Jennifer Pickering got the email that said her grant was canceled a week before LEAF Global Arts’ annual spring retreat.
Over the weekend, thousands attended the festival at Lake Eden in Black Mountain. Barns and tents surrounding the lakeshore buzzed with dance classes and musicians from all over the globe. Among the dozens of workshops, some featured artists who shared lessons from surviving natural disasters.
“It's been such an extraordinary week of seeing how supporting the arts and music can change a community, bring a community together,” Pickering said. “It has been absolutely exactly the medicine that we needed at this moment.”
The event was partially funded by a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which has canceled hundreds of grants across the country this month under the direction of the White House. The move is part of a wider effort to cut funding for arts projects that don’t reflect priorities laid out by President Donald Trump.
“We're in this dual moment of experiencing what arts funding does,” she said. “And at the same time, recognizing in the next few weeks, we're really going to have to start to see what this reality means for our future.”
LEAF Global Arts has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts since the early 2000s. It has an annual operating budget of around $1.5 million. In addition to putting on annual festivals, LEAF offers year-round classes for young people, including drum classes, choreography and songwriting.
In an email, the National Endowment for the Arts wrote that the grant would be terminated effective May 31.
“The NEA will now prioritize projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities,” the email said.
While Pickering doesn’t expect the government to claw back what’s already been spent on the festival, she’s worried about how she’ll be able to fund future festivals.
The grant applications that fund this work are “really extensive,” Pickering said. “We put a year's worth of work into getting these grants. So, it's not only the funding you're losing, but also the dreams and the energy and the efforts.”
Penland, Asheville Creative Arts also lose grants
LEAF is not the only organization that’s losing a grant. Two other local nonprofits, Penland School of Crafts and Asheville Creative Arts, a youth theater troupe and arts programmer, also received termination letters this month.
Abby Felder is one of the founders of Asheville Creative Arts. Her organization – which she said has around a $250,000 annual budget – received a $15,000 grant to produce the play Petit Mondrian, a theater production for the very young.
“We've been receiving funding from the NEA since 2021,” she said. “They've been a huge part of our programmatic budget and have really allowed us to step up our accessibility initiatives, meaning we offer all of our performances as pay-what-you-wish and we tour them to rural communities.”
That’s meant free theater productions for thousands of students in hard-to-reach places.
Without the $15,000 grant, she’ll have to pull back on that programming.
“Making arts available to our community, regardless of economic ability, is just so important,” she said. “Our region has been so incredibly damaged by Helene, and I think a lot of people are really struggling financially and so we would prefer to keep our programming as accessible as possible.”
Other organizations with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts – including ArtsAVL and the Asheville Art Museum – appear safe for now. Neither have received a notice of grant termination, according to Katie Cornell, Executive Director of ArtsAVL.
Organizations with grant terminations were given seven days to appeal. Asheville Creative Arts and LEAF both submitted an appeal, but have not heard back yet.
As federal funding cuts continue, the White House has proposed eliminating National Endowment for the Arts spending entirely. The agency has awarded $5.5 billion in grants since 1965, when Congress founded it. While it remains one of the smallest federal agencies, it is the largest arts funder in the country.
