Saving Our Souls
Dump's U.S.A. continues to degrade public support for the arts and art education. We must fight to save them to save ourselves.
Mentioning the state of the arts in the United States after Dump started an illegal war with Iran on Saturday seems superfluous. Yet both are connected.
The Wall Street Journal made this clear eight years ago in its video article “What Funding Cuts for the Arts Buys the Military” that can be watched below.
Because of Dump’s election, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 began going into effect once he took office in January 2025. Now Project 2026 is moving forward to bring The Heritage Foundation’s evil machinations to completion.
Along with rolling back women’s rights to 1850 (forget 1950), Project 2026 wants to achieve the complete defunding and dismantling of the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
The polarizing but brilliant sociocultural critic and “dissident feminist” Camille Paglia asserts, “[T]he society that forgets art risks losing its soul.” The November 2024 election of Dump that resulted from 77 million Dump voters and 90 million non-voters should make everyone meditate on her words.
Most of all, these Dump voters and non-voters must perform an uncomfortable and deep self-reflection to take accountability about their hand in destroying art in America as well as American life. Only then can they work to end this hell and not leave it up to just the marginalized and vulnerable.
Already Dump & Fiends have withheld federal funds for blue states. Governors would then apply to those federal funds to their state education and arts funding. Last week Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s state budget barely increased state arts funding. Courtney Kueppers’s WBEZ-FM Chicago article states:
This comes at a perilous time for arts across the country. Since beginning his second term just over a year ago, President Donald Trump has clawed back grants given through the National Endowment for the Arts, announced he will close the Kennedy Center for two years of renovations after taking over control of the venue and called for a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions.
Funding for museums and the humanities has also been slashed.
In the state budget released last week, Pritzker proposed $25.9 million for the Illinois Arts Council, up just slightly from the $25.7 million allocated in fiscal year 2026.
Some arts advocates say the flat funding proposal is worrisome in a precarious moment for the sector overall.
Arts Alliance Illinois, the statewide arts advocacy organization, is calling on the General Assembly to increase the arts budget by 20%, which it says would restore state funding levels to where they were 20 years ago. Since then, fiscal support for the arts has dipped on the state level.
In 2025, the state made a big increase in funding for the arts, growing the budget from $15.5 million to $25.5 million annually. Still, the Arts Alliance says the state has not supported the arts the way it did two decades ago.
The day before waking up to Dump’s illegal war in Iran, I read two distressing Chicago news stories. On focused on a Chicago university art museum shutting down because of lack of funds. The other discussed Chicago Public Schools (CPS) taking over an independently operated public Chicago high school devoted exclusively to the visual, performing and literary arts.
On June 30, the DePaul Art Museum will officially close after 15 years. I used to teach at DePaul University part-time, and I often brought my college writing students there for a few essay assignments. I would go there alone sometimes to gain creative inspiration or decompress from stress.
The museum hosted works from artists who came from a variety of marginalized and unrepresented backgrounds. According to Ambar Colón of the Chicago Sun-Times:
In 2025, DePaul’s museum lost an expected $500,000 in funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That funding supported a partnership with Chicago Public Schools, said Laura-Caroline de Lara, the museum’s director.
A November 2025 survey from the American Alliance of Museums found that one-third of U.S. museums (34%) have struggled in the wake of the cancellation of government grants and contracts after a series of Trump executive orders that impact the arts.
The funds cut for museums came primarily from the IMLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In the Chicago Tribune’s article about the DePaul Art Museum’s closure, its author Nina Metz reminded readers that DePaul will continue its plans “to build a ‘$42 million basketball practice facility in the heart of its Lincoln Park campus, a controversial plan that will require demolishing a row of century-old residential buildings.’” The Chicago Plan Commission approved DePaul’s proposal to do so last November.
Sports again are the priority. The arts be damned.
On top of the closure of the DePaul Art Museum, the windy city suffered another hit on its value for and education of the arts. Next fall, CPS will take over the independent public arts conservatory school The Chicago High School for the Arts also known as ChiArts. CPS wants to decrease the amount of ChiArts’ art classes.
Emmanuel Camarillo of the Chicago Sun-Times writes, “. . . [U]nder the potential new structure, there would be 30 minutes less of conservatory instruction and those lessons would be embedded throughout the day.”
No surprise ChiArts parents are not pleased. Because CPS is not transparent (as usual), it barred the Chicago Sun-Times and its partner WBEZ-FM from attending its ChiArts meeting. However, someone leaked an audio recording to them.
One parent said at the meeting, “Making it an after-school program does not keep it ChiArts.”
Last year CPS went after my daughter’s own arts magnet school Senn Arts at Nicholas Senn High School. It wanted to reduced Senn Arts’ two art classes five-days a week to one art class five days a week. When my daughter applied to and auditioned for Senn Arts in the winter of 2024, that was what the high school sold to to parents and prospective students.
Actually, my daughter knew she wanted to attend Senn Arts as a 7th grader at Saint Matthias School. She told me her desire to apply to and audition for Senn Arts after I picked her up from school in the fall of 2022.
CPS is still reducing at Senn Arts but has somewhat changed its original intent. That resulted because of parent and student pushback. I argued for Senn Arts to keep its two art classes in my December 2024 Chicago Tribune op-ed. My daughter’s class and the current junior and senior class were grandfathered to keep what was originally presented to us back in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Phoebe Collins, the DePaul Art Museum’s collections and exhibitions manager told Leen Yassine of Block Club Chicago, “It’s a very hard time for all museums, and especially the arts in general with the loss of federal funding to museums and also to universities.”
Former DePaul Art Museum curator Ionit Behar who now works as the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art had an even stronger response for Yassine.
She felt angry and called DePaul’s choice to close the DePaul Art museum “very short-sighted”
I am sad to the point where once again I am physically sick. Dump’s America is a hell of a time to be a highly sensitive person (HSP) and an INFP. It’s also a demoralizing historical moment to raise a teenager, especially one who has been an artist since she was a toddler.
Yet I have always lived in a dopey and greedy timeline where the United States did not value or publicly support the arts. My own public elementary and middle schools slashed art, home economics and industrial art programs to save money.
My school district still wasn’t satisfied. During my freshman year of high school, it wanted to abolish all art and extra-curricular programs. Saving and valuing the arts and humanities during my childhood and adolescence was always a battle.
Of course where I grew up was a rural conservative school district. Even after I graduated though, I couldn’t escape fiscally cheap, selfish and prudish philistines.
When I entered college and graduate school, Republicans in Congress attacked and worked to abolish the NEA. Actor Jane Alexander wrote about her experience during this time as NEA chair in her memoir Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics.
During my visit to Ireland two years ago, the island republic’s value toward art and culture uplifted me. As a writer, I most enjoyed Oscar Wilde House. Dublin’s Merrion Square Park features a statue of the canonical Irish wit along with one filled with his aphorisms.
The park also features busts of Irish historical and political figures, such as Michael Collins, other statues like the Merrion Park Statue and countless flowers. Along Custom House Quay in the Dublin Docklands is a memorial to Ireland’s devastating Great Hunger in the mid-19th century created by the UK government. On Dublin’s Sullivan Road stands the Molly Malone statue.
Two years after my Ireland trip, Dump & Fiends continue to strangle and starve the arts. Because art does not align with capitalism, fascism or tyranny unless it is propaganda, tyrants will bend the arts to their will. That is why Dump now heads The Kennedy Center.
Because true art and artists have resisted tyranny and still do, the San Francisco Ballet has become the latest U.S. performing arts company to withdraw from its scheduled Kennedy Center performance. Another peaceful rebuke to a man and his craven Reich who want to dumb down and kill Americans and culture, but a rebuke nonetheless that robs those living in and around the D.C. area of yet another artistic medium.
Until Americans as a whole begin valuing the arts, supporting our artists, and fighting for both, I know more of these art shut downs and incidents of state violence will continue. When will we realize that putting money toward sports and war instead of saving a university art museum and an arts-focused high school is misguided?
When will we recognize this not only harm students and audiences but American culture and life itself? Paglia expresses it best:
Art is not a luxury for any advanced civilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Even in economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative.
American culture has become unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortex consuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations, political power is transient. America’s true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspired insurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Left must recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion.
Art unites the spiritual and material realms.
This story links back to my admonition from a couple of weeks ago to 1. show up at school board and library board meetings and advocate for progressive values; 2. request progressive books at your local library; 3. get involved in area cultural boards and commissions; and 4. support and attend cultural events. Creators are one of the biggest fighters of fascism. Support them everywhere.