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      in Elections

      Tony Bechara, Painter Who Championed Latino Artists, Dies at 83

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      He turned away from a potential career in the law or international relations to produce abstract paintings, and he headed El Museo del Barrio.Tony Bechara’s parents didn’t believe he could make a living as an artist. So he majored in philosophy and economics in college and earned a master’s degree in international relations. He started law school, too, but in his mid-20s he found his true passion as a painter.Returning to New York from Paris, where he studied history at the Sorbonne, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in 1967, where he began painting black-and-white figurative imagery.Animated by the chaos of the city’s streets, he graduated to painting kaleidoscopic grids that he meticulously mapped, and he was embraced by critics and invited to exhibit in museums. He became a patron of the arts and of fledgling Latino artists and, for 15 years, led El Museo del Barrio, a showcase of Puerto Rican art that he expanded to encompass works from all over Latin America.Mr. Bechara died in a Manhattan hospital on April 23, his 83rd birthday. The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman for El Museo del Barrio said.From 2000 to 2015, he served as chairman of the board of the museum, on Fifth Avenue and 104th Street on the edge of East Harlem, where many newcomers from Puerto Rico originally settled (barrio is Spanish for neighborhood).His mandate was to broaden the museum’s collection and exhibits beyond the Barrio to include art from Latin America and the Caribbean. That expanded purview prompted some local critics to complain that the museum was neglecting its primary focus on Puerto Rican culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Casualties in Trump’s war on the arts: the small museums keeping local history alive

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      For the past two years, a small arts non-profit has been telling stories about the communities living alongside the Los Angeles river, one voice at a time.The organization, called Clockshop, has collected the oral histories of nearly 70 local residents, activists and elected officials. Their knowledge is compiled in a vast cultural atlas – which contains videos, an interactive map and a self-guided tour exploring the waterway and its transformation from a home for the Indigenous Tongva people to a popular, rapidly gentrifying urban space.But in April, the future of the ever-growing atlas was thrown in uncertainty, when a three-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency that supports libraries, archives and museums, was terminated 17 months early. The grant, originally for $150,000, still had $20,000 left to pay out. “There is no recourse to recover the funds still in the grant project activities,” the organization said in a post on Instagram.Now, executive director Sue Bell Yank says their mission to preserve the stories of residents ousted by gentrification could lead to “erasure of the past, of cultural self-determination, and a lack of understanding about how communities can successfully advocate for the kinds of neighborhoods we deserve”.Clockshop’s post foreshadowed an alarming message that would eventually be delivered to hundreds of other arts and cultural institutions across the US. As the Trump administration directed federal agencies to cancel grants that did not support the president’s new priorities, which focused on funding “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” and targeted anything broadly deemed “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion), millions of dollars dedicated to preserving local history and culture suddenly disappeared.Shortly after IMLS grants were terminated, so too were those awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). By Friday 2 May, a spreadsheet created by writer and theater director Annie Doren was being passed around the internet, aiming to catalog every organization that had lost their NEA funding. With more than 500 organizations on the list, the question shifted from who lost their funding to who didn’t.View image in fullscreenWhile organizations of all kinds were impacted, it is the small and midsized institutions that lack endowments, prominent donors, and broad outreach whose futures are particularly in jeopardy. The cuts have affected a broad swath of projects – from a documentary film-maker in Fresno making a film about a woman who has played Harriet Tubman in civil war reenactments for 30 years; to a dance performance about south-east Asian mothers in New York City, to an organization that brings films, book clubs and other cultural events to rural Montana.Rick Noguchi who runs a non-profit called California Humanities, said he has seen the 112 NEH grants it awarded across the state suspended indefinitely by the Trump administration. “There are many newer immigrant communities that don’t have deep donors and struggle with being able to find individual donors that step in to tell their stories.”‘The country is abandoning its citizens’Back in Los Angeles, the cuts have blanketed cultural institutions with feelings of anxiety and urgency. But their leaders are also fighting back, vowing to continue the work of preserving local history in spite of the administration’s threats to revoke non-profit status if they continue to champion DEI programs.The Japanese American National Museum (JANM), an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood that focuses on the history, culture and legacy of Japanese immigrants, initially lost grants that amounted to roughly $1.45m – though some have since been temporarily restored after a court order. Among those cut was a NEH landmarks of American history and culture grant, which funded a workshop helping teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration during the second world war. JANM CEO Ann Burroughs said that the program benefits approximately 20,000 students a year.“It was very much to ensure that the history was never forgotten,” Burroughs said about the museum’s mission and outreach. “It was also to ensure that what happened to Japanese Americans never happened to anybody else.”View image in fullscreenLos Angeles’s One Institute, which houses the largest queer archive in the world, also uses their collection to help educate others on queer history and marginalization. They lost a $15,000 NEA grant to support their upcoming annual festival in October, and now they are scrambling to hold fundraisers to keep the festival on track.Tony Valenzuela, the organization’s executive director, said that their event is important because it covers a gap in education. “Even in liberal states like California, only a fraction of students learn about the contributions of queer people to society,” Valenzuela said. “If the government abandons funding non-profits and other individuals and organizations providing a social good, this country will also be abandoning whole swaths of its citizens who greatly benefit from this work.”Another organization that was hit hard was the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which operates the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, located just a few blocks north of the neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. They lost four grants administered by IMLS, NEH, and California Humanities, and are unlikely to receive an NEA grant that normally keeps the organization running – a total value of nearly $144,000 dollars, or 22% of the organization’s annual budget.Like Clockshop, the LAPD’s exhibitions, public programs and archives chart the ways Skid Row has been transformed – and nearly erased – due to development and gentrification. “Not everyone sees Skid Row as a community, let alone a thriving arts community,” said Henry Apodaca, LAPD’s media archivist. “This is a critical counter narrative to popular narratives that we’ve all been inundated with when talking about Skid Row.”View image in fullscreenOne of the terminated grants was an IMLS grant for small museums, which was being used to support a project called Welcome to the Covid Hotel. The project, named for the temporary medical treatment centers that popped up in vacant hotels during the pandemic to care for unhoused people, culminated in an exhibition and a series of theatrical performances based on interviews with patients, nurses and social workers.“There’s stories of people coming in blind and getting cataract surgeries,” explains LAPD’s co-founder and artistic director, John Malpede. “Someone with gangrene needed to have his legs amputated, and it saved his life. And most people got and accepted some form of next-step housing.”Malpede’s performance is a creative way for policymakers to notice the Covid Hotels’ impact and potentially make the sites into permanent fixtures. When the grants were canceled, LAPD was still waiting on more than $38,000 to come through: money that was supposed to pay venues, crew and performers for events that took place in April, as well as upcoming performances in May and June, and a forthcoming publication. While LAPD aims to move forward with their plans, they are uncertain on how to fund it.After going public on social media, private donors have since stepped up to help the JANM and Clockshop recoup their losses. LAPD and the One Institute, however, are still looking for support. Without this funding, not only could the non-profits disband, but also the communities that have flourished as a result of their work.As Malpede warns: “It’s only because of the neighborhood standing up and using its own history that it continues to be present.” More

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      in Elections

      Can Shoplifting Be Justified? This Artist Wants You to Decide.

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      Dries Verhoeven has constructed a replica grocery store for his latest provocative performance.Between two aisles of a grocery store, a woman is having a destructive meltdown. She opens a jar of applesauce, spits in it and returns it to the shelf. She squirts a tube of mayonnaise onto the floor, then smears tomato sauce from a container on her chest.Climbing the shelves, she recites a soliloquy on the joys of shoplifting. “Why call it stealing?” she says, with surprising calm. “I call it a love affair.”All of this takes place within a giant glass box on the stage of the International Theater Amsterdam as part of the six-hour performance installation “Everything Must Go,” by the Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven. Through Thursday, spectators can enter and exit the theater during the performance to peek into the box or can watch the performer unravel on TV monitors displaying CCTV footage.It is the latest disquieting offering from Verhoeven, 49, who combines elements of theater and visual art to create performances that are engineered to leave the audience trembling.“I’m quite a nervous person, and I like this feeling of nervousness, because it means there’s something at stake,” he said, while the glass box was being assembled at the theater earlier this week. “When we’re nervous, we are activated.”The installation takes place over six hours …Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times… and features disquieting elements to unsettle the audience.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Met Museum Surrenders Artifacts Thought Looted From Iraq

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      The Manhattan district attorney’s office said the objects had been identified as illicit during an investigation of an art dealer suspected of having trafficked in stolen antiquities.Three ancient artworks that for years had been part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are now thought to have been looted were returned on Monday to the Republic of Iraq, the Met and the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in statements.The artworks were recovered following criminal investigations into looted art, including one into the British antiquities dealer Robin Symes, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Symes, who died in 2023, was long suspected by investigators to have been a trafficker.The artifacts were returned in an official ceremony at the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan that was attended by Met officials and representatives from Iraq.“Through the Museum’s cooperation with the Manhattan DA’s office, and as a result of its investigation into Robin Symes, the museum recently received new information that made it clear that the works should be repatriated, resulting in a constructive resolution,” the Met said in a statement.The artifacts include a Sumerian vessel made of gypsum alabaster dating to around 2600 to 2500 B.C., which passed through Symes’s hands and was given to the museum in 1989 by a private collection; and two Babylonian ceramic sculptures, a head of a male and a head of a female, dating to around 2000 to 1600 B.C.The head of a male was sold by Symes to the Met in 1972; the head of a female was a gift from the same private collection in 1989. All three were seized by the district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit earlier this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Thaddeus Mosley Shapes Universes in Wood

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      In a spectacular exhibition at Karma Gallery, the 98-year-old artist makes hardwood sculptures that burst with vitality and variation.The first sculpture in Thaddeus Mosley’s spectacular show “Proximity” is an assembly of four roughly wishbone-shaped pieces of carved walnut that stands 6 ½ feet tall. He calls it “Arboreal Choreography.” Seen from the gallery’s front door it does indeed bring to mind a well-dressed dancer in a self-conscious pose, thumbs in braces, one toe raised. From the end of a nearby bench, though, it becomes a complex jungle of shadows, creases, cracks and reinforcements, with brown and off-white tones so rich and various that you’d almost think he painted them on. As you pass alongside, it all becomes something else again.Mosley, who was born in 1926, has also worked in assemblage, sourcing miscellaneous objects from a Pittsburgh junkyard owned by Andy Warhol’s brother; one piece in the current show is mounted on a found lamp stand. In the past few years he’s also taken up casting, and a group of his recent bronzes will soon be installed in City Hall Park in Manhattan. But since he started making sculpture in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, the Pennsylvania native has chiefly worked with hardwood, enlisting every last bit of its natural aesthetic splendor, as Noguchi did for stone.Mosley’s “Flight Form,” 2023, in which a rounded, hollow mass of dark brown walnut sits horizontally atop a ballet-toe-shaped column. via the artist and KarmaMany of the pieces in “Proximity” express more singular thoughts than “Arboreal Choreography.” There are stools, wooden embraces, and several notched spirals that culminate in a majestic, nine-foot-tall column topped by a jaunty half pipe. Two sculptures made of locust wood are so shiny and yellow that they call to mind glazed French confections, at least for the moment. (Exposure to the air will eventually turn them brown.) It’s not that any of these things are simple — you could almost see “Curvilinear Reach” in a graduate-level math course — just that they’re easily taken in as wholes. Still, even in the most straightforward pieces, Mosley weaves together heady pairs of opposites: stillness and motion, curves and straight edges, intimacy and grandeur, conscious intention and organic growth.“Sonic X24” leans back like a debonair narwhal, and in “Crossroads,” a blade-shaped length of walnut notches a semicircular piece that evokes a slice of melon. In “Flight Form,” a rounded, hollow piece of dark brown walnut sits horizontally atop a ballet-toe-shaped column.Viewed from the middle of the room, it brings to mind a flayed beef carcass of the kind that Chaim Soutine liked to paint, a bulging, numinous stand-in for the universe itself. But Mosley ends his universe with 12 square projections, as if to impose some human order and decision onto the natural world. From the other side the same form reveals a crackling cavity full of esoteric mystery.Thaddeus Mosley: ProximityThrough May 23, Karma Gallery, 549 West 26th Street, Manhattan; (212) 717-1671, karmakarma.org. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Love, hope, community and resistance’: ACLU to unveil 9,000 sq ft quilt for trans rights

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      “It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t anxious,” Abdool Corlette said while discussing his latest project with the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom to Be. An award-winning film-maker and head of brand at the ACLU, Corlette has been working for nearly two years with hundreds of trans people across the country to create a 9,000 sq ft quilt, composed of 258 panels that are packed with responses to the question: what does freedom mean to you?Corlette is anxious because Freedom to Be is all about trans joy and trans freedom, and it will make a defiant stand for both on 17 May in Washington DC in spite of the war that Donald Trump has waged against the trans community since his inauguration.“We have been doing everything we can to create contingency plans to make sure we have every scenario accounted for,” Corlette said. “This is what keeps me up at night, making sure our guests are safe.”This was not the celebration that Corlette had hoped for. When Freedom to Be kicked off in September 2023, it was focused more around combating the tsunami of anti-trans legislation that has taken over statehouses since 2020, as well as the related wave of anti-trans rhetoric that has seeded the ground for such legislation. The first two prongs of the campaign have already occurred: with the first, Corlette helped tell the stories of trans kids whose lives had been transformed by gender-affirming medical care, and with the second he spearheaded a rally on the steps of the supreme court on 4 December 2024, in conjunction with oral arguments in the case of United States v Skrmetti. The eventual ruling on that case will decide on the legality of bans against gender-affirming care for trans minors.The third prong of Freedom to Be happens this weekend as part of WorldPride, an annual global celebration of the LGBTQ+ community that just happens to occur in DC this year. The festivities will play out during the upswing of one of the most virulently anti-queer governments in US history, and, already, attenders from all over the world have pulled out, as have many of the event’s corporate sponsors.View image in fullscreenIn spite of the potentially dangerous situation, Corlette is hoping that the trans community will be able to find joy as he publicly displays the completed quilt. “I want someone who is feeling heavy to walk into that space and see that across the United States there’s 9,000 sq ft of messages of love, hope, community and resistance,” Corlette said. “Joy is what I want to blanket that day.”Lee Blinder, founding executive director of Trans Maryland, took part in helping create some of those messages that Corlette hopes trans people and their allies will see in DC. On 9 February this year, less than three weeks into the Trump administration, Blinder walked into a local queer bar to host more than 100 members of the trans community in creating squares for the quilt. According to Blinder, coming together to make the quilt instilled hope amid the onslaught against trans people that filled Trump’s first weeks in office. “People walked into that room feeling extraordinarily grateful to be there,” Blinder said. “There were these gorgeous multicolored sewing machines; there was so much thought and intention that went into the event. Multiple people came up to me and said, ‘We’re so grateful that y’all had this event. This is what I needed.’ It was really nice to be there and take time out of that impossible week.”Blinder’s comments speak to the power of being in community, even when confronted by the profound threats to basic human rights and bodily autonomy posed by the Trump administration and Republican-led state governments. It is a power Blinder is quite familiar with, as for years they have led Trans Maryland in hosting weekly trans support groups and organizing a program in which trans people help each other with name and gender marker changes. “It’s trans people who have been through the process helping other community members,” they told me.View image in fullscreenBlinder plans to be in DC for the unveiling of the Freedom to Be quilt, and they are extremely thrilled to be participating. “I’m really excited to see it all stitched together in person,” they said. “I saw all the quilt squares stacked there [in the bar] after everyone had made them – there’s this pool table in the space, and they’d lay them out there where we could see a little bit of the vision of how they would all come together.”Blinder echoed many who have posed art as an important element in fighting back against the Trump administration and other anti-LGBTQ+ governments. In particular, they see the way that art can bring together communities, while also opening minds and hearts, as integral to pushing back against authoritarian political movements. “The process of creating art has been a longstanding element of resistance for the trans and queer community,” they said. “It’s a key component with the resistance against fascism – it’s played a key role in the past, and I think it will continue to play a significant role in the resistance as it is right now.”According to Corlette, working with trans people at a particularly dangerous time for the community has been a powerful and often painful experience, as he has built personal relationships with individuals who have been harmed by repressive governmental policies. “Individuals who were storytellers in the first part of this campaign have had to pick up and leave their home states for fear of safety for their own bodies,” he said. “That’s what makes it so personal.”View image in fullscreenCorlette hopes that Freedom to Be will not just reach trans people and their allies but also connect with anyone who is feeling demoralized amid the authoritarian ambitions of the Trump administration. “No matter how daunting this fight is, hope has not been lost,” he said. “If the most marginalized community in the country is remaining in the fight, everyone else should be as well.”Ultimately, Corlette sees Freedom to Be as continuing a legacy of transformative community action taken by the queer community in support of itself. For him, spreading stories and joy while giving the community ways to be together is what’s most important. “This monument is a direct descendant of the Aids memorial quilt,” he said. “We wanted to really be in the legacy of those who came before us, to use art and advocacy to not only memorialize but to create pockets of joy for communities to tell their stories and come together to celebrate their existence.” More

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      in Elections

      With Guarantees Galore, Christie’s Has a Rocky Start to Auction Week

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      There was little excited bidding on the art collection of the Riggio family, who built their fortune on the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain — a caution flag for the art market. Chandelier bidding. Quiet phone banks. Executives wiping their brows.One of the most anticipated auctions of the season proved to be anticlimactic on Monday evening at Christie’s in New York, where many objects were presold to guaranteed bids and there was little evidence of the enthusiastic buyers who defined the market’s peak in 2022. Experts said the sale was marred by the economic uncertainty surrounding President Trump’s tariffs and how they might hurt the global art market.Louise Riggio consigned nearly 40 works from the collection she built with her husband, the Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio, who died last year. A second auction on Monday night, called the 20th Century Evening Sale, fared better, with more artworks selling above their estimates and livelier bidding on the phones and in the room.Christie’s had guaranteed the consignors an undisclosed minimum amount for the collection and then worked feverishly in recent days to offload the auction house’s risk, object by object, by finding outside buyers to leave their own pre-sale bids on works by modern masters like Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.At first glance, the Riggio collection appeared to have done fine with a $272 million total, including buyer’s fees. But stripped of the fees, the sale fell short of the auction house’s pre-sale expectations that included a low estimate of $252 million.“Coming in? It should be now, ideally,” said the auctioneer, Adrien Meyer, at one point, struggling to find bidders on one of the lower-priced items in the sale, a terra-cotta vase by Picasso that ultimately sold within its estimate for $567,000, including fees.The top lot of the Riggio sale was a 1922 gridded painting by Mondrian that had once greeted visitors in the grand entryway of the bookstore tycoon’s Park Avenue apartment. It sold for $47.6 million, including fees. The canvas, “Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue,” fell short of the previous record for a Mondrian, $51 million, set just three years earlier at Sotheby’s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Arts groups for people of color steel themselves after Trump’s NEA cuts: ‘They poked the bear’

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      Summertime at the Upijata Scissor-Tail Swallow Arts Company, an artistic program located on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, is usually bustling. The arts community center, created to help combat high youth suicide rates on the reservation, would normally offer twice-a-week classes to enrolled students. Traditional artists – quilters or beadworkers – would be paid to teach interested participants. It was all a part of Upijata’s mission to emotionally and economically support the vulnerable community, the poorest reservation in the US.But this year Upijata will have to significantly reduce its programming. Classes will now only be held monthly. Instead of hosting 20 students for workshops, Upijata will only be able to accommodate six. The cuts at Upijata come after a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was rescinded last week. The funding, the first time Upijata has received an NEA award since being founded in 2019, made up about half of the company’s budget.Upijata is one of hundreds of groups facing severe budget deficits after the Trump administration swiftly cut millions of dollars in NEA grants. Now, arts organizations nationwide, such as Portland Center Stage and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, are scrambling to cover the shortfall. Groups specifically catering to marginalized communities are also caught in the fallout.“We’re [building] a community where we’re creating a sense of belonging to combat the suicide rates,” said Upijata’s executive director, Shannon Beshears. “If we cannot be that sense of belonging, because we don’t have the consistency, the ability to impact our participants’ lives in a positive way decreases dramatically.”An email sent out to grant recipients on 2 May said that the NEA would “focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President”, several outlets reported. Recipients of rescinded grants were given only seven days to appeal the decision. Several top officials at the NEA have since resigned from the agency following the grant terminations. The NEA did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.Projects being prioritized by the Trump administration instead include initiatives that “elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, [and] empower houses of worship to serve communities”, among others.Grant terminations have affected artistic programming in every corner of the US, and organization administrators have taken to social media to share their shock and outrage. Many of the funded projects are already underway. In the interim, institutions have launched emergency funding campaigns, urging community members to donate. Others say they are appealing to other streams of donation, including private philanthropists. Many have filed appeals with the NEA to have their grants restored. Several of the funded programs are also the signature projects for impacted organizations, such as the annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park initiative for the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) in New York City.CTH, known for its contemporary takes on Shakespeare classics and Greek tragedies, was only a month out from rehearsals for their production of Memon, a new play about an Ethiopian king who fought with the city of Troy, when they received news that their $60,000 grant had been cancelled. “They sort of signaled that they were going to do something like this a couple of months ago,” said CTH’s producing artistic director, Ty Jones. “Did I think they would follow through? No, I didn’t.”The production is a part of the theatre’s annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park festival, which sees about 2,000 attendees a performance. The event generates foot traffic for local businesses. Representatives from New York City’s department of health and mental hygiene also provide community members with onsite services, including blood pressure checks and social service references.In Philadelphia, the advocacy group Asian Americans United (AAU) lost a $25,000 grant meant to support their annual mid-Autumn festival ahead of the event’s 30-year anniversary in October. The event was first founded by local youth who couldn’t be with their families for the mid-Autumn celebration, said AAU’s executive director, Vivian Chang. The festival has since grown substantially, exposing upwards of 8,000 attendees annually to more than 100 local performers.“For a lot of people, it’s a very accessible way to reach a new audience. These aren’t groups that will be on a super mainstream stage, or maybe they’re performing an art form that’s undervalued,” said Chang. “Where do they get to celebrate this? Where do they get to display? The festival is one of the few places for that.”For many organizations catering to disenfranchised groups, the alleged reprioritization is especially frustrating and contradictory. Upijata, for example, works with tribal groups and theoretically should be considered eligible under the NEA’s newly outlined goals, which include projects that “support Tribal communities”. “They said supporting tribal communities [in their new priorities], but in their effort to prioritize supporting tribal communities, they are directly taking funding from them,” said Beshears. “It feels like there is so much back and forth, so much dishonesty.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMany affected organizations were not surprised to see the Trump administration’s attack on funding. Prior to last week’s cuts, the NEA was ordered to require grant applicants not to promote “gender ideology”, as a part of a broader executive order.The National Queer Theater (NQT), a non-profit theater based in Brooklyn, New York, had a $20,000 grant rescinded for its Criminal Queerness Festival, a showcase featuring work by queer artists from countries where queerness is criminalized or censored. The group joined a lawsuit in March with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to sue the NEA over its anti-LGBTQ+ policy. As for the latest NEA cuts, NQT’s artistic director, Adam Odsess-Rubin, said he and staff members are “upset by the NEA cuts, but I can’t say we’re surprised”.“These cuts are part of the larger story of how Elon Musk and Doge have tried to gut the federal government and really focused on eliminating any programs they see as potentially counter to this administration’s priorities,” said Odsess-Rubin. “That includes any programming related to LGBTQ+ issues, any programming focused on Black and brown communities, as well as programming around climate change or healthcare”.Many groups are hopeful that they’ll be able to close the gaps in funding, especially given outcry from the community. But questions of how to handle attacks on the arts in a long-term capacity remain.CTH ultimately decided not to request an appeal, instead opting to focus on future actions against NEA attacks. The theatre hopes to work with the other organizations who have also seen their funds stopped, possibly through legal means.In the meantime, CTH is moving ahead with their Memon production and is confident their community will help them raise $60,000 by June. “I’m one of these crazy people that believes that the power of people is stronger than the people in power,” said Jones. “I don’t fear these people. If anything, they poked the bear. It’s a spark that’s put a flame in motion.” More