News broke a few weeks ago that President Trump would seek to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in his next budget proposal, along with several other federal cultural agencies. Hours later, it was also widely reported that some of our current grants were being withdrawn and canceled with immediate effect.
These announcements have caused fear, anger, and bewilderment inside our agency. I find myself (as the historian for the NEA) in the unique position of explaining to my fellow employees how matters have reached this dire pass.
When I arrived at this agency in 2004, in the first years of the George W. Bush Administration, the staff was mostly composed of Democratic Party supporters. But they were also cognizant of the near-death experience that the NEA suffered during the so-called “culture wars” (which stretched from 1989-1998), when the agency was widely lambasted for providing sub-grants that were used for exhibitions which included Andres Serrano’s blasphemous work “Piss Christ,” as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochist and homosexual pornography.
The result of that foolish grantmaking was the restructuring of the NEA so that from then on 40% of our total budget was automatically awarded to state arts agencies, while an independent council was created to oversee the entire grants authorization process as a watchdog appointed by the executive branch.
In 1999, the then state-owned Servicio Postal Mexicano issued a postage stamp celebrating sixty-five years in Mexico of the development bank Nacional Financiera (Nafin).
