Latest news with #N.E.H.
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
On the Chopping Block: Arts and Humanities
To the Editor: Re 'Trump Seeks to Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts' (news article, May 2) and 'Top Officials at National Endowment for Arts Resign Amid Cuts by Trump' (news article, May 7): I can't say I was surprised by President Trump's proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Autocrats scorn art for its ability to speak truth to power. They know that art can mobilize and unite, inspire and defy. Yes, art challenges authority, and it's pretty clear by now that Mr. Trump assails all challengers. As a high school teacher over the last 28 years, I've been fortunate to take part in N.E.H. programming, specifically its Summer Institutes and its Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops. At these gatherings of teachers and experts from around the country, I've deepened my knowledge of literature, history, music and geography. I've exchanged ideas with other educators. I've developed lasting friendships. I've honed my expertise. Thousands of my students have enjoyed enriched lessons thanks to my involvement in N.E.H.-funded institutes and workshops. With a crumbling education system and a shrinking teacher pipeline in much of America, isn't such programming the very antidote to failure?
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Trump Administration Is Looking for Artists to Craft "Garden of American Heroes"
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The call has gone out from the National Endowment for the Humanities for artists submissions for the Garden of American Heroes, President Trump's proposed national park, location to be determined, of 250 statues of American figures considered heroes. Winners of statue grants, which range from $200 and $600,000, will create up to three life-size statues that 'realistically' depict one of the people on this National Register list. Ultimately, who each artist will depict will be decided for them: 'Applicants are asked to select ten to twenty figures from those listed in the Executive Order and NEH will determine which statues are to be created by each award recipient,' states the application. The list includes a wide range of names, including George Washington, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley, Susan B. Anthony, Kobe Bryant, Alex Trebek, Frederick Douglass, Albert Einstein, Ray Charles, Julia Child, and Billie Holiday to name a few. The list is said to have been the responsibility of Vince Haley, the chair of the president's Domestic Policy Council, according to the New York Times. The finished statues must be made of marble, granite, bronze, copper or brass, sourced and funded by each artist, and completed by July 4, 2026. The Garden of American Heroes, first announced back in 2020 during President Trump's first term, is intended to coincide with the 250th anniversary of American independence. A release published on April 24th stated that this 'special funding opportunity' would support the creation of statues depicting those who have 'contributed to our cultural, scientific, economic, and political heritage,' and will fill a 'space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes.' Beyond a critique of the meaning of the word hero, there has been a loud outcry over the funding of the project, which as the Times reported, comes in part from the $34 million 'committed jointly by the N.E.H. and the National Endowment for the Arts, each of which had a budget of $207 million last year.' This comes after 80% of N.E.H. staff were placed on administrative leave earlier this month, according to NPR, and most of its grants were canceled. 'Nearly half of the NEH's budget goes directly to humanities councils in every U.S. state and jurisdiction,' writes Elizabeth Blair, Culture Trends correspondent for NPR. 'The endowment also supports museums, libraries, preservation, history and media projects through a competitive application process.' The widespread impact of the cuts is an unfolding story. In the short-term, myriad projects in the works have lost funding, like Yuriko Romer's, a documentary on 'baseball's role in American-Japanese relations over the past 150 years,' writes The Atlantic. Instead, the funding will go toward 'a sprawling sculpture garden with 250 likenesses of people [President Trump] deems 'American heroes.'' You Might Also Like From the Archive: Tour Sarah Jessica Parker's Relaxed Hamptons Retreat 75 Small (But Mighty) Kitchens to Steal Inspiration from Right This Instant
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Trump Administration Seeks Artists for ‘Garden of Heroes' Statues
The National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Thursday a grant program to support President Trump's National Garden of American Heroes, the first concrete step toward realizing one of his central priorities for the 250th anniversary of American independence. The garden, which was announced during Mr. Trump's first term, will feature life-size renderings of '250 great individuals from America's past who have contributed to our cultural, scientific and political heritage,' according to a news release. The endowment is now requesting 'preliminary concepts' for individual statues from artists who must be American citizens; those who are selected will receive awards of up to $200,000 per statue, which must be made of marble, granite, bronze, copper or brass. All submissions must depict figures from a long, eclectic list issued in a previous executive order, which included traditional heroes like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Sacagawea, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers alongside figures like Walt Whitman, Kobe Bryant, Julia Child, Johnny Cash and Hannah Arendt. Mr. Trump has also directed that subjects be depicted in a 'realistic' manner, with no modernist or abstract designs allowed. While no site for the garden has been determined, it will be 'a public space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes,' the release said. According to an earlier executive order, responsibility for setting the final list of 250 people lies with Vince Haley, the chair of the president's Domestic Policy Council, who is also overseeing broader White House efforts related to the 250th anniversary. The agency's release confirmed earlier reports that the program would be paid for in part with $34 million committed jointly by the N.E.H. and the National Endowment for the Arts, each of which had a budget of roughly $207 million last year. The announcement came weeks after a major shake-up at the humanities endowment, which is currently led by Michael McDonald, a longtime employee who became interim director after the previous director, Shelly Lowe, left at Mr. Trump's direction. Following visits from employees of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, the endowment laid off nearly two-thirds of its staff of about 180 and canceled most existing grants, which had supported museums, historical sites and community projects across the country. (The future of grants at the arts endowment remains unclear.) The moves have stirred a broad outcry among humanities advocates, who warn that they could undermine state and local programming for the nation's 250th anniversary. It has also prompted fears that some state humanities councils, particularly in rural states without a significant private philanthropic base, would be forced to shut down entirely. Shortly before Thursday's announcement about the Garden of American Heroes, the National Endowment for the Humanities issued a separate update on its funding priorities, saying it seeks to 'return to being a responsible steward of taxpayer funds.' All future awards, it said, will be 'merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.' In another embrace of traditional symbolism, the agency has changed its logo. Instead of a sunburst design from recent years, it reverted to one derived from the Great Seal of the United States, showing an eagle clutching an olive branch and a bundle of arrows.
New York Times
11-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
MAGA Needs High Art, Not Just Kid Rock
Two weeks ago a friend of mine at the National Endowment for the Humanities told me that a team from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had arrived and was reviewing the books. Last week the hammer came down, as N.E.H. leaders told their staff members that cuts in personnel were coming, eliminating perhaps 80 percent of the agency. This is a mistake — not, however, for the reasons given by leading humanities organizations such as the American Historical Association, which argued that DOGE's actions 'imperil both the education of the American public and the preservation of our history.' That peril has been present for a long time, much of it caused by scholars entrusted with that education and preservation — and funded by the N.E.H. Many of the professors who teach the humanities in the United States, with their stifling ideological uniformity and their tiresome fixation on 'critique' and social identity, could use some bureaucratic pummeling. The N.E.H. should not grant any more awards like the $133,165 it gave to San Diego State University to develop a social justice curriculum based on comic books or the $324,418 it gave to California State University, Fullerton, to create and study an interactive database of a popular L.G.B.T.Q. travel guide. Good riddance to all that. But for the Trump administration to promote a culture of 'American greatness,' it cannot just eliminate what it dislikes; it must also support what it favors. During his first term, in a speech denouncing the 'left-wing cultural revolution,' President Trump called for a more celebratory attitude toward America's cultural heritage — one that proudly recalled that 'we gave the world the poetry of Walt Whitman, the stories of Mark Twain, the songs of Irving Berlin, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald.' To that end, Mr. Trump needs an N.E.H. that funds projects that embrace this heritage. To cut the N.E.H. and the National Endowment for the Arts (which may be next on the chopping block) is to lay down potent weapons of ideological contest that the Trump administration should be wielding aggressively. It is a conservative truism that politics are downstream from culture. What happens in the arts and humanities doesn't stay there; it flows into the broader society over time. Without queer theory in the academy in the 1990s, the Supreme Court's Obergefell and Bostock decisions, which extended rights and protections to gay and transgender people, might not have happened. The Trump administration needs to make sure that the right kind of culture is at the headwaters of the river today. When it comes to popular culture, the MAGA movement readily attracts kindred spirits. Hulk Hogan speaks at the Republican National Convention. Kid Rock visits the White House. Joe Rogan presides over a sympathetic 'manosphere.' But when it comes to high culture, the movement falters. After President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in February, he signaled that he would bring about a more congenial vision of the performing arts and the nation's cultural heritage. But the people and creative works that he has mentioned in connection with this ambition — Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth, the musical 'Cats' — are middlebrow at best. This is where the N.E.H. and N.E.A. would serve Mr. Trump well: not only correcting 'woke' excesses, but also providing an elite counterpart to MAGA's populist thrust. Expert critics, scholars and artists could ensure that only traditionalist projects are funded. There is precedent for this conception of the agencies, namely, when Dana Gioia led the N.E.A. and Bruce Cole led the N.E.H., both under President George W. Bush. (During Mr. Gioia's leadership I served for several years at the N.E.A. as the director of the Office of Research and Analysis.) Mr. Gioia and Mr. Cole managed to please Republicans and Democrats alike by developing programs that emphasized the legacy of Western civilization and the American tradition and were often aimed at young people. Under Mr. Gioia, the N.E.A. created Shakespeare in American Communities, which sent theater troupes into schools across the country to introduce students to the Bard. Under Mr. Cole, the N.E.H. introduced programs such as 'We the People' and 'Picturing America,' which provided teachers with resources to help them teach classic American documents such as the Constitution and artworks such as Grant Wood's painting 'The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.' That exercise in cultural conservatism is a lesson for the White House — or should be. The challenge may lie in the outlook of DOGE, which seems primarily financial and bureaucratic. The purging of fraud, waste and identity politics in the civil service is commendable, but we need to build things, too. A welcome example is the memorandum Mr. Trump issued in January concerning federal architecture, which instructed that federal public buildings must 'respect regional, traditional and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States.' Ideally, the Trump administration would do more than just revive the Bush-era conception of the arts and humanities agencies. It would also draw inspiration from even bolder, New Deal-era initiatives, such as the Federal Writers' Project, which gave jobs to out-of-work writers to document American culture, and the Federal Art Project, which funded murals, sculpture, paintings, posters and other public art. Such ambitious proposals would be anathema to small-government Republicans, of course. And it is true that state-sponsored art programs have often resulted in clumsy propaganda. But they have also given us the Lincoln Memorial, the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and the great comic novel 'A Confederacy of Dunces' (an N.E.A. product). If conservatives wish to halt the progressive advance in American society, they must rectify a mistake they made decades ago: focusing on law and economics and leaving the arts and humanities to the other side.
New York Times
07-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The N.E.H. Does What Republicans Always Wanted. DOGE Slashed It Anyway.
Tim Henderson was up late last Wednesday night, keeping an eye on the weather as catastrophic storms barreled across Tennessee toward Nashville. Around midnight, his email pinged. Amid overlapping National Weather Service alerts of damaging hail, tornadoes and flash floods, he read the message: Humanities Tennessee, where Mr. Henderson is the chief executive, had just lost all its federal funding. It's not as if Mr. Henderson didn't see this news coming. As with the actual tornadoes, the economic and ideological tornadoes emanating from Washington first touched down at some distance, but their destruction was always headed this way. Employees at the National Endowment for the Humanities had already learned that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was recommending staff cuts of up to 80 percent. The N.E.H. is one of the least-known of the federal agencies, but its work reaches a huge number of Americans, including those in Republican districts. It awards grants that fund research fellowships, programs at museums and historic sites, website development and documentary filmmaking, among a host of other projects related to the public humanities. But it also disburses a great chunk of its appropriation — some $65 million of an annual budget of roughly $210 million — directly to nonprofit humanities councils in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories. These independent affiliates of the N.E.H. then reallocate those funds to programming tailored to the people of their own state. Through the work of the state humanities councils, in other words, the N.E.H. is doing exactly what Republicans have always said they wanted to do with federal funds: It gives federal money back to the states. Humanities Tennessee, for example, funds traveling museum exhibitions and speaking series, neighborhood story projects, writing workshops for teenagers and a magnificent book festival, just for starters. Chapter 16, Humanities Tennessee's vibrant daily web publication about the literary life of this state, is rare among nonprofit media outlets. (I know that because for 10 years I was its editor.) Federal grants to state councils were designed to be 'seed money,' as Mr. Henderson puts it — a way to keep the lights on while the organizations seek philanthropic support from donors and corporations, and other grant funding, to expand their offerings. The federal funds are meant to create the conditions for public-private partnerships to bloom. But some states are wealthier than others, and some benefit from serving a populace that doesn't need to be persuaded of the value of the humanities. Before they can begin to make the case for supporting humanities programming, more than a few state councils must work, first, to explain what the humanities even are. Mr. Henderson has fielded calls from people looking for the Humane Society. In a university setting, the term generally refers to subjects like history, religion, philosophy, literature and art. In the context of the public humanities, the definition can be harder to pin down: 'It's how human beings understand themselves, interact with each other, come to make communities — all of those things about being human,' Mr. Henderson said in a phone interview. 'In the public humanities, we're trying to make those things immediate and relevant. But that's hard to write an elevator pitch for.' Which is why federal appropriations are so crucial. These funds are marshaled with the greatest possible care to benefit the most people. The savings achieved by cutting them 'amounts to a rounding error' in the context of the federal budget, as a statement from the National Humanities Alliance notes, but many state humanities councils would not survive without them. The N.E.H. itself may not survive. I am not, I admit, a disinterested party here. As editor of Chapter 16, I was an independent contractor, not involved in Humanities Tennessee's other operations. But I had a front-row seat to the crucial work a state humanities council does — work that most Americans never recognize. I can't even count the times that people arriving at the Southern Festival of Books, a Humanities Tennessee initiative, have asked me where the ticket booth is. They always look astonished when I tell them there isn't one. Festival events are free. In the context of other planned cuts — a far from complete list includes funding for science (including the science of storm prediction), public schools, Meals on Wheels, health care for impoverished people, the federal lands and parks that belong to all of us, protections for the air we breathe and the water we drink — losing the N.E.H. might not seem like the biggest tragedy in the world. This is exactly what the architects and enforcers of Project 2025 want us to do: They want us to fight over who deserves the biggest piece of a pie that is so diminished and distorted it doesn't even look like a pie anymore. They are leading us, willingly, into a scarcity mind-set. But these resources are not scarce. They have already been approved by Congress. Over the years, certain Republicans have attempted to generate controversy by calling the N.E.H. an expense the government could not afford. But in the past, funding has always been preserved because the humanities are not ultimately a partisan issue. Whichever party held the White House, whichever party controlled Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities survived. That's because Americans really like book festivals and local history museums and summer writing camps for teenagers. We like seeing hometown heroes celebrated and remembered. We like hearing hometown authors read from their books. We like being invited to join a conversation in which our opinions and our experiences matter. We especially like it when such gifts are available to everyone, and not just to those who can afford the price of a ticket. We live in an age of abounding ironies, and this one is a doozy. Eliminating federal funding for the humanities saves next to no money, but it will cost the American people something precious: one of the few federal institutions whose whole purpose is to foster community and thoughtful discussion across the polarities that increasingly divide and depress us. And surely that is part of the point. Maybe it's the whole point. So long as we're busy fighting with one another, this wrecking-ball administration thinks, we won't notice that it's dismantling the protections we rely on and destroying the treasures we love. In a social media post last week, Humanities Tennessee urged Americans to call members of Congress and let them know how the public humanities matter. Which storybook characters did our children meet at the book festival? What museum exhibit taught us something we didn't know about the place where we have always lived? How does it feel to join a respectful conversation about a contentious subject? We need to tell the people who represent us a story — a true story — that reminds them of our shared humanity. Because the concept of a shared humanity is something too many of them, and too many of us, have lately all but forgotten.
