BRATTLEBORO-Gutting the arts is unquestionably the wrong way to stimulate the economy.
According to the website of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in 2024 "Arts and Cultural Industries Grew at Twice the Rate of the U.S. Economy, Adding $1.2 Trillion."
So when the Trump administration announced its desire to close the NEA as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and then started to cut funding and pull grants, its actions plunged a cold knife directly into the heart of creativity.
The stabbing's effects will be felt even in Windham Country.
In reaction, on May 9 in Randolph, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vermont, convened a group of arts organization directors and funders to discuss the situation. U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vermont, joined them. Both leaders passionately support the arts.
"The way that we are going to get to a better place in this country is through the arts," Balint said. "We desperately need the voice of the artists today."
Welch charged that the reason behind the cuts is that President Donald Trump finds the arts dangerous.
"The arts are often critical of authority," Welch said. "And an authoritarian does not like critics. So they go after the arts right away because they are dangerous. In this Trump era, we have to push back every way we can. Sustaining, promoting, and respecting the arts is job No. 1 - to get us back to where we need to be."
Much of Vermont's artistic endeavors are funded through a combination of grants from the federal government, private donors, and philanthropic organizations. Sitting on top of the grant pyramid is - or, should we say, was? - the NEA.
In the past, in Windham County, NEA grant money has funded such widely different arts programs as the Sandglass Theater's international Puppets in the Green Mountains festival, the Brattleboro Museum & Arts Center (BMAC), and the Brattleboro Music Center (BMC), among others.
The Vermont Arts Council (VAC), which also provides grant money to the arts, gets - or maybe got - 40% of its funding from the NEA.
Many organizations and individuals in Windham County got VCA grants in 2025. For example, The Retreat Farm in Brattleboro got $15,000 "to support the fabrication and installation of a mural that explores connection to land."
Individuals received grants for such things as supporting the purchase of an electric kiln, membership fees to a Submitter's Club for writers, travel to a film festival, and to secure advanced piano instruction, among other things.
Susan Evans McClure, the executive director of the VAC, told The Commons that she has never talked to more reporters than she has in the past two weeks. But for now, she wants to emphasize that funding is secure.
"Currently, the Vermont Arts Council continues to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts," McClure said. "The funding cuts that came out from the NEA earlier this month were only to direct grantees. We have been assured that we have our funding for this year and that we will continue to have federal support for next year. So we intend to continue grantmaking."
McClure encouraged people to continue applying for grants. However, a full list of NEA cuts has not yet been released, so more could come. None of the ones in Vermont that have been directly impacted are in Windham County, McClure said.
"I guess what I can say in terms of the Arts Council and Windham County is we have been informed that our federal funding continues, and we are continuing to move forward with the important grant funding that we do," McClure said. "It's a big way that we support the arts and culture sector in the state."
Most challenging is the uncertainty, McClure said.
"It's hard for organizations to make plans in an uncertain time, so we're really encouraging people to continue to apply for grants and move forward," she said. "Our communities really need our arts and cultural organizations to continue doing the great work that they do."
Over at Vermont Humanities, Executive Director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup is still employed, although his organization has already cut two positions and not filled a vacancy, bringing its staff down from 11 to eight, and "we have canceled or put on pause a number of our programs," he said.
"On April 2 and 3, virtually every awarded grant at NEH was terminated by [the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE], including all of the state and jurisdictional humanities councils, most of which, including Vermont, have received annual funding through NEH for decades," Ilstrup told The Commons.
Annual federal funding for Vermont Humanities dates to the agency's founding in 1974.
"Vermont Humanities has a budget that is about 40% federal funding, so we have 60% that comes from other sources," Ilsrup said. "That allows us to keep moving forward and do much of what we used to do."
He acknowledged that, "of course, 40% is quite a large chunk of" the agency's $2.2 million annual budget. The lost nine months of NEH funding represents about $730,000, he added.
None of the direct grantees are in Windham County, but several have a statewide reach - like Vermont Folklife in Burlington - and might cause disruptions for the organizations that count on them.
"I don't have anybody on my list from Windham County, which is not to say that there wasn't anybody," Ilstrup said. "I just don't know about it."
He said the largest share of NEH funding goes through the council, "and of course, we have many grantees in Windham County."
"Fortunately, because we don't use federal funding for our grantmaking, we have not been canceling any of our local grants," Ilstrup said. "And we don't intend to."
Long before the Trump administration took office, Vermont Humanities made the decision not to depend on federal funding.
"We did it largely because it makes it easier for the very small grassroots organizations that we fund to apply to us for funding," Ilstrup said. "That way they don't have to maintain all of the records and requirements that you would get if you were a federal subgrantee. And we've been working for many years to try and reduce that percentage, as well."
He said that at Vermont Humanities, "there have been times when a much higher percentage of our budget has been federal funding, and so we feel very lucky to be at only 40%."
Ilstrup said that cutting the NEA and the NEH is "pretty crazy."
"The NEH budget, for example, is about $207 million for the entire country for a full year," he said. "That works out to be less than the price of a postage stamp per American. And that's for a tremendous amount of cultural support around the country."
But it's also economic support, Ilstrup said.
"The way these grants work, you have to match every dollar you get from the feds with at least one additional dollar that you raise locally," he said. "So the value is at least twice what the federal government is spending on it, and often it's many times more than that for the grants that we're giving out."
Windham County is a creative county. At least 20 arts organizations have made their homes here, as well as scores of independent artists who are, in their studios, producing everything from films to paintings, to pottery to hand-woven shawls.
Even those without artistic leanings still benefit from the creative approach to life that artists can bring to their communities, be it performances or gallery shows or crafts shows or farmers markets or murals.
Whole towns also benefit from the arts because a movie or a concert or an art show brings people into town. Once there, they leave an economic footprint at restaurants, shops, and gas stations.
'An unconscionable blow'
The Commons talked to many of the arts organizations in Windham County to find out how they might be affected by the cuts.
Monique Duffy, managing director of the New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro, said "grants are a big piece of our funding, but right now no grants are in the works. This is all good and we're very relieved, for the moment, but we're keeping our eye on things."
In Saxtons River, Main Street Arts doesn't currently receive any NEA grants.
"Main Street Arts depends heavily on grants from the Vermont Arts Council, especially to fund our programs in Creative Aging, theater residencies in the [Windham Northeast Supervisory Union schools], and the renovation of our building," said Board Chair Susan Still. "MSA could not have survived the pandemic without Arts Council support."
She acknowledged Evans McClure's reassurance of stable funding this year.
"But after that, things will be tough for Vermont arts organizations and individual artists," Still said.
Over at the Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro, Executive Director Eugene Uman said his organization also gets NEA money from the Vermont Arts Council.
"They've been very generous with us, and we are very grateful," Uman said. "Because it's a three-year grant for $9,000 a year that we're on right now, we're guaranteed the last installment. So we're not in jeopardy of losing that particular funding. But a lot of other arts organizations who have been funded direct from the NEA are now in jeopardy."
It is an honor to receive a grant directly from the NEA, Uman said. "That's a selective grant that's only given to a very small number of people and organizations."
However, the Jazz Center has tried applying a handful of times but has never gotten any money directly from the NEA. "And it's such a heavy lift that we've chosen not to do it because it's a lot of work and the competition is fierce," he said.
Next Stage Arts in Putney received a $50,000 NEA Our Town grant in 2016 to support the Legacy Putney program, a 10-day collaborative celebration of Putney history, arts, and culture that took place in 2018.
It partnered with the town of Putney, the Putney Historical Society, Yellow Barn, Sandglass Theater, the Vermont Folklife Center, Twilight Music, the Vermont Humanities Council, and area artists, schools, and businesses to tell the story of its community and further build Putney's legacy.
"Next Stage does not currently have a grant or a pending application there," said Acting Executive Director Maria Basescu.
She called the cancellation of the funding "an unconscionable blow to the arts community and an unforgivable abdication of the government's role in supporting its citizens through critical cultural exchange."
The Brattleboro Music Center is in the second year of an operating grant from the Vermont Arts Council that awards it $9,000 a year, according to Executive Director Mary Greene.
"We have had that for many fortunate years," Greene said. "It's a key part of how we put the budget together here at the BMC, and we will definitely have to figure it out if that money is pulled back.
"We have received our allocations for years one and two of the grant. So far, we have not been informed that next year's allocation has been cancelled. These operating funds are critical to the BMC, and their loss will directly impact our programming."
BMC has also been applying for grant money from the NEH.
"This spring, we were notified that the NEH Preservation Assistance grant program to which we had applied has been suspended for the foreseeable future, with the funds being allocated for other administration priorities," Greene said.
'It makes the pie smaller'
At Sandglass Theater, Artistic Director Shoshana Bass is worried about the effect that gutting the NEA will have on the funding for the next Puppets in the Green Mountains festival, which is scheduled for 2026.
"We're trying to assess what the future is, or maybe not even the future, but what the next moment of Puppets in the Green Mountains can be," Bass said. "We're totally committed to our work and doing it as long as we can. And we have always been creative when it comes to how an arts organization gets by in this country, anyway. It's never been an easy equation."
The Vermont Arts Council will remain an important partner for Sandglass, Bass said.
She wistfully remembered a different time - 2016, to be precise - when a former chairperson of the NEA, Jane Chu, came to Windham County to visit Sandglass.
"She named Sandglass as a national treasure on that visit," Bass said. "And it was a really profound visit to have access to someone, to the chair of the NEA, in a rural place like Vermont, coming to recognize and see what we were doing, and to feel that partnership over time, has been a huge piece of our longevity."
Art's importance is that it protects and celebrates different kinds of freedoms, Bass said.
"Theater spaces, creative spaces, art spaces are all spaces of freedom," Bass said. "They're spaces of free expression. And a government that wants to demolish exactly that, and attack freedom of expression, attack and censor a people, knows where to start.
"And they're doing it. This is where they're starting. I hold on to the hope and the assurance that the spaces of freedom will always remain somewhere in a community, and we will make them, no matter what."
BMAC has just finished an NEA grant of $10,000 for an exhibit of contemporary Ukrainian folk art.
"We had conversations with refugees who have recently come to Brattleboro, talking about how this folk art relates to the folk art traditions in the countries where they're from," said Executive Director Danny Lichtenfeld.
"We recorded those conversations, and those are available as a supplement to the exhibit. That was something that we were working on for quite a while, and it was a relatively small grant by NEA standards. We wrapped it all up and requested our final payment and got it, and then a month or two later, we heard that the NEA is in the crosshairs."
This was not the first time BMAC has received money from the NEA, but its main exposure to federal grant money has been through the Vermont Arts Council.
"I don't think anybody knows what's happening yet," Lichtenfeld said. "Frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone in the Trump administration even really knows. It feels like they do a lot of stuff, kind of on impulse and knee jerk, and then they pull it back, and then they change their minds, and that the chaos is part of the plan.
"The strategy is to keep people unsettled and uncertain about what's going on. At least that's how it seems to me. It's really discouraging and disheartening to feel like your government is attacking things that are important to your community," he continued.
The attempt to defund the arts raises many important questions. Since the arts are important and artists are dedicated, arts organizations will try to make up any decrease in funding with private philanthropy. But is there enough money in Windham County to cover any downturn in grant funding?
"It's just making the pie smaller overall," Lichtenfeld said. "So everybody's slice of it gets a little smaller."
He recalled a conversation he had a few months ago, "when it seemed for a minute like the federal government might be planning to reduce funding or eliminate funding for the Head Start program. I don't believe that's the case, although these things change on a daily basis."
"But a few months ago, it seemed like that was going to happen, and a funder who normally makes a certain size gift to the museum contacted me to say that we should just be aware that if the federal government stops funding Head Start, they're going to shift some of their funding," Lichtenfeld said.
"It puts more of a burden on everyone else," he said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.