When artist Edra Soto put out the call for photos of daily life for her new exhibit, it was just days after the second inauguration of President Donald Trump.
In the three months since, the Trump administration has proposed cuts, or major changes, at cultural and media organizations, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Voice of America, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Arts.
On Friday, the NEA notified The Sculpture Center in Cleveland that it was terminating the remaining money from a $40,000 grant to fund Soto’s "La Casa de Todos | Everyone’s Home,” opening May 16. The work highlights the concepts of migration, displacement and home. Grace Chin, executive director of The Sculpture Center, said she received only an email about the cut in funding for the four-part exhibit.
“It said we no longer align with the administration's priorities,” she said. “It's a form letter and it's not a person who sent it. It's a generic arts.gov address. I've never received anything like this. I've actually never had an award rescinded so, it's really a different time.”
Chin has been at the helm for six years. This is the center’s second NEA grant during her tenure, and only the third since its founding in 1989.
"Usually when I see an NEA award being pulled, it's because the organization isn't fulfilling the terms of the agreement," she said. However, that isn’t the case here. The exhibit has been in the works for two years and the funds were awarded in 2024.
In January 2025, Chin requested and received $34,000 of the grant.
“And at the time I asked, ‘Can I submit for the remainder because I'm foreseeing some bad things happening,’” she said. “I didn't get a response.”
The center’s overall budget jumped to $750,000 this year on the heels of a one-time $449,000 Cleveland Transformative Arts Fund grant.
"That actually skews our budget because next year, we won't have that," she said.
Chin also submitted an NEA application last summer, but is not confident in its success “for a number of reasons.”
“Our work deals a lot with living artists that are using their voice as a form of advocacy for underrepresented artists and communities,” she said. “I had written that in my grant application. So, I'm pretty sure for that alone, we wouldn't get funded. The other reason we may not get it is, I am not certain that the NEA will exist.”
The Trump administration has proposed cutting the agency, which is budgeted for $207 million.
“Emotionally, it's upsetting because this is a sign that the work of what artists are doing doesn't matter,” Chin said. “And the new priorities of the NEA have nothing at all to do with art. An NEA grant was a stamp of approval that we could show that we are being recognized on a national scale.”
Soto’s project will still be on view at the center through July 19. She grew up in Puerto Rico and came to Chicago for post-graduate work. That led to teaching roles with the Chicago Public Schools and at the School of the Art Institute. She said she wanted to create the Cleveland exhibition with crowdsourced material so it didn't express only her viewpoint of migration.
“They are telling their own personal story of migration,” she said. “I utilized representations of working-class decorative motifs that come from the houses of Puerto Rico. People can go inside the structure and when people go in, they will encounter different fragments of the motifs that will have the photographs embedded.”
The immersive marquesinas (porches) or balconies are made of aluminum and PVC. The photographs were submitted by Clevelanders.
“It's a democratic exhibition in that anybody is welcome,” she said. “The concept of the home belongs to all of us.”
Another aspect of the exhibit is a journal, curated by Latino artists working with Chin and Soto. It contains stories and poems about their migratory experience.
“I think that people reckon with their sense of belonging, and this is a theme that has been widely explored among artists,” Soto said. “I was able to reflect on my cultural identity and a sense of home after leaving Puerto Rico. I think that is something that becomes relevant in that experience, and that perspective kind of give me a real look at how the cultural identity of the place where I grew up is formed and the impact of colonialism.”
The project’s final component, "La Distancia | The Distance," is a permanent sculptural outdoor bus shelter to be installed in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. It's slated for completion in late summer, and Chin said she's "confident" it will still happen despite the loss of funding.
