Under Trump, the NEA Faces an Uncertain Future

“The Arts … belong to all the people of the United States,” proclaims the 1965 legislation that created what is now the National Endowment for the Arts.

Well, we’ll see.

As of early March, the quote still occupied prime real estate on the NEA’s grants page. But the Trump Administration has eliminated one grant program and changed the rules for others, spurring artists and other critics to worry about the future of federal funding for projects by and about marginalized communities. The Feb. 6 announcement followed a sharp-tongued executive order terminating anything that smacked of diversity.

The NEA’s Challenge America grant, explicitly aimed at projects for “underserved” groups and communities, is gone.

Challenge America applicants–often small, newer organizations or first-time applicants–now must compete against established juggernauts like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in the larger Grants for Arts program. Applicants must also have five years of programming experience, compared with the three-year runway required for Challenge America.

More than 400 artists signed an open letter to the NEA asking it to reverse the changes.

“Abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us,” the letter pleads. “Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”

The Twin Cities-based Playwrights’ Center has asked donors to help make up the $35,000 NEA grant it’s not sure it will still receive, given its focus on “inclusive theater-making.”

“We cannot hew to the narrowest possible view of who gets to participate in artistic and civic life,” the center’s leaders wrote in a letter posted to its website. “We cannot comply. We cannot betray our mission. We cannot be silent.”

This year the NEA granted a total of $2.72 million to 272 groups across the country through the Challenge America program. Recipients included Austin’s Cine Las Americas film festival, the Network for Diversity in Concert Percussion, Inc. in Annapolis, Md., and the Upijata (Scissor-Tail Swallow) Arts Company, which brings arts programs to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. There were also multiple programs bringing a wide range of music, art and dance to Title 1 schools, senior centers and small rural communities.

New grant guidelines also “encourage” honoring the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in applications. Projects focused on America250, the understandably shortened rebranding of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, should “celebrate and honor the nation’s rich artistic and cultural heritage.”

Left unsaid is who exactly that is under the new rubric. The revised guidelines specifically mention disability-related projects but reference no other groups outside of “communities of all sizes.” Its legal provisions, however, note that grantees must comply with all executive orders.

So does that mean “serving every person with dignity and respect” as the anti-DEI order states? Or does it mean the end of grants to groups that have “infiltrated” the U.S. government with their “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility mandates,” which it also states?

“Everything that we do in the arts inherently expresses who we are as a nation, and flows from the vision of the founding fathers, that artistic expression was one of the highest benefits of freedom,” Grants for the Arts recipient Creative Waco told Glasstire magazine. “Therefore it makes sense to invest in the arts to recognize the freedom we share, and the 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

“However, I’m not sure we are really celebrating that freedom if we dictate that as the only theme for artistic expression across our nation. My hope is that this is intended to be an invitation to celebrate our shared identity with imaginative and innovative, artistic programming, not a constraint on the freedom we value so highly.”