This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
In the past week, the upheaval in Washington, D.C., has included Elon Musk’s DOGE team getting possibly illegal access to sensitive U.S Treasury records and the Trump administration slashing funding for the National Institutes of Health.
But the havoc has been systemic. In the arts, Trump drew attention by apparently firing every member of the board of the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts he didn’t appoint and installing a loyalist as executive director.
While it’s still unclear how all of this will play out, the president’s stated goals included banning drag shows at the Kennedy Center that he claims are “targeting our youth” and ushering in “a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
However, a lower-profile change in federal arts policy might have even wider-ranging impact, in Pittsburgh and nearly every other town: new rules on grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
One change was the elimination of Challenge America, a long-running program designed to fund arts groups serving disadvantaged communities.
The NEA also issued new guidelines for its Grants for Art Projects that foreshadow substantial changes in the type of work that will be funded, and perhaps even new limits on how applicants can operate internally.
First, Challenge America. For 2025, the NEA awarded some 270 groups around the country $10,000 each, for a total of $2.7 million. In Southwestern Pennsylvania, that money bolstered the Genesis Collective, a Beaver County nonprofit with a total budget of about $250,000 that will use its grant to help compile an oral history of Black Aliquippa.
Genesis co-founder Pamela Rossi-Keen says Andrenna Williams, another of the six artists who created the group in 2021, suggested the project after she lost her father to COVID-19. “She just realized that his generation and all their stories are going away,” Rossi-Keen says.
Like the other 2025 Challenge America grants, and despite Trump’s threatened freeze on all federal grants, those funds seem safe for now. But starting in 2026, it’s a funding option that will no longer exist for groups like Genesis. And that’s unfortunate, says Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council executive director Patrick Fisher.
“The dissolution of Challenge America removes an entry-level funding opportunity designed for smaller organizations, which could make it harder for first-time applicants to access NEA support,” Fisher wrote in an email.
The NEA’s budget of $207 million is a small fraction of overall public and private arts funding in the U.S., but it’s important to individual groups and often a catalyst for leveraging further fundraising. According to a statement from the NEA, the cancellation of Challenge America — a program whose grants account for 1.3% of the NEA’s current budget — will help NEA staff “focus resources more efficiently in their work.”
Presumably that includes resources for Grants for Arts Projects (GAP). The eight Pittsburgh GAP grants this year ranged in size from $15,000 for City Theatre to $80,000 to Carnegie Mellon University. Other recipients include the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh Opera, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and City of Asylum.
But last week, the NEA announced GAP is changing too. Groups who have applied for 2026 grants now must re-apply under new guidelines.
That’s a hassle, and an additional expense for applicants. But the NEA’s announcement that it will also require applicants to demonstrate five years of programming history, up from three years, sounded further alarms.
“Requiring five years of programming history for the Grants for Arts Projects program creates a significant barrier, particularly for newer or smaller organizations,” wrote GPAC’s Fisher.
Moreover, the NEA raised eyebrows with a statement that read, in part, “Funding priority will be given for projects … that celebrate and honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
The America250 project has long figured in NEA grant documents, but in the past it was mentioned as one possibility, not a “priority.”
Even more worrisome to some was a Feb. 10 NEA update that applicants must “comply with all applicable Executive Orders while the award is being administered.”
These orders, the update emphasized, include one targeting for elimination “‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA).” Applicants, the NEA wrote, “will not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws …”
Also, the NEA stated, grant funds “shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” an order that would erase trans identities from public records.
Executive orders are not laws; most are more like wish lists. The one targeting DEIA programs (which are of course intended to prevent discrimination, not perpetuate it) is already the subject of a lawsuit by the City of Baltimore and other plaintiffs.
But for now, arts groups, who have been among the most vocal proponents of DEI, might be wondering what this means for their dealings with the NEA.
James McNeel, City Theatre’s long-time managing director (and a former NEA employee) said his pro-DEI troupe is planning to apply for a 2026 NEA grant to support a forthcoming production.
City’s 2025 NEA grant, by the way, was to back a production of LN Feldman’s play “Another Kind of Silence,” a love story about two queer women told simultaneously in English and American Sign Language.
DEI “is a value of our organization because it’s something we believe in, it’s something we feel lifts up our community,” McNeel says. He adds, “There is nothing in our commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility that’s in violation of federal law.”
A local 2025 Grants for Arts recipient who already applied for 2026 and now must reapply is multimedia dance troupe PearlArts Movement and Sound. Co-artistic director Staycee Pearl says NEA grants have been “huge” for the group in recent years. She says that while she will review the new guidelines to see if things like prioritizing America250 could align with what her group does, “I’m not changing my mission because they want us to do something that specific.”
With Challenge America gone, Genesis Collective’s Rossi-Keen looked at Grants for Arts. But with the new prioritization of America250, “I will not be applying for that grant,” she said. “I’m not trying to create work to get money. We have marching orders from our community.”
How many arts groups will be discouraged from approaching the NEA by its new anti-DEI stance, or simply by its rapidly shifting rules?
“I do think it’s of concern that specific values that many arts groups across this country lift up and celebrate and consider absolutely integral to who we are in our communities are itemized as something to avoid,” said City Theatre’s McNeel. “How could that not be chilling?”
