Representatives of Vermont’s arts and cultural organizations on Friday expressed a resolve to continue their work despite the federal government’s attempts to slash their funding and eliminate the agencies that support them.
Band together and keep making art were the takeaways from a conversation among artists and lawmakers in Randolph on Friday. U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) organized the “Arts & Humanities Town Hall” event to address the challenges presented by President Donald Trump’s attempts to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A federal judge earlier this week blocked Trump’s efforts to shutter the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Last month, Vermont Humanities lost $729,000 in federal funding after the National Endowment for the Humanities abruptly terminated grants across the country to redirect the money toward Trump’s priorities. Last week, at the president’s direction, the National Endowment for the Arts canceled grants to hundreds of arts organizations across the country, including several in Vermont.
“We are in a dark place right now,” Balint told the 100 people assembled at Chandler Center for the Arts, explaining that she called the meeting to take stock of the situation and to chart a way forward. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal,” she said. “We know that authoritarians go after the arts and education first for a reason, and we collectively have the creativity and the spirit in order to turn us toward a better place.”
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) joined Balint onstage along with nine directors of Vermont arts and cultural organizations, including Vermont Arts Council executive director Susan Evans McClure, who moderated the discussion. In interviews after the event, Welch and Balint both said that Republicans are failing to speak out against the Trump administration’s attacks on arts and culture. “There’s universal dismay and disgust on the Democratic side and quiet concern, but not public opposition, on the Republican side,” Welch said. “My Republican colleagues are terrified of crossing Trump.”
The arts directors on the panel talked about what their organizations are doing and, in some cases, what the arts have meant to them personally.
Elizabeth Frascoia, executive director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont, attended the institute she now runs when she was a 15-year-old trombone player with braces, she said. “I came to the Arts Institute as this nerdy, lovely, excited young person and found my people.” The Arts Institute last week lost the $30,000 grant it had been expecting from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Vermont Historical Society lost funding for its project to help the state’s small museums and 190 historical societies assess their collections, executive director Steve Perkins said, but donor funding will allow the work to continue through October. “It’s part of our mission. It’s part of what we do,” Perkins said. “We have a set of values for the Vermont Historical Society, and one of those values uses the words ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion,’ and we’re not changing that.”
Fletcher Free Library director Mary Danko is also president of the Vermont Library Association. “Freedom of speech lives on our shelves,” she said to applause.
Eric Ford, who produces the “Made Here” film series for Vermont Public, said the series has featured more than 250 Vermont-made films in its nine-year history and will continue to support the creative economy: “We’re not going anywhere.”
Rose Friedman, cofounder and executive director of the Civic Standard, a cultural community center based on Main Street in Hardwick, said she thinks there should be a cultural office on the main street of every town in the country.
“None of us should be spending as much time as we spend on writing grant reports,” she said. “We should be doing our magical thinking and building universes.”
Poet Rajnii Eddins wrapped up the program by performing his poem “Calling.”
“Calling all painters, poets, potters, put your pens to the page, shape the clay of this land,” Eddins said. “We need your undivided attention, your unrelenting commitment to the notion we are worthy of redemption.”
“I have tons of hope, Catamount Arts executive director Jody Fried said as he left the event. His St. Johnsbury arts organization celebrates its 50th birthday on Saturday. The arts are the way out of the problems facing the arts, he said, because they bring people together across ideological divides.