This report draws on publicly available grant records and program descriptions from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the organizational literature of state arts councils, peer-reviewed research on arts philanthropy, and journalism covering the 2025 federal arts funding crisis. Budget figures and grant statistics are drawn from the NEA’s own press releases, annual appropriations records, and Congressional Research Service analyses. Data on the concentration of arts philanthropy draws on the 2023 Scientific Reports study by Shekhtman and Barabási, which analyzed $36 billion in foundation grants to arts organizations from 2010 to 2019 using IRS 990 e-file data, and on Grantmakers in the Arts’ annual sector surveys. Research on the 2025 grant revocations draws on reporting from NPR, Artnet News, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, and Deadline.
A note on what this report does not have: no one has published a systematic analysis of public arts grant funding by artistic medium. The NEA’s searchable grant database records discipline (Visual Arts, Folk & Traditional Arts, and so on) but not the specific media within those disciplines. To determine how much public money has supported mosaic-specific projects over the NEA’s six-decade history, one would need to read every Visual Arts and Folk & Traditional Arts grant award description the agency has ever issued. This has not been done. That absence is not a gap in this report. It is the argument of this report. The data does not exist because the field that would need it has never had an institution with the standing to demand it. The Museum of Mosaic Environments intends to be that institution.
The National Endowment for the Arts makes its grant application available online. You download the guidelines document, register on Grants.gov, and prepare for what the NEA estimates will take approximately twenty-six hours to complete. Near the beginning of the application, you are asked to select a discipline. A drop-down menu appears. You are applying for a project about mosaic art: contemporary, large-scale, institutionally rigorous, made by an artist whose practice spans thirty years and whose commissions have been nationally recognized. You scroll through the fifteen options.
You could choose “Visual Arts.” The NEA describes it as supporting “visual artists and projects in all genres.” Your work is a visual art. But the Visual Arts panel will convene a group of experts in contemporary fine art — people who think primarily in terms of painting, photography, video, and installation. Their evaluative framework was built around a tradition that, as this series has documented since Designed to Fail, was constructed in the eighteenth century to exclude the media you practice.
Or you could choose “Folk & Traditional Arts.” The NEA describes it as covering “culturally- or community-centered artistic traditions, represented by a wide-range of genres including, but not limited to, music, dance, crafts, foodways, dress/adornment, occupation, ceremony, and oral expression.” Crafts appears in this list between dance and foodways. Your medium, which decorated the ceilings of Hagia Sophia and has been practiced continuously for five thousand years across every inhabited continent, has just been classified alongside the preservation of traditional cooking practices. A Folk & Traditional Arts panel will review your work through a lens of community practice and cultural continuity rather than contemporary fine art production.
The NEA adds a note in its application instructions: “In limited cases, staff may transfer an application to a discipline other than the one that was selected by the applicant to ensure appropriate panel review.” Your self-classification can be overridden. The form will decide for you.
There is no third option. There is no “Studio Arts” category, no “Craft Practice” category, no category that recognizes a medium as simultaneously ancient and contemporary, global and Western, sacred and secular, institutionally marginal and artistically central. The art/craft hierarchy that Designed to Fail traced to the sixteenth-century Italian academies and their successors is not merely an aesthetic preference expressed in auction records and museum collections. It is encoded in a federal grant application form, reviewed by a panel whose composition was shaped by the same hierarchy, and enforced by a system that will classify your work for you if you fail to navigate it correctly.
This report documents how that system was built, what it costs, and what the Museum of Mosaic Environments is positioned to do about it.
The National Endowment for the Arts was created by an act of Congress signed by President Lyndon Johnson on September 29, 1965. The act established a federal agency dedicated to “supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.” The founding vision was, at its core, artist-centered. The NEA would fund individual artists, directly, through fellowships in specific disciplines — visual arts, literature, music, theater, dance — so that they could develop their work without the immediate pressure of the market.
For its first three decades, this vision was substantially honored. Individual artist fellowships became the NEA’s most direct mechanism for supporting creative practice. Visual artists received fellowships on competitive application; panelists were drawn from the field; awards ranged from a few thousand dollars in the early years to multiyear support as the program matured. The NEA grew from an initial budget of $2.5 million in 1966 to a peak annual budget of approximately $176 million in fiscal year 1992, having grown steadily through the late 1980s and early 1990s. By 1989, at the program’s apex, the NEA distributed $8.4 million in individual artist fellowships across disciplines. For an artist working in a medium without a commercial infrastructure — a mosaic artist, a weaver, a ceramicist before ceramics achieved fine art recognition in the gallery system — a federal fellowship was one of the few mechanisms that could sustain practice through the long years before recognition.
The mechanism that destroyed this system was political: the politics were about content. In 1989, two NEA-funded works provoked a national controversy: Andrés Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, several of which depicted homoerotic imagery. Senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato led a campaign against the NEA that framed federal arts funding as the taxpayer subsidization of blasphemy and obscenity.
The following year, NEA chair John Frohnmayer vetoed the grant recommendations of a peer review panel for four performance artists whose work engaged with sexuality, identity, AIDS, and LGBTQ+ experience: Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck — the NEA Four. The artists had passed peer review. They were defunded above the panel level, by a political appointee responding to congressional pressure. All four sued. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the NEA’s favor on procedural grounds, but the practical consequence of the case — and of the political environment it reflected — was a restructuring of the entire federal arts funding apparatus.
In 1996, Congress cut the NEA’s budget from $162 million to $99.5 million — a 38 percent reduction. The agency restructured its grant programs in response. Individual artist grants were eliminated for nearly all disciplines. Literature fellowships were retained; jazz fellowships were eventually added. For visual artists, the direct federal fellowship program that had existed since 1966 was gone. Painters, sculptors, photographers, ceramicists, textile artists, mosaic artists: after 1996, none of them could apply to the NEA directly. The system that had allowed an individual artist to make a case for their work to a panel of peers was replaced by a system that required organizational infrastructure as a prerequisite for federal support.
The formal justification was accountability: organizations are more traceable than individuals, their programs more auditable, their outputs more legible to congressional oversight. The practical consequence was the introduction of a second hierarchy on top of the art/craft hierarchy: not just medium, but organizational form. To access federal arts funding after 1996, you needed a 501(c)(3) designation, a documented programming history, the staff capacity to manage a twenty-six-hour application process, and the ability to match whatever grant you received dollar for dollar from nonfederal sources. The individual mosaic artist, self-employed and working without institutional support, was removed from the system entirely.
The NEA’s principal grant program is Grants for Arts Projects (GAP), which distributes project-based funding to organizations in fifteen discipline categories. Grants range from $10,000 to $100,000 and require a one-to-one nonfederal match. Individuals are not eligible. Applications require at least five years of documented arts programming history prior to the deadline. The agency estimates the application process takes approximately twenty-six hours to complete, not including the weeks required to establish eligibility and complete federal registration systems.
The total NEA budget for fiscal year 2024 was approximately $207 million — which represents 0.003 percent of the federal budget, or roughly what the United States spends on national defense every ninety minutes. Of that total, 40 percent is distributed by statute to state arts agencies and regional arts organizations, whose programs mirror the federal structure. The remaining 60 percent funds the NEA’s direct grants and operations. Grants for Arts Projects distributed approximately $31.8 million across roughly 1,127 grants in fiscal year 2025 — an average award of about $28,000, well below the theoretical maximum.
The Challenge America program, which offered $10,000 grants specifically designed for small organizations without the infrastructure to compete for larger GAP awards, was eliminated for fiscal year 2026 — removing the one entry-level pathway available to organizations that could not compete on the terms the system was designed around. Its elimination in 2026 came as part of the same administrative restructuring that revoked hundreds of previously awarded grants and proposed the elimination of the NEA entirely.
This is the system within which a mosaic artist or a mosaic institution must operate. It was designed around organizations, not individuals; around disciplines defined in the 1970s, not the full range of artistic practice; and around a political accountability to Congress that has, three times in thirty years, resulted in wholesale restructuring of who gets funded and on what terms.
The NEA organizes its grant programs into fifteen discipline categories: Artist Communities, Arts Education, Dance, Design, Folk & Traditional Arts, Literary Arts, Local Arts Agencies, Media Arts, Museums, Music, Musical Theater, Opera, Presenting & Multidisciplinary Works, Theater, and Visual Arts. These categories are not merely administrative. They determine which panel reviews your application, and panel composition shapes funding decisions in ways that are structural, not incidental. A Folk & Traditional Arts panel brings to the table a set of evaluative frameworks built around cultural continuity, community practice, and intergenerational transmission. A Visual Arts panel brings a set built around contemporary artistic practice, institutional critique, and the gallery-to-museum pipeline. The same project, reviewed by the wrong panel, can fail on grounds that have nothing to do with its artistic merit and everything to do with category mismatch.
For mosaic, neither category is right. The Visual Arts category is where contemporary fine art practice lives — but the evaluative framework of contemporary fine art, shaped by the same hierarchies Designed to Fail documented, does not reliably recognize mosaic as fine art. In a competitive pool, a mosaic project applying under Visual Arts is competing against painting, photography, video, and installation with the disadvantage of a medium whose institutional standing is not yet commensurate with its history. The Folk & Traditional Arts category solves this problem by reframing it: mosaic is not competing against painting, it’s competing against traditional ceramics and community weaving programs. But the solution compounds the problem. Applying under Folk & Traditional Arts implicitly accepts the classification that Designed to Fail, The Geography of Exclusion, The Mosaic Record, and this report all argue is unjustifiable — that mosaic is a traditional community practice rather than a fine art with a five-thousand-year institutional history.
The NEA’s Folk & Traditional Arts discipline description is specific about what it covers: “culturally- or community-centered artistic traditions, represented by a wide-range of genres including, but not limited to, music, dance, crafts, foodways, dress/adornment, occupation, ceremony, and oral expression.” The word “crafts” appears in this list between “dance” and “foodways.” A contemporary mosaic artist applying under this category is asking to be reviewed alongside the preservation of regional quilting traditions, community food practices, and oral storytelling — not because their work is similar to those practices, but because the taxonomy offers no alternative.
The mechanism by which classification becomes consequence is panel review. The NEA uses peer review panels to evaluate applications: experts in the relevant discipline convene, read applications, view work samples, and score proposals. The NEA assembles panels that are diverse with respect to geography, race and ethnicity, and artistic point of view. What panel diversity does not address is the evaluative framework that the discipline category itself imports.
A Visual Arts panel, however diverse its membership, is reviewing applications through the lens of contemporary fine art practice. Panel members are practitioners, critics, curators, and educators whose professional formation happened within the institutional context of contemporary fine art — the gallery system, the art school, the museum. When they encounter a mosaic project, they are not evaluating it on the terms of mosaic’s own history and institutional context; they are evaluating it on the terms of the category it has entered. A mosaic project that does not make legible connections to contemporary art discourse, that does not cite the right institutional references, that presents itself as mosaic rather than as contemporary art that happens to use mosaic, will lose to a painting project that speaks the panel’s language fluently. The medium is disadvantaged before the work is even seen.
The Folk & Traditional Arts panel runs the reverse problem: it is looking for community rootedness, cultural continuity, and intergenerational transmission. A contemporary mosaic artist working at studio scale, making large-format architectural commissions for secular clients, with a practice informed by art history rather than local folk tradition, will not score well on the criteria that panel is using. The work is not what the panel is for. The artist has submitted to the wrong room.
The NEA acknowledges this problem with its note that staff may transfer applications between disciplines. But the note also contains the caveat: “we cannot guarantee that an application will be transferred in all cases where this might be desirable.” The responsibility for navigating an unnavigable taxonomy remains with the applicant.
The federal structure is not anomalous. Private foundation grants for individual visual artists reproduce its logic at the philanthropic level. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, one of the most important funders of individual visual artists in the United States, explicitly restricts eligibility to painters, printmakers, and sculptors. Mosaic artists are not eligible. The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation offers Individual Support Grants to painters, printmakers, and sculptors with at least twenty years of professional experience. Mosaic artists are not eligible. The Harpo Foundation offers grants to “under-recognized” visual artists, but evaluates applications on the basis of “critical engagement with aesthetic inquiry” within the contemporary art field — the same evaluative framework that the NEA Visual Arts panel applies.
The primary safety net for artists in historically excluded media at the individual level is CERF+ — the Craft Emergency Relief Fund. CERF+ provides emergency relief and career recovery loans for artists whose practice has been disrupted by crisis: fire, flood, illness, natural disaster. It is a triage fund, not a development fund. It does not commission new work. It does not fund residencies, exhibitions, or scholarly research. It exists because the rest of the grant ecosystem does not adequately support artists in historically excluded media, and so a separate emergency system was built to catch them when the existing system had not sustained them. The existence of CERF+ is a precise measure of the gap — but it is a measure of what the field does not have, not of what it needs.
The Windgate Charitable Foundation, which has invested significantly in education in historically excluded art forms through schools like Penland School of Crafts and North Bennet Street School, represents the most substantial philanthropic infrastructure for art in historically excluded media outside the emergency relief context. But Windgate’s focus is institutional — supporting schools and programs that teach in historically excluded media — rather than individual artist development or critical scholarly work that would accelerate the reclassification of these art forms within the fine art field. The infrastructure exists; the intellectual infrastructure to transform how that infrastructure is understood does not.
A 2023 study published in Scientific Reports analyzed $36 billion in grants from 46,643 foundations to 48,766 arts organizations between 2010 and 2019. The findings are consistent with every other analysis of arts philanthropy: funding is highly concentrated, follows a power-law distribution, and flows disproportionately toward large, prestigious institutions. Performing arts organizations — opera companies, ballet companies, symphony orchestras, theaters — led both in number of grants and total dollars, receiving $9.7 billion over the decade. Visual arts organizations received a smaller share; organizations working in historically excluded media do not appear as a tracked category.
Grantmakers in the Arts, the national association of public and private arts funders, estimates that the top 1,000 foundations gave approximately $3 billion to arts and culture in 2018. Of that total, performing arts and museums were the top recipients, at 29 and 24 percent respectively. Visual arts received 8 percent — approximately $240 million. Excluded art forms are not tracked as a separate category. The number for mosaic, specifically, is unknown, which is itself the argument this report is making.
Alongside foundation data, the researchers found that the top 1 percent of museums receive 41 percent of donated revenues. The Metropolitan Museum of Art reported over $250 million in philanthropic support in 2018 alone. At the other end of the distribution, the majority of arts organizations operate on budgets that would not qualify them for many major foundation grants and would make the twenty-six-hour NEA application process represent a significant proportion of their annual staff capacity. A 2025 analysis cited by the Mimeta Foundation found that 55 percent of U.S. arts funding flows to large institutions with budgets exceeding $5 million, leaving smaller organizations — particularly those led by communities of color — severely under-resourced.
Public arts funding follows the same concentrating logic, compounded by the organizational eligibility requirements that private foundation grants share with the NEA. Grantmakers in the Arts estimated that total public arts funding from all sources — federal, state, and local — was approximately $1.4 billion in 2018. This figure is considerably smaller than private foundation giving ($3 billion from the top 1,000 foundations alone), which underscores the outsized practical significance of classification decisions within the public system: federal and state arts agency grants, though modest in absolute terms, carry a certification function. An NEA grant signals institutional legitimacy in ways that shape private funding decisions downstream.
The NEA’s current grant requirements include a minimum of five years of documented arts programming history prior to the application deadline. This rule was introduced as part of the accountability reforms that followed the culture wars and tightened over time. Its practical consequence is the exclusion of new and emerging organizations from direct federal support — precisely the organizations most likely to be doing innovative work in underrepresented media, serving underrepresented communities, or attempting to correct the structural inequities this series has documented.
A newly established institution dedicated to mosaic art — an organization like the MME in its early years — cannot apply to the NEA for the first five years of its existence. During those years, it must build its programming record, its organizational infrastructure, its financial management systems, and its grant-matching capacity without federal support, while competing against institutions that have been accumulating NEA grants for decades. The five-year rule does not prevent inequality from reproducing in the grant economy. It schedules it.
The matching requirement compounds this further. Every NEA grant requires a one-to-one nonfederal match. For an institution without a large donor base or endowment, securing the match can be harder than writing the application. For a mosaic institution, which does not benefit from the donor infrastructure that surrounds symphony orchestras and art museums, the match is a structural obstacle rather than an incentive. The NEA’s grants are, in practice, more accessible to institutions that already have substantial nonfederal funding than to institutions that need public support most.
Below the organizational threshold, there is essentially no public arts funding available to individual artists. The NEA’s individual fellowships — eliminated for visual artists after 1996 (literature fellowships survived that restructuring; the Trump administration cancelled them in August 2025) — were the primary federal mechanism for supporting artists who could not or would not work through organizational intermediaries. Their absence means that the federal government’s relationship to individual artistic practice is now almost entirely indirect: the NEA funds organizations, which fund or employ artists, which means that the NEA’s priorities are transmitted to artists through an institutional filter whose own priorities may not align with the NEA’s stated commitments.
For a mosaic artist working independently — which, as The Disability Gap established, is the dominant career structure in the field — the path to public arts funding requires either founding an organization or partnering with one. Founding an organization requires legal and administrative overhead, a five-year programming history, and the capacity to manage grant compliance. Partnering with an existing organization requires finding an institution whose priorities include mosaic, whose grant programs can accommodate a mosaic-related project, and whose overhead rate does not consume the award. These requirements are not impossible, but they are significantly more demanding than making a strong artistic case for a strong project. They are, in precisely the sense Designed to Fail used the term, structural.
The artists who navigated this structure most successfully were those with institutional connections — academics, teaching artists, artists with MFA credentials and school affiliations, artists whose practice was legible to the contemporary art institutions that controlled the organizations most likely to receive NEA funding. The artists without those connections — self-employed studio practitioners, community-based artists, artists working in media not recognized by the institutional fine art world — found themselves outside the system at every level. Not denied. Not reviewed and rejected. Simply not present.
The NEA’s grant database is publicly available at arts.gov. It records, for each award, the recipient organization, the state, the discipline, the award year, and the award amount. It does not record the specific artistic medium of the funded project. To determine how much public arts funding has supported mosaic, specifically, since the NEA’s founding in 1965, one would need to read through the project descriptions of every grant ever awarded under the Visual Arts and Folk & Traditional Arts disciplines — tens of thousands of records across six decades — and identify those in which mosaic was the primary medium.
This analysis has never been conducted. No researcher has published a systematic study of NEA grant records by artistic medium. No state arts council has published a comparable analysis. The question “how much public money has supported mosaic art in the United States?” cannot be answered from currently available data. It can only be answered by doing the work the field has not had the institutional standing to demand.
The absence of this data is not neutral, and this series has made this argument before. Designed to Fail noted that no formal demographic survey of the mosaic field by gender exists. The Unpaid Canvas documented the precarity of artists who earn below the threshold of formal tracking. The Disability Gap observed that no major arts organization has published data specifically on chronic illness and career trajectory for visual artists. In each case, the absence of data reflects the absence of an institution with both the scholarly authority and the institutional interest to generate it. Fields that are marginalized by the systems that would track them do not generate the record-keeping that would quantify their own exclusion. The gap in the data is a mirror of the gap in the infrastructure.
While medium-specific grant data does not exist, the available discipline-level and sector-level data allows inference. Visual Arts receives a smaller share of arts philanthropy than performing arts at every level of the funding system. Within Visual Arts, the available evidence suggests that grants concentrate in media with strong institutional representation — photography, video, installation, painting — and in artists who have achieved gallery representation or academic affiliation. There is no data to contradict the hypothesis that mosaic receives a negligible share of Visual Arts funding, and the structural conditions described in Parts II and III are exactly the conditions that would produce negligible funding regardless of project quality.
The Folk & Traditional Arts discipline offers an alternative pathway, but the Grantmakers in the Arts data does not separately report Folk & Traditional Arts funding as a share of total arts giving. The discipline is smaller than Visual Arts, Music, and Performing Arts in the NEA’s own grant distribution. A mosaic organization that successfully navigated the classification and applied under Folk & Traditional Arts would be competing for a smaller pool of grants, evaluated on criteria that the medium’s global contemporary practice does not straightforwardly satisfy, and classified in a way that would carry downstream effects for private fundraising by signaling a relationship to traditional community practice rather than to the contemporary fine art institutions whose validation private funders rely on.
CERF+ data provides one indirect measure. The Craft Emergency Relief Fund serves artists in historically excluded media — ceramics, fiber, glass, metalwork, and others — when their practices are disrupted by unforeseen crises. The organization’s survey data, which The Disability Gap drew on for occupational health statistics, covers a population of artists in historically excluded media who are, structurally, outside the mainstream funding system at the career development level. The existence and scale of CERF+ — and the fact that it describes its mission as filling a gap in the arts funding ecosystem — is, in the absence of direct data, the strongest available evidence that artists in historically excluded media, including mosaic artists, are systematically underserved by public and philanthropic funding structures.
The research that does not exist can be done. The NEA’s grant database is publicly searchable and includes project descriptions for awards since 1998. A systematic search of those descriptions for terms including “mosaic,” “tessera,” “tile art,” “smalti,” and related terms would produce the first quantitative estimate of NEA support for mosaic-specific projects over the past twenty-five years. A similar search of available state arts council grant records, which vary in public accessibility but many of which are available through state government websites, would extend the analysis to the full public funding system.
This is not a large research project. It is a database query with manual verification — the kind of work a research assistant can complete in several weeks. The reason it has not been done is not that it is difficult. It is that no institution with a scholarly stake in the answer has existed. Until now. The MME is positioned to be the institution that generates this data, publishes it, and submits it as a contribution to the NEA’s own research agenda. That submission would be the opening move of a policy argument for medium-neutral grant classification reform — an argument that can only be made with numbers.
On May 3, 2025, hours after the Trump administration proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts from the federal budget, hundreds of arts organizations across the United States began receiving emails informing them that their NEA grants had been canceled. Dance programs, literary magazines, regional theater groups, LGBTQ+ film festivals, rural arts initiatives, youth writing workshops, and museum education programs all received identical language: the grants were being terminated because they did not align with the agency’s “updated grantmaking policy priorities.”
Several program directors resigned in the wake of the revocations, including the heads of the NEA’s folk and traditional arts, museums, dance, theater, design, and literary programs. Senior staff at the agency with decades of institutional knowledge left in a matter of weeks. The agency that remained was substantially smaller, substantially less experienced, and substantially reoriented toward the administration’s stated funding priorities: “skilled trade jobs,” “AI competency,” “support for the military and veterans,” “economic development of Asian American communities,” and projects tied to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
None of these priorities are legible to a mosaic institution making a scholarly argument for the global history of the medium’s institutional erasure. The MME, had it been eligible and in operation, would have had no viable path to federal support under the 2025 priorities regardless of the quality of its scholarship or the clarity of its institutional commitments. This is the point. The 2025 revocations are the most visible recent expression of a structural fragility that was built into federal arts funding from the moment it was made organization-only, project-based, and politically accountable to a Congress in which the NEA has always had enemies.
The grants that were revoked in 2025 were not randomly selected. They disproportionately served LGBTQ+ communities, communities of color, small organizations, and experimental work. The Frameline LGBTQ+ film festival lost a $20,000 grant. The Three Bone Theatre, which produces works by Chicano playwrights about immigrant families, had its grant initially canceled before recovering it through a receipts submission process. The Rhode Island Latino Arts organization, which had sued the NEA over its “gender ideology” restriction months earlier, saw its funding threatened. The pattern was not arbitrary. The administration’s grant revocations reproduced, in accelerated form, the same logic of exclusion this series has documented across seven prior reports.
The institutions that lost funding in 2025 were largely the institutions that had been partially filling the gap left by the art/craft hierarchy and the racial and gender exclusions documented in Designed to Fail through The Collector Gap. The queer theaters, the BIPOC arts centers, the organizations serving rural communities and underserved populations, the programs that existed because the mainstream arts funding system did not adequately reach the communities they served: these are the institutions whose defunding compounds every structural exclusion in this series. When they lose funding, the gap they were filling reopens.
Private philanthropy responded. The Mellon Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation launched emergency funding programs to partially offset the federal cuts. But emergency philanthropy is not a structural correction. It is a triage response to a structural failure, and it is temporary, discretionary, and unevenly distributed. Organizations with existing philanthropic relationships were better positioned to access emergency funds than organizations without them — which means the same concentration dynamic that governs the regular funding system governs the emergency response as well.
There is a constituency for whom the 2025 revocations changed nothing, because nothing was there to begin with. The individual mosaic artist who could not apply to the NEA before May 2025 — because she was an individual, not an organization, because her medium had no institutional champion, because her grant applications under Visual Arts had not succeeded or under Folk & Traditional Arts had implicitly misclassified her work — did not lose a grant that month. She had no grant to lose.
This is not a consolation. It is the indictment. The structural exclusion documented in this report did not begin in May 2025. It was built into the system in 1996, when individual artist grants were eliminated. It was encoded in the NEA’s discipline taxonomy when crafts were listed alongside foodways and dress/adornment. It was compounded by the organizational eligibility requirements, the matching requirements, the five-year programming history rule, and the panel review structures that evaluate mosaic through frameworks built around the media the fine art hierarchy privileged. The 2025 revocations made visible, suddenly and dramatically, what had always been true: the system does not protect everyone equally, and the people it protects least are those for whom protection matters most.
The analysis in Parts I through V documents a system of exclusion that is structural, documented, and correctable. This section articulates how the Museum of Mosaic Environments will operate as an institutional corrective — not in the aspirational mode of a mission statement, but in the operational mode of specific commitments with specific consequences. The MME is being designed to generate the institutional standing, the scholarly authority, and the public data that would make a policy argument for classification reform irrefutable.
The MME’s dual-entity structure positions the MME Foundation as the grant-eligible, nonprofit entity through which public and philanthropic funding can be received and deployed. Achieving full grant eligibility in its Iberian Peninsula jurisdiction — the organizational and legal equivalent of 501(c)(3) status — is an institutional priority, not a bureaucratic afterthought. Every year that the MME Foundation is operational without grant eligibility is a year in which the institutional infrastructure to advocate for mosaic artists in the funding system does not exist.
Once established, the Foundation will immediately begin building the five-year programming history that federal-level grant programs require. It will apply to available European and Portuguese public arts funding programs — including those administered through the Republic of Portugal’s Direcção-Geral das Artes and through EU Creative Europe programs — and will track those applications and their outcomes as public institutional data. The MME will not wait until it is eligible for the largest grants to begin building its grant record.
The MME will commission the first systematic analysis of NEA grant records by artistic medium. This study will use the NEA’s publicly available grant database to identify and quantify all awards whose project descriptions reference mosaic, tessera, tile art, and related terms from 1998 (the first year of detailed digital records) through the most recent available year. A parallel analysis will review state arts council grant records from the states with the largest mosaic artist populations — California, New York, Texas, and Florida among them — to extend the analysis beyond the federal level.
This research will be published as a peer-reviewed contribution and submitted to the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis as a data input. The goal is not merely to document the gap but to begin the process of making the invisible visible: to put a number on how much, or how little, public arts funding has reached mosaic-specific projects, and to connect that number to the structural arguments documented in this series. The MME cannot make a policy argument for grant classification reform without the evidence that reform is necessary, and that evidence can only be generated by doing the research.
The MME will operate a grant-writing and arts-administration support program for mosaic artists who lack the organizational infrastructure to access institutional funding. This program will include: direct grant-writing training for mosaic practitioners; fiscal sponsorship for eligible projects by artists who do not have their own 501(c)(3) structure; access to the MME’s institutional standing as a supporting organization for applications that benefit from organizational affiliation; and documentation of artists’ grant-seeking experience that can be used to build the case for systemic reform.
The program will not be structured as charity. It will be structured as a knowledge-transfer program that equips artists to navigate a system that was not designed for them while building the record that demonstrates the system needs to change. Every failed grant application, properly documented, is evidence. Every successful one is proof of concept.
The NEA’s fifteen discipline categories were not handed down from a neutral authority. They were designed by people, at a particular historical moment, with particular institutional assumptions. They can be redesigned. The MME will advocate for the creation of a “Studio Arts and Craft Practice” discipline category that is distinct from “Folk & Traditional Arts” and operates on parity with “Visual Arts” in terms of grant ceiling, panel composition, and evaluative framework. This category would recognize media — mosaic, ceramics, fiber, glass, metalwork, wood — that are currently forced to choose between a fine art identity that the system’s evaluative framework does not fully support and a craft/traditional identity that misrepresents their contemporary practice.
This advocacy will be grounded in the research this series has generated and in the data the MME’s own commissioning will produce. It will be submitted to the NEA’s National Council on the Arts and to the relevant congressional subcommittees that oversee arts funding. It will be coordinated with the Society of American Mosaic Artists, with the American Craft Council, and with other organizations that have standing in the field. It is a multi-year effort, not a single submission, and it begins with the evidence-building documented in this report.
The MME will publish its own grant records as part of its annual Equity Report — tracking which applications were submitted, to which programs, at what amounts; which were funded, at what amounts; and which were denied or transferred to different discipline categories. This creates the public data that does not currently exist and demonstrates by example how an institution can be transparent about its relationship with the public funding system.
An institution that is willing to publish its grant application history, including its failures, is making a statement about what it believes institutional transparency requires. It is also generating the comparative data that individual mosaic artists cannot generate alone: if the MME applies for ten NEA grants over five years and receives two, that record is evidence. If its grant descriptions under Visual Arts are repeatedly transferred to Folk & Traditional Arts, that is evidence. If its applications succeed only when they do not mention mosaic prominently in the project description, that is evidence. Publishing the record creates the case. The MME is committing to making that case in public, year by year, until the case does not need to be made anymore.
Return to the drop-down menu. There are fifteen options, none of them right. You have twenty-six hours to complete an application whose outcome depends, in part, on which box you check. You are an individual, so you cannot apply at all. You are an organization, so you can apply — if you have been operational for five years, if you have achieved the right legal structure, if you can match the grant dollar for dollar, if you can write the application in a way that speaks the panel’s evaluative language while making an honest case for your work, and if the political environment that governs the agency in the year you apply has not reoriented its priorities toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The system that produces this situation was not designed to exclude mosaic artists. It was designed to be politically accountable to a Congress that, three times in thirty years, has threatened or acted on the elimination of federal arts funding entirely. It was designed around organizations because individual grants were eliminated as a political concession to the culture wars of the 1990s. It was designed around discipline categories that reflect the institutional assumptions of the 1970s because no constituency with standing to demand their revision has existed until now. The exclusion of mosaic from the system’s benefits is not malicious. It is structural. It is the accumulated result of design decisions made under political pressure, within a framework of institutional assumptions that this series has spent eight reports documenting.
The case this series has been building since Designed to Fail is always the same case stated in a new register. Designed to Fail showed it in auction records and life room petitions. The Geography of Exclusion showed it in museum collections and ethnographic classifications. The Unpaid Canvas showed it in the career ladder and the poverty of the working artist. The Mosaic Record showed it in the art history volumes that gave Roman mosaics a single line. What Institutions Are Worth showed it in the appraisal values and the market void. The Disability Gap showed it in the bodies of the practitioners and the silence of the data. The Collector Gap showed it in the boardroom composition and the collector demographics. The Grant Economy shows it in a drop-down menu.
The argument is the same. What gets funded, like what gets called art, is a political question with economic stakes. It is not a neutral outcome of artistic merit distributed fairly across a well-designed system. It is the result of institutions making decisions, category by category, panel by panel, eligibility requirement by eligibility requirement, that reproduce the hierarchies they inherited. The Museum of Mosaic Environments was designed to be an institution that makes different decisions — that generates the data the field does not have, that advocates for the reclassification the field deserves, that builds the infrastructure the individual artist cannot build alone, and that publishes the record so that what it does can be held to account.
The case for the museum is inseparable from the case for equity in the systems that fund it. They are the same case. They always have been.
The following table consolidates primary data points cited throughout this report for use in downstream communications, presentations, and advocacy materials.
| Statistic | Figure | Source / Year |
|---|---|---|
| NEA founding budget (1966) | $2.5 million | NEA Timeline, arts.gov |
| NEA budget at peak (FY1992) | ~$176 million | NEA Appropriations History |
| Individual artist fellowships at peak (1989) | $8.4 million | The Arts Fuse / Walker Art Center |
| Year individual artist grants eliminated (visual arts) | 1996 | NEA / Opera America |
| NEA budget after 1996 cut | $99.5 million | Wikipedia / NEA |
| NEA total budget (FY2024) | $207 million (0.003% of federal budget) | CRS / NEA fact sheet |
| NEA GAP grants awarded (FY2025 round) | 1,127 grants totaling $31.8 million | The Art Newspaper, 2025 |
| NEA GAP grant range | $10,000–$100,000 (organizations only) | NEA GAP guidelines |
| NEA discipline categories | 15 (no standalone “Crafts” category) | NEA arts.gov |
| Crafts classification in NEA taxonomy | Listed under Folk & Traditional Arts alongside foodways and dress/adornment | NEA Folk & Traditional Arts discipline page |
| NEA: 40% of funds to state arts agencies | By Congressional mandate | NEA Wikipedia / NEA |
| State arts agencies leverage federal funding | ~$650 million statewide combined (FY2026) | The Art Newspaper, Sept. 2025 |
| Total public arts funding (all levels, 2018) | ~$1.4 billion | Grantmakers in the Arts (cited in Scientific Reports, 2023) |
| Foundation grants to arts organizations, 2010–2019 | $36 billion (798,670 grants) | Shekhtman & Barabási, Scientific Reports, 2023 |
| Performing arts: share of private foundation grants, 2010–2019 | $9.7 billion | Shekhtman & Barabási, Scientific Reports, 2023 |
| Visual arts: share of top-1,000 foundation giving (2018) | 8% (~$240 million) | Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors / GIA |
| Top 1% of museums: share of donated revenues | 41% | Shekhtman & Barabási, Scientific Reports, 2023 |
| Arts funding concentration: institutions over $5M | 55% of U.S. arts funding | Mimeta Foundation analysis, 2025 |
| Challenge America (small org entry grants) status | Eliminated for FY2026 | NEA / Pittsburgh Arts Council tracker |
| NEA grants revoked (May 2025) | Hundreds across dance, theater, LGBTQ+, rural, and community arts programs | NPR / Artnet News / Deadline, May 2025 |
| NEA proposed for elimination | May 2025 (Trump FY2026 budget proposal) | NPR / Washington Post, May 2025 |
| Mosaic-specific NEA funding data available | None — not tracked by medium in public database | This report (research gap) |
National Endowment for the Arts. Grants for Arts Projects: Program Description, Artistic Disciplines, Visual Arts, Folk & Traditional Arts. arts.gov/grants/grants-for-arts-projects
National Endowment for the Arts. FY 2025 and FY 2027 Grants for Arts Projects Guidelines. arts.gov/news
National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Announces Over $33 Million in Project Funding. arts.gov/news/press-releases/2022
National Endowment for the Arts. Appropriations History, Fiscal Years 1966–present. arts.gov/about/appropriations-history
Congressional Research Service (2024). National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities: FY2024 Appropriations. R48255.
Opera America (2020). The 90s: Culture Wars. operaamerica.org
The Museum Review (2017). The National Endowment for the Arts: Transitions and Restructuring. Vol. 2, No. 1. themuseumreviewjournal.wordpress.com
Wikipedia. National Endowment for the Arts; NEA Four. en.wikipedia.org
ACLU (2025). Revisiting the NEA Four: Free Speech Battles in the Arts. aclu.org
NPR (2025, May 3). NEA Hit with Grant Cuts After Trump Administration’s Call for Elimination. npr.org
NPR (2025, February 11). Arts Organizations React to End of DEI Initiatives from Federal Agency. npr.org
Artnet News (2025, May 8). All the Arts Organizations Impacted by NEA Funding Cuts. news.artnet.com
The Art Newspaper (2025, February 7). NEA Shuts Down Arts Grant for Underserved Communities. theartnewspaper.com
The Art Newspaper (2025, September 3). Amid Layoffs and Defunding Threats, How US Arts Funding Is Adapting to Life Under Trump. theartnewspaper.com
Hyperallergic (2025, December 17). How Trump Impacted Arts and Culture in 2025. hyperallergic.com
Deadline (2025, May 9). Trump Administration’s Termination of Arts Grants Hammers Film Festivals. deadline.com
Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council (ongoing tracker). Trump’s Impact on the Arts. pittsburghartscouncil.org
Shekhtman, L. & Barabási, A-L. (2023). Philanthropy in Art: Locality, Donor Retention, and Prestige. Scientific Reports. nature.com/articles/s41598-023-38815-1
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (2025). Arts and Culture Philanthropy: A Topic Brief for Donors. rockpa.org
Inside Philanthropy. Arts and Culture Grants; Nonprofit Grants for Visual Arts. insidephilanthropy.com
Grantmakers in the Arts. Working with Small Arts Organizations. giarts.org
Mimeta Foundation (2025). How Philanthropy Shapes Artistic Freedom in America: 2025 Giving Trends. mimeta.org
Giving Compass. Arts and Culture Philanthropy: What Donors Should Know. givingcompass.org
Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Grant guidelines. pkf.org
Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Individual Support Grants. gottliebfoundation.org
Harpo Foundation. Grants for Visual Artists. harpofoundation.org
CERF+ (Craft Emergency Relief Fund). Artist health, safety, and emergency relief programs. cerfplus.org
Windgate Charitable Foundation. Arts education grants (institutional). Referenced in Foundation Funding for Arts Education, Grantmakers in the Arts.
Miles, H. Mosaics in the History of Art (or Not as the Case May Be); Contemporary Mosaics: Learning Lessons from Ceramics. helenmilesmosaics.org