As President Donald Trump advances his proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), arts organizations across the U.S. are already feeling the effects.
After a sweeping White House budget request released in May that did not include allocations for the federal arts funding agency, dozens of institutions have received abrupt notices that their NEA grant applications were either denied or rescinded. The grantees received termination emails that stated that the NEA was “updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” according to NPR.
In protest of the president’s actions, many senior staff at the agency resigned—including program directors overseeing grants for dance, theater, design, folk and traditional arts, museums, and literary programs—while others have been asked to retire, leaving the agency in disarray.
This isn’t the first time Trump has attempted to defund the NEA and eradicating the agency has been a conservative goal for decades. (During Trump’s first term, Artnet’s art critic Ben Davis published a list of 10 practical reasons why the NEA should continue to receive federal funding.) This recent push comes amid broader federal efforts to reshape and defund cultural agencies, including the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the NEA’s sister agency the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has seen a 70–80 percent reduction in its staff and has canceled more than a thousand grants. Trump has justified the cuts as part of his mission to root out “woke” influence in public life.
Several private organizations, such as the Mellon Foundation and the Helen Frankenthaler and Andy Warhol Foundations, have already launched emergency funding programs to offset the toll that Trump’s funding cuts are taking. But for the countless artists, educators, and community-based organizations that rely on NEA funding, the consequences are immediate and destabilizing. With no clear guidance on what will come next—or whether the NEA will continue to function at all—arts leaders are left scrambling. Below, we’ve compiled a list of organizations that have lost funding or been notified of changes, offering a snapshot of how these policies are already reshaping the nation’s cultural landscape.
This list will be continually updated.
“Jeffrey Gibson: Power Full Because We’re Different” at Mass MoCA
Installation view of “Jeffrey Gibson: Power Full Because We’re Different” at MASS MoCA. Photo: Tony Luong, courtesy of MASS MoCA.
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), in North Adams, was notified on May 2 that a grant to support an exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, “Power Full Because We’re Different,” was terminated, according to an announcement from director Kristy Edmunds. The emailed notification said that the grant, awarded in 2024, “falls outside” the focus on funding “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”
According to the NEA’s website, the grant was in the amount of $50,000. The exhibition remains open through August 2026.
The museum also lost a grant for staff training in technology from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, noted Edmunds, because it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
Art21 series “Art in the 21st Century”
Art21, the New York nonprofit that produces the beloved public television series Art in the 21st Century, lost an $85,000 grant to support the production of seasons 12 and 13 of the program. As the season is still in production, Art21 declined to share the names of participating artists.
The season that launched in April 2023 featured artists including Alex DaCorte, the Guerrilla Girls, Amy Sherald, Rose B. Simpson, and Christine Sun Kim. That fall, for the first time, some episodes hit theaters for a screening at New York’s Metrograph theater.
“Monuments” at MoCA Los Angeles
Red paint splashed on statue, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD. Baltimore Heritage from Baltimore, Maryland, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Eli Pousson, 2017.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles lost $65,000 in support for the exhibition “Monuments,” co-organized with the Brick (formerly LAXART), which has been in the works since 2021 and was inspired by the widespread decommissioning of Confederate War memorials. It was to bring together a selection of decommissioned Confederate statues with contemporary artworks borrowed and commissioned for the occasion, and was to include artists such as Stan Douglas, Leonardo Drew, Nona Faustine, Kahlil Robert Irving, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, Hank Willis Thomas, and Kara Walker.
“It’s quite engaging,” Brick director Hamza Walker told Artnet News in an interview in 2021, “to work on something that is unfolding in real time.”
The museum had not spent or received any of the funds, said a spokesperson via email.
Other impacted organizations:
• Shunpike, in Seattle, Washington, lost $65,000 to support its Artists of Color Expo and Symposium. “We have received funding for this program since its inaugural event in 2017, in varying amounts each year, usually in the $20,000–$30,000 range. So of course, we were thrilled when the NEA recognized the impact and true cost of the program with this significant increase,” said executive director Line Sandsmark in an email.
• The Print Center, a New York nonprofit, was notified on Friday that it would lose its $50,000 award for its exhibition “Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print,” just five months before the show was set to open, according to a report in Hyperallergic.
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Photo: Shutterstock.
• The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver lost a $40,000 grant to support the exhibition “Movements Toward Freedom,” which ran through February 2 and explored “the power, possibility, and vulnerability of bodily movement in contemporary life through movement’s physical and social dimensions.”
• The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive lost a $40,000 grant to support the exhibition “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California,” set to run June 8–November 30, 2025. The museum also lost about $230,000 in unspent funds from a $461,000 IMLS grant to support conservation of the quilts, which number in the hundreds.
• The Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, in Newcastle, Maine, lost $35,000 to support an artist residency program.
• A.I.R. Gallery, in Brooklyn, New York, lost a $30,000 grant to support exhibitions of the A.I.R. Fellowship Program for Emerging Artists. “We applied for this funding back in February 2024 and were notified by the NEA that our project was recommended for funding in the amount of $30,000 in November 2024,” said the gallery’s Christian Camacho-Light. “Since that point, our grant remained in the offer stage (despite submitting the requisite documents back in December) and had not reached the official approval/contracting stage by May 2 (despite us having usually cleared this stage in prior years by mid-April).”
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Photo: Shutterstock.
• The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, lost a $30,000 grant to support the exhibition “William Villalongo: Myths & Migrations,” set to open May 15, that includes two decades’ worth of work “exploring identity, race, and visibility,” according to the museum.
• The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California, lost $30,000 that was going to support the exhibition “From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments,” which was part of PST Arts: Art and Science Collide.
• The Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art lost a $30,000 grant to support exhibitions, programming, and publications. “It’s unclear if any of the funds we were awarded last summer will be distributed,” board president Nando Alvarez-Perez said in an email.
• The Bronx Council on the Arts lost a $30,000 grant to support a series of visual arts exhibitions.
• The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, in Summit, lost $30,000 grant to support exhibitions and honoraria to artists.
• The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, based in New York and the Umbria region of Italy, lost a grant of $30,000 to support a residency program in Umbria for American artists.
• The Bunnell Street Art Center in Homer, Alaska, lost a $25,000 grant to support artist residencies.
• Bomb Magazine, in New York, lost a $20,000 grant to support visual arts interviews, essays, and portfolios in print and online. “Because there was an opportunity to be considered for funding through America250 (the semiquincentennial—quite a mouthful!) in the FY25 application we also proposed an essay series, Constellations, that invites artists to draw from our 44-year archive to make connections between interviews of American artists across time,” said Sheryl Oppenheim, institutional giving manager, by email.
• New York’s Artists Alliance lost $20,000 to support an exhibition at New York venue Cuchifritos.
• ArtWorks for Milwaukee lost a $10,000 Challenge America grant to support its environmental arts internship program, which produces public art related to environmental concerns.
• Dimensions Variable, in Miami, lost $10,000 of a $20,000 grant to support a series of contemporary art exhibitions.
• Los Angeles nonprofit venue JOAN lost $20,000 to support artist residencies and exhibitions for L.A. artists.
• Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden lost $10,000 for a visual arts and storytelling workshop series.