Bay Area Groups Reel From Trump’s Cuts to the National Endowment of the Humanities

Bay Area arts and cultural groups are reeling after the Trump administration’s revocation earlier this month of previously awarded federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Living New Deal Assistant Director Mary Okin recalled getting the email with a cancellation notice for the Oakland-based non profit’s $150,000 grant and being thrown by the non-governmental address.

“It was from something like ‘NEH emails on microsoft.com’ or something,” said Okin, “and I went, what the hell is that?”

The Living New Deal is a crowdsourcing project that maps the buildings, art and infrastructure created by Americans under President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies during the Great Depression.

“I think it’s really important for people to know about the New Deal and all of what it did, because it’s such a model for what we can still do as a society,” said Okin.

Okin said more than a million people use it each year, and the effort had won federal support on its first try. She says without the NEH money, progress on the project will slow.

At 20 Hawthorne, one block from San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, archivists Jeff Gunderson and Becky Alexander are engaged in safeguarding and sharing 152 years of historic materials and artwork from the now-shuttered San Francisco Art Institute through their nonprofit SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive. They, too, had NEH support.

“I do get a kick out of the things that survived pre-1906 earthquake and fire, like the early board minutes,” said Gunderson, “but then there’s all the stuff dealing with the founding of the photography department by Ansel Adams, and student artists right up until the very end who were making really curious, interesting things in that crucible up there on Russian Hill.”

“We have a great trophy from the SFMOMA Artists Soapbox Derby that some of the final students from SFAI participated in, and one of the cars won the award for Most Impractical, which we have proudly displayed here,” mused Alexander.

Before learning of the cuts, they’d managed to use about 75% of a $234,000 NEH award toward preserving the collection, and were counting on the remaining funds. “So now we’re in kind of full-blown fundraising mode,” said Gunderson.

Groups like SFAI Legacy and the Living New Deal don’t have many options at the state level, either. California Humanities has also been cut off from federal funds. The statewide body gets over 90% of its funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and that money has supported local community groups, museums, and libraries across the state.

“Unfortunately, our loss is also going to be their loss,” said California Humanities CEO Rick Noguchi. He says the organization plans to rely on savings until it runs out; likely in about a year.

“Humanities in California and across the country really need to be supported at this time,” said Noguchi, “It’s really critical for our democracy.”

Those like Noguchi call the revoking of federal funds an attack on history, culture and the arts, and say the savings are meager.

NEH officials have said the Trump administration hoped to “claw back” $175 million dollars in grant money not yet disbursed.

Other NEH-funded projects in the Bay Area now facing slashed support include a UCSF-hosted digital health archive, a dialogue-based interpretation strategy at the Angel Island Immigration Station, a series of community dialogues with Chinese American war veterans and a UC Berkeley-affiliated storymap highlighting tribal residents’ relationship to the endangered Hitch fish in Clear Lake.