What Nashville Artists Are Doing About Cuts to Federal Funding

On a Tuesday in early April, Nashville artist Mary Addison Hackett received an email telling her that her federally funded grant had been suspended. The language was blunt and bureaucratic: Her grant “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”

Hackett calls the letter a “gut punch.” She was involved with the Autistic Voices Oral History Project, an organization that gets federal funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and was a target of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency.

“The grant was for a project that was to learn about inclusive oral history techniques for interviewing people in the autistic community and preserving that culture,” Hackett tells the Scene by phone from her home studio in Donelson. “I was looking forward to improving that skill set, and I saw this as an opportunity to learn more about researching and give me those skills that would enable me to apply for various other grants.”

As a longtime working artist, Hackett is used to piecing together income through teaching, writing and grants. Her expansive practice includes painting, photography, documentary and performance art. Recently she’s used documentary techniques to investigate the intersection between photography, neurodiversity and mental health, which followed a late-in-life diagnosis on the autism spectrum. “Spoiler alert: I’m autistic,” she tells the Scene. 

Still, the loss of the IMLS grant was deeper than a single lost opportunity. Hackett understood it as a signal that government institutions and the policies that guide them were no longer interested in supporting the kind of work she does, or the kind of communities she’s part of.

“It was a huge disappointment,” she says. “And I think that’s a natural thing for people in the autism community — really looking forward to something, and then kind of a crash.”

Hackett commemorated the email in her typical diaristic, deadpan way — she baked herself cupcakes, wrote FUCK DOGE on the tops with white icing, and posted a photo of them on Instagram.

Across Nashville, artists and cultural organizations are facing a sudden rupture in federal support. Under Executive Order 14151, signed on Jan. 20 as part of President Trump’s second-term agenda, programs tied to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility are being cut. Arts and humanities agencies — including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities — are facing drastic budget reductions and potential dismantling. Entire categories of arts funding are being wiped out. And while this kind of attack isn’t new, artists say its scope and severity feel unprecedented.

For Nashville’s arts community, this moment feels like not just like a financial threat, but an existential one — a threat that signals a shift toward a culture that no longer prioritizes the arts.

Less than a month after Hackett received the letter from ILMS, OZ Arts CEO Mark Murphy learned that the NEA was withdrawing the nonprofit arts organization’s $45,000 grant. Similar letters went out to organizations throughout Nashville. It’s a laundry list of the city’s cultural institutions — the Belcourt Theatre, Actors Bridge Ensemble and the Nashville Ballet all received the same letter, which was sent out to arts nonprofits across the country.

The language in the letter is similar to the one that Hackett received: “The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”

“The whole thing reeks of DOGE,” Murphy told the Scene in May. “I’ve been dealing with getting and managing NEA grants for almost 40 years, through the culture wars in the ’90s and through the previous Trump term and several presidents and congresspeople who said they wanted to gut the NEA. But nothing like this has ever happened.”

When NEA funding was under attack in the late 1980s and early ’90s, it was about specific content — Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, for example, attempted to bar the NEA from funding “obscene or indecent materials.” His message was clear-cut.

What makes the current attack on arts funding different? What’s at stake is harder to identify. Entire concepts and categories of thinking are prohibited. Broad language about what does and doesn’t “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage” makes it unclear what’s allowed. What exactly does “diverse” art look like? 

Banning Bouldin’s contemporary dance nonprofit New Dialect has been a cornerstone of the local dance community since its inception in 2013. She worries that the language of NEA’s new priorities will create ripples throughout the culture, and that diminishing resources are just a side effect.

“The messaging from the new leadership within the agency is that priority will be given to projects that celebrate the 250th anniversary of America and that celebrate how great our history is, while also making it very clear that projects that are rooted in or center diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in any way are disqualified,” Bouldin says. “But how do you celebrate the history of how fantastic America’s arts are without centering Black artists?” 

“It’s just an intense narrowing,” she says, “and it feels very strategic — narrowing to the point of elimination. … The arts are in trouble. We could lose them. This arts ecology in Nashville, and certainly this performing arts ecology, is at risk of extinction or collapse.”

“My sense is people are pretty resigned to the fate of federal arts funding being pretty bleak,” says Stephanie Silverman, the longtime executive director of nonprofit film center the Belcourt.

Silverman compares these budget cuts to suffering death by a thousand cuts — a prolonged agony delivered in small increments, which will result in a slow contraction of the community. “It feels like a sort of baked-in permission structure potentially to just not center the arts, to keep pushing them further and further down the importance pipeline.”

On the future of the Belcourt — an institution that has seen countless changes and restructurings in its 100 years — Silverman is crystal clear: “We are very fiscally stable. But the thing that worries me the most is the slow, painful death versus the drama of going away immediately, because that’s probably not going to happen. I think we’re in a moment of peril.”

As much as larger organizations like the Belcourt and OZ are prepared to weather the storm of federal cuts, individual artists and smaller nonprofits are preparing for a sea change caused by the federal government’s priorities. Daniel Jones, who works as OZ’s manager of artistic programming, is the producing artistic director of Kindling Arts, a performing arts nonprofit with an annual budget around $160,000. This spring, he learned that Kindling’s NEA Challenge America grant had been revoked. The program, meant to support small organizations serving underserved communities, was canceled entirely.

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Kindling’s grant would have funded “an interdisciplinary performance development lab for artists exploring the evolving identity of the modern South,” according to a January release from the NEA. More than 270 small organizations had been awarded a total of $2.7 million before the program was scrapped.

Almost concurrent with finding out his Challenge America grant had been canceled, Jones got news that Kindling was one of 80 organizations that would receive replacement funds from The Warhol Foundation, in partnership with The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. But for Jones, that doesn’t solve the bigger problem — he sees the Warhol grant as a Band-Aid on a serious wound.

“The arts in this country have been severely underfunded for a long time,” Jones says, “whether through government funding, corporate sponsorship, individual donors, et cetera. And right now, everyone who is stepping forward — these private foundations and institutions that are pulling together their money to fund some of the things that would be lost — they’re doing it in the state of an emergency.”

When the Scene spoke with Jones in early July, Kindling had just received award notices from the Tennessee Arts Commission, which gets some of its funding through the NEA. The NEA also helps fund South Arts, an Atlanta-based nonprofit regional arts organization that empowers artists, organizations and communities, and increases access to arts and culture. 

“It’s clear that there’s not as much funding as there was last year in the Tennessee Arts Commission pool,” says Jones. “So the fact that that is under threat is concerning, and we just received those award notices last week. And also to not have the South Arts grant opportunity is really not a good situation.”

OZ Arts’ Murphy has an image that handily breaks down the small percentage of the federal budget that goes toward the arts.

“I remember during the culture wars,” he says, “I used to use the example that if the federal budget was the front page of a newspaper, the NEA would be smaller than a comma.” 

At the Belcourt, Silverman echoes the sentiment with gallows humor. 

“I guess the good news,” Silverman says with a laugh, “is that because the U.S. has never really supported institutions very generously, it’s not that debilitating for us on a grants level. But what is troubling is that, when you are a capitalist country, what you value is what you budget for. And so to see the arts and the humanities and so many things that make life fundamentally richer just zeroed out without any analysis about the law, the real impact of that is heartbreaking.”

“There’s a resilience that comes from a scarcity of resources,” says artist Virginia Griswold. She’s speaking to the Scene during a break from leading children’s art classes at the small nonprofit Buchanan Arts, where she works as the executive director. “There’s a baseline of being sort of accustomed to making do with very little. 

“But at the same time,” she continues, “there’s this dreaming that has to happen concurrently with that. You can’t get too complacent, too used to not having enough, to the point where you stop thinking about what’s possible or what could be if you did have all of the resources available. And psychologically, that’s a tough place to be.”

That psychological tension — between having dreams but not resources — leads some Nashville artists to abandon the traditional arts model altogether. Performer and choreographer Asia Pyron, who founded and directs the dance ensemble PYDANCE, has seen her faith in the system erode.

“I don’t really believe that the government has been very trustworthy in terms of arts funding,” Pyron says. “And because of that, I don’t see why we should be going back to the same process after this. I think Nashville was already experiencing a lot of this before this happened to all of America.”

Pyron points to a chaotic series of recent events at the Metro Arts Commission — the body that distributes grants from the city to local artists and arts institutions. Over the past two years, Metro Arts has seen significant turnover, a bungled grants process and other persistent issues.

“Nashville and Metro Arts are already very much struggling with delivering funds to artists,” says Pyron. “Promises were not kept. Grant cycles were not finished.”

Pyron doesn’t think a nonprofit model is sustainable, and she’s avoided getting PYDANCE 501(c)(3) certification as a result. Instead, she relies on financial support through community partnerships.

“If this has been shown to us multiple times that this is not a sustainable infrastructure for us,” she asks, “then why drink the Kool-Aid anyway?”

Despite all the struggle, artists themselves remain hopeful. At New Dialect, Bouldin has plans to diversify. 

“Cooperation is what comes up for me first,” she says. “We’re going to be looking at ways that we can share space and share overhead with the understanding that we’ll have less capital to work with, but we have other resources that we can leverage together.”

At Kindling, Jones says a lifetime in the arts has prepared him for this moment. “You know,” he says, “I’ve grown up in this industry. And my whole life, people have made references to the culture wars, and those were happening while I was like, 3 or 4 years old in the early ’90s. What I’m realizing is there were all of the byproducts of those culture wars — this repressed culture, a censoring of queer people, a much less diverse landscape than we should have been having in performing arts and media. And to now be circling back around to this censorship just feels sort of uncanny in a way. We’re basically on this infinite loop, a terrifying merry-go-round that circles back to this censorship and to a fear of the power of artists and intellectuals. It feels really potent.

“But the other thing,” Jones says, his tone lightening, “is that at this moment we have an internet that cannot be contained, and we are infinitely more globalized than we were 30 years ago. 

“It’s a really interesting moment of knowing that they can’t control the culture as much as they want to.”