Arts Nonprofits Struggle Amid Federal Funding Cuts
159May 16, 2025
With President Donald Trump intent on dismantling theNational Endowment for the Arts, nonprofit art organizations across the United States are searching for alternate funding streams to keep their programming alive. Following the early May clawback by the organization of grants already issued, philanthropical organizations such as theHelen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundationhave stepped in to offer assistance, but many nonprofits, especially smaller ones, are still finding their way through the fiscal forest.
Among the visual arts organizations who saw their NEA funding vanish are New York’s renowned A.I.R. Gallery, a pathbreaking feminist arts space founded in 1972, which lost $30,000 in NEA funding earmarked for its fellowship program for emerging artists. The Print Center, also in New York, lost $50,000 that was to have supported its exhibition “Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print,” set to open in just five months. Farther up the coast, the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine, lost $35,0000 in aid of an artist’s residency program, while down in Miami, contemporary arts organization Dimensions Variable said goodbye to $10,000 of a $20,000 grant for exhibition support.
On the other side of the US, the Los Angeles experimental art space JOAN lost $20,000 in funding for exhibitions and residencies for local artists. In Seattle, artist-empowerment group Shunpike lost $65,000 in aid of its Artists of Color Expo and Symposium; and in Homer, Alaska, the Bunnell Street Art Center was stripped of $25,000 in support of artists’ residencies. The country’s vast center was not spared, with St. Paul, Minnesota’s Public Arts Saint Paul losing $35,000 in support of its Wakpa Triennial, and the Oklahoma Arts Institute losing $30,000 set aside for a faculty honorarium at its summer school, which was to have begun next month.
While some organizations, like the Fort Bragg, California–based Art Explorers, an art space for disabled people that lost its NEA Challenge America grant and received $10,000 from the Frankenthaler and Warhol foundations, are receiving some assistance from private organizations, others, like A.I.R., are seeking to make up the missing funds through donations.
“The work will go on, but right now I’m pretty discouraged,” wrote Rob Lentz, executive director of Chicago’s Open Studio Project, perhaps echoing the feelings of many after the organization saw its two-year grant supporting art for elementary schoolers canceled. “The nonprofit sector is under siege by our own government, and arts organizations are especially vulnerable. When chaos and cruelty are the order of the day,” he concluded, “all I can ask for is solidarity and resistance.”