Artists demand National Endowment for the Arts roll back Trump restrictions | Culture

Donald Trump’s efforts to influence US cultural institutions received more pushback on Tuesday, as a group of more than 400 artists sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) calling on the organization to resist the president’s restrictions on funding for projects promoting diversity or “gender ideology”.

The letter, first reported by the New York Times, comes after the NEA declared that federal grant applicants – which include colleges and universities, non-profit groups, individual artists and more – must comply with regulations stipulated by Trump’s executive orders. The new measures bar federal funds from going toward programs focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” or used to “promote gender ideology”.

“While the arts community stands in solidarity with the NEA, we oppose this betrayal of the Endowment’s mission to ‘foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States’,” the letter reads. “We ask that the NEA reverse those changes to the compliance requirements.”

“We recognize that our colleagues at the NEA are in a difficult position,” it continues. “Perhaps the hope is that by making these compromises, the Endowment will be able to continue its important work. But abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”

The letter, signed by 463 playwrights, poets, dancers, writers, visual artists and others, was sent on behalf of a campaign organized by the New York-based theater director and writer Annie Dorsen. Signees include the Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel, as well as Holly Hughes, a performance artist who in 1990 became one of the “NEA Four” – artists denied funding because of outcry from conservative critics that their art was “obscene” at the height of the culture wars.

“In some ways this just feels like déjà vu all over again,” Hughes, a professor of art and design at the University of Michigan, told the Times. “These funding restrictions are a good barometer for who is the easy punching bag in American culture at the moment.”

The letter, sent to 26 NEA officials on Tuesday morning, objects to new requirements instituted by Trump in executive orders – a few of the flurry of orders he signed during the opening days of his second term in office. One requires that grant applicants “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”. Another prevents federal funds from being used “to promote gender ideology”, referring to another anti-trans executive order that declares that American policy is “to recognize two sexes, male and female”.

“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 reads. “But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody. We can’t give that up.”

By Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the NEA, Elizabeth Auclair, said the organization had not yet received the letter, but assured that “presidential executive orders have the full force and effect of law and within the executive branch must be implemented consistent with applicable law. The National Endowment for the Arts is a federal agency and will fully comply with the law.”

The backlash arrives on the heels of similar outcry over Trump’s takeover of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Last week, Trump purged the arts foundation’s board all appointees by Joe Biden and installed several loyalists, who promptly appointed Trump as chair. The takeover prompted several notable names in the cultural community, including Issa Rae, Shonda Rhimes, Reneé Fleming and Ben Folds, to sever ties or cancel performances with the organization.

This is also not the first time Trump has targeted the NEA, an organization that has provided over $5bn in grants since its founding in 1965, and which has been subject to culture wars and political threats since the Reagan era. In 2017, at the beginning of his first term, Trump pledged to shut down the NEA, and proposed a budget slashing funds by 80%. The agency survived the first Trump presidency – and, in fact, saw its budget grow – largely because of bipartisan support in Congress, which repeatedly voted to save it.