The Great Quiet-Quitting of DEI in Bay Area Arts

Jens Ibsen can still remember the day he learned he’d won the Emerging Black Composers Project in 2022.

It was his second year trying; Ibsen, a software trainer, freelance vocalist and composer, says it was one of the things he applied for and then tried to forget about.

That day, he got a message from Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, a conductor and panel judge for the project, saying they needed to talk about his application. When Bartholomew-Poyser called him and broke the news, Ibsen says, the experience felt surreal.

“It’s not every day you get a phone call where you find out that you’ve just won $15,000 and a commission for the San Francisco Symphony,” Ibsen says. “That was pretty magical.”

This year, though, the Emerging Black Composers Project’s activities came to a grinding halt in March. The San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which had facilitated the program, cited a memo from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that instructed schools to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or face the possibility of losing their federal funding.

The Symphony and Conservatory confirmed that their 2024 winner, Tyler Taylor, will still see his work come to fruition, but the program’s future remains uncertain.

The sudden pause is a direct result of the Trump administration’s attempts to eliminate both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has forced a major step back from DEI in the arts community.

Five years after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent bloom of arts-related DEI initiatives, arts organizations have been abandoning their DEI programming and reconfiguring or erasing their websites’ DEI commitments.

The full result of this retreat — a widespread quiet-quitting of DEI — remains to be seen. But some arts leaders are already raising concerns.

“This isn’t just about money, it’s about controlling narrative, visibility and power,” says Eric Garcia, co-director of Detour Productions in San Francisco and producer of the monthly queer performance cabaret Clutch The Pearls. “We’re witnessing a deliberate effort to police not only what stories are told, but who is allowed to tell them.”

Page not found: An online disappearing act

Five years ago, a flurry of equity-inspired energy arose after the murder of George Floyd and the massive Black Lives Matter protests.

In the Bay Area, people rallied, marched and painted murals and streets. Seemingly every company and organization released statements, held panels and workshops, centered DEI in mission statements and hiring practices and commissioned BIPOC artists and consultants.

“Some of it was meaningful,” Garcia says, “But a lot of it was reactive, short-lived and ultimately self-serving.”

Five years on, that feeling of urgency has faded, and so have many of the DEI initiatives spawned by the country’s moment of racial reckoning. One example of quiet-quitting DEI can be found in the form of a joint curatorial position that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum of the African Diaspora announced in 2023.

The role called for advancing “the pipeline of BIPOC curators within the museum field,” and was meant to uplift Black Bay Area artists and usher in new exhibitions, arts projects and public programming.

Fifteen months later, the role has still not been filled. The job posting disappeared, then reemerged after KQED reached out to both museums to learn more about its status. Neither museum responded.

Other arts organizations that once openly touted DEI commitments on their websites have quietly removed or obscured them, altering language to avoid words that the DEI-hostile Trump administration could flag. An infamous list of targeted words, which includes terms like “transgender,” “racial justice” and “woman,” has expanded to more than 350 since news outlets and free speech watchdogs like PEN America began compiling them earlier this year. (The White House denied creating a list, while claiming that prohibiting certain words was necessary to comply with the executive order.)

In KQED’s audit of 70 Bay Area arts organizations, only 30% have DEI commitments on their websites as of June 2025. Some of those are incomplete; the California Symphony Orchestra’s website still boasts a commitment to diversity, but the link to the DEI statement is broken.

Other sites show signs of institutional neglect: West Edge Opera’s website still has its DEI plan posted online, but the plan, created in 2020, appears to have expired — it’s referred to as a “three-year strategic plan.”

SFFILM’s DEI page is intact, but it’s not linked on the homepage, and typing “DEI” into the search bar won’t reveal it, either. Instead, it’s shrouded behind an “About SFFILM” page and a “Learn More” section containing the link.

Some organizations clearly rooted in equity don’t use the red-flagged term “DEI” as their chosen acronym. The American Conservatory Theater, for example, has opted for EDI. BroadwaySF uses the IDEA acronym (inclusion, diversity, equity and access), while CounterPulse uses DEAL (diversity, equity, accessibility and liberation). Others have traded acronyms like “DEI” for words like “belonging” or other coded language.

Montalvo Arts Center, for example, lists its values as access, belonging, diversity, community, excellence and stewardship. Aunt Lute Books has a link to a statement released in 2020 acknowledging their positionality and calling for a more equitable society, along with a mission page with phrases like “structural power imbalances” and “prejudiced and gendered systems” to signal where the organization stands — without actually mentioning diversity, equity and inclusion.

KQED, too, is reflective of how these changes are being made and what they look like in real time. As recently as Jan. 29, 2025, KQED’s website had an active, dedicated DEI page. Between March and April of this year, KQED changed the page to a “community representation statement.”

Eric Abrams, KQED’s Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer, says that KQED remains committed to “building a culture centered on human dignity, equity and belonging,” and says the website changes came in response to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting updating its reporting requirements for stations.

“We have since conducted further review to ensure that our language more clearly reflects our station’s similar commitment to full legal compliance. But the mission and initiatives this office leads, as well as the programming, journalism, and content we serve has and will not change,” Abrams says.

In perhaps the most telling sign of DEI evasion, even arts organizations visibly staying the course with DEI — like the San José Museum of Art, which boasts an equity task force and a DEI commitment — did not respond to KQED’s inquiries for this story.

Internal quandaries over funding and representation

The irony is that in the near future, arts organizations will need to have uncomfortable, internal conversations at the intersection of race, class and gender and quickly. Not only have DEI initiatives fallen off, but DEI staff roles have, too.

Out of the 70 arts organizations assessed by KQED, only four (American Conservatory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, KQED and the San José Museum of Art) still have dedicated, DEI-specific staff members listed on their websites. This decline in DEI staff roles goes beyond the Bay Area: over the past two years, more than 2,600 DEI jobs nationwide have been eliminated.

If this is a strategy to avoid cuts to federal funding, it isn’t working. Nearly every Bay Area recipient of an NEA grant had their funding canceled in May. Meanwhile, rejecting DEI in 2025 risks damaging relationships with the communities these arts organizations repeatedly say they want to serve and uplift.

Some arts organizations have looked to foundations to make up for lost public funding. But Ted Russell, program consultant lead with California for the Arts, says that while foundations like his are doing their best to help fill funding gaps, private philanthropies are now also under threat from the Trump administration.

Russell cited guidance released in March by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Justice, in which both the EEOC and DOJ refer to DEI in the workplace as “unlawful.” The result is that private funders who hire people with protected characteristics, have DEI trainings or even simply promote diversity within their own workplace are now under scrutiny from the federal government.

“It’s a really rough time right now to see philanthropies also essentially have to lawyer up,” Russell says.

Private funding or not, no arts organization will be able to press-release or TikTok-trend their way out of the current DEI-related turmoil. Even reinstating previous DEI initiatives or continuing existing ones may not be enough.

“You don’t just, like, have a nice shiny arts initiative and then we fix racism,” composer Jens Ibsen says. “Even if we weren’t going through the political moment that we’re going through, these initiatives on their own are insufficient.”

Ibsen says what’s needed is an expansion of programs, funding and action from everyone in the arts — funders, artists and appreciators alike.

“Of course, having big opportunities like the Emerging Black Composers Project is super important, but we need way more of them,” Ibsen says. “We need people to be brave, and that includes the donor class. What is the next generation of art gonna look like?”

Artists, Detour Productions’ Eric Garcia says, are constantly told to dream big and innovate. So why can’t the systems they adhere to match that energy? Arts organizations, Garcia says, need to ask themselves what they’re willing to risk.

“If we’re not funding the work that challenges us, builds us and reflects all of us,” Garcia says, “then we’re just preserving institutions, not culture.”