Since a seismic round of NEA grant retractions in 2025, arts organizations have overhauled funding strategies with stability in mind.
Last year, hundreds of art groups learned via a Friday night email that the grants they’d been expecting from the National Endowment for the Arts had been terminated or withdrawn. In the Southwest, they included the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona, and the Queer Spectra Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, among others.
Soon after, organizations began appealing the NEA’s decisions, seeking alternative funding, or modifying or canceling the projects that NEA money would have supported. More than a year later, the impacts of those jarring May 2, 2025, notices are still being felt—and arts organizations are reassessing their programming, operations, and budgeting in light of what transpired, attuned to the possibility that something similar could happen again.
Today, there’s an ongoing sense of uncertainty as NEA priorities continue to shift, and arts advocates say federal actions threaten the very existence of the NEA.
When artists do the work, will the NEA turn around and say ‘no’ to sending the grant money?
“It’s all so unpredictable and there are a lot of rumors and hearsay,” says J. Matthew Thomas, executive director of the Paseo Project in New Mexico.
Thomas still recalls his visceral reaction to learning that a $35,000 NEA grant meant to support the 2025 Paseo Festival in Taos got nixed. “It was a shock to the system,” he says of receiving the May 2025 notice. “We didn’t think something like that could even happen.”
The Paseo Festival still took place, somewhat “reconfigured” to account for a twenty percent smaller budget, and they’re currently transitioning to a biennial festival. “It wasn’t a direct result of losing the grant but the timing made sense,” Thomas explains.
The Paseo Project is continuing to apply for NEA grants. But now, Thomas feels wary even when a grant is approved. He wonders, “When artists do the work, will the NEA turn around and say ‘no’ to sending the grant money?” To account for this, Thomas has worked up a contingency plan: “We’ve had to tighten our purse strings. The thought is to diversify our funding and have some slush funds because things are wonky.”
After getting an offer letter from the NEA, Motus Theater in Colorado expected to receive a $35,000 grant to support its Youth Behind & Beyond Bars program centering the voices of adults who’ve experienced juvenile incarceration. Instead, they got an email saying the NEA “would no longer offer award funding for the project.”
The email stated that the NEA was “updating its grantmaking priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President” and “terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”
Support from foundations, organizations, and community members kept the program going, but without the $35,000 grant Motus Theater had to cut back on its touring plans, according to producing executive director Rita M. Rufino Valente-Quinn. The lost dollars comprised about five percent of their budget, she says. So they quickly pivoted to asking the community for more support. Although they’re still applying for NEA grants, the theater company is working to broaden its funding sources moving forward. “Our strategy has become clearer and more deliberate,” reflects Rufino Valente-Quinn.
The NEA also withdrew a $25,000 grant from the Arizona-based theater company Childsplay, money that would have gone towards producing a new play for the national BIPOC Superhero Project. Managing director Steve Martin says it’s important to remember that NEA-related uncertainties are happening within the wider context of economic realities and ideological factors, which amplifies their effect.
The Trump administration continues to take aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion, for example. Conservative legislators routinely float cuts to state arts funding. And foundations donating more for housing and food security have fewer dollars for arts and culture. “We’re doing fewer productions, laying off staff, and running deficits,” Martin says of specific impacts. “The arts are struggling a lot.”
As arts organizations adapt to myriad uncertainties, art advocates in and beyond the Southwest are keeping an eye on arts-related federal policies and proposals. The Americans for the Arts Action Fund, for example, has a timeline of federal actions going back to January 2025, with details on everything from executive orders to proposed legislation.
Creative West, one of six regional affiliates of the National Endowment for the Arts, has carefully followed a lawsuit challenging a U.S. Office of Management and Budget proposal that “could fundamentally reshape how public awards and pass-through subgrants flow to all communities for years to come.”
In July, a federal district court ruled on the case, saying that the OMB can’t cancel grants because priorities change after they’re awarded. That’s good news for organizations that get grants directly from the NEA, and also for NEA affiliates such as the Nevada Arts Council, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, which award grants in their communities using funds provided through their own NEA partnership agreements.
Folks should really concentrate on the local level, because that’s often where their actions can have the strongest and quickest impact.
When controversies arise, national sites like the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution may garner the most attention. Yet Christina You-sun Park, executive director for the state NEA affiliate Arizona Commission on the Arts, urges people to connect with what’s happening in their own communities. “Folks should really concentrate on the local level, because that’s often where their actions can have the strongest and quickest impact,” she says.
As government funding uncertainties persist, some arts organizations are turning to foundations to fill the gap. Soon after the initial NEA cuts, the Warhol and Frankenthaler Foundations teamed up to provide stopgap arts funding, and the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation launched a rapid response grant fund. But Michelle Laflamme-Childs, executive director for the NEA state affiliate New Mexico Arts, says it’s essential that people continue to push for public arts funding as well.
“I’ve really recognized that the issue with arts funding isn’t that people don’t believe in the arts, it’s that they don’t understand the importance of public funding for the arts,” Laflamme-Childs explains. “Public funding is really about access. We want to be sure we are reaching all the communities in our state and you can lose that with the private funding model.”
When Christin Crampton Day, executive director for the Denver-based nonprofit Colorado Business Committee for the Arts, thinks about artists and arts organizations working to navigate the present moment, she harkens back to lessons learned during Covid-19.
“We leaned into advocacy and put more infrastructure in place,” she says, referencing the creation of an education and advocacy platform called Colorado Arts Action Network. “Initially we were reactive, but the goal was always to be proactive.”
