August 2, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
Small rural arts organizations, as well as those that serve minorities, will feel the biggest bite from reductions in arts budgets enacted this year by 31 states, according to The New York Times.
“When any form of government funding is cut, the organizations that tend to get hit the most are rural, organizations of color, avant-garde institutions – those that have a harder time raising individual and corporate money,” said Michael M. Kaiser, president of Washington’s Kennedy Center.
While state grants represent only 2 to 5 percent of national arts expenditures, small groups rely more heavily on such aid, not just to cover slim operating margins but also to win additional funds from donors and the federal National Endowment for the Arts.
The damage is likely to be most acute in Kansas, where Republican Gov. Sam Brownback eliminated all arts aid. But the issue is less partisan than economic, with both Republican- and Democrat-controlled state houses adopting deep reductions.
The place of the arts in public policy “has always been tenuous,” said Bill Ivey, head of Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. “The arts are considered an amenity – nice to fund when you have a bit extra but hard to defend when the going gets tough.”
