May 2, 2025, was a much anticipated date for the Harris Theater. That night—a Friday night—was the U.S. premiere of a revival of Scott Joplin’s sole surviving opera, Treemonisha. Despite Joplin’s legacy as a composer, Treemonisha had nearly disappeared from history. No copies survive of Joplin’s original orchestrations, only a 1911 score for piano and voice. The opera didn’t receive its first performance until 1972, when it was staged at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center, 55 years after Joplin’s death. Productions since then have been few and far between.
The reimagined version of Treemonisha that premiered on May 2 had been in the works for nearly a decade. Toronto production company Volcano Theatre had helped assemble a group of Black women artists: Composers Jessie Montgomery and Jannina Norpoth adapted and orchestrated the music, while Leah-Simone Bowen adapted the story and wrote the new libretto with Cheryl L. Davis.
Crucially, both the 2023 world premiere in Toronto and the U.S. premiere at the Harris Theater received support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The 2025 production, a collaborative effort in cultural preservation, linked the past, present, and future—and its exploration of Black identity in America dovetailed with its multifaceted celebration of Black American music in dialogue with European classical tradition. At 7:30 PM, following a Black carpet celebration, the curtain rose on Treemonisha. Three minutes later, Harris Theater president and chief executive officer Lori Dimun received an email from the NEA: The theater’s $20,000 grant supporting Treemonisha had been terminated.
The Harris Theater is among many organizations and artists nationwide to get late-night emails from the NEA notifying them that their funds had been terminated or withdrawn. And because the NEA pays its grants by reimbursement, this didn’t just throw a wrench in the theater’s planning—it created a deficit by stripping funds that had already been spent.
The NEA was the third federal grant-making agency in the cultural sector to claw back promised funds on the orders of the Trump administration. Its actions follow a March 14 executive order calling for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to reduce its functions and staff to the minimum allowed by law and April directives terminating or withdrawing grants made by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
The workers at these agencies have been thrown into turmoil, with many either placed on leave or announcing their resignations. The turmoil has been aggravated by confusing and inconsistent communication from the administration’s hatchet-wielding functionaries. The NEH grants were rescinded via an email from Grant_Notifications@nehemail.onmicrosoft.com, which might explain why so many notices went to spam. One grant recipient tells me that they couldn’t decide whether to trust a message about a discontinued grant, because it was filled with odd punctuation errors. NEA notices (which at least came from a government email address) provided the option to appeal the decision, but they only gave grantees a week to file—without any indication of next steps. Both rounds of notices arrived after working hours, and because the NEA sent its out on a Friday night, many organizations didn’t see them till Monday, losing two days of their appeal window.
As with many of the Trump administration’s other clawbacks, lawsuits have been flying in an attempt to stall or block these cuts. But even when these suits succeed, the resulting back-and-forths (the IMLS is a particularly messy example) only add to the sense of uncertainty and instability.
I conducted more than 30 interviews for this story. This sample includes organizations and artists across every facet of Chicago’s cultural sector: museums, venues, curators, educators, dancers, musicians, festival producers, poets, translators, historians, filmmakers, and visual artists. I spoke to representatives of institutions with massive operating budgets or substantial endowments and tiny groups with little to spare. Some have been around since the 19th century, long before the category “nonprofit” existed. Others were born out of and persevered through the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the people I talked to were blunt about the politics of the day. Others were careful not to use Trump’s name. But nearly everyone spoke with anger, frustration, or grief—something you don’t often hear in these sectors. Even prior to this administration, cultural workers were accustomed to never quite having enough, a condition that demands resilience and optimism.
“I worry about the resilience narrative,” says Kate Dumbleton, executive and artistic director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, which lost nearly a third of its core artist budget to an NEA grant withdrawal. “Why do we have to be resilient all the time? It’s because the people in power have decided that communities need to be resilient, should be resilient.” To meet this moment, impacted organizations will need to call upon their communities to collaborate, but Dumbleton doesn’t think their capacity to do so is “an excuse for not addressing the issue of a scarcity of resources.”
She poses a key question: “Who are we asking to be resilient, and why?”
The NEA announced its first round of fiscal year 2025 grant awards on January 14—less than a week before inauguration. Out of the nearly $36.8 million in funding, $1,903,000 was awarded across 80 grants in Illinois. Seventy-four of those grants, amounting to 95 percent of the state’s NEA funds in this cycle, were awarded in Cook County. NEA funding isn’t limited to direct grants, though: Per Arts Alliance Illinois, 40 percent of the NEA’s budget goes to state arts agencies that make their own grants, including the Illinois Arts Council.
“For smaller to midsized organizations, particularly for smaller organizations, public funding is just a much larger share of their budget,” says Claire Rice, executive director of Arts Alliance Illinois. “They don’t have the deep pockets and six- and seven-figure donors, so for them, public funding is one of the most equitable forms of funding that we have.”
A grant for a one-off project can represent years of work. Multiple rescinded NEA grants awarded to Chicago-area organizations were dedicated to the process of commissioning, developing, and premiering a single piece, such as Silk Road Cultural Center’s Road Less Traveled, conceived by artistic director Jamil Khoury and written by Lyra Nalan. This new production—which connects Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to the story of human rights crusader Tye Leung Schulze, the first Chinese American woman to vote in a U.S. presidential election and the first to receive a federal appointment—evolved from a project announced in 2023 as Silk Road’s return to live theater.
NEA-funded projects often have complex timelines, but the agency tends to award grants by fiscal year, which makes planning relatively straightforward. An added layer of complexity can arise for NEH and IMLS grants, which are frequently awarded for periods that span years. The kind of work that goes into this multiyear planning process can be seen in an IMLS sample application that features excerpts from a National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) project proposal. IMLS awarded the museum $129,050 to expand upon the “History Lessons” exhibition marking the museum’s new permanent location at the last of the Jane Addams Homes. (Substantial NEH funding also supported the capital campaign behind the museum’s new location.) This 12-page sample application includes several pages of narrative, a schedule of completion running from September 2024 through September 2026, and a chart outlining the data the museum will collect to demonstrate its performance.
Once an organization has a grant application approved by a federal agency, the agency offers a grant amount, and an extended administrative process follows. Grantees revise and resubmit their proposals, agencies adjust the amount, and both parties finalize a contract. Weeks or months pass between an organization or individual being notified of their grant and the actual announcement of the final amount. (This piece uses several terms for rescinded grants. If the feds claw back a grant after it’s finalized, it’s been terminated. If they end the process before finalizing a contract, the grant has been withdrawn.) Because NEA funds and some NEH funds are provided via reimbursement, organizations may not receive the money until long after the award commitment, and to be paid they must complete extensive reporting to prove they’ve met the grant requirements.
Money to be reimbursed represents promises already made by grantee organizations. They can’t rectify their budgets by unspending their grants once the government claws back the funds. And groups involved in education have to deal with extra complications because of the way school years and fiscal years overlap. The rescinded NEA grant awarded to Art Encounter, a multifaceted arts nonprofit based in Evanston, would’ve covered just over 25 percent of the organization’s school-based residency, which serves “about 900 students every year in about 28 classrooms across six or seven public schools,” per executive director Lea Pinsky.
Community TV Network (CTVN), a small 51-year-old organization that provides youth with media production opportunities, would’ve used its $30,000 NEA grant to support stipends and salaries for year-round media arts education programs at Austin College and Career Academy. “That’s the disaster,” says executive director and founder Denise Zaccardi. “When you finally have a program in a neighborhood that needs programs, and you cut it.”
Some organizations end their fiscal years on June 30, and axed grants left them with less than two months to reconcile their budgets. And while some organizations were fortunate enough to be reimbursed before the rescissions happened, they’ve already approved budgets for the next fiscal year that depend on federal funds no longer forthcoming.
Adding to the confusion, some organizations neither received their funds nor were notified they were withdrawn or terminated. Arts of Life director of development and communications Anne Cauley says that the organization received a $25,000 NEA grant offer at the end of last year. “[When the NEA offer] shows up in portal, we revise the budget to match what they will be funding,” she says. But Arts of Life’s grant has neither been withdrawn nor confirmed as awarded.
Cauley says the organization typically would’ve completed the project and invoiced by June. “I have reached out to them several times since January to check in on the status, and each time I received a very similar response: ‘We are comparing our grantees to the executive orders.’” Cauley says she’s been reaching out weekly with no movement in the process. “The federal government might just ghost us.”
The past five years had already been a complicated time for the arts and culture sector, even before Trump’s second inauguration. “The end of COVID relief dollars is, in my view, the biggest strain on our sector in the moment, regardless of this administration and regardless of these cuts,” says Claire Rice. The American Rescue Plan passed during the Biden administration in 2021 included $470 million in relief to the arts and culture sector, with provisions that ensured that federal agencies as well as state and regional organizations were substantially supported. Many organizations I interviewed for this piece underlined the importance of this infusion of government money.
“It is a weirdly idealistic thing for the federal government to do,” says Rebecca Hall, director of communications and operations at Chicago Film Archives. “It sort of assumes that we live in a society instead of every person for themselves, every organization for themselves.” For an all-too-brief moment, it looked like the crisis of the pandemic had revived the notion of government support for a cultural commons. Erica Bittner, founder and president of Artistic Fundraising Group, says her firm connected many organizations with aid during the worst of the pandemic, much of it from the federal government—what separates today from those years is that the feds aren’t addressing the crisis but causing it.
At the height of the COVID pandemic, solidarity and communication across the culture sector were key for survival and sanity. The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), founded in March 2020, launched a campaign that succeeded in getting the Save Our Stages Act passed in December of that year. Its provisions included the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program, which provided relief to venue operators and promoters, including concert halls, live theater venues, movie theaters, and museums.
“Right now is the time for us to get very entrenched with the advocacy of it all,” says Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL) cochair Jimalita Tillman. Beginning in June, some SVOG recipients began receiving rescission notices from the Small Business Administration (SBA) that gave them 30 days to repay their grants or challenge the decision. NIVA and CIVL have attempted to reassure their members that these clawback attempts are in line with eligibility guidelines and criteria in place since 2021. A July 2024 report from SBA’s Office of the Inspector General recommended expediting the review and termination process for recipients “identified as high-risk of potential ineligibility,” aiming to finish by September 30, 2024.
These rescission notices have their roots in Biden-era actions, but it’s difficult to trust the Trump administration not to make things worse. Tillman advises that everyone stay connected and informed on what’s happening in both legislation and advocacy “before it gets to crisis-crisis mode.” A number of moving parts are in play, she says, including funding cuts, changes to nonprofit tax code, and the effects of the alleged One Big Beautiful Bill. “It’s difficult to do as a lone wolf,” she says.
The slashing of federal budgets is explicitly intended to force nonprofits to conform to the administration’s ideology if they don’t want to risk losing the funds they need to survive.
The severity of attacks on the arts under Trump may be unprecedented, but culture workers have come to expect a cycle of boom-and-bust: a familiar waltz where a period of national crisis provokes a substantial but temporary surge of federal support for the arts and social services, followed by a conservative backlash to undo these investments.
Art critic Ben Davis describes “a culture whose forms and functions are reshaped by cataclysmic events” in the introduction of his 2022 book, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy. In 1935, in response to the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched Federal Project Number One under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), creating national programs to support art, music, theater, and writing as well as founding the Historical Records Survey. WPA director Harry Hopkins famously spoke to the plight of unemployed artists: “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people.”
The NEA and NEH were established in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, during the civil rights era and the implementation of Johnson’s Great Society programs. Notable in this era is the government’s increasing use of nonprofits as facilitators.
“The nonprofit industry is such an important part of our social safety net because our government doesn’t provide so many things that it should,” says Devon VanHouten-Maldonado, executive director of SkyArt. For 17 years, SkyArt had reliably received funding from the NEA, including a $40,000 grant awarded for this year. But then the 2025 grant was withdrawn. “There is a problem with the fact that this social safety net that has been created by nonprofits will never have enough resources to serve all the people that we need to serve,” he says. “And we have to be honest with ourselves about why that is and the fact that it’s designed that way on purpose.”
In the 2007 essay collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, academics and activists critique the historical role and structure of nonprofits. The collective argument is that good intentions and earnest efforts don’t change the fact that nonprofits are tools of the state, positioned to piece together services that the government should be providing. People who might otherwise dissent against a government that neglects its responsibilities—health care, labor protections, education, infrastructure, solutions to housing insecurity and poverty—are instead turned into service providers who rely on the government for the tax-exempt status and legitimacy that allows them to fundraise. And that money frequently has strings attached, whether it comes from government agencies, philanthropic entities, or corporations. This means nonprofits can end up prioritizing the funders who keep the lights on over the people who benefit from their services.
The idea of a “nonprofit industrial complex” may sound like a metaphor, but the Trump administration seems hell-bent on making it bluntly literal. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded warned of the danger of getting in bed with the feds precisely because they can do what they’re trying to do right now. The slashing of federal budgets is explicitly intended to force nonprofits to conform to the administration’s ideology if they don’t want to risk losing the funds they need to survive. Cultural organizations may even be squeezed by cuts or ideological targeting affecting agencies outside the culture sector.
The EPA just declined a six-figure grant proposal from the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance to train community gardeners and aspiring young horticulturists on the west side. Arts of Life, which provides programming for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, receives nearly 50 percent of its income through Medicaid, which is under assault by the Republican murder budget. In 2023, SkyArt received $250,000 from the Illinois Department of Human Services for violence prevention, but they’re no longer eligible for such funds. Fearmongering about crime has also helped shift resources away from community programming and toward policing, despite evidence that the arts improve outcomes for at-risk youth.
Conditions of scarcity in the culture sector can pit “the arts” and “the public” against each other, in that arts organizations may feel pressure to pander to the largest possible audience in order to compete for funding. An increasing emphasis on accessibility can make it difficult to preserve the integrity and history of art that knows it isn’t for everyone.
That the arts and culture sector could be so easily thrown into existential chaos probably says less about investment under Biden or the attacks under Trump and more about the fundamental asymmetry of the relationship between nonprofits and the state. It’s also a reminder that the state has always put capitalistic interests ahead of the public good—the main difference from administration to administration is a matter of degree, not of kind.
“Should this regime fall flat and it goes away, and we spend a couple years in a reconstruction period, I worry that the kind of hypercapitalist mentality will just persist,” says School of the Art Institute professor Pablo Garcia. “The next person in charge on the other side of the aisle, I don’t know if a priority [for them] would be ‘let’s reinvest.’”
Garcia took a sabbatical this year to work on a digital publication covering what he describes as “the history of drawing technologies,” expecting his NEH grant to supplement the temporary loss of salary. The agency’s disbursement schedule meant that Garcia received $30,000 of his $40,000 NEH grant before it was terminated, but his project still ended up stalled just as he was going to hire animators, Web developers, and other assistants.
Thankfully, some alternative funders are stepping up and filling a few gaps. At the end of April, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a “$15 million emergency funding commitment to the Federation of State Humanities Councils.” In early July, the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation announced a $600,000 NEA Relief Fund available to current grantee partners. And organizations note that their established audiences have really come through with stopgap donations.
Despite these demonstrations of support and enthusiasm, circumstances in the federal government aren’t likely to improve anytime soon. Artists and organizations may look to state and city agencies to step up, but the loss of federal money will surely have ripple effects on the Illinois Arts Council and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). And DCASE in particular already faces tension with the local arts community.
Since the appointment of commissioner Clinée Hedspeth in early 2024, the department has suffered from high turnover and allegations that Hedspeth has bullied and mistreated staff. At the February 25 meeting of DCASE’s Cultural Advisory Council—less than three weeks after the NEA announced the discontinuation of the Challenge America program, a key portal to federal funding for small organizations from underserved communities—Hedspeth attended only briefly via video. Her staffers were left to deal with the council’s questions and concerns around the potential loss of federal funds. (DCASE did not respond to a request for comment.)
A coalition calling itself Artists for Chicago sent a DCASE letter of concern to Mayor Brandon Johnson in April, blaming the department for late grant payments, broken relationships with long-standing grantees, and a lack of communication around grant administration. Several organizations I interviewed for this story noted a regressive change in grant eligibility for the CityArts program. In 2022, DCASE had expanded CityArts to provide two-year support and removed its restriction on consecutive funding, so that organizations could reapply for CityArts grants immediately after completing a funding cycle. But this year, DCASE announced that the consecutive funding restriction would return beginning in fiscal year 2026, requiring grantees to take a year off.
“Chicago does a fantastic job of supporting the arts overall, but this simultaneous tumult at the city and federal levels is affecting our future planning and other organizations’ future planning,” says David Skidmore, ensemble member and executive director of Third Coast Percussion. “While we know that Chicago’s philanthropic community is strong and passionate, any disruption in one part of the funding ecosystem puts undue strain on another part.”
“At the end of the day, it’s not really about our bottom line,” says Illinois Humanities executive director Gabrielle Lyon. “We are really trying to remind people we need more public spaces. We need more ways to get together.” Illinois Humanities lost $2 million in NEH funds—a third of its annual budget. This puts more than operating funds and grants at risk: It also threatens the organization’s public programs, which support free events at libraries, continuing education for adults, and initiatives that explore alternatives to mass incarceration.
In mid-June, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum presented a one-week workshop to encourage University of Illinois Chicago faculty to use the museum’s exhibits and archives to bring the humanities into the curriculum of any department. This workshop was the initial phase of a three-year project that would have been supported by a terminated NEH grant of nearly $150,000, but it was important to museum director Liesl Olson to go through with it anyway. Faculty learned about “the histories that literally are beneath the feet of UIC students, that help people understand where they are and why they’re here.”
The systems supporting arts and culture haven’t worked for a long time, and this has taught artists and the public that cares about them to come together, to refuse to stand down, and to imagine new ways forward. Olson talked about the artists and immigrants who’ve passed through Hull House since 1889, many of whose names have been lost to time.
“The place is about Jane Addams, but it’s really Hull House that made Jane Addams,” she says. “It’s the tens of thousands of people who came through the doors of Hull House who created Jane Addams. Those are the histories we’d like to tell.”
She recites the final lines of the novel Middlemarch, written by Mary Ann Evans under the pen name George Eliot, as a reminder of how Addams herself thought about history: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
The Trump administration has routinely cited DEI and “waste, fraud, and abuse” as key targets of its aggressive actions targeting arts funding. This is a white supremacist project that has declared its aim to disappear marginalized people of all kinds from public life, and its tactics so far have relied on the invisibility of much of the cultural labor it is destroying. The jobs lost to these cuts won’t just include people you might see onstage: We’re at risk of losing teaching artists, preservation workers, small businesses who vend at festivals, costume designers, museum curators and researchers, people who build sets or rent out equipment, and so many more it’s difficult to count. And when they’re gone, will we know who to blame and why?
The 30-plus interviews I conducted weren’t nearly enough for me to grasp the magnitude of what we’ve lost or predict if we’ll ever get it back. This piece only scratches the surface when it comes to the history of the artists, academics, and administrators I’ve spoken to, the lives they’ve touched, and the diverse experiences and stories they honor with their labor. Tyler Thompson, an executive director of 773 Dance Project, doesn’t think communities will immediately realize the impact of the cuts, but she knows that coming together will only get more important. “Our involvement with each other is mandatory,” she says.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
