This spring, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced it was withdrawing funding for arts organizations across the country. As part of broader efforts already in motion to cut back government spending under the Trump administration, the arts is the latest sector on the chopping block.
The implication spells a precarious future for many art institutions—in particular ones that serve Black communities. For New York City alone, between 2000 and 2016, $233 million in NEA funding benefited all five boroughs, with significant allocation to spaces focused on Black, Latino, and working-class neighborhoods.
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Yet even as Black art museums and organizations struggle, the nation’s biggest institutions continue to prosper: the Metropolitan of Art’s Costume Institute recently raised a historic $31 million at its annual Met Gala, using “Black Dandyism” as its theme, an aesthetic historically rooted in the resistance of Black people to colonial dress codes and class exclusion.
The juxtaposition is jarring at a time when elite institutions gain prestige from mounting shows about Black aesthetics while underfunded Black organizations face existential threats.
“The reality is that many of our institutions are consistently under threat of shutting our doors and/or reducing programming to survive,” Amy Andrieux, director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), told ARTnews. “Most of us are operating with limited staff who have long exceeded their capacity, and many of us with no cash reserve or endowment to fund periods of uncertainty.”
Sizable endowments, lucrative sponsorship deals, and wealthy private donors are solid sources of funding for the nation’s biggest museums, and they help these institutions navigate financial challenges. But these are safety nets that many Black art institutions don’t possess. When NEA funds are cut, these organizations are among the first to be hit the hardest.
MoCADA isn’t the only Black-led institution feeling the pressure. Museum Hue, an organization advocating for Black artists and other cultural workers of color, received federal grant termination notices from both the Institute of Museum and Library Services (a three-year grant totaling more than $545,000) and the NEA (a matching grant totaling $75,000).
While the former has been overturned due to a temporary injunction but can still be appealed, Museum Hue was able to complete NEA grants requirements and receive full disbursement before the termination notice.
The revocation, while not requiring the organization to return funds, means that Museum Hue will no longer be eligible to renew or extend the grant in future cycles, cutting off a critical stream of institutional support for their programming.
“These losses are highly distressing, demoralizing, and distracting, although Museum Hue was able to find solace and solidarity among numerous other affected organizations locally.” Stephanie Johnson-Cunningham, executive director of Museum Hue, told ARTnews.
Others, like the Billie Holiday Theatre, were in a unique situation when the NEA policy shift occurred. The theater was in the final year of their multiyear funding grant and were given an expedited closeout to receive their final payment of $30,000 for its projects. It had applied twice for open NEA funding rounds last year and had not received any response.
The NEA was the primary funding source for the Billie’s Black Arts Initiative (BBAI), a program created for recent arts and drama school graduates as well as emerging professional actors who are seeking a deeper understanding of and training in the American Black theater canon.
“The NEA subsidized this program, so there was no fee for participants,” Shadawn N. Smith, executive director at the Billie Holiday Theatre, told ARTnews. “This program model costs approximately $70,000 to $75,000 annually to execute,” a figure that accounts for its program director, instructor fees, field trips, performance tickets, and other indirect costs.
In response to the withdrawal of NEA support, these Black art platforms aren’t sitting idle. For example, the D.C.-based Association of African American Museums (AAAM) has sprung to action.
“Our immediate response has been twofold. First, we are working to identify which of our members have already been affected, gathering direct information on disrupted contracts and rescinded funding,” Vedet Coleman-Robinson, president and CEO of AAAM, told ARTnews. “Second, we have been actively engaging with members of Congress, advocating for these museums and cultural organizations—many of whom had already been awarded funding through formal, signed contracts. These are not hypothetical grants; they are committed funds that our members were depending on.”
The relationships between major museums and smaller Black art institutions can be defined through one-off collaborations, consistently lacking long-term objectives or cross-institutional imagination.
“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” at Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
In the 1980s, the Met did a small community exhibition at Restoration Plaza (where the Billie is located). Fast forward to 2025, the Met’s education department chose the Billie as its second community partner to host a conversation for its current fashion exhibition, “Superfine.”
“There were no other collaborations between the Met and the Billie. The Billie doesn’t have relationships with the majority of predominantly white-led cultural organizations and theaters,” Smith said.
“Throughout our 49-year history, we have been approached by larger elite institutions for one-time programs, but these are mainly performative or for diversity visibility purposes,” says Melody Capote, director of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI). “We would much prefer long-term intentional, mission-aligned programming where there is an equal distribution of resources, representation in the decision-making process and cultural capital.”
Though major museums have said over the past few years that they would support Black arts institutions, some leaders of those organizations said they felt isolated by recent NEA cuts, with their more financially stable colleagues not there to help them.
Like Black fashion, Black art is entangled with the material conditions (racial capitalism, segregation) that shaped it. Often excluded from white-dominated, institutional spaces (galleries, museums, global markets), Black art thrived on the margins, stitched into the fabric of community, merging with Black power movements aesthetics as a tool for liberation.
Historically, funding for local Black art drew from community, churches, mutual aids, self-financing, informal economies, and political movements. Kerry James Marshall and Noah Purifoy achieved local fame in Chicago and Los Angeles, respectively, before receiving retrospectives at the nation’s biggest museums. Recognizing this trend, some artists have even founded their own spaces: the married LA-based artists Noah Davis and Karon Davis formed the Underground Museum in 2012 in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood with a large Black and Latino population.
But despite supporting generations of Black artists, Black art spaces have often struggled to fully flourish because of gentrification, financial precarity, and institutional neglect.
For some, the uneven terrain for art funding has raised a larger, more uncomfortable question: should elite art institutions be obligated to redistribute their wealth and resources, especially if they were amassed under the banner of celebrating Black cultural legacies? What would a more just, more accountable, and more materially equitable celebration of Black fashion and the arts look like, especially from the perspective of a community-rooted Black arts institution?
“Just imagine how impactful directing some of these funds to some of our local small and mid-size organizations might look like,” Capote said. “These major institutions need to use their platforms to highlight and lift Black artists and organizations that are grounded in these communities and experiences, who are doing the work.”
In times like these, there’s often pressure on Black art spaces to act as a counterweight, to step in to fill funding gaps. Andrieux thinks this approach fails to acknowledge how nurturing and committed institutions like MoCADA have been to the early and continued development of artists, long before they are accepted by mainstream institutions. “This, in addition to our work as community anchors and centers of care, with less capacity and manpower to do it all,” she said.
In addressing funding disparities, Andrieux proposed that major foundations and donors need to get into the right relationship with small and mid-sized institutions—beyond the most recognizable ones—to understand their work and the communities they serve.
“Foundations and donors need to build a mechanism to sustain our organizations long term, which in turn levels the playing field and elevates the sector as a whole” she said. “I invite them to move beyond underwriting programs and consider giving general operating dollars that fund a year of overhead, staffing, research, experimentation, or an endowment (like what NYSCA is currently doing). That would be life changing.”
The New York State Council on the Arts may not directly be affected by the NEA budget cuts, but its operational flexibility offers general operating support rather than program-specific grants, which can administer long-term sustainability to organizations that need it.
Beyond symbolic gestures, social media solidarity, and the performance of diversity efforts, Coleman-Robinson believes there’s a real opportunity for community-serving institutions like AAAM to lead a call for a national accountability framework regarding the equitable distribution of resources, ethical collaboration, and long-term investment.
“Too often, institutions operate in silos, planning independently and then, as February approaches, scrambling to develop programming for Black History Month. While those efforts may come from a good place, we have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to do more than just check a box,” she said. “Instead of creating standalone events, we should be asking: how can we support and uplift the work already being done by African American museums and culturally specific institutions in our communities? It should be a conversation rooted in partnership, not duplication.”