Donald Trump’s efforts to influence US cultural institutions received more pushback on Tuesday, as a group of more than 400 artists sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) calling on the organization to resist the president’s restrictions on funding for projects promoting diversity or “gender ideology”.
The letter, first reported by the New York Times, comes after the NEA declared that federal grant applicants – which include colleges and universities, non-profit groups, individual artists and more – must comply with regulations stipulated by Trump’s executive orders. The new measures bar federal funds from going toward programs focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” or used to “promote gender ideology”.
“While the arts community stands in solidarity with the NEA, we oppose this betrayal of the Endowment’s mission to ‘foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States’,” the letter reads. “We ask that the NEA reverse those changes to the compliance requirements.”
“We recognize that our colleagues at the NEA are in a difficult position,” it continues. “Perhaps the hope is that by making these compromises, the Endowment will be able to continue its important work. But abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”
The letter, signed by 463 playwrights, poets, dancers, writers, visual artists and others, was…
