Those selected would receive up to $200,000 to create one of the 250 sculptures, which will be paid for in part with canceled grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Tag: National Endowment for the Arts
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Trump Administration Seeks Artists for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Statues
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DOGE Demands Deep Cuts at Humanities Endowment
Leaders at the National Endowment for the Humanities have informed employees that the Trump administration is demanding deep cuts to staff and programs at the agency, in the latest move against federal agencies that support scholarship and culture.
The move comes about three weeks after the agency’s leader, Shelly Lowe, who was appointed by President Biden, was pressed to resign, several months before her four-year term was over. Since then, a team including staff members from the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s government restructuring effort, have made several visits to the N.E.H. office.
On Tuesday morning, managers told staff members that DOGE had recommended reductions in staff of as much as 70 to 80 percent (of approximately 180 people), as well as what could amount to a cancellation of all grants made under the Biden administration that have not been fully paid out, according to three staff members. Senior leadership, employees were told, would develop more detailed plans for what the cuts would look like in practice.
A spokesman for the N.E.H. did not respond to a request for comment. The agency is currently led by an interim director, Michael McDonald, who is its general counsel.
The N.E.H. was founded in 1965, under the same legislation as the National Endowment for the Arts. Since then, it has awarded more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, universities, libraries and other organizations, according to its website. Last year, its budget was $211 million.
The endowment supports a variety of projects through direct grants. The most recent round, announced in January and totaling $26.6 million, included $175,000 for oral history projects connected to the Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii; $300,000 for digitization efforts at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens; and $150,000 for a study of online language learning at the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts.
But it is also particularly important for the survival of state humanities councils, many of which derive all or most of their support from the 40 percent of the N.E.H. program funds that are channeled directly to them.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the National Humanities Alliance — an umbrella group of universities, museums, state councils and cultural organizations — said it was dismayed at the targeting of the only entity, federal or private, charged with making the humanities accessible to everyone.
“DOGE is targeting a small federal agency that — with an annual appropriation that barely amounts to a rounding error in the U.S. budget — has a positive impact on every congressional district,” the statement said.
The moves at the N.E.H. came a day after all employees at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, another independent federal agency, were put on administrative leave, setting the stage for a potential shutdown. That development drew widespread condemnation from public library supporters in particular, who noted that the agency, which has an annual budget of roughly $290 million, provided a third to half of the budgets of many state library boards.
It remains unclear whether there will be similar cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts. In February, the N.E.A. announced that it was ending a small grant program aimed at projects for underserved groups and communities, though its larger general grant program, available to groups of all kinds, would continue.
A spokesman for the N.E.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Hundreds of Artists Call on N.E.A. to Roll Back Trump’s Restrictions
In one of the first signs of collective pushback to the Trump administration’s arts initiatives, several hundred American artists are calling on the National Endowment for the Arts to roll back restrictions on grants to institutions with programming that promotes diversity or “gender ideology.”
Among the 463 writers, poets, dancers, visual artists and others who signed the letter are the Pulitzer-winning playwrights Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel. There is also one name with striking historical resonance: Holly Hughes, a performance artist who in 1990 was one of the so-called N.E.A. Four, denied funding by the agency because of concern from conservative critics at the height of that era’s culture wars.
“In some ways this just feels like déjà vu all over again,” Ms. Hughes, now a professor of art and design at the University of Michigan, said in a telephone interview. “These funding restrictions are a good barometer for who is the easy punching bag in American culture at the moment.”
The artists on Tuesday sent a letter to the N.E.A. objecting to new requirements for grant applicants that the organization put in place this month to comply with executive orders signed by President Trump. One of the requirements is that applicants “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”; the other is that federal funds not be used “to promote gender ideology,” referring to an executive order, prompted by Mr. Trump’s concern about public policy toward transgender people, that declares that American policy is “to recognize two sexes, male and female.”
The artists’ letter asks the N.E.A. to “reverse” the changes, saying “abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”
“Trump and his enablers may use doublespeak to claim that support for artists of color amounts to ‘discrimination’ and that funding the work of trans and women artists promotes ‘gender ideology’ (whatever that is),” the letter adds. “But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody.”
The letter was sent to 26 N.E.A. officials on Tuesday morning; the agency has not yet commented.
The letter-writing effort was spearheaded by Annie Dorsen, a writer and theater director — and a recent law school graduate — who was a recipient of a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2019. “I felt it was important in this moment to signal to the N.E.A. and to anyone else paying attention that artists were aware of what was happening and not staying silent,” Ms. Dorsen said.
The changes at the N.E.A. are occurring at the same time that Mr. Trump has assumed control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He replaced numerous board members, and the new board appointed him as the center’s chairman; several staffers have been ousted, and some artists have resigned from positions there or canceled appearances.
Some programming has also been canceled, including a touring production of a musical for young audiences, “Finn,” about a gray shark who wishes to be a glittery fish. The show’s creators believe the tour was canceled because the show’s message of self-acceptance was deemed problematic during the Trump era, but Kennedy Center officials say there was not sufficient interest in the tour from presenters around the country to make it financially viable.