The Art Trump Doesn’t Want and the Artists Left Behind

Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled.

The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives. 

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Angela Sutton and a team of archaeologists were in the middle of excavating a long-forgotten Black neighborhood in Nashville when she got the news: “Just got an email out of the blue saying, ‘Please stop. You’re done.’”

This week on Reveal, reporter Jonathan Jones travels to Nashville and beyond to meet the people living with the fallout of arts funding cuts. Some organizations are scaling back their work. Others worry artists will censor themselves just to survive. But many are fighting back.

Since this show first aired in March 2026, federal courts ordered the National Endowment for the Humanities to reverse mass grant cancellations and struck down the National Endowment for the Arts’ restrictions on “gender ideology.” While some NEH funds have resumed, no retroactive NEA money was restored, and the Trump administration has appealed both rulings.

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