President Donald Trump has confirmed fears that he plans to do away with National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), but the nation’s most prominent artists and cultural figures are already fighting back.

Over 230,000 individuals have already signed a petition from PEN America opposing the plan to defund the NEA and NEH. Among the signatories are artists Jasper Johns, Marina Abramović, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson, Kiki Smith, Julian Schnabel, James Turrell, and Richard Serra. Other names on the list include authors Michael Chabon, Judy Blume, and Margaret Atwood, who wrote the increasingly worrying speculative fiction novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

The petition says that the NEA and NEH “promote innovative and creative expression, cultural and artistic understanding, and scholarly research as a basis for an informed democracy.” It goes on to warn that “eliminating these vital agencies would lessen America’s stature as a haven for free thinkers and a global leader in humanity’s shared quest for knowledge,” and would be tantamount to “ushering in a new Dark Ages in America.”

The America First Budget Blueprint, unveiled on March 15, allows for $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending. The NEA and NEH, which have a collective budget of a comparatively paltry $300 million, were established in 1965 to promote innovation in arts and culture. Although Congress will ultimately write and pass a budget of their own, the newly released blueprint makes Trump’s priorities clear.

National Center for Arts Research (NCAR), at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, responded to the proposed budget’s unveiling by releasing a paper full of facts and figures demonstrating the positive economic and social impact of the non-profit arts and cultural sector; and the potential dangers of cutting its federal funding.

“Elimination of federal support is not about the money, which only comes to 45 cents per capita for the NEA or .003 percent of the federal budget,” notes the report, which criticized the increasingly prevalent rhetoric “framing arts and culture as elitist and only available and of interest to those with concentrated power.”

This narrative falls apart when one looks at the numbers. According to the NCAR report, museums contribute $9.95 billion to the US economy, and federal arts and humanities funding creates jobs for Americans. Its data was collected from US arts and cultural nonprofits with annual budgets over $50,000, of which there are more than 39,000. These cultural institutions can be found all across the country, and are not limited to the big cities. The report states that there were some 467 million visits to these organizations in 2015.

“Retaining and growing federal support for arts and culture first requires shifting public perception to align with reality and taking back control of the rhetoric surrounding its connection to American life,” the report concludes. “The arts being termed ‘elitist’ is an argument founded in anecdote or cherry-picked support. The arts being termed small-d ‘democratic’ is the reality revealed to us through examination of the larger set of facts.”

The Smithsonian Institute has also underscored the importance of the threatened endowment, publishing a fascinating Smithsonian Magazine article highlighting some of the best-known projects funded by the NEA over the years. Without it, we might never have gotten the blockbuster King Tut exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1976, or rediscovered the site of Jamestown, England’s first permanent colony in the US.

Also weighing in on the issue was the Met, with a statement from outgoing director Thomas P. Campbell and president Daniel H. Weiss:

The President’s budget released today proposing the elimination of funding for the NEA, NEH and IMLS is shortsighted and does a terrible disservice to the American people. For more than 50 years, these programs have provided, at modest cost, essential support to arts organizations throughout the country—many times sustaining the arts in areas where people do not have access to major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum. We will join with arts organizations and artists nationwide and work with our supporters in Congress to see that these vital funds are maintained.

“I am deeply troubled by the Trump Administration’s proposed FY2018 budget calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts,” added Robert Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts in a statement. “President Trump is the first and only American president who has made such a recommendation.”

He added:

The administration’s budget proposal stems from tired old ideas that show a lack of understanding of the important role that the NEA plays in America today. This thinking could not be more misguided. With only a $148 million annual appropriation, the NEA’s investment in every Congressional District in the country contributes to a $730 billion arts and culture industry in America, representing 4.2 percent of the annual GDP. This arts and culture industry supports 4.8 million jobs and yields a $26 billion trade surplus for our country. President Trump does not yet realize the vast contribution the NEA makes to our nation’s economy and communities, as well as to his own agenda to create jobs ‘made and hired’ in America.

PEN advises concerned citizens to contact their local elected officials and encourage them to protect the NEA and NEH, making note of local projects that receive funding.

Here is a list of some of the petition’s most high-profile signatories, as provided by PEN:

Marina Abramović

Laurie Anderson

Margaret Atwood

Paul Auster

Judy Blume

Robert A. Caro

James Casebere

Rosanne Cash

Vija Celmins

Michael Chabon

Ron Chernow

Sandra Cisneros

Dan Colen

Lydia Davis

Rita Dove

Christopher Durang

Dave Eggers

Nawal El Saadawi

Jules Feiffer

Neil Gaiman

Robert Gober

John Green

Lev Grossman

Jessica Hagedorn

Jenny Holzer

Khaled Hosseini

Siri Hustvedt

Jasper Johns

Alex Katz

Phil Klay

Joseph Kosuth

Nicole Krauss

Barbara Kruger

Glenn Ligon

John Lithgow

Janet Malcolm

Colum McCann

Jay McInerney

Julie Mehretu

Paul Muldoon

Azar Nafisi

Shirin Neshat

Susan Orlean

Robert Pinsky

Francine Prose

Norman Rush

Salman Rushdie

Esmeralda Santiago

Stacy Schiff

Julian Schnabel

Alice Sebold

Richard Serra

Elif Shafak

Cindy Sherman

Gary Shteyngart

Shahzia Sikander

Jane Smiley

Kiki Smith

Andrew Solomon

Stephen Sondheim

Alec Soth

Art Spiegelman

Elizabeth Strout

Mickalene Thomas

Colm Tóibín

James Turrell

Anne Tyler

Ayelet Waldman

Tobias Wolff

Hanya Yanagihara

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