Scores of National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant awardees, including the Print Center New York, received a Friday night email from an unmonitored NEA email address rescinding part or all of their funding. The Manhattan nonprofit had received a $50,000 award for its exhibition Reimagining Du Bois: Data Portraits in the 21st Century, but the grant was abruptly pulled with $0 paid only five months before the show was set to open, a spokesperson told Hyperallergic.
Mary Gibilisco, executive director of WhyArts, Inc. — a Nebraska multidisciplinary arts education program serving historically marginalized communities — also received the email late on May 2. WhyArts’s $15,000 cost-sharing grant to fund in-school dance instruction for Omaha Public Schools had been cancelled.
Funding reversal notices reviewed by Hyperallergic told organizations, including n+1 Magazine, the Virginia art center Studio Two Three, the Film Festival Alliance, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival that their funded projects did not align with a new set of priorities for the federal agency. The NEA would now focus on objectives including advancing “skilled trade jobs,” “AI competency,” “support [for] the military and veterans,” and the “economic development of Asian American communities,” the emails said.
For some organizations, such as WhyArts, the NEA withdrew funding offers before they could materialize. Other programs that had already received portions of their awards were told their grants were “terminated” effective May 31.
“We serve the marginalized who rarely have access to high-quality art workshops, experiences, and events,” Gibilisco told Hyperallergic in an email. “We have done all the right things for 35 years, and to have this regime tear it down in 100 days is unconscionable.”
The NEA has not responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.
The emails were sent hours after the Trump administration published its proposed Fiscal Year budget proposal, which called for the elimination of the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), all of which have seen mass grant terminations and personnel cuts over the last two months.
As of today, May 5, a survey started by theater director Annie Dorsen counts 91 canceled NEA grants across disciplines. Composer Rob Deemer is also keeping track of axed grants in his own analysis of news articles, social media posts, and NEA grant data, and tallied 152 cancelled awards amounting to $4.5 million so far.
President Trump has proposed slashing the agency twice before, during his first term, but in 2018, he reversed course and signed a bill increasing funding for both the NEA and NEH.
Some organizations told Hyperallergic they would now turn to their communities to recoup lost funds. Several arts groups sent email appeals urgently asking for contributions.
Within the agency, the Trump administration budget and grant terminations appear to have also triggered a series of staff resignations, according to internal communications obtained by Hyperallergic.
At least three employees announced today to colleagues that they would accept deferred resignation offers first extended to federal employees by the administration in January. According to someone familiar with the resignations, who spoke to Hyperallergic on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, the agency’s employees were offered deferred resignation for the second time a couple of weeks ago.
The individual, who is familiar with the NEA’s internal affairs, said representatives for the formerly Elon Musk-led Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) have also visited the agency, which, for sister agencies like the IMLS, has signaled impending cuts.
If Congress completely defunded the NEA, it would be extremely difficult for the agency to be rebuilt in the future, the source said. They noted that though Trump had made similar threats in the past, this attempt to gut the agency is different because it invokes ideological arguments.
In the lead-up to Friday’s mass grant purge, the NEA announced a series of changes under the Trump administration, including the February cancellation of its over two-decade-old Challenge America grant program meant to expand access to the arts for “underserved communities.” In March, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the agency for requiring arts funding applicants to comply with Trump’s anti-trans “gender ideology” executive order in an unsuccessful First Amendment suit.
The termination email offered organizations an opportunity to appeal their decision, which, according to the Film Festival Alliance, an NEA grant recipient circulating information on fighting the cancellations on social media, is likely to be unsuccessful.
The film organization had already used its $65,000 NEA funding for Fiscal Year 2024 for development opportunities for independent film exhibitors and distributors by the time the emails came, Film Festival Alliance Director Barbara Twist told Hyperallergic. The organization is now trying to track the grant losses within the film community.
“By eliminating or restricting funds from the NEA, the government is exercising a level of ideological control over what we as Americans can see and experience,” Twist told Hyperallergic in a phone interview, “and that to me is terrifying.”