NEFA - Don't Bother Applying If You Are a White Male

This Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 was a NEFA grants and programs deadline to apply for a "Public Art for Spatial Justice" grants. The grants are sizable and are constrained to Massachusetts based artists only (this usually means that all kinds of nod and wink exceptions abound but let's pretend its true).

Website to clarify:

Eligibility Criteria

Eligible

Lead Applicant must be based in Massachusetts.

Lead applicant may a be…

• Community-based anchor organization in Massachusetts, working in collaboration with a particular artist(s); organizations may be a 501c3 or fiscally sponsored
• Massachusetts-based Artist(s). Individual artist applicants must be 18+ years old. Artistic collaborations may be a group of artists informally working together for this particular project, or an artist collective that regularly works together on projects.

Recognizing the intersectionality of identities, we acknowledge that artists may also identify as cultural practitioners, activists, and community-rooted collaborators, and may be self/community-taught, institutionally trained, or a combination of both. All are welcome to apply.

Proposed public art projects must:

• Be located in Massachusetts.
• Engage the public realm and/or be available to the general public to happen upon.
• Cultivate expressions of and/or embodiments of spatial justice through public artmaking. Projects of all artistic disciplines –visual, performative, rooted in ritual, etc.-- are eligible.

Not eligible

• Lead applicants based outside of Massachusetts.
• Proposed projects based outside of Massachusetts.
• Current PASJ grantee (lead applicant) who has not completed their respective grantee report.
• Past PASJ Grantees are not eligible to apply to PASJ again for a full calendar year from completing their grantee report (e.g., If you submit a PASJ grantee report on June 1, 2023 that is approved, you are not eligible to submit a new application for PASJ till June 1, 2024 or after). 

Note: If you are applying for a Collective Imagination for Spatial Justice and a Public Art for Spatial Justice grant in the same grant round, each application will be reviewed independently and funding is not guaranteed (i.e., you may be funded for one but not the other).

So what the hell does any of this have to do with NEFA (the 'NE' presumably representing all New England artists (tho this cohort is rarely if ever the beneficiary of NEFA funding)?

NEFA serves as a social engineering platform to launder Arts funding into the coffers of political operatives who let's face it represent a unitary interest and that is the national DNC Democrats. By monopolizing the grant specifications and definitions, art no longer belongs to artists but to the political puppet masters at NEFA and nationally at the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Arts community was once dedicated to a profession of making art as was the choosing of the artist. Today the most marginalized and underrepresented group of art makers are artists themselves. Social engineers, sociology craftspeople, talent challenged political activists, and money changers far outnumber artists. It is this administrative overhead that poisons the aesthetic experience.

Let's take a look at the "reimagined" specifics:

NEFA (2018 - 2021 strategic plan (who knew?) on Public art:

Vision and Values

Guided by NEFA’s organizational values, articulated in the 2018-2021 strategic plan, NEFA’s vision for our public art programs is rooted in the beliefs that: 

• Public art has the power to shift public culture and change the future.  
  • Public art can help us all see, feel, experience and imagine decolonized and/or indigenized places. These tangible experiences are essential on the journey towards realizing more just futures for our public spaces and public culture.  
• Diverse cultural and artistic expressions of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) are essential to more equitable and vibrant public spaces. 
  • Addressing the intersectionality of spatial justice and racial justice is critical to cultivating a more vibrant public art ecosystem. 
• Context is important in public artmaking.  
  • NEFA aims to support public art that honors the integrity of the people, places, stories, and ideas – past, present, and future - engaged in the artmaking.   
  • Disrupting harmful historic narratives that uphold structural inequities requires understanding context.  
  • Public spaces are not neutral. And public art made in public spaces is not neutral. 
  • Public art practices that reduce people, places and stories to tools for artmaking are harmful.  

NEFA acknowledges that the arts sector has a legacy of benefiting from and perpetuating white privilege, and therefore we are committed to working towards racial justice. 

The Public Art Team at NEFA aims to uphold and hold ourselves accountable to these values through our public art program design and grantmaking.  

Program Goals

Through our public art grantmaking and field-building opportunities NEFA aims to: 

• Invest in artists and the creative process. Foster public art practices that are dynamic and aesthetically impactful, and authentically honor the integrity of the people, places, stories, and ideas that are engaged in the process and presentation of the artmaking. 
• Cultivate artists as civic leaders. Support public art that positions artists to directly inspire, disrupt and engage the public sphere to strive for greater equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in our public culture.  
• Strengthen a community of practice by fostering partnerships that facilitate knowledge building and sharing to support the evolving field of public art throughout the New England region. 

Does anyone else detect a disconnect between NEFA's values and goals?

• "Public art can help us all see, feel, experience and imagine decolonized and/or indigenized places. These tangible experiences are essential on the journey towards realizing more just futures for our public spaces and public culture. "
   

Art isn't going to "decolonize" anywhere. Fact of the matter is that public art can be separated into two categories: nationally specific art and everything else.  NEFA disingenuously conflates the two to promote an agenda of recrimination and political division.

The United States cohabits a part of North America with tradition Indian populations who are no more indigenous than anyone else born here. And being born here doesn't magically endow anyone with a right to claim more of an insight on nature than the next person. The United States is not decolonizing. And Indigenous places exist within the country, are self-governed, and nobody tells them how to make, present, or sell their art (and they sell a lot of it).

Public art (not nationally specific) must be judged on quality to ensure that it is an aesthetic experience being promoted  regardless of WHO the artist is or WHO they claim to speak for.  But my guess is that NEFA is doing the speaking and aesthetics have nothing to do with any of it.

What about this rancid word salad:

• "Diverse cultural and artistic expressions of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) are essential to more equitable and vibrant public spaces. 

  • Addressing the intersectionality of spatial justice and racial justice is critical to cultivating a more vibrant public art ecosystem."

Here the word justice is used to discriminate against artists who don't belong to these insider curated institutions. As I've documented previously, the organizations that get these grants largely subsidized the recreational funding of elite educational institutions whose diverse constituency is limited to the wealthy and their guests.

The undefinable term, 'equity' is nowhere on the horizon and that ensures that the race-baiters have a never ending supply of grift to mine.  And for artists this means never being granted the opportunity to express a universal or loving ambient artistic vision that doesn't pander to the political narrative.

And, if that's not toxic enough there's always context:

Context is important in public artmaking.  

• NEFA aims to support public art that honors the integrity of the people, places, stories, and ideas – past, present, and future - engaged in the artmaking.   
• Disrupting harmful historic narratives that uphold structural inequities requires understanding context.  
• Public spaces are not neutral. And public art made in public spaces is not neutral. 
• Public art practices that reduce people, places and stories to tools for artmaking are harmful.  

"Disrupting harmful historic narratives" is quite a mouthful. These are code words for distorting the civil commons with subliminal interpretations of political truths.  Again, a conflation of nation and state sponsored art with public space art that represents the aesthetic, shared human experience.

The assertion that "public spaces are not neutral" is  false. Public spaces not only can be neutral but often are in the United States.  Furthermore they are more often diverse, inviting, multi-cultural, and democratically representative than these misguided administrators would have us believe.

And their last bullet point is pure irony. NEFA's entire narrative is an exercise in reducing all artists to political pawns and there's nothing in their literature that implies anything but a predetermined guilt by skin color for male artists and an obvious disinvitation to any artist who isn't  selling myopic, progressive politics.

Funding the National Endowment of the Arts is national suicide. And the NEFA administrators who advocate these hate-filled, discriminatory policies can't be shown the door fast enough.