By Sara Mohr, Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow
Recent surveys administered by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Alliance for Museums, Americans for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts show that U.S. cultural institutions enjoy strong public approval. However, despite that high regard, studies reveal a decline in engagement with many of these institutions, particularly since the pandemic.
To explore these trends, the Academy convened an exploratory meeting in Chicago in March 2025, bringing together leaders from libraries, museums, the performing arts, private philanthropy, government, and academic research. Academy members Leah Dickerman (Museum of Modern Art), Oskar Eustis (The Public Theater), and Cynthia Chavez Lamar (Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian) cochaired the meeting. The participants discussed the challenges facing cultural institutions, identified points of similarity across the institution types, and began developing practical solutions that the Academy could advance.
The two-day event was a unique gathering of leaders from a wide range of cultural organizations that featured lively discussion on both the historical challenges cultural institutions have faced and the new issues emerging in the current political moment. The meeting was designed around four key questions: Who and how do we serve? What is our value proposition? How can we build and extend alliances across cultural spaces? And who will pay to build and reform existing institutions for the future?
In response to these guiding questions, the participants discussed the importance of building trust in and with their local communities, the current funding challenges facing arts and humanities organizations, methods for articulating and building value, the myriad ways cultural practitioners can support each other, and strategies for moving forward in the current political landscape.
The discussions around building community trust focused primarily on methods of engagement, establishing and maintaining local spaces for engagement, and learning more about their local communities. Many cultural institutions gather data on their visitors, but one participant noted that they often fail to understand the community members who don’t visit their institutions. Filling this data gap begins with being unafraid to ask people what they would like to see from their cultural institutions and sharing those findings back to them. Several participants observed that while more remote communities are frequently invited to visit a cultural center to engage with the arts and humanities, the center seldom engages with them where they live. It can take years, sometimes decades, to build community trust with remote and rural populations, whether they are geographically distant or just on a different subway line.
Funding cultural activities at all levels remains a challenge. Top of mind for many participants was the gap between large funders and small organizations. One participant highlighted the importance of transparency in bridging that gap—in particular, identifying the need for clear information from funders on who is making funding decisions and how. Recognizing that private funding can be unpredictable and may shift with changes in leadership, one participant stated that there are constants in what private funders can do to court smaller organizations, such as moving beyond their comfort zones, being present in the community, standing for something instead of against something, and embracing a more fun and playful approach to culture.
Participants were encouraged to think about the ways funders can support grantees beyond writing checks—for example, by facilitating capacity-building at the local level and supporting community hubs in their own grant-making. The discussion was particularly animated around the current state of government funding and government pressure on work perceived as “advocacy,” especially given the effect that the recent volatility in the markets will have on sources of private funding.
The conversation returned repeatedly to issues of freedom of expression, how the public consumes information, and the role of cultural institutions in using stories to help shape public opinions and emotions in a democracy. Several participants pointed to a crisis of civic literacy and fluency that has left members of the public stranded on information islands. Discussion turned to the fundamental ways in which the reading habits of the public have changed, both in regard to the written word and images. Multiple participants expressed concerns about self-censorship and freedom of expression in adjusting their institutional policies around the current demands of the federal government.
One of the evergreen challenges arts and humanities organizations face is conveying the value of their work in public life. One participant emphasized the need to challenge the assumption that value is defined solely by economic contributions, and urged the group to look at concepts of healing, bridging, and thriving. Another participant proposed the model of “cultural kitchens”: gathering places where people can come together and without great risk, through arts-based practices, ask hard questions, have nuanced conversation and exchange, and make sense of the world around them while building connection to other people. Other participants discussed ways in which culture could be of value today, including creating spaces where people could feel tethered to their communities, and igniting joy as a way of promoting general well-being.
Throughout the meeting, it became clear that there was a pressing need to identify ways that those in the cultural sector could support each other. Participants reiterated the importance of working together while also leveraging the unique aspects of their own institutions, paying particular attention to the need to include smaller organizations in these efforts. The discussion highlighted several nonfinancial resources that cultural organizations could share with each other: geographical proximity, infrastructure, attention, participation, space, complementary competencies, community need, and staff knowledge.
In the final part of the meeting, the discussion focused on what the Academy can do to support cultural spaces. Participants emphasized the Academy’s unique convening power, noting the value of the exploratory meeting itself in bringing people together who may not otherwise interact. One participant noted the importance of including diverse forms of expertise in future gatherings.
Participants expressed a desire to move beyond traditional reports and white papers, and encouraged the Academy to work instead on new types of tools and engagement, such as a primer on effective collaboration with both likely and unlikely allies, a public service campaign in support of the work of cultural institutions, and an effort to document and map the damage currently being done to cultural institutions.
Based on the participants’ suggestions, in the coming year Academy staff will explore the following ideas:
Hold convenings and roundtables, including member convenings, to discuss the challenges facing the sector; a convening of arts and humanities communicators to discuss a better articulation of who they are and what they do; and more local conversations about the civic value of cultural organizations.
Develop a primer outlining best practices for engaging communities in new and innovative ways; and fostering collaborations that promote future success and financial efficiencies.
Begin to document the damage to cultural institutions at the national and local levels to “name the harm.”
Draft a think piece envisioning what cultural organizations might look like in 2030, exploring how they could rebuild and evolve in response to the challenges anticipated over the next five years.
Build a social media campaign on the value of cultural organizations.
For more information about the Academy’s work on the arts, please visit www.amacad.org/topic/arts-humanities.