A Questionable National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to an Independent and Non-Profit Classical Art School.
Looking deeper, the grant seems to uphold Dump & Fiends' fascist agenda. The school and us cannot give up our ability to think; we must push back against the MAGA-Nazi Reich's destructive goals.
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Yesterday, the New York Times published an article about the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarding a grant to Grand Central Atelier, an independent, non-profit and unaccredited art academy located in Ridgewood, NY. Since the 1990s, the not-for-profit school has educated sculptors, painters and draftsman about how to present their subjects in a realistic classical manner. That sounds wonderful. Right?
Think again.
Despite Dump & Fiends’ attack on the arts and humanities that uses a specific venom for the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the NEH grant for Grand Central Atelier was not applied for and is non-competitive. It came out of nowhere.
NEH grants are not awarded independently nor for seven figures. The $2 million grant for Grand Central Atelier did both.
This is unusual. NEH and NEA grants are two of the most competitive federal government grants for scholars and artists. I’ve received local and state artistic grants whose money came from the NEA.
Though not as competitive as national NEA and NEH grants, they were still competitive and required a precise application compete with samples of my short and long-form fiction and an achievable budget and goal.
I’ve never had a public grant or an artistic fellowship handed to me without me applying for them first. The only grant I know about where an artist or a scientist is awarded a fellowship independently and without an application is the MacArthur “Genius Grant”; the total amount from that fellowship is $800,000. A MacArthur Fellowship is only awarded after the artist or scientist has produced a substantial and notable body of work.
Something else here is at play. The New York Times reporters Zachary Small and Jennifer Schuessler questioned this grant, writing “it has . . . been enlisted in the Trump administration’s efforts to reclaim the arts and humanities from the progressive trends of mainstream academia.” Months after Dump took office, “the [NEH] abruptly canceled nearly all previously approved grants — some 1,400 in all . . . .”
While this particular grant does help sustain Grand Central Atelier and its mission to teach artists how to create works in the classical style, it does makes the school a cog to Dump & Fiends’ fascist and white supremacist agenda. Small and Schuessler’s article acknowledged,
For the Trump administration, the goal to return to classicism echoes its priorities in building a triumphal arch in Washington and issuing an executive order last year to “Make Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” — symbols of a bygone era when classical aesthetics were the federal government’s default style.
Later in their article, the journalists discuss how former President Joseph Biden’s pick to steer the NEH and the NEH’s “outside scholarly board” were terminated and replaced with an interim leader who believes in Dump’s “‘America First’ vision”. The MAGA-Nazi Reich seeks to refashion all art in a classical manner and harm contemporary artists whose work does not adhere to their philistine, non-aesthetic and white supremacy ideals.
Though Grand Central Atelier’s students belong to the Black Indigenous, Latino, Middle Eastern, Asian and mixed-race communities along with white students from differing white ethnicities, they are still being used and manipulated by Dump & Fiends to promote white supremacy and the MAGA-Nazi Reich. Unlike what Dump & Fiends believe and propagandize, however, classical art has never promoted racism and white supremacy.
Margaret Talbot noted in her New Yorker article that because white supremacists mistakenly believe classical works of art promote and affirm whiteness and white supremacy, they jam it into their racist and destructive machinations. Talbot points out works created in Ancient Greece, the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire never did this. Instead classical art, especially that of the Roman empire, reached and depicted varying ethnicities and races.
I do not fault Grand Central Atelier at all for receiving and accepting its grant to sustain its operations and benefit its students. The academy’s artistic director Jacob Collins told The New York Times that the grant will “raise his school’s profile.” I only hope Collins’s students contemplate why their received the grant and critically think about how Dump & Fiends are using them to accomplish its grotesque, fascistic and white supremacist ends. Collins acceptance of this grant though is suspicious and should be questioned.
Small and Schuessler point out that last year Collins spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C., which also hosted MAGA-Nazi speakers like Steve Bannon, Tom Homan, Sebastian Gorka, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Vought, Kelly Loeffler, Senator Josh Hawley and The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 and 2026’s evil mastermind Kevin Roberts.
There Collins “argued that America’s turn toward modernism over the past century had been ‘an error.’ The European models of abstraction, he said, had complicated the optimism of ‘natural American empiricism’ that had existed in paintings made between the late 1700s and the beginning of the Civil War.
Make no mistake that this NEH grant smacks of Nazi Germany’s campaign to rid the United States of its modern art and artists much like how Hitler, a failed artist who was rejected from art school twice, and the Nazis demonized “degenerate art.” A view that Collins himself upholds.
Hitler’s vision also applied to architecture. The Nazis most famous architect who also worked as Hitler’s minister for armaments and war production was Albert Speer.
Speer, who had exploited the Nuremberg Trials to save his own life, designed Germania to rebuild Berlin in Hitler’s bland and classical vision. The late art critic Robert Hughes noted that Speer "for a time, [was] not only the most powerful architect in the world, but perhaps the most powerful one who has ever lived." Greg McKevitt in his BBC article about Speer emphasized, “In Hitler's vision, the Third Reich was going to last 1,000 years, and so must its buildings.”
McKevitt also wrote:
Speer was asked how, as "an intelligent man, a man of some honesty", he failed to see Hitler's regime was a criminal one. Did he just accept it? Speer told [Michael} Charlton [of the BBC in 1970) that he was now a different person to the man he was at the end of the war. "In 1945, I was a technocrat. I was educated to think in my environment, not to think in the general. In school, we were obliged to learn our lessons, but there was no discussion about the problems of politics. We were almost shunning away from those problems, and we were not prepared to think thoroughly about some man like Hitler when he came."
I hope Collins, his full-time employees of three and his student body of 50 critically think about the money they received and the flatulent, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and cruel autocratic warmonger behind it. I also hope the NEH itself does some soul searching. It is not too late.
Hannah Arendt, the German and American philosopher and political theorist, believed and reasoned that Nazis like Adolph Eichmann and Nazi followers rose was because they could not or gave up their ability to think and failed to empathize with other people. That is what she meant by the banality of evil. The United States, especially its artists and teachers, cannot and can never abandon their ability to think and empathize.
Perhaps Grand Central Atelier students and its artistic director will use their art and craft and their education to produce dissenting art works like Secret Handshake. Last week the anonymous artist collective struck Washington D.C. again with its new statue “The King Of The World.” Placing Dump and his bestie the pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in the Jack and Rose lovebirds of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic, Secret Handshake once again demonstrates how the power of art can be used for dissent.