"It was a hard year,” Christina Barr says of 2025, speaking of Nevada Humanities but voicing a wider truth. The catastrophic, capricious funding cuts inflicted on the nonprofit she directs, and on many others around the country, were just one facet of the widespread turmoil that marked the first year of Trump 2.0.
Medicine, the sciences, environmental protections, education, equity programs, and the social safety net all felt devastating impacts. Likewise, arts and culture suffered variously from indiscriminate DOGE cuts, grant rescissions, ideological pressures, and a general Trump-branded anxiety. From the president adding his name to the venerable Kennedy Center — prompting performers to cancel gigs there — to the White House pressuring the Smithsonian Institution to follow its political dictates, no amount of prestige or good works could shield artists or institutions.
As an independent nonprofit, Nevada Humanities was especially hard hit when, in the middle of the 2024-25 fiscal year, the government terminated most federal humanities support. It had only received half their funding, and the new fiscal year wouldn’t begin until November 1. No funding has been received since, says Barr, the agency’s executive director. This has almost entirely curtailed its ability to pass along funding to local humanities organizations and activities.
As much as these cuts hew to the administration’s presumed culture war agenda, it’s worth noting that Nevada Humanities’ programming is bipartisan and serves many of the state’s very red rural counties; certainly the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, traditionally a recipient of Humanities pass-along funding, is hardly left-coded.
Barr, her team, and their partner nonprofits are fighting back as best they can, legally challenging the DOGE cuts, working their congressional representatives, making a case for the value of their work. A bit of relief arrived in April, when the Mellon Foundation announced $15 million in emergency funds for humanities councils nationwide. Nevada Humanities got $200,000, and another $50,000 in matching grants, which has allowed Barr to avoid laying off staff and still maintain some programming. For example, the Reno Literary Crawl went off in September, with participants essentially donating their services.
Over at UNLV’s Barrick Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts partially funded a recent exhibit of Asian diaspora artworks, Living Here — eventually. “The NEA was delayed by the executive orders, and we deliberately decided to move forward with the show because we knew it was the right thing to do,” executive director Alisha Kerlin writes in an email. “Our mission is to provide access to the arts. Not knowing if the grant would come through was very hard. It did: seven months later. As you can imagine, that created some instability regarding funding and our exhibition calendar.”
Kerlin and her staff sought more support from private donors, curated the exhibit with artists closer to home to reduce shipping costs, and asked artists to be patient. “All the artists were supportive and agreed that the project was important.” But if the show went on, not everyone went with it: “The most heartbreaking impact of the delayed NEA (funding) was that it decimated our budget for part-time staffing, and we had to lay off some valuable team members.”
The impacts of federal actions weren’t only fiscal. Many culturally inclined Las Vegans — artists, presenters, audiences — felt a pervasive dread prompted by the totality of Trump’s actions. Example: One of last year’s most affecting gallery exhibits was Home Is a Place Rooted Inside My Throat, by the Scrambled Eggs collective, in the Sahara West Library. If their collective name sounds whimsical, the show’s theme was as serious as a Google news alert: “The year began with ever-escalating hostile policies and state violence,” the exhibit statement read. “We wondered: What does it mean to belong here, there, or anywhere?”
For Scrambled Eggs’ Latinx artists, this was fraught territory. Given the government’s shifting commitment to constitutional rights, such as free speech, they were concerned about the consequences of strident resistance in a public venue. “So we found language that was more universal than the vocabulary around ICE raids and immigration enforcement,” co-curator Lille Allen says. “We settled on belonging.”
The resulting group show was a moving testament to the lived reality of people for whom the stability of belonging, of home, was suddenly under government attack. “This way we had something to fall back on if anybody came asking, if visitors at the library tried to say the show and the work was ‘divisive,’” Allen says.
Ideally, this sort of self-protective triangulation isn’t how American artists are supposed to work.
That Home Is a Place was an aesthetic success didn’t dispel this chilling effect. “A few months out from the show, I think that struggle continues,” Allen adds. “A lot of us want to make art that invites change but can’t afford to be too visible — to the state, to others — and be labeled a threat. What kind of work could put us in danger now?”
Ann-Marie Pereth, artistic director of A Public Fit Theatre Company, and her team opted to steer into the national mood. In October, they presented Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, an unabashedly political, Tony-nominated play that examines the Constitution’s effects on four generations of women in one family. “It’s about all of the things we’re up against now,” Pereth says. Starting March 26, A Public Fit will collaborate with Nevada Conservatory Theatre on a play titled Passage, by Christopher Chen, about colonialism and power, set in an unnamed occupied country. “The season is filled with things people can talk about,” Pereth says.
Some of the disquiet caused by Trump 2.0 showed up forcefully in the troupe’s post-show talk-back sessions, called The Buzz, Pereth says: “People came in there hopeless, not knowing what to do. One person said, ‘I feel lost.’” Indeed, felt it strongly enough to admit it in an open forum. Another audience member sent a letter accusing the company of indoctrinating viewers. “We were very careful in our response,” Pereth says. “We tried to say, ‘Hey, thanks for sharing your opinion. This is a space where you can do that.’”
Pereth is quick to point out that A Public Fit’s shows attract audiences from across the political spectrum — at least one generous donor is a conservative — and this, she proposes, is where we begin answering the question about what to do in this chaotic time. “What you’re doing, coming to a play, sitting in a theater with people who don’t think like you, talking — that’s the solution, on a local level.”
As a nonprofit, Nevada Humanities can be somewhat nimble in adapting to these chaotic times. For instance, Barr says, they’re having success with nature walks based on its Sagebrush to Sandstone workbook, as participants stroll through the desert, read poetry, paint landscapes, engage in creative reflection. “People are really excited,” she says. “We need the tools of the humanities in order to make healthy decisions. This is a humanities moment.”
A similar head-on ethos is in play at the Barrick, where “our upcoming exhibitions are in response to the anxieties we have perceived (and felt ourselves),” Kerlin writes: the group show Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology, for one, as well as works by artist Amy Elkins titled Mourning Songs of Salt and Silt. (Both open February 20.) It’s not a coincidence that these exhibits deal with grief, solace, care, even in an atmosphere where universities are under federal scrutiny for just these sorts of, in the words of so many federal grant cancellations, “unaligned priorities.”
“We have continued to do what we do here despite what is happening,” Kerlin writes. “Business as usual, but with a lot more anxiety.”
Full disclosure: The author participated in last year’s Reno Literary Crawl and helped assemble the Sagebrush to Sandstone workbook for Nevada Humanities.
