National Endowment for the Arts awards $12m in new grants to more than 100 US arts organisations

A community event organised by ArtsHere grant recipient Juneau Alaska Music Matters Photo by Meghan Johnson
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is launching a pilot programme with a $12.3m round of grants going to 112 arts organisations across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and three US island territories. The new programme, dubbed ArtsHere, will distribute grants ranging from $65,000 to $130,000 and aimed at supporting organisations in underserved communities to increase locals’ engagement with the arts.
The NEA announced the creation of ArtsHere in 2023 partlyt in response to an executive order from President Joseph Biden for the federal government and its agencies to prioritise racial equity and reaching underserved communities. The initiative was also informed by the findings of a 2017 study of patterns of arts participation across the US, which found persistently low participation in historically underserved communities, disparities that were often influenced by issues of location, race and ethnicity, class and disability.
“There’s quite a range of kinds of participation that we’re interested in encouraging and making available to people—so audience attendance and participation, but also making, doing, teaching and learning, all of these different ways of participating. And there are barriers to those things that have to do with isolation, language, relevance to the populations themselves, taking into consideration different worldviews and perspectives, different cultures,” Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the NEA, tells The Art Newspaper. “It’s part of our job to figure out how to overcome those barriers to access and participation, and we’re thrilled that we’ve been able to select organisations that have demonstrated track records in being able to reach populations for whom these barriers exist.”
Participants of the 2023 Tennessee Indian Education Pow Wow of traditional Native American dancers Photo by Elliot Kiegelis Photography
The initiative is being launched in partnership with South Arts, an organisation that supports cultural activities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The NEA and South Arts, in turn, are collaborating with five other regional arts organisations—Arts Midwest, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Mid Atlantic Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts and Western States Arts Federation—to distribute funds across the entire country to art groups working to promote participation, accessibility and engagement with culture.
“So often it boils down to the finances—certain parts of the country do not receive as much funding as other parts of the country, and so that can hold back a variety of arts organisations from achieving their missions as fully as they could,” Suzette M. Surkamer, the president and chief executive of SouthArts, tells The Art Newspaper. “Now this funding will not achieve that full mission, but for smaller arts organisations with an annual budget of $10,000 to $50,000, they don’t have the staff to be able to really focus on development, fundraising, approaching foundations, etc. These grants of $65,000 to $130,000 are huge.”
The grantees include the Native American Indian Association of Tennessee in Nashville, which will put its $130,000 to expanding its arts and education programme that promotes improved cultural representation, participation in Native American arts and community engagement. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, a $70,000 grant to Taller Comunidad la Goyco will seek to increase attendance at the organisation’s monthly community fairs by supporting programming and marketing, plus training for the volunteers who provide arts activities at the fairs. In the capital of Alaska, the tuition-free musical education programme Juneau Alaska Music Matters will put its $105,610 grant toward developing musical instruction of the Lingít language and related training for educators. The Welman Project—a Fort Worth, Texas-based organisation that is redeveloping a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into a centre for arts and community healing—will use its $74,900 grant for cultural competency training ahead of the opening of its makerspace and tool library, plus for strategic planning.
A workshop participant learning how to drill at The Welman in Fort Worth, Texas Photo by Taylor Williams
For Jackson, one of the strengths of this pilot cohort of grantees is that many are focused on elevating the work of local artists, performers, culture bearers and community leaders, rather than bringing in programming from elsewhere. “There is not only an interest in making sure that people in those communities have access to arts experiences that are coming from other places, but there is also a deep commitment to revealing the cultural vitality and the creative brilliance that exists in those communities themselves,” she says. “It’s wonderful to know that you’re contributing to the revival and evolution of cultures, to creative expression in places that have a lot to offer and for people who are often overlooked and underestimated.”
More than 4,000 organisations applied for grants through the ArtsHere programme. Grantees will receive funds for projects running from October 2024 until June 2026. As it is a pilot project, the NEA will monitor and evaluate the project’s rollout and impact to gauge its success and make determinations about possible future iterations of ArtsHere or similar initiatives.
“We want to see progress at the organisational level—do the organisations feel like they’re stronger and can actually go out and create more opportunities for people, or deepen opportunities for people in the communities that they serve?” Jackson says. “Often at the Arts Endowment we’re supporting a production or an exhibition or something that is going to be finite and specific, but some of the investments that the Arts Endowment makes are really important investments that bloom over time, so the actual increase in access or participation may not materialise in a year, but you’ve created a stronger organisation that is better able to deliver and we may see the fruits of that later.”

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