Philly arts organizations are navigating stormy federal funding guidelines

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Arts and culture organizations in the Philadelphia region are grappling with changes in federal funding guidelines at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

President Donald Trump’s Jan. 21 executive order declared diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies as discriminatory. The NEA and NEH complied with that order by changing its eligibility standards, denying funding to organizations with such policies.

But last month, a judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction against the order, temporarily blocking its execution. The NEA now has a somewhat confusing caveat in its guidelines, saying DEI programs might be disqualifying but perhaps not in the short term.

Last week, Trump issued another executive order to eliminate the functions of several federal agencies “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” including the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

In 2024, the IMLS granted more than $2.25 million to museums and libraries in Philadelphia.

“We are monitoring what is happening daily to gauge the impact to the museum,” said a spokesperson at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has received $871,000 from the IMLS over the last 10 years.

The art museum currently has two grants from the NEA totalling $700,000, or less than 1% of the museum’s annual budget. One of the grants is funding the digitization of its collection of drawings and the other is funding a recent Mary Cassatt exhibit.

In 2021, following a harassment scandal involving one of its executives, the museum established a robust diversity, equity, inclusion and access plan and posted it to its website.

“Representing the communities we serve continues to be a focus of the museum. We are seeing the positive impact with attendance,” wrote the museum’s Maggie Fairs in an email, adding that attendance increased 11% last year, bringing the museum to 90% of pre-pandemic-level visitors.

Opera Philadelphia says it will not seek federal money

Since the new NEA and NEH directives, Opera Philadelphia threw up its hands and decided not to turn to the federal government at all for future funding.

“We don’t feel that this shift in values aligns with our values at the Opera,” said general director and president Anthony Roth Costanzo. “We feel this is a really important time for art to mean something to people, for art to tell everyone’s stories.”

Costanzo became president less than a year ago. His predecessor, David Devan, established a pattern of championing marginal and underserved voices in opera, commissioning new works from composers who represent a wide range of backgrounds, including being Black, Latino and LGBTQ. He also hired the opera’s first vice president of people operations and inclusion, a position that ended less than three years later when the company shrank its staff in 2024.

Over the last 10 years, Opera Philadelphia has received $405,000 from the NEA, according to the NEA’s grantee database, an amount Costanzo described as “meaningful to us even though it’s not a huge amount of our operating budget.”

“This is not to say I’m not grateful to the NEA for the incredible support over the many years and the amazing people who no doubt work there for years trying to support great art,” he said. “It just means that we can’t endorse a shift in priorities that does not match with our mission and our values.”

More tangible challenges have been made against the NEA for requiring grantees to disassociate themselves from “gender ideology.” Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island on behalf of three theater companies who present performances often based on transgender and nonbinary subject matters. They claim the new NEA guidelines are unconstitutional.

In response to the court challenge, the NEA rescinded the requirement that applicants sign a certification that they will not engage in “gender ideology.” However, funding can still be denied to artists and organizations that appear to promote gender ideology, pending the outcome of the lawsuit.

Opera Philadelphia said it may apply for future NEA grants if the court case removes the requirement to deny funding to programs informed by DEI and so-called gender ideology.

Cultural workers lobby on Capitol Hill

On March 3 and 4, Americans the Arts, a national arts advocacy organization, sent a cohort of culture workers to the Capitol to speak directly with individual members of Congress, especially Republicans, about the benefits of arts funding. Patricia Wilson Aden, president and CEO of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, was part of the group.

“We were putting faces and names of organizations in front of them and letting them know that these executive orders were having a detrimental impact,” Wilson said. “There are cascading effects as well. It doesn’t stop here.”

One of the people she spoke with was Republican U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, of Bucks County.

Wilson shared with Fitzpatrick a recent survey of Pennsylvania arts organizations describing possible impacts of the executive orders: 59% of respondents said the orders will impact cash flow and payroll, 48% said it would disrupt their educational programming and 43% said that they will likely have to cancel exhibits, presentations and performances.

A game of wait and see

For a few organizations in the city, the executive orders and pushback against them have become a game of wait-and-see, unsure of what comes next.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia has received $440,000 from the NEA over the last 10 years, which has directly supported 34 artists in residence. Like many in the cultural sector, executive director Kelly Shindler said the FWM is “closely monitoring changes at the federal level.”

“For decades, NEA funding has served as vital early support for artists’ projects at FWM in the form of seed money,” she said. “This crucial first step has often given us the leverage to approach other grant making organizations and donors with confidence.”

The Philadelphia Dance Company, or PHILADANCO!, has spent the last 54 years training and presenting dancers of diverse backgrounds, particularly Black dancers. It has a grant application pending with the NEA right now and is waiting to learn the outcome.

“We have been around for a long time, through many cycles of funding increases and decreases,” founder Joan Myers Brown said in a statement. “Based on our past experience when federal funding has been cut, we obviously are concerned about what the new administration’s changes might mean for arts organizations in Philadelphia and across the country, including ours.”

Brown also called out to individuals, companies and foundations to ensure that the arts “do not disappear from our communities.”

Aden at GPCA does not believe private philanthropy can compensate for the loss in federal support, which, between the NEA, NEH and the Institute for Museum of Library Services, totals more than $111 million for Pennsylvania organizations in the last four years. Of that, $42.5 million went into the Philadelphia region.

“The federal funding from NEH, NEA and IMLS has been essential to the stability and programming of many of our organizations,” she said. “To have that funding suddenly withdrawn is a frightening, destabilizing factor.”

On Thursday, March 13, Philadelphia arts organizations and elected officials staged a march in Kensington from the NextFab building at 1880 N. American St. to the Crane Arts Building at 1400 N. American St. The event was organized by InLiquid, an artist support organization, as a public display of unity among cultural workers in the city.