In line with the Trump Administration's cuts to federally funded programs, the Sheldon Jackson Museum’s Alaska Native artist residency program, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, was canceled Friday.
However, a private foundation has come forward to allow the museum to host the summer program this year, said Melissa Fouse, president of Friends of Sheldon Jackson Museum.
The Alaska Native artist residency program has operated for years on NEA funding, and this year was again to bring Indigenous artists from throughout the state to demonstrate their artistry at the museum through the summer.
“We had been approved for the NEA grant that the curator applied for, but there's a lot of stuff going on in the arts and museums. And so I wouldn't say it was a bolt from the blue, exactly, but it was an unpleasant surprise,” Fouse told the Sentinel by phone on Tuesday.
Cancellation of federal grant money has already shut down the AmeriCorps and Jesuit Volunteer programs in Sitka.
National media reported that a number of senior NEA officials resigned Monday in protest of the funding cuts.
The alternate funding for the SJ Museum Native Arts residency is a grant from the Maxwell Hanrahan Foundation, a national philanthropy that supports the arts.
"We'll be OK for this coming summer -- we don't have to call the people that we said, come on down and say, ‘Oh, never mind.’ and then we'll just hope for the best going forward,” Fouse said.
On the schedule for Alaska Native artist in residency at the museum this year are Liz Morrow, an Unangax painter and printmaker; Shirley Hootch, a Yup’ik carver and jewelry maker; Amber Webb, a Yup’ik graphic artist and beader; Danielle Larsen, a Koyukon Athabascan and Unangax painter who also makes seal gut jewelry; and Anna Brown Ehlers, a Tlingit weaver. Programming is set to commence in June and continue through October.
The NEA grant was to take effect on June 1. The NEA email to Friends of the Sheldon Jackson Museum said it is “updating its grant-making policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”
The email said projects favored by Trump are artificial intelligence competency, the history of historically Black colleges and universities, and the 250th anniversary of American independence.
A process to appeal the revocation of the grant is laid out in the email, with a time frame that extends until Friday. Fouse says the Friends plan to use that process.
Though the Alaska Native artist residency program will still operate this summer, Fouse worries about the fiscal future of the SJ Museum, not just the Native Artist program. In 2019, she fought against state efforts to sell the museum, and in the 1980s, advocated for the state’s purchase of the facility from Sheldon Jackson College.
With the price of oil on the international market falling, Fouse was concerned that might “severely impact the price of oil from Alaska."
"And my concern is that the Legislature will have gone home, and the governor will tell those commissioners to just cut, cut, cut, because there'll be an enormous deficit, and that the impact will hurt the museums and libraries division,” she said.
