NEA terminates grants to four county arts groups

The emails Friday night from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to Lane County arts organizations weren’t unexpected.

But that doesn’t mean they were welcome.

The emails told the organizations that their grants from the NEA — grants the groups had been counting on to help pay the bills for specific programs — were being terminated.

The emails came just a few hours after President Donald Trump released a budget proposal that called for eliminating the NEA and other federal agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Here are the organizations that received grant termination emails from the NEA:

• The Eugene Symphony had been awarded two grants totaling $50,000 — one for a premiere that took place in March, pianist Dan Tepfer’s “The Harmonies that Bind Us” and another program scheduled for this month, featuring the Northwest premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ “Swing Symphony” and a residency by jazz pianist Darrell Grant.

• The Lane Arts Council had been awarded $30,000 to support Eugene’s First Friday ArtWalk downtown.

• The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon had been awarded $30,000 to help pay for a fall exhibit featuring works by James Lavadour, a well-known northeast Oregon painter and printmaker.

• The Oregon Bach Festival had been awarded $25,000 to help cover the costs of commissioning a theatrical presentation of Bach’s “Markus Passion,” a lost Passion setting by the composer that’s been planned for years — and which is meant as a cornerstone of this summer’s festival. 

All four organizations said they will find other means to support their planned programs.

But for arts organizations, many of which are facing fiscal challenges, the sudden cutbacks come at a particularly bad time. 

“These sudden terminations are hitting arts organizations hard at a moment when many are already bracing for the post-pandemic fiscal cliff, following the temporary boost of relief funds that helped keep the sector afloat,” Dave Moss, executive director of the Eugene Symphony, told The New York Times in a statement.

James Boyd, the director of programming and administration at the Bach Festival, noted that the  $25,000 now needed to replace the hole in the Markus Passion budget “is not something that you find overnight.”

Making the cuts particularly painful is that the NEA grants are structured as reimbursement grants, meaning that the organizations already have incurred expenses that they believed the grants would cover. 

For the symphony, cancellation of the grants with such short notice increases the financial pressure on the organization.

“The immediate hit is $50,000, but the larger and more troubling impact will be felt down the road,” Moss said in the statement. “Without outside support, we may be forced to cut future projects or community programs that provide access to music education, family concerts and free public events — the very things that strengthen our region and serve people who otherwise wouldn’t experience live symphonic music.”

For the Lane Arts Council, the NEA funding in the past has covered about a quarter of the costs of the First Friday ArtWalk, said Stacey Ray, the council’s executive director. 

Ray said the First Friday ArtWalk is a good example of a community program that “provides a platform for free and accessible cultural experiences for the general public. They’re really important for access — and they’re very hard to fund. We have a very limited revenue model for these, and we really rely on grant support.”

But she said the council was dedicated to keeping the program running. The grant termination “just creates an additional hurdle for us to be able to offer accessible programs like this.”

She added: “The hardest part of this, from the termination of these grants to the proposed removal of the NEA and NEH and other critical cultural programs from the federal budget that’s being proposed, is that this undermines, from the top, (from) the highest level, the government’s commitment to arts and culture in our country.”

John Weber, the executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, said the museum plans to appeal its grant termination. The Friday email says the terminations can be challenged if filed within seven calendar days — if recipients believe their project falls within the NEA’s new priorities.

Weber is confident the museum has a solid case to make about its James Lavadour exhibit. Lavadour, a member of the Walla Walla tribe, is the founder of the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and is well-known nationally as a painter and printmaker.

The Friday email from the NEA said the grants were being terminated in order to “focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage as prioritized by the President.”

The priorities listed in the email include projects that elevate the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions, along with those that “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”

The Bach Festival also plans to appeal the NEA decision on its project. “I think our project satisfies many of the new requirements as well,” Boyd said.

The Eugene Symphony also is appealing the decision on its grants. Ray said the Lane Arts Council hasn’t decided whether to appeal.

For Boyd, who has been traveling to watch early productions of the Bach piece, it’s been a wild few weeks.

“To go from a position of just being so grateful that we have the opportunity to bring this work to life and to bring it to the Pacific Northwest and then, in a short span of just three weeks, see the funding disappear — it’s very much a high to low that I wasn’t anticipating.”

Statewide implications

Brian Rogers, executive director of the Oregon Arts Commission, said the commission’s best estimate now is that about 27 arts organizations across the state had NEA grants terminated. He said that once the commission has a definitive list, it plans to survey the organizations to determine whether they found additional funding to move ahead with the projects or if they had to cut back or cancel the offerings.

But Rogers said the state does not have the resources to cover funding gaps left by the NEA decisions.

Rogers added that the NEA has an agreement to contribute about $1 million each year to the arts commission, which then funnels all of that money to Oregon organizations. That money is intact for the next two fiscal years, he said. 

#instaballet 

Another Lane County arts organization, the Eugene dance company #instaballet, says it’s continuing to have issues with its NEA Challenge America grant, although it was not among the recipients of the Friday email.

Miranda Atkinson, #instaballet executive director, said the group had been awarded the $10,000 matching grant earlier this year. She said the group was planning to use the grant to provide interactive, on-site, accessible education workshops, prioritizing children who are neurodiverse or have disabilities. 

But the money has “really been in limbo ever since,” she said. “We haven’t heard anything. I’ve reached out to the NEA,” but with no results.

The holdup places #instaballet in a jam, although Atkinson said she was searching for alternatives. 

“I am uninterested in not fulfilling a promise to our community,” she said.