Dozens of arts organizations were recently notified that the grants they had received from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were canceled. This is part of the Trump administration’s budget proposal that looks to eliminate the NEA altogether. In the Bay Area alone, nearly 30 nonprofits have confirmed they have lost grants they were previously awarded from the NEA, each grant ranging from $10,000 to $85,000.
Many of these organizations note how these cuts will force them to cancel projects that represent the stories of LGBTQ+ people and people of color. San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center, for example, lost a $20,000 grant they planned to use to produce “Simple Mexican Pleasures,” a play about a gay Latino man on journey of self-discovery in Mexico City. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music has also paused their Emerging Black Composers Project in response to Trump’s agenda that is forcing schools to eliminate diversity efforts or risk losing federal funding. Other groups affected are Berkeley Repertory Theatre, San Jose Taiko, California Symphony, among many others.
Trump had previously targeted marginalized communities by forcing the NEA to require it follows his “gender ideology” when awarding grants. The NEA had to remove this eligibility criteria after it was sued by several arts groups and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Now they are skipping over the requirements and simply cutting funding, harming projects that were already slated to premiere later this year. The NEA has also been pushing its staff to resign amidst these budget cuts.
The NEA awards hundreds of millions annually to arts organizations and individual artists to help fund their work. The administration’s cuts are erasing the stories of marginalized communities from the public. This is yet another attack that aims to vilify the diversity that exists in this country and make it standard to follow Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. Arts organizations help us celebrate the abundance of cultures and peoples that make up the U.S. and speak to the realities everyday people face. We can’t let these attacks frighten us into seeing each other as the enemy!
