A landscape transformed: Arts community reels as it responds to federal program cuts

NEW YORK -- Poet Marie Howe, one of this year's winners of the Pulitzer Prize, says being a writer is often less a career than a vocation. You rely on teaching and other outside work and seek support from foundations or from a government agency, like the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Everybody applies for an NEA grant, year after after year, and if you get it, it's like wow — it's huge," says Howe, a Pulitzer winner for “New and Selected Poems” and a former NEA creative writing fellow. “It's not just the money. It's also deep encouragement. I just felt so grateful. It made a big, big difference. It gives you courage. It says to you, ‘Go on, keep doing it.’”

Behind so many award-winning careers, high-profile productions, beloved institutions and in-depth research projects there is often a quieter story of early support from the government — the grants from the NEA or National Endowment for the Humanities that enable a writer to complete a book, a community theater to stage a play, a scholar to access archival documents or a museum to organize an exhibit.

For decades, there has been a nationwide artistic and cultural infrastructure receiving bipartisan support, including through the first administration of Donald Trump.

Now that is changing — and drastically.

Since returning to office in January, the president has alleged that federal agencies and institutions such as the NEA, NEH, PBS, the Kennedy Center and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) were advancing a “woke agenda” that undermined traditional values.

Trump has ousted leaders, cut or eliminated programs and dramatically shifted priorities: At the same time the NEH and NEA were forcing out staff members and canceling grants, they announced a multimillion-dollar initiative to support statues for Trump's proposed "National Garden of American Heroes,” from George Washington to Shirley Temple.

“All future awards will, among other things, be merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country," reads a statement on the NEH website.

Individuals and organizations across the country, and across virtually every art form, now find themselves without money they had budgeted for or even spent, anticipating they would be reimbursed.

Electric Literature, McSweeney's and n+1 are among dozens of literary publications that received notices their grants have been rescinded. Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum & Library had to halt a project to create an online catalog after losing a near-$250,000 grant from the IMLS. The Stuttering Association for the Young, which manages a summer music camp, has a $35,000 gap.

“Our fundraising allows kids to attend our summer camp at a greatly reduced cost so the lost funds make it harder to fulfill that commitment," says the association's director, Russell Krumnow, who added that “we planned our programming and made decisions with those funds in mind.”

“Government money ought to be consistent. It ought to be reliable,” says Talia Corren, co-executive director of the New York-based Alliance of Resident Theatres, which assists hundreds of nonprofit theater companies. “You need to make decisions based on that money.”

The NEA, NEH and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were among the institutions established 60 years ago, during the height of President Lyndon Johnson's “Great Society” domestic programs. At various times, they have faced criticism for supporting provocative artists, such as photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1980s. But they have endured, in part, because of their perceived economic benefits, distributed through as many congressional districts as possible.

Arts advocates contend that, like other forms of federal aid, the importance of an NEA or NEH grant isn’t just the initial money, but the “ripple” or “mutliplier” effect. Government backing often carries the kind of prestige that makes a given organization more desirable to private donors.

The millions of dollars channeled through state arts and humanities councils in turn support local projects. Funding for a theater production helps generate jobs for the cast and crew, brings in business for neighboring restaurants and bars and parking garages and spending money for the babysitter hired by parents having a night out.

Actor Jane Alexander was just beginning her stage career when the endowment helped fund the 1967 Arena Stage production of Howard Sackler's drama about boxer Jack Johnson, “The Great White Hope," which starred Alexander and James Earl Jones and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. Alexander, who headed the NEA in the 1990s, remembered how Arena co-founder Zelda Fichandler worried that the endowment might hurt business by supporting other theaters in Washington.

“And I remember my late husband (Robert Alexander) who was artistic director of the Living Stage Theatre Company at the time, saying to her, 'No, it doesn’t work that way. A rising tide floats all boats," she says.

In the short term, organizations are seeking donations from the general public and philanthropists are attempting to fill in fiscal holes. The Mellon Foundation recently announced an “emergency” $15 million fund for state humanities councils. At the Portland Playhouse in Oregon, artistic director Brian Weaver says that donors stepped in after the theater lost a $25,000 NEA grant just a day before they were to open a production of “Joe Turner's Come and Gone,”

But Weaver and others say private fundraising alone isn't a long-term solution, if only because individuals incur “donor fatigue” and philanthropists change their minds. Jane Alexander remembers when the Arena theater in Washington founded a repertory company, supported in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.

“It was like the National Theatre in Britain," she says. '"We felt so proud that we can have a repertory company of 30 players rotating players through the season. It was very, very exciting. And we had, you know, voice lessons, we had fencing lessons. We were going to become the great company. And guess what happened? Rockefeller’s priorities changed.”