nominee in the Best Album Notes category. Ivey currently serves as senior advisor to the Mike Curb Foundation, as a trustee of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress, and is visiting research scholar to the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Television Ivey produced several television shows for the Country Music Foundation, including producing and writing Country Music Hall of Fame: 25. Ivey was advisor to the PBS television series, American Roots Music, and was writer and co-producer of In the Hank Williams Tradition, also on PBS. In 2016 he was co-executive producer of the documentary on the impact of rock music on the collapse of the Soviet Union, Free to Rock. Writing In 2007 Ivey co-edited, with Steven Tepper, the book Engaging Art: the Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural, and In 2008 Ivey's book Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights was published by the University of California Press. Then in 2012 he released the book Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy. In 2018 he published the book Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America. Ivey was also the co-editor of the books The Pocantico Gathering: Happiness and a High Quality of Life