Essay: The American Artist as Pariah

The character and identity of all artists, but more specifically American artists, has been culturally misappropriated by woke political forces. These include the hegemony of academic "studies" professionals who pose as curators or administrators, radical feminists whose "Smash the Patriarchy" initiative is all that matters, and the innumerable special interest groups who supplement their own program finances by openly redirecting arts funding for political social engineering campaigns.

And it is not only the definition of art and artists that has been conflated with a single woke political profile.  The idea of community is also being appropriated to promote racism and identity bigotry and resentment. in melting pot America, community used to refer to integrated urban neighborhoods or country towns and villages.  In both cases, the common denominators were shared social concerns and a dedication to making those interpersonal social units more prosperous for everybody. Working, civil communities countywide can be identified by "not in my backyard!" mantras. In other words, this community manages just fine on its own because its worked at it and has earned its peace - that doesn't qualify it as a candidate to save the world. In fact, Native Americans might argue that "not in my backyard" is their historical meme.  

Contrast that conceptual model with the politically motivated woke narrative that claims that they *are* out to save the world.  But in order to do that saving,  segregation, suspicion, innuendo, reverse bigotry, political tribalism, decolonization, and a Pandora's box of psychological anger and fear needs to be utilized to achieve that goal.

In the context of art and craft, community no longer refers to the community of art and crafts practitioners, it refers to special interest groups who appropriate artistic roles and vernaculars to express their anger and bottomless greed for more funding to promote their holier-than-thou cause - "funding for mine, but not for thine".  Not for thine refers to any art practice that isn't loudly, obnoxiously selling some aspect of the woke identity agenda. This concept of community comes prepackaged with a word salad vernacular,  look-and-feel signaling ornamentation, a demographically tested narrative of need and historical abuse, and a plausibly digestible, socially redeemable intent.

While there is a cohort of woke-mind-virus inspired true believers, most artists just want to make art.  And making art or creating craft has nothing to do with politics, personal identity issues, or saving-the-world.

For highly successful artists, few of them need to care about any of this. But that is a tiny number of individuals. And this is why government funding dedicated to the arts is so critical to ensuring the autonomy of artists and new ideas.

The current Biden administration has allowed and empowered the National Endowment for the Arts to embezzle funding dedicated to the arts for identity politic and Democratic National Committee priority and promotion.  Significantly, union interests have as much or more representation in the NEA process than actual artists do.

Artists (conservatives, liberals, independents, and the indifferent) who would not pass the litmus tests involved must either hold their nose and fake interest, distort their art to fit a narrative, or otherwise hack their way through the process. The damage is external as well.

The funding of anti-Trump/anti-conservative, aesthetic hate speech through the National Endowment for the Arts and its subsidiaries is nothing short of criminal. Despite the presumption that all artists are woke and political, and unified in hating conservatives, the NEA suppresses and muzzles the truth.

Artists should never have to submit proposals for art funding through virtual gateways whose subliminal message is to conform or else and this is true nationally. The evidence is empirical when the administrators post identity politic profiles as their qualifications for the job.

The integrity of Arts funding has to be decolonized of politics and thoroughly regulated for these kinds of political subversion.  

  

National Embezzlement of the Arts - Part 2

 I succinctly described my initial efforts to file a complaint of discrimination against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and/or the New England Foundation for the Arts earlier. I still have not received any feedback from any of them.

While searching for a political contact who might somehow trigger one or any of these agencies to wake up, something pointed me to the Wikipedia entry for the NEA. And there as is said, "the plot thickens".

So there it is.  There are *six * ex officio members of Congress who are embedded in the NEA and presumably interested in the health and integrity of the organization!  Woo Hoo!

I clicked on the link and it took me here.

Lo and behold, there are only three ex-officio members in the final year of the Biden administration.

I tried contacting all three of these chuckle-heads and what I immediately found out was that despite the fact that all three -cough- "govern" the NEA, not a sticking one of them is responsive to anyone who is not in their gerrymandered orbit.

The first problem is that two of the three links don't work at all.  I tracked down good links. Their actual web pages filter out by zip code anyone who can't vote for them. I managed to hack the zip code problem only to be met with dead end indifference.

Senator Baldwin was the only email response I received and it was a final one.

Pingree and Thomson are out to lunch. Both being wholly oblivious.

And so, there seems to be nowhere to turn except to my own worthless Senator Blumenthal whose integrity I have serious doubts about.

It's been over a week since all of those contacts. 

I decided to watch the March 2024 Public meeting of the National Council of the Arts and found the evidence of political embezzlement and misappropriation in plain sight. 

The Arts have been hijacked by a woke cohort whose subliminal goal is to promote the DNC narrative and to strangle any opposing viewpoints.  Money intended for artists is redirected to a hundred social engineering initiatives that promote unnecessary and wasteful administrative job creep nationally. Everyone and every project takes priority over supporting artists themselves.

National Embezzlement of the Arts - Part 1

 I started my research into the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) earlier this year based on the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) and CT state arts grants.  The point of the research was to simply understand how tax-payer funded Arts grants to individual artists such as myself are administered.

That research resulted in discovering innumerable unethical and likely illegal administrative practices being conducted nationally, regionally, and in the hydra of local malpractices.

On April 3, I called the NEA office to inquire how to make them aware of what I was documenting. I was told to email the public affairs and office of the Inspector General which I did. On April 9 I added additional material in a second email. I received absolutely NO FEEDBACK whatsoever.

On May 1, I requested that both divisions simply acknowledge that my emails were received. Public Affairs replied with a robo-response that implied that the organization likely ignores all incoming mail on these channels.

The obvious conclusion is that the National Endowment for the Arts is self-insulating and that there is no serious autonomous Office of the Inspector General auditing the operation.

In the interim I have attempted to solicit information from numerous tax-payer funded Arts organizations - a few of which are listed above.  Scott Wands at CT Humanities is the sole individual who ever responded.

All of the websites list phone numbers that, when called, don't get answered - leave a message - when leaving a message is attempted, you are informed the phone message box is full - send an email.  Sending the email is ignored.  It is unclear if anyone on the Arts payrolls ever works their job. Emptying the phone messages daily should be a no-brainer.  Reading the inbox and spam email folders is also a no-brainer. NOT DOING THE JOB YOU ARE PAID TO DO is malfeasance.

Given the wholesale dysfunction of the Arts network, the next most logical step is to lodge a discrimination complaint for both the lack of opportunity and the unacceptable conditions under which to pursue opportunities for grants and awards from these entities.

Yesterday I called the CT Human Rights and Opportunities Commission  to inquire as to where to file a discrimination complaint against NEFA which serves multiple states and is administered through a Boston office. I was directed to the federal Equal Employment and Opportunities website but hit a deadend. My complaint didn't neatly fit any of the obvious categories and so I selected "other".

The EEOC blindspot has to do with opportunities involving arts grants, funding, and arts administration. I called them and spoke with Rachel Aniston who said that although it wasn't covered by the EEOC that "some other" government agency regulates and governs Arts organizations.

She said that the answer must be listed on USAGOV.gov and if not there then the Federal Coordination and Compliance Division (FCC) of the Department of Justice.

Finding nothing on the USAGOV website, I called their number and was eventually speaking with an operator who was incapable of doing anything other than reading the USAGOV website talking points to me without adding any value.  Another deadend.

I located the information for the FCC and called their generic number.  It rang for three minutes and hung up.  So I called the Title 06 HOTLINE, it too rang for three minutes and hung up.  

There is little question in my mind, that the Arts and Arts funding is an unintentionally rogue set of operations that function out of sight and out of mind and as such are functionally unaccountable except to their own make-believe Offices of "Inspector Generals".

As such they represent a tax-payer money sink that has been illegally appropriated for Democratic party solicitations, special interest honeypots, and exclusive higher education institutional abuse. And there is nobody enforcing the ethics, the veracity, or the governance of this operation.

I'm going to share this with some politicians who should wake up to this.

Updates will follow. 

The Uniparty Arts Money Pit - A Work in Progress

 The acronyms in this diagram refer are:

NEA - National Endowment (euphemistically) for the Arts

NEFA - New England Foundation (euphemistically) for the Arts

DECD - [CT} Department for Economic Community Development (e.g. a special interest group run by and for casino gambling)

COA - CT Office (Euphemistically) for the Arts 

DRSO - Designated Regional Services Organization (CT is divided into "service" regions)

This topology of organizations manages to mismanage multi-millions of Federal, State, and local taxes in addition to funds donated to promote the Arts community (e.g. actual, living, breathing artists). This investigative series that started by simply attempting to understand if there was a single source, uniformly administered way to apply for an arts grant or fund to -gasp- make some more art.

By the time money is awarded to actual, living, breathing local artists the grand total awarded to a cohort of artists is equivalent to less than one single State of Connecticut bureaucrat (about $100,000 per year) with no benefits. The awards to individual artists is $1000, $3000, or $5000 dollars, the quivalent of a week's to a few week's pay of that same sample CT State employee - don't spend it all in one place.

The deeper I dig, the more obvious it is that this money is illegally being funneled into a single political party's narrative. An apolitical fine artist not only doesn't stand an honest chance of  consideration but is doomed to witness money intended for arts to be squandered maliciously on the corrupt and unethical subversion of that funding for illiberal political gain. 

Use this link to follow my investigative series into all of these organizations, their malfeasance, and their brazen criminal practices.

 

  

Connecticut Humanities Grants

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with Scott Wands, the Director of Grants at Connecticut Humanities.  This was a follow on of research I've been conducting involving how Arts and Humanities grants work.  

My first question was why CT Humanities (CTH), unlike the National Endowment for the Arts framework, was administered the way it is.  That is, no regional equivalent of the New England Foundation for the Arts exists for the Humanities AND, oddly enough in Connecticut the CT Humanities is funneled through the Department of Economic and Community  Development (DECD) -> CT Office of Arts (COA).

Scott explained the in the 1960s the Humanities were administered exclusively from Washington, DC and later through State affiliates. In Connecticut this was implemented through the creation of a 501c Non-profit - the CTH.  It's primary function is to distribute as equitably as possible grants for organizations that promote the Humanities and for local Community programs doing the same (this all includes Digital content as well).

So where does the money come from for Humanities grants?

One Source is Federal funds. Some of this incoming money is used for staff expenses but the rest is used exclusively (by law) for Connecticut community programs and Digital cotent that are listed in detail on the CTH website. 

The Second money stream comes from the State of CT itself and is, of course, dependent on State budget considerations. Some of this incoming money is used for staff expenses but the rest is used exclusively (by law) for Connecticut institutional grants. 

I questioned why NO grants to individuals were available and the answer is that this is how the State of Connecticut constrains, through governance, the dissemination of these funds.

I was a bit perplexed here. One of the advertised responsibilities for CT Humanities is that funding for Art Criticism should be administered through CTH. What gives? Scott's response was that any such grants to individual Arts Criticism writing would be found downstream from an institution receiving CTH state funded grants.

In other words, someone looking for an Art Criticism project grant should not waste time soliciting CTH and instead research candidate institutions.

The third source of funding comes from outside contributions. These funds get dedicated to lobbying.

Who gets lobbied? The State. I had examined their transparent spreadsheet of Tax Returns and had noticed the lobbying expense and it occurred to me that unless that expense was exceeded by the return it seemed like a waste.

Scott explained that the lobbying is necessary and of course cannot guarantee a return but ensures due diligence in soliciting for programs that benefit the State.

One such program, Summer at the Museum, offered free passes to CT museums during the summer months had been defunded post-Covid and remains and sorely missed program that continues to be lobbied for. 

In terms of my research into qualifying for Arts grants, CTH exercise its responsibilities on an institutional or Community Program scale.  The quality and metrics for determining the effectiveness or continued veracity of institutional grants is out of scope of my interests for the time being.

And the idea of cultivating arts and humanities patrons is a topic I'll return to.

Tip-Toeing Through CT Arts Grants

 In researching *how to* apply for government arts grants (my art career plan B), I started with local grants and that exercise exploded in my face and escalated to Regional and Federal levels of interest. It is unavoidable. And it's circular.  I'm back to the CT State mosh pit of Arts funding.

As a software engineer there's a conceptual framework that ought to apply to the awarding of Fellowship grants or institutional funding is "As above, so below". For sports enthusiasts this translates to "The goalposts shouldn't be moving." In CT anything can happen.  Let's dive in.

The CT Artist Fellowship Program 2023 Recipient List is here. The accuracy of the information appears to be approximate on closer inspection. My interest as a visual artist was to attempt to identify some kind of pattern of award and what I found was a rich, superficial diversity of identity politic types. Any discrimination in that regard appears co-incidental - I poked through a number of years. I had no real ability to speak to viewpoint diversity.

What I did find are a few backdoor things that imply that the rules for Fellowship qualification are not rigorously enforced.  One problem was actual residency (being a New England artist isn't someone necessarily paying CT State taxes) and the second problem is the greased pig identity problem of whether or not such a person really exists.  Later.

Of the 69 Fellowships awarded, I teased out that 31 of the 69 artists listed had something to do with the Visual Arts - my particular special interest. So I really took a close look at those and sampled a few others to confirm the problem I found.

And that problem involves the fact that 15 of the 31 Fellowships went to instructors or employees in Higher Education institutions. Six of those 15 are associated with Yale and 9 in other higher ed schools.

I think a similar ratio of Fellowship particulars will play out with the rest of the non-Visual artists listed.

As feedback that could and should alert the DECD that the system is broken. If a quarter or more of the Fellowships being awarded are going to the graduates of the world's richest University and another quarter to graduates of exclusive institutions, then Federal and State money intended to promote equity is in fact being money laundered back into the pockets of the rich.

What my research has helped me to do is conclusively define who the "underserved" CT artists actually are.  The underserved community consists of anyone who did not graduate with an MFA from Yale or other exclusive institution.  This is worth unpacking.  It is not patriarchy, racism, systemic government breakdown or any other popular victim narrative that suppresses a livelier arts culture in CT (and maybe New England), it is social class education.

The total amount of money at the end of the spigot for actual artists struggling to create a maker budget is half of that more or less $200K yearly payout. ALL the rest of the arts funding is administrative overhead - we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

But we can't be done yet,  What about institutional funding?

"The pandemic and COVID-related restrictions have hit these organizations hard. Theaters and other performing arts venues were recently given the go-ahead to open to the public as part of the state’s Phase 3 reopening plan but only at 50% capacity, further undermining their ability to turn a decent profit.

In a news release, Connecticut’s Flagship Producing Theaters, a consortium of theaters that includes Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Goodspeed Musicals, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, Westport Country Playhouse and Yale Repertory Theatre called the grant program “a welcome step toward helping theaters recover.”"

So what the hell is the Yale Repertory Theater doing in this mix? Make this make sense. Was there ever some doubt that F'n YALE was in danger of going under?  And the State put some qualifications on this funding that YALE, of all places, would have absolutely no problem maxing out should they so choose.

Google:

And about 5% of that is spent funding Yale:

So what condition is Yale Rep in these days?

"“I think her legacy is already operating out there in the field,” said James Bundy, who as dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Rep has worked alongside of Nolan for 17 years. “It’s in all the leaders that she’s had such an important role in training.” Nolan, who announced her decision back in October and is succeeded by Florie Seery, has seen the theatrical landscape evolve first-hand from her multifaceted position at Yale. As a shrewd managing director and innovative educator, Nolan is as responsible as any one person for how theaters operate across the commercial and nonprofit spectrum countrywide.

Naturally, her influence started in New Haven.

“We were a $16 million operation then,” said Nolan of Yale Rep’s operating budget, “and $40 million now."

DECD funds Yale Rep approx. $43325 per year (2018 - today, likely long before 2018 as well). These Directed Local Funds got even funkier in 2022 and 2023 when some kind of 2 year state carry forward windfalls were added $129,975 and $86,000 were added to the funding. SWEET. Go Yale.

Compare and contrast.

Friends of mine compare applying for arts funding as a crab bucket exercise.    There's no such intention here.  This process is highly flawed and needs fixing. I hope these essays clarify some solutions.

My first recommendation is that if funding is going to involve residency then that residency have a threshold of three continuous years in the State. Residency less than that limits the grant to its lowest possible award.  This rewards long term resident artists and limits academic drive-bys.

Second, add aliases. The gaming of identity masks the number of applications, awards, and residences that craftier agents use to obfuscate their history.

Encrypt all personal characteristics of the applicant. Let the quality of the art speak to the virtue of the application and the individuals involved.  Nobody wants their awarded funding to be diminished by the innuendo that they "didn't earn it" (DEI).

 

Federal Art Funding Done Right

 In the 1960's Major League Baseball expanded and added back another New York team, the New York Mets.  Needless to say as an expansion team the talent was razor thin and their colorful and entertaining coach Casey Stengel quipped, "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?"

That sense of humor is not lost on any artist attempting to locate and apply for a arts grant or other funding opportunity from the State of CT, the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), and to some degree the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Aside from the clusterMuck of confusing and misleading website and - cough- "portal" interface problems, it is a full time chore for anyone who is not already associated with a mainstream arts organization, a University, or otherwise inside track to simply navigate, recipe-wise, 'how do I apply for the damned thing and how can I be sure my application will be treated fairly'?

I'm chipping away at making sense of this stuff in a series of essays and inquiries that I hope will concise road map that any artist can follow.

What has caught my attention and has answered the question of "Can the Federal government do a good and truly honest job of creating opportunities for creatives whose instructions are reasonable, whose solicitations are free of cognitive and political bias, and who advocate and practice an even handed evaluation process?"

The improbable answer is YES.

In researching arts funding you will inevitably encounter cross references to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sometimes that cross-reference is misguided.  In a couple of cases, an arts administrator or political advocate for funding wants to co-opt or deflect responsibility for funding something having to do with writing or related matter for funding as a Humanities project. NEA and NEH serve two autonomous and unique cohorts that only co-incidentally share some of the same creative juices that applicants are looking to exercise.

On the NEH website there's a webinar that's been recorded with tons of very useful, specifics about who the Humanities serve and what the scope of that stuff is as this slide shows;

Taken at face value, artists such as myself can claim some of that territory as our own but what NEH makes clear throughout their material is that the generation of art is out of scope - that stuff belonging to the responsibility of the NEA, NGOs, and private parties

Again, as an artist, I find comfort in this kind of clarity. This means that funding opportunities for stuff I do or hope to do is in the scope of the NEA and not here.  HOWEVER, my expectation as an artist is that everything that applies to the Humanities in terms of an expected field of neutrality WILL apply at the NEA.

Let's compare and contrast what i found in the NEA budget and performance plan:

Wait, WHAT?

I'm going to analyze the NEA's malfeasance in this regard in a separate essay. Obviously, every single form of psychological intimidation appears to be "the plan" at the NEA.

But this post is about doing it right and for the sake providing how its done right let me provide additional references and links from NEH that conclusively prove that government can work responsibly and fiscally soundly.

The NEH grants webpage is a breath of fresh air - lots of truly well-developed recipes for successfully submitting an application for the funding you hope will be chosen.

The YouTube channel for NEHgov is rich with additional videos that make life easier for funding applicants.

see: Connecticut Humanities Grants

NEA First Inquiry -NEFA Concerns

 NEFA Concerns

Fromkrasicki@protonmail.com <krasicki@protonmail.com>

Topublicaffairs@arts.gov, oig@arts.gov

CCkrasicki@protonmail.com

DateThursday, April 4th, 2024 at 12:17 PM

Yesterday I called the NEA and spoke with someone who advised that I send an email to document my concerns.

I am semi-retired at the moment, a lifelong artist, I've dedicated quite a bit of time to unpacking and disentangling American Arts funding nationally and at local levels. I consider this the first of what I expect to be more correspondences as the feedback cycle will generate additional questions and areas of research.

Today I want to address two specific areas of inquiry and concern. One is the governance of NEA's regional affiliates. In my case, the New England Foundation for the Arts.

My understanding from yesterday's phone call is that 40% of all NEA arts funding is distributed to these regional affiliates. If I assume that to be true, then as an artist I can apply directly to the NEA for Federal grant money which is sourced from 60% of the total NEA budget allocated for that purpose and that I can apply to my regional Arts affiliate for grants sourced from some percentage of the 40% of the budget made available to a specific region. Importantly, in order to apply for such grants or opportunities,

I must somehow both navigate to and through the application process AND be provided some set of understandable instructions for successfully doing so.

AND, implicitly, anyArtist should not be coerced into political loyalty oaths, political identity litmus tests, illegal constraints on the creation or content of my proposal, or other illegitimate expectations. Equally, implicit, is the clear and unambiguous understanding that the art being proposed or advocated for consideration will be evaluated strictly on its own merit and accepted or not based on those metrics. Presumably, American citizens over the age of 18 is the only qualification and that the solicitation for grants or whatever is for art​.

Please do correct my understanding of how the NEA funding operates is any of this is wrong or sadly mistaken (and I'm not naive enough to believe that, in practice, there's a broader range of interpretation by certain individuals administering the programs).

Assuming that as a context that anyArtist can expect and given that the only​access to NEFA arts funding is through NEFA's web portal, anyArtist has absolutely no other alternative for application for funding, grants, and so on.

However there are differences between the NEA's broad spectrum of art opportunities and NEFA's regional subset. I documented those differences in on my art criticism blog; https://artscrub.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-criminal-negligence-of-new-england.html

Nothing has changed. In essence, the NEA - instead of ensuring a consistent funding distribution model based on professional practice, say Visual Arts - distributes funding opportunities by geography and geography is implemented on that local level by funding power brokers who can constrain (or more accurately operate a money laundering operation) because they abuse the system to empower themselves to. The corruption of opportunity is contagious to even finer grains of more local funding on the State level (a different discussion). Numerous categories of professional art activity are missing.

And this speaks directly to my first empirical complaint - the NEFA site is a, for lack of a better term, woke hellhole of political advocacy, racial and identity politic litmus tests and more. There is nothing balanced and there is no avenue for a professional anyArtist to navigate a neutral, unbiased, nonconformist application process. Conservative or disinterested artists are wholly discouraged to apply or even think that their applications - barring a word salad of magic associations - will ever be taken seriously. This is a big problem.

The problem gets even bigger when anyArtist examines the NEFA Terms of Use for the (reminder) only portal to apply for the 40ish% of regional funding. The TOU is self-referential as a legally binding agreement yet contains numerous passages that are entirely capitalized. In digital form, the convention of using all caps is to be screaming - needless to say, not a typical legally formulated convention to my knowledge.

More to the point, the TOU is unusual in that it attempts to insulate NEFA from all and any accountability for their implementation and administration of federal (and State) arts funding. Many of its assertions appear to be, at face value, entirely an attempt to subvert the legal rights of artists to engage in legal remedy. Only one other region, the South copies the TOU (badly - misspellings and maybe other quirks).

Section 12d, essentially eliminates your ability to access the funding opportunities:

" BY ACCEPTING THESE TCU, YOU WAIVE AND HOLD HARMLESS NEFA FROM ANY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM ANY ACTION TAKEN BY NEFA DURING OR AS A RESULT OF NEFA’S INVESTIGATION AND/OR FROM ANY ACTIONS TAKEN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF INVESTIGATIONS BY EITHER NEFA OR LAW ENFORCEMENT RELATED TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES. IF YOU BELIEVE THAT CONTENT REMAINS ON THE SERVICES WHICH VIOLATES YOUR RIGHTS OR THESE TCU, AS STATED IN SECTION 15, YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY AGAINST NEFA SHALL BE TO TERMINATE YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES."

I don't know why no one reads or realizes that this amounts to intimidation and the normalization of the abuse of the legal system by this arts organization.

OTOH, other regions (see MidAtlantic Region) acknowledge the legal rights and remedies available to artists in their TOU for geographical domain portals.I will publish this as an open correspondence on my blog artscrub.blogspot.com and update it with your feedback. My long term intent is to create a HOWTO set of instructions for anyArtist to follow to apply for funding opportunities so this is a work in progress, one small step at a time.

regards,

Frank Krasicki

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

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.