Art Is Not Optional
What philanthropy owes the cultural sector - and what it’s getting wrong
The stories a society tells about itself are not decorative. They are structural. They determine who is visible and who is erased, what is grievable and what is not, and which experiences are recognized as belonging to the common human inheritance.
There is a scene near the end of Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone - called by Primo Levi “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis” - in which Otto Quangel, a simple Berlin factory foreman, sits in his prison cell awaiting execution. His crime: writing anti-Hitler messages on postcards and leaving them around the city. Most of the postcards, Fallada tells us, were turned in to the Gestapo immediately by terrified citizens who found them. Almost no one who picked one up was moved to act. The resistance, by any conventional measure, failed.
And yet the novel insists it did not fail. The act of refusing to pretend, of naming reality in a society organized around enforced silence, was itself the victory. The postcards were not propaganda. They were testimony. They were proof that someone, somewhere, in the grinding machinery of terror, insisted on remaining human.
This is what art does. This is what it has always done. And this is why authoritarian governments move against it first.
What Happened
The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget allocates just $29 million to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), $38 million to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and $6 million to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), not to continue their work, but to “permanently wind down operations.” These are not the opening shots. In May 2025, the NEA began issuing grant termination notices to organizations with pending or open awards, rescinding offers already extended and ordering seven-day appeals windows for grants already in progress. DOGE placed approximately 80 percent of NEH staff on administrative leave and terminated thousands of individual grants. An executive order targeted the Institute of Museum and Library Services for dismantlement.
Courts intervened. Congress, in a rare display of bipartisan resolve, restored funding for the NEA and NEH in its FY2026 package. The immediate crisis was partially arrested. But the structural assault continues, and its logic is more important than its current status in the appropriations process.
Gone from the surviving NEA are the Challenge America grants dedicated to underserved communities. Surviving agency guidelines now cite compliance with executive orders banning “woke” ideologies. Funds have been redirected toward projects celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States, including a $14.1 million IMLS grant to traveling Freedom Truck exhibitions organized by evangelical interests.
This is not budget discipline. It is cultural policy - the systematic replacement of a public cultural infrastructure that served the full breadth of American life with one that serves the consolidation of a particular, narrow vision of American identity. The authoritarian cultural playbook has two moves: defund the voices that complicate the story, and fund the voices that tell the story you want told. Both are happening simultaneously and at speed.
The cultural sector has responded with advocacy, litigation, and emergency fundraising. All of that matters. But the dominant philanthropic frame - fill the gap left by government - is not a strategy. It is a stopgap dressed as a strategy. And it may be quietly making things worse.
Who Government Was Actually Funding
To understand what was lost, and what philanthropy’s responsibility therefore is, we need to be precise about who received federal arts funding and why it can’t simply be replaced.
The NEA’s Challenge America program, eliminated because its language around “underserved communities” was deemed to constitute DEI, specifically supported small arts organizations in communities with limited access to the arts relative to geography, ethnicity, economics, and disability. In fiscal year 2025, it awarded $2.7 million to approximately 270 organizations: a Native artists’ residency in North Dakota, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC exhibition programming in Fort Lauderdale, a mural-apprenticeship employment program in Seattle for young people facing systemic barriers, arts programming for aging adults combating memory loss in Newark, a classical music festival in a Michigan town of fewer than 2,000 people, dance tours to rural Minnesota towns that have no other gateway to live performance.
The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies has reported that while private funders are the largest contributors to major U.S. cultural institutions, rural communities specifically rely on state and federal programs. Georgia ranks last in the country in state arts funding per capita. Without federal access, organizations like the Stonewall National Museum in Fort Lauderdale, which lost not only its Challenge America grant but most of its corporate donors once federal signals shifted, have no comparable private alternative.
Under the Biden administration, the NEA had celebrated increasing first-time grant applicant rates, translated its guidelines into Spanish and Chinese, and deepened engagement with HBCUs and Native communities. All of that has been deleted. The new requirement of five years of prior programming before application - up from three - is not an administrative adjustment. It is a gatekeeping mechanism that systematically excludes the organizations least likely to have institutional longevity: grassroots groups, newer immigrant-serving organizations, community-based arts collectives that have never had a development department and no prospect of getting one.
What is being defunded is not “the arts.” What is being defunded is a specific commitment - the only one of its kind in the United States - to reach every community regardless of what it can offer in return. The NEA is the only arts funder in the country, public or private, that provides access to the arts in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. Nothing in the philanthropic universe approximates that geographic and democratic scope.
What the Books Tell Us
The literature of resistance to authoritarianism returns, across every culture and century, to a single insight about the relationship between art and power: the stories a society tells about itself are not decorative. They are structural. They determine who is visible and who is erased, what is grievable and what is not, which experiences are recognized as belonging to the common human inheritance and which are treated as exceptional, peripheral, or dangerous.
This is why every sustained authoritarian regime has moved against cultural expression, and why the quality and diversity of that expression is among the first casualties when democratic norms collapse.
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate - arguably the greatest novel written about the Soviet-Nazi conflict - was confiscated by the KGB in 1961. The officer who took the manuscript told Grossman it could not be published for two hundred years. It was published in seventeen. Friends had microfilmed it and smuggled it to the West. The art survived the regime. That is also the story, but it required people willing to carry it, hide it, and reproduce it. It required cultural infrastructure the state could not fully reach.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison partly because he understood that the ANC’s power was cultural as much as political - that the stories Black South Africans told about themselves, the songs they sang, the art they made inside and outside prison, were not adjuncts to the freedom struggle but its substance. Martin Luther King built the civil rights movement on cultural infrastructure: the church traditions that provided meeting space and moral authority, the spirituals that encoded collective identity, the trained orators who could frame suffering as testimony and testimony as demand. Czesław Miłosz, writing from exile in The Captive Mind, dissected how the most gifted writers he knew had accommodated themselves to Stalinism through intellectual sophistication, career calculation, and the slow deformation of moral reasoning he called “Ketman.” His analysis of capitulation is a handbook for understanding why institutions fail, and why cultural independence from state power is not a luxury but a democratic necessity.
The most persistently marginalized voices in federal arts funding - Indigenous communities preserving languages and traditional arts, Black artists documenting histories the dominant culture prefers not to examine, LGBTQ+ cultural institutions maintaining archives of lives systematically excluded from official memory, and immigrant communities whose creative expression is the primary vehicle for cultural continuity, are not peripheral to the democratic project. They are its most precise measure. The degree to which a democratic society sustains space for these voices is the degree to which it is actually, rather than nominally, democratic.
What is being defunded is the democratic imagination - the capacity of a pluralist society to recognize itself in its full complexity rather than in the curated image that consolidating power wants projected. Otto Quangel’s postcards threatened the Nazi regime not because they were persuasive to many people but because they existed, because they made visible the gap between official reality and lived experience - the gap that every authoritarian system depends on people agreeing to ignore.
The books are not cautionary tales. They are field reports from people who understood what we are only beginning to learn.
Why Gap-Filling Is the Wrong Frame
When government retreats from the arts, philanthropy’s instinct is to fill the gap. This is understandable. It is also, as a strategic frame, both practically insufficient and conceptually dangerous.
It is practically insufficient because the math does not work. The NEA funds at $207 million annually; the NEH at $207 million; the IMLS at $291 million. These numbers represent not just the direct federal investment but the multiplier of state arts council matching requirements, private foundation co-investment, the economic activity that federal legitimacy catalyzes. Philanthropy cannot replace federal arts infrastructure at scale, and claiming otherwise relieves political pressure to restore public investment while shifting an impossible burden onto a sector already operating under severe strain.
It is conceptually dangerous because gap-filling accepts the premise that public arts funding is optional. It treats federal arts support as a service any provider can deliver, rather than as a public commitment - a democratic declaration that cultural expression is a good to which all have a claim, regardless of where they live, what they look like, or whether their cultural production appeals to private wealth. The difference between a government that funds the arts and a philanthropist who funds the arts is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of kind. Government funding is accountable to democratic process. Philanthropic funding is accountable to the preferences of wealthy individuals and institutions whose historical investment patterns have not aligned with the cultural expression of the communities most marginalized by economic and racial hierarchy.
When philanthropy fills the gap left by retreating government, it does not restore what was lost. It replaces a public democratic commitment with a private one - one that can be withdrawn, redirected, or conditioned in ways that public commitments theoretically cannot. The arts organizations that rebuild their sustainability models around philanthropic gap-filling are not becoming more resilient. They are exchanging one form of dependency for another, less accountable, form.
There is a subtler danger too. Gap-filling philanthropy, if it substitutes for political mobilization, can actually reduce the pressure on elected officials to restore public funding. Every dollar that flows from a private foundation to replace a terminated NEA grant is a dollar’s worth of evidence that the problem is being managed, that the sector is resilient, that the community is responding. The arts community and its philanthropic partners, in their shared desire to keep organizations alive, may be inadvertently dampening the political signal that needs to be heard loudest right now.
What Philanthropy Should Do Instead
None of this means philanthropy should withhold support from arts organizations in crisis. Some will not survive without emergency intervention. The sector’s most vulnerable institutions - the smallest, newest, most marginalized, and those with no endowment and no wealthy board - need emergency general operating support now, without the bureaucratic timelines that make “responsive” philanthropy anything but.
But emergency support is not strategy. Here is what strategy looks like.
Fund the communities government has specifically abandoned, at the level of their actual need.
The Challenge America universe of small organizations serving rural communities, folk and traditional arts practitioners, Indigenous cultural institutions, LGBTQ+ archives, BIPOC arts organizations, organizations serving people with disabilities, and immigrant cultural centers is the most precise available map of where philanthropic investment is most urgent and most absent. These are also the organizations that corporate philanthropy and major foundations have historically overlooked, because they lack the grantwriting capacity, the institutional prestige, and the social networks that larger funders reward. Fund them. Fund their operating costs, not just their projects. Fund them for three years minimum. Fund them without the programmatic conditions that force them to reshape their work to fit funder priorities.
Treat cultural organizations as democracy infrastructure.
The Oregon ArtsWatch journalism series on gender identity supported by a Challenge America grant was not just arts coverage. It was the kind of cultural expression that authoritarian consolidation targets specifically. The LGBTQ+ museum maintaining archives of suppressed lives is not just a cultural amenity. It is a node in the civil resistance ecosystem - a keeper of memory that makes it possible to know what was, and therefore to imagine what could be again. Philanthropy funding arts organizations should be thinking and communicating in these terms. The framing of arts funding as enrichment, even among funders who believe in it, cedes the most important argument: that cultural expression is not optional to democratic governance. It is its precondition.
Fund political organizing and advocacy within the cultural sector.
The mobilization of arts advocates that stalled NEA and NEH elimination in the House’s FY2026 appropriations package, with overwhelming bipartisan support, demonstrates that the cultural sector has real political power when it deploys it. Philanthropy should be funding the organizations doing that work - Americans for the Arts, state arts advocacy coalitions, arts worker unions - not just the organizations making the art. The sector will not survive this political moment through cultural production alone. It will survive through civic power, through electoral accountability, through the kind of coordinated political action that movements build and that most arts funders have historically been reluctant to support because it looks too much like politics.
Invest in models that reduce donor dependency.
The arts organizations most vulnerable to both government and philanthropic withdrawal are those whose economic model is entirely dependent on external funders. Philanthropy can invest in the development of alternative economic structures, including community land trusts for arts spaces, cooperative ownership models for cultural institutions, and community-membership funding models that build genuine democratic ownership. An arts organization owned by its community is harder to defund than one that depends on the goodwill of a government agency or a foundation board whose priorities may shift. Durability is democratic power.
Be a visible institutional actor in the democratic defense of public arts funding.
Some of the most important things philanthropy can do right now are not grantmaking. They are positioning: signing onto legal briefs in support of IMLS and NEH litigation, speaking publicly about the democratic function of federal arts funding, using institutional platforms to frame these cuts as authoritarian consolidation rather than fiscal management, and making clear to elected officials - especially the Republican members of Congress who supported bipartisan arts funding in the House - that there are organized, resourced constituents watching their votes. The American Alliance of Museums is already circulating letters to Congressional leaders. Foundations should be signing them, loudly.
Resist the pressure to self-censorship.
One of the most insidious effects of authoritarian cultural policy is the chilling effect it produces in institutions that aren’t directly targeted. Private funders, watching government agencies require compliance certifications against “promoting gender ideology,” face invisible pressure to quietly avoid grants that might attract scrutiny and to self-censor their grantmaking before anyone compels them to. This is the mechanism by which authoritarian cultural policy extends itself beyond the reach of direct enforcement. Foundations that respond by quietly shifting their portfolios away from LGBTQ+ cultural institutions, racial justice arts programming, or immigrant cultural expression are not being prudent. They’re participating in the suppression they claim to oppose.
The Longer View
The books in the resistance literature canon share something beyond their politics. They share a conviction about time. Grossman believed his novel would find its readers eventually; he was right. The Hampels’ Gestapo file inspired Fallada’s novel because the act of resistance it documented survived even though the resisters did not. Mandela built ANC capacity during 27 years in prison because he understood that democratic movements operate on a different timescale than the states that oppress them.
The cultural sector is being told, implicitly, that the present moment is an aberration and that government will return, that funding will be restored, that organizations just need to survive until the political weather changes. This framing produces an orientation toward preservation rather than transformation. It asks artists and cultural organizations to hold on rather than to build.
A more honest framing acknowledges what the civil resistance literature understood: authoritarian consolidation rarely reverses itself without being pushed, and the organizations most likely to push effectively are those that have developed their own institutional power, their own community roots, their own capacity to name what is happening. Philanthropy’s job is not to restore the status quo ante. It’s to help the cultural sector become stronger, more politically coherent, more democratically owned, and more resistant to future encroachments than it was before the cuts began.
Quangel’s postcards didn’t work, in the narrow sense. They were turned in. The people who wrote them were executed. And yet here we are, reading about them because someone else, in a different time, understood that the act of bearing witness had made something permanent that the regime could not erase.
That is the timescale on which culture operates. Philanthropy that is serious about democratic culture must operate on it too.