The Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona doled out more than $850,000 in grants in April just weeks before the National Endowment for the Arts attempted to rescind the funding.
It was the second phase of the foundation’s $1.4 million ARPA Artist and Organization Grant Programs, funded in 2021 through city of Tucson and NEA American Rescue Plan Act grants. In December 2023, the arts foundation distributed the first round of grants totaling more than $540,000.
The foundation’s timing turned out to be fortuitous, said Gabriela Muñoz, the foundation’s director of grants and programs. It received a letter from the NEA on May 2 that rescinded the foundation’s $500,000 ARPA grant.
Arts organizations around the country were receiving similar notices that threatened to rescind or withdraw grants that did not align with President Donald Trump’s agenda. Such grants included those fostering AI competency, empowering houses of worship to serve communities, assisting with disaster recovery and supporting tribal and Asian American communities.
The letter did not mention the Arts Foundation’s two other NEA grants for $75,000 each.
The NEA, which is responsible for distributing public arts funding, did not say what would happen to grants that were already spent.
The Arts Foundation 2025 grants went to reimburse 43 artists and 41 arts and cultural organizations from 16 cities and towns throughout Southern Arizona that had funded their projects out of pocket. Muñoz was part of the urgency she and Arts Foundation CEO Adriana Gallego had in distributing the funding.
“We had met our original contract already so we were so relieved that our community would be able to benefit from these public dollars,” Muñoz said.
Some of the projects from the ARPA Artist and Organization Grant Programs included:
- The Gila Valley Arts Council’s music education program that served nearly 200 adults and more than 600 students from a dozen schools in the Graham County community
- Odaiko Sonora Rhythm Industry used its grant money to pay artist administrators to work with students aged 10 to 80 on everything from team-building to performing in Tucson’s annual All Souls Procession.
- A pilot program established by a Pascua Yaqui tribal member to help tribal businesses navigate the tech world and improve their profile.
- Eli Beren taught songwriting to an underserved population at a long-term Tucson medical care residence.
- Tucson-based American Literary Translators Association used the funds to keep its program director, who continued the organization’s popular online multilingual workshops and online pitch sessions.
The Arts Foundation said 70% of its 43 artist grantees received their first-ever grants and served some 389 families and 82 health-care and frontline workers.
“The sheer impact of numbers of families served, artists hired,” Muñoz said. “Forty one organizations that we supported turned around and hired 366 artists in their own communities. You think about, all of the impact of these households and the impact of the service and bringing people together. We were just so delighted to be able to issue the money and support all of our grantees.”
The top stories from the Arizona Daily Star’s Caliente section for this week.
