This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is less well known than the National Endowment for the Arts. But the Trump administration’s recent gutting of the NEH so far looks even worse for Pittsburgh than its attacks on the NEA.
DOGE’s defunding of the NEH, which became public earlier this month, included termination of hundreds of multi-year grants awarded across the nation, some as recently as this year.
In Pittsburgh, the biggest casualty seems to be the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which according to a museum spokesperson had spent and been reimbursed for just $73,347 of a $498,303 NEH grant for developing its big new Egypt exhibit, “Egypt on the Nile.” The grant was supposed to accommodate spending through April 2028. The remaining $425,000 is likely now lost to the museum.
Phipps Conservatory fared a bit less badly, having been reimbursed for $375,000 of a $450,000 grant to repair and restore its aquatic ponds and three vintage glasshouse exhibition spaces. That still leaves it with a $75,000 gap to fill.
Others are possibly in a similar boat. The University of Pittsburgh did not respond by press time to an inquiry about the status of its three-year, $400,000 NEH grant that remains open through this year.
For groups promised funds that now won’t be awarded, this is harsh news. In an emailed statement, Museum of Natural History director Gretchen Baker said the Carnegie was disappointed to lose the money but remains committed to “Egypt on the Nile” and will keep fundraising to complete it. Phipps likewise said through a spokesperson that it would “seek funding elsewhere for the remainder of the project.”
The NEH, founded in 1965, promotes the exploration of the humanities — human culture and thought, typically in areas like history, philosophy and language. Its 2024 budget of $207 million is about the same as the NEA’s, though instead of arts organizations it mostly supports schools, libraries and museums. In that, it somewhat resembles the Institute for Museum and Library Studies, yet another federal agency DOGE has targeted, with funding implications in Pittsburgh.
Over the past five years, NEH has awarded a total of more than $3.5 million directly to Pittsburgh-based entities, also including Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, the Braddock Carnegie Library, Heinz History Center and WQED. A few hundred thousand dollars more of NEH funding during that stretch came from PA Humanities, a Philadelphia-based, NEH-backed nonprofit that supports humanities projects in the state.
Why the cuts? A form letter sent to affected recipients and signed by NEH acting chairman Michael McDonald read, “Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities” and “the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” McDonald added, “The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration.”
The urgency seems to have to do with cutting spending, though the NEH’s share of the federal budget is miniscule. According to the New York Times and other sources, the new “priorities” seem to include Trump’s proposal for a “Garden of Heroes,” a sculpture garden depicting famous Americans.
PA Humanities, for its part, lost $1.2 million of the $1.8 million the NEH had promised. The group, whose mission is to make the humanities accessible to all, has also funded things like youth reading programs in places from Pittsburgh to Aliquippa, Etna and Ambridge — some of them underserved rural or urban communities.
All these moves, while not unexpected, have traumatized the culture industry over these past few months, says Brett Crawford, a professor of arts management at Carnegie Mellon. She says many of her program’s alumni have gone on to the NEH, NEA and IMLS.
“There is a lot of pain” including “a sense of loss and grief,” Crawford says.
Because most of the funded projects have little to no expectation of generating earned revenue, they depend on philanthropy. But foundations and other private donors can only give so much. That leaves the government as the only plausible funder for such projects, she says. And she says the rapid destruction of that funding source seems especially thoughtless.
“No one’s asking why [the programs] are here and why are they taking these away,” Crawford says. “They’re just doing a corporate wipe … There’s a reason these programs exist and that’s going to be more evident when they’re not there.”
There is some hope that groups can recover some of the terminated funds. After all, the grants involved signed contracts, and other groups in recent months have taken the government to court over rescinded funds. Crawford also says she is seeing more arts advocates pressuring Congress, which created the NEA, NEH and ILMS and technically controls their funding.
Meanwhile, if there’s a glimmer of good news for the cultural community here, it lies with groups like the Carnegie Library and Music Hall of Homestead, which managed to be reimbursed for all its grant expenditures before DOGE intervened.
This Sat., April 19, the library will cut the ribbon on phase 2 of a multi-year renovation that increased accessibility in the library’s stacks and computer lab and made the massive 125-year-old structure one of the first in the county with sensory-friendly meeting rooms for people with disabilities. It also updated two meeting rooms with their first-ever HVAC systems — making those spaces a better year-round source of income for the library (when renting them out for private events) and a better community resource for holding free public meetings.
The $2.3 million project couldn’t have happened without a $500,000 NEH grant. In 2024, the agency awarded the funds and gave the nonprofit Carnegie of Homestead three years to spend that much and then get reimbursed.
Luckily for it, the Carnegie of Homestead finished much faster.
The project highlights another reason federal arts-and-culture grants are so valuable. They typically require recipients to raise additional funds from outside donors, in amounts equal to or exceeding the federal dollars. So it was with the library and music hall, which leveraged the promise of NEH funds to approach donors who’d then see their giving go further.
“It was the reason people gave,” says Carol Shrieve, the group’s executive director. “Otherwise many of these funders might not have come through.” (Other funders included the Pittsburgh Foundation, the FISA Foundation and Keystone Library Network.)
But even for the Carnegie of Homestead, the funding news is not all good.
Nonprofit cultural organizations that serve many functions, like libraries, have been eligible for funding from many types of sources. And last year, the group received notice that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had awarded it a Community Project Funding grant of $1 million toward phase three of its renovation.
That phase, which includes installing HVAC in the music-hall side of the venue so it can be comfortably used year-round, is budgeted for $4.7 million.
But the Carnegie of Homestead never got to sign a contract. And recently it received another notice from the feds, indicating the CPF grant was no more.
“Now we have to figure out where we’re going to get that money,” says Shrieve. Speaking of the funding situation more generally, she adds, “It’s not looking good for any of us.”
