Shownotes
When unchecked power rewrites the story of America,
who gets to live, who gets to speak,
and who quietly disappears?
In this episode of ART IS CHANGE, Bill Cleveland shares next chapter in the continuing Weather Report, (now called the Arts Freedom Weather Report) Rather than chasing single headlines or isolated outrages, this episode steps back to examine the cultural climate shaping 2026: how small policy shifts stack up, how institutions quietly recalibrate under authoritarian pressure, and how artists and cultural organizations are responding in real time.
In this show, we explore three critical dynamics shaping the arts and democracy right now:
- How culture is being strategically targeted and weaponized — through funding shifts, legal pressure, and narrative control.
- What’s actually happening on the ground at the NEA, in public media, museums, universities, and courts.
- How artists and organizers are responding with preparation, creativity, and discipline, treating resistance as a learned practice rather than a spontaneous reaction.
Listen in as we establish a cultural baseline for 2026 — one we’ll return to again and again — and map the early warning signs, fault lines, and sources of strength shaping the struggle for artistic freedom and democratic life.
NOTABLE MENTIONS
People
Host of ART IS CHANGE and founder of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.
Minneapolis poet, mother, and community member whose work and life are honored at the close of the episode. (Minnesota Public Radio)
Singer-songwriter and educator who stepped away from a Kennedy Center performance, citing concerns that the space no longer felt welcoming.
Composer of Wicked who withdrew from a Kennedy Center gala in protest of politicization.
Banjo innovator who canceled Kennedy Center appearances rather than participate in a politicized cultural space.
Jazz vibraphonist and bandleader who canceled his long-running Kennedy Center Christmas Eve jam.
Jazz ensemble that canceled its New Year’s Eve engagement at the Kennedy Center.
Trumpeter and composer who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming.
Choreographer whose company stepped away from scheduled Kennedy Center performances.
Organizations & Institutions
Center for the Study of Art & Community
Producing organization for ART IS CHANGE.
National Endowment for the Arts
Federal arts agency examined throughout the episode for structural and policy shifts.
Reported widespread loss of federal funding and program contraction across U.S. museums.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Public media funder affected by the 2025 Rescissions Act.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Legal organization representing arts groups challenging unconstitutional funding restrictions.
National advocacy organization involved in litigation defending artistic freedom.
Plaintiff in the successful lawsuit challenging NEA viewpoint discrimination.
Arts organization involved in the NEA lawsuit.
Boston-based theater organization and plaintiff in the NEA lawsuit.
Laws, Policies & Frameworks
Conservative blueprint for reshaping federal agencies and executive authority.
Order challenged for restricting arts funding tied to “gender ideology.” (Federal Register)
Legislation cutting federal support for public media. (Congressional record)
State legislation restricting DEI initiatives and chilling arts and humanities education.
Movements & Practice-Based Resistance
National Artists Safety Survey
Anonymous survey developed by the Artists at Risk Connection documenting censorship, harassment, and threats against artists and arts organizations.
Global network training artists and organizers in creative, strategic resistance.
Organization helping artists design interventions that apply pressure where power actually lives.
DC-based movement integrating music, ritual, and performance into organizing, including Go-Go traditions.
Movement centering culture, humor, and performance to assert democracy as a lived practice.
Acknowledgements:
From FreeSound.org
03419 swirly swooshes.wav by Robinhood76 -- https://freesound.org/s/160611/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
Ambient 19_Cello Song by PodcastAC -- https://freesound.org/s/720336/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Winterstorm I: A Cinematic and ambient soundscape by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/541062/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Darkest Thursday – A Haunting Electronic Masterpiece by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/558271/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
WonkTone_125bpm01_LoopCache_AbstractPercussion.wav by aikighost -- https://freesound.org/s/199050/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Ominous by ViraMiller -- https://freesound.org/s/742117/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Applause 1.mp3 by FunWithSound -- https://freesound.org/s/381355/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Creepy music by Victor_Natas -- https://freesound.org/s/551567/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Insirish by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/724797/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Stardust, Minimalist Piano Background Music That Evokes Emotion by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/546087/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.
Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.
Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.
Transcripts
Hey there. So when unchecked power rewrites the story of America, who lives, who thrives, who speaks, and who disappears?
From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. I'm Bill Cleveland. Now, I'm going to begin with a digression too, actually, which I'm told is something you should never do with a podcast.
So my first digression rises up from what has been going down in my old stomping ground, Minneapolis, and in Portland and the dozens of other places that ICE has been transforming communities from safe and friendly to fearful and lethal. More on this in a bit. My second digression, which will seem much further afield, has to do with improvisation.
A lot of people who are not practicing improvisers think that it's just making stuff up, you know, whatever comes to mind in the moment.
But those musicians, actors, dancers and the like who practice what I think of as the penultimate creative skill understand that imagining and manifesting things on the spur of the moment is just the start.
This is because improvising combines that made up stuff with a highly disciplined and intricately structured framework that defines and actually constrains the mix of relationships, intuition, listening, language, timing, and even the physical space within which all that free flowing imaginative magic travels.
The simple way of describing this weird juxtaposition of freedom and limitations is that if you don't know where the actual front edge of the stage is, you are lost as an improviser. Now back to ice. The problem with our Legion of the Immaculate and Protected border is that they have no borders.
They are performing their drama of terror and intimidation on a stage with no edge, combined with the understanding that the unconstrained, untethered and totally unimaginative masquerade being performed by their Regent in the White House is the script they should be following. Which translates as your only goal is to brutalize and terrorize everyone you encounter. So make it up as you go along.
And if you fuck it up, don't worry, because in this dystopian monster movie you are inoculated. So there is no such thing as a fuck up. That's right. Needless to say, you are amused because the President of the Universe has your back.
Who have been murdered and injured.
Needless to say, the hideous reality of India impacts all vulnerable souls who have been murdered and injured their families, their communities, and Indiana. All of us who care about having a peaceful and productive life. It also impacts the growing numbers of us who are called to push back and resist.
Like murdered poet and mom Renee Macklin Goode in Minneapolis. I know a vicious story like ice let loose and the world can SAP your spirit. Please, please don't let it happen.
As you may recall, over the past year we we have interspersed our interviews and conversations with episodes that take stock and report on the cultural weather in these turbulent times.
Bill Cleveland:We've been doing this because it's important.
Bill Cleveland:To take note of what's actually happening on the ground where authoritarian pressure is being applied and how artists, cultural organizations, and public media are responding. In previous episodes, we called this our weather report, but from now on we're going to call it the Arts Freedom Weather Report.
So thanks for joining us. I want to start by saying this clearly.
Nothing that follows is about single decision, single bills, legislation, single bad actors, or individual acts of courage and pushback.
What we're dealing with right now only comes into focus when you look at it over time, when you notice how small changes stack up, how rules shift quietly, and how institutions begin recalibrating long before anybody tells them they have to.
And most importantly, when you realize that there is a slowly mounting wave of revulsion and resistance that is gaining force and making its presence felt.
kay, this is where we were in:We'll start with Washington, not because everything originates there, but because what happens there often sets the tone for what feels permissible everywhere else. So the National Endowment for the Arts is still functioning, and I guess that matters. Grants are still being awarded, panels still meet.
ly consequential. In February: For:Some scrambled to rewrite applications under tougher competition. Others simply stepped away. Because roughly 40% of the NEA funding flows through state arts agencies, the effects didn't land evenly.
States with strong arts budgets could sometimes cushion the blow. States with thinner or politically hostile arts funding couldn't.
The result isn't officially partisan, but it's geographically and politically uneven. Some state arts councils shortened grant cycles or reduced staff others held steady.
As a result, the cultural map is becoming more unequal, I think, by design. Now I'm going to get a little wonky here.
this moment, known as Project:This 900 page conservative agenda, championed by allies of the current administration, envisions remaking federal agencies to embody and advance a particular narrative of American identity and heritage, rather than serving as neutral patrons of diverse political, social, and cultural expression.
While Project:In other words, culture isn't untouched it's being weaponized in the war over American story and meaning, with federal institutions recast not just as funders but as vehicles for a prescribed national narrative. So the tide of cultural change is both overt and covert, leaving many unsure and unclear.
And often, when uncertainty becomes the operating condition, one of the places culture inevitably ends up is the courts.
,: ement tied to Executive Order:As a result, the NEA withdrew the requirement.
That ruling mattered not just because artists won, but because it reaffirmed something foundational Federal cultural funding cannot be conditioned on ideological conformity.
nearly the same time, in May:What does it mean when funding is awarded, celebrated, and then withdrawn because priorities shift midstream? That same instability has landed hard in public media.
In:Many depend on CPB for a quarter to a third of their operating budgets. Stations responded by laying off staff, cutting local reporting, and reducing community programming in places with no commercial alternatives.
Public radio and television aren't just culture, they're emergency infrastructure. Well, listeners noticed. Donations surged. Philanthropy stepped in with emergency bridge funding. But no one pretended this was a long term fix.
osses happen quietly. In June:They were counting on more than 20% cancelled or scaled back programs serving high need audiences. Rural communities, veterans, students, people with disabilities. You know, the building stays open, but the program shrinks.
What's lost first is the open invitation. Now, federal signals don't stay federal for long. They get picked up and amplified. At the state level.
In Ohio, Senate Bill 1 restricted DEI programs and barred public universities from engaging with what the law calls controversial beliefs. Faculty testified that the language chilled teaching in art history, theater and cultural studies.
Students protested under the banner shred SB1, warning lawmakers the law would drive talent out of the state.
In Indiana, budget mandates tied to enrollment thresholds forced public universities to eliminate or suspend degree programs in art history, dance, theater and comparative literature, narrowing the pipeline that produces artists and cultural workers for decades to come. Whenever public systems contract, the question becomes not who fills the gap, but how. Some philanthropy has acted as emergency ballast.
Others are taking a longer view. The Andrew W. Mellon foundation committed $50 million to strengthen literary and humanities infrastructure.
The Kettering foundation has centered artists as democratic practitioners, not messengers, but co creators of civic life explicitly supporting artistic voice as essential to democracy itself. I think that distinction matters. And it helps explain why something unexpected happened this winter.
Not in a courtroom or a budget hearing, but on a stage.
Now, once upon a time, not long ago, there was a place we called the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to a president who believed the arts were essential to democracy. Not a brand, a public trust. Then came the decision to graft another name onto it.
Not through Congress, not through public debate, but through boardroom muscle. A memorial turned into a marquee. Hey, few artists notice. First quietly, then publicly. And then the names began to gather.
Sonio de los Santos stepped away from her concert, saying the space no longer felt welcoming to her or her community. Stephen Schwartz, the composer behind Wicked, withdrew from a gala that once would have been a crowning honor.
Banjo master Bella Fleck canceled his appearances, saying the music had been drafted into a political fight. He never signed up for. Bandleader Chuck Red, whose winter wonderland you just heard, called off his long running Christmas Eve jam.
The Cookers canceled their New Year's Eve production, Wayne Tucker pulled his trumpet from the lineup, Doug Verone and dancers stepped away from their dates.
The Brentano Quartet rescinded their booking and others followed singers, composers, bandleaders, storytellers, each one choosing integrity over prestige, principle over paycheck. It wasn't a boycott so much as a quiet chorus of refusal, a reminder that sometimes the bravest performance is the one you never give.
All of this helps explain why preparation and prevention keeps coming up as an important aspect of the resistance, particularly for nonprofits. Not as fear, but as capacity building.
In a previous artist change episode, which we'll note in our show notes, we outlined basic steps nonprofits can take to protect themselves clarifying mission, language, understanding governance responsibilities, documenting decisions and building alliances before crises hit.
One such alliance that you can connect to right away is the National Artists Safety Survey, which is gathering information anonymously from artists and arts organizations across the US about their experiences with censorship, persecution, harassment and other threats. If you're an artist or work with an arts organization, I encourage you to just take a few minutes to complete the survey.
And if you're not an artist, just as importantly, share the survey link in our show notes and help them reach as many artists as possible. We'll be sharing their results when they become available later this year. Preparation doesn't make organizations cautious, it makes them steadier.
And steadiness is shaping today's resistance. Resistance right now isn't improvised, it's being taught.
The organization Beautiful Trouble has spent more than a decade training artists and organizers in the craft of creative resistance, treating art as strategy, not as decoration. The center for Artistic Activism helps artists design interventions that apply pressure where power actually lives.
Shifting from expression to effectiveness on the ground, groups like Free DC have been integrated music, visual art, performance, and ritual into all their organizing, insisting on visibility and shared authorship. In a city where politics can easily become abstract.
Free DC Representative:Utilizing percussion and the drum always has uplifted the spirits of the community. It's the crank of the bounce beat opponents of the federal surge using the powerful spirit of Go go music from TLB to heal.
Bill Cleveland:Every resistance step is a good step.
Bill Cleveland:Movements like no Kings have centered culture, humor, imagery, performance to assert democracy as something you practice, not something you petition for. When you lay all of this side by side, a few things stop looking accidental culture is being targeted because it works.
Institutions with trust are strategic choke points, and the strongest responses blend legal defense with imagination and relationships. And it's important to note places that invested in community before crisis are holding up better than those that didn't.
That's not ideology, that's observation.
s I said, this episode is the:First, culture isn't under pressure because it's fragile. It's under pressure because it shapes how people understand power, belonging and possibility, and it threatens oligarchs and kings.
Second, resistance that lasts is isn't just loud. It's strategic, relational and learned. And artists are learning and teaching those skills every day. Third, democracy doesn't survive on policy alone.
It survives where people practice it together in stories, rituals, shared spaces and acts of imagination. In closing, I'd like to reinforce that sentiment by sharing an excerpt from a poem by Minneapolis poet Renee Macklin Goode.
Bill Cleveland:May her soul rest in peace.
Bill Cleveland:From on learning to dissect fetal pigs under.
Bill Cleveland:Clippings of the moon at 2:45am I studying and repeat ribosome endoplasmic lactic acid stamen at the IHOP on the corner of Powers and Stetson Hills. I repeated and scribbled until it picked.
Bill Cleveland:Its way and stagnated.
Bill Cleveland:Somewhere I can't point to anymore, maybe my gut, maybe there in between my pancreas and large intestine, is the piddly brook of my soul. It's the ruler by which I reduce all things. Now hard edge and splintering from knowledge that used to sit a cloth against fevered forehead.
Can I let them both be this fickled faith and this college science that.
Bill Cleveland:Heckles me from the back of the classroom.
Bill Cleveland:Now I can't believe that the Bible and Quran and Bhagavad Gita are sliding.
Bill Cleveland:Long hairs behind my ear like mom.
Bill Cleveland:Used to, and exhaling from their mouths make room for wonder.
Bill Cleveland:All my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest and is summarized as.
Bill Cleveland:Life is merely ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often and how well and what dies there.
Bill Cleveland:Art IS Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community, our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro. Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Neppe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of UKE235.
So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. Once again, please know this episode has been 100% human.
