Korn Alley mural unveiling in Newport (Photo by Beth Rexford)
In early 2025, a plan to install a series of murals in downtown Newport was moving full-steam ahead. The images would depict what made life in the Sugar River region special—skiing at Mount Sunapee, skating on the town common, picking blueberries at a local farm.
The National Endowment for the Arts sent word in January 2025 that it would kick in a $10,000 grant, accounting for about a quarter of the total budget. Artists were given the go-ahead to start work on their murals. Paint and other materials were purchased.
By early May, the murals were done and the artists were about to be paid. So, staff at the Library Arts Center, the local nonprofit spearheading the project, were shocked when they got an email announcing the NEA grant was rescinded because it no longer aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Over the past year, cuts to both federal and state arts funding have sent NH arts organizations scrambling for other funds at a time when some institutions are still recovering from pandemic-era drops in attendance.
As theaters, orchestras, visual arts groups and others work to make up for the immediate funding shortfalls, they’re also planning for a future where they can no longer count on once-reliable funding from state and federal agencies.
“It’s already a difficult landscape, and I think it’s just going to get much harder,” says Genevieve Aichele, the director of community engagement for the NH Theatre Project and NH’s current artist laureate.
A live performance at The Colonial Theatre and Showroom in Keene (Courtesy of the Colonial Theatre and Showroom)
Arts Under Pressure from Government Cuts
The murals in Newport were saved by what Library Arts Center marketing coordinator Fran Huot calls a “guardian angel situation.” Two private funders, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, announced they would give 80 arts organizations around the U.S. grants to make up for lost NEA funding.
The murals were unveiled in June as planned. But Huot says the episode underscores the new realities facing nonprofit arts organizations. “It’s just given us a sense that we can’t depend on those [grants] anymore for funding,” she says. “It’s kind of made us re-examine our entire funding strategy.”
The NEA canceled grants to hundreds of organizations nationwide last spring, according to NPR, after the Trump administration outlined a new list of priorities for federal arts funding ranging from honoring historically Black colleges and universities to projects that “foster AI competence.”
New compliance language targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts (DEI) and “gender ideology” has also deterred some from seeking federal funds.
Meanwhile, in NH, state lawmakers all but defunded the NH State Council on the Arts, which makes grants to a wide range of arts organizations, cutting its annual funding from around $1.4 million to $150,000.
Lawmakers said they were facing a tough fiscal environment and had to prioritize more important needs. Sal Prizio, the executive director of the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, calls the move short-sighted. He notes the arts are a significant driver of tourism and economic activity. “We are [now] the worst-funded state in the United States for the arts,” says Prizio, who also chairs the board of arts advocacy group Arts4NH. “We are actually so low, we’re lower than the territory of Guam.”
Nonprofit leaders say the State Council’s grants were relatively small, often around $10,000 to $15,000. But they were important as a stable source of funding for general operating expenses. Sam Bergman, executive director of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in Nelson, says those expenses are typically the hardest to fundraise for. Donors want to fund exciting projects, not overhead.
Apple Hill String Quartet on the Center’s campus in Nelson (Photo by Kate Preftakes)
“It’s one thing for me to go to a donor and say, ‘Would you like to pony up $20,000 so that our quartet can go work with students in Cuba?’” Bergman says. “That’s not all that difficult to do. But if I go and I say, ‘Hey, listen. We had a water main break under our campus, and we need to dig it up and replace the pipe,’ that’s less attractive.” State and federal arts grants also have value beyond their dollar amount, functioning as a kind of “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” when courting private donors, he says.
Aichele worries the loss of state arts funding will hit smaller organizations and arts programs in rural areas the hardest. For example, the NH Theatre Project, which she founded to use theater as a way to make positive change, presents a program called the Elephant-in-the-Room Series, which tackles important but under-discussed issues. A grant from the State Council on the Arts allowed them to tour a program about families navigating addiction throughout the state, including the North Country community of Gorham.
“We would never have been able to do that if we didn’t have grant funding,” she says. “And that’s who’s going to lose out. You know, the big places, they’ll survive. But the smaller communities are going to have less and less access to things that really benefit and support their communities.”
With public arts funding dwindling, nonprofit leaders say competition for private funds has increased as donors are responding to a surge in need from food, housing and other social service agencies.
“Everyone now is trying to go after the finite amount of money that’s in the coffers,” says Lynne Grigelevich, the executive director of the Littleton-based community theater, Theatre UP. “And funders are feeling the strain of, wow, I have to choose, and that’s tough.”
Adele Sicilia, director of the NH Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, says the State Council on the Arts’ mission of supporting the arts has not changed. “What has changed is our capacity,” she says in an email. “With significantly fewer state dollars, it is more difficult to deliver that mission at the same scale or level of impact.”
To soften the funding cut, state lawmakers created a new tax credit capped at $350,000 per year for businesses that donate to the arts council.
In Prizio’s view, the tax credit is “well-intended, but ill-informed.” He fears it will siphon off corporate sponsorships because companies that have previously given to venues will now have an incentive to give to the Council instead. “Whether you realize this or not, you have put the Council on the Arts in competition with the venues they’re trying to serve,” he says.
Symphony NH 100th anniversary concert in April (Photo by Brian Malloy)
Competing with the Couch
Ticket sales at theaters plummeted during the pandemic. While many saw an initial bump in attendance post-COVID, some have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, says Keith Marks, executive director of The Colonial Theatre and Showroom in Keene.
Between 2023 and 2024, theaters around the U.S. saw a 19% drop in attendance and a 37% decline in revenue, The New York Times reported in December, citing data from SMU DataArts. At the same time, “it costs more to present a show, to present an artist, and because of that, ticket prices have gone up,” Marks says.
Deanna Hoying, the executive director of Symphony NH, says the pandemic changed consumers’ habits in ways that are still affecting performing arts organizations. That, paired with economic uncertainty, means fewer people are going to shows.
“People are really deciding, you know, ‘Do I want to spend this extra money on entertainment? Do I want to leave the house when I can get 8,000 options via streaming?’” she says. “We are competing with the couch, to some degree,” she adds.
In response to funding cuts and other challenges, many organizations are stepping up fundraising appeals. “One of the things that I am doing is I’m communicating to community members about the fragility of the situation — that if we want to maintain a historic theater in a city of Keene’s size, then it’s going to take community engagement in a way that hasn’t really happened in the past few years,” Marks says.
The situation has also highlighted the need for more collaboration, says Theatre UP’s Grigelevich. Arts organizations in the North Country have talked about pooling resources to hire a shared grant writer and launched a region-wide arts calendar to spread the word about local events in hopes of boosting ticket sales.
In September, the Capitol Center for the Arts hosted a summit where creative economy stakeholders could discuss these challenges and what could be done. Prizio says one takeaway was that arts organizations are too “siloed.” He says there’s now an effort to form a broad coalition of creative economy stakeholders to advocate and lobby for the arts.
Something Rotten, a spring 2025 production at Theatre UP (Photo Courtesy of theatre UP)
For Aichele, the erosion of public funding makes it even more important that nonprofit arts organizations demonstrate their value to the community — to think of their mission as not just making art but “producing impact.” That can diversify revenue while strengthening collaborations with other community partners. The NH Theatre Project, for example, has partnered with the Safe Harbor Recovery Center in Portsmouth to use theater techniques to train peer recovery counselors.
Art “is more than a frill,” says Kate Luppold, executive director of the Library Arts Center in Newport, says. “It’s more than a little cute addition to a town but truly is an economic driver. And so it’s very disheartening to see the state budget not reflect that knowledge.”
