Out of the many uses for the letterpress machines at Flower City Arts Center, this year has seen a rise in protest posters. The Trump administration’s myriad executive orders, immigration crackdowns and weaponization of the Department of Justice have galvanized artists and other community members to push back.
Executive director Kristin Rapp said the machines offer a voice to do just that.
“Those are traditionally where people would be expressing dissent or public protest and making signs or making literature,” Rapp said. “We have the big, expansive type collection and we definitely have seen people using it for the protests that they’re going to.”
Without proper funding, the center would not be able to offer many of its services and classes in addition to the community arts programming for which it’s come to be known. This year, the future of that funding came into question due to cuts at the federal level.
Flower City Arts Center had applied for a $95,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, earmarked for what Rapp called “a community-based collaborative project.” But the center did not receive it. The Trump administration began canceling federal grants in May, in what became sweeping cuts to the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Federal funding from these agencies provides essential operating money for arts nonprofits across the country, including many local organizations in addition to Flower City Arts Center like Visual Studies Workshop, Boa Editions and more.
Rapp said the cuts strike her as a means to stymie diversity, equity and inclusion in the arts. But without specific feedback from the agency, she’ll never know.
“We asked for that funding and we were not funded. We do not know if it is because we have a strong stance on DEI,” she said. “They’re certainly not going to tell us that, either.”
CITY spoke with the heads of five local arts nonprofits to hear about how the loss of federal funding affects their specific organizations as well as the arts scene at large — and what this moment means for the future of those groups in Rochester. Their answers illuminate what may be on the horizon in 2026 and beyond.
“It’s about survival”
When poetry publisher Boa Editions lost a $35,000 grant from the NEA, it also lost its single largest source of funding. The money had been designated to support work from several authors; in practical terms, it also meant that Boa — which publishes about a dozen books per year — would not offer hardcover editions or audiobooks for certain titles.
Publisher and executive director Peter Conners said the loss also hampers marketing efforts for Boa which, unlike other local arts organizations such as Geva Theatre or the Memorial Art Gallery, does not have a physical space for the public to engage with its work.
“I hate to put it so in such dire terms, but it’s about survival,” he said. “Our books go into the world, so people don’t interface with us as an organization. It is important to put the word out there.”
Boa marks its 50th anniversary in 2026, so the publisher has begun celebrating with a revamped logo on tote bags and t-shirts. The goal is for the streamlined wordmark to help raise the organization’s profile.
Visual Studies Workshop has also recently made upgrades. In March, the media arts organization and film archive moved to its new home on King Street, near the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House. Not even two months later, its staff learned that its $20,000 grant from the NEA was included in the spate of national cancellations.
The money had been set aside for core projects like artist residencies, publications, exhibitions and public events. The way the grants work, executive director Jessica Johnston explained, is that they reimburse the arts organizations after they spend the money.
“This money was supposed to pay for programming that we did in the spring, so we just did it anyway,” Johnston said.
Funding issues are nothing new for nonprofits, she added, and most rely on grants as well as fundraising and sponsorships to help round out their operating budgets. VSW’s, for example, is around $500,000. This presents an opportunity.
“While [losing a $20,000 grant] isn’t insignificant, it is something that, given time, we can work around,” Johnston said.
But in the short term, the loss requires ramped-up fundraising efforts to help reduce the difference.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the George Eastman Museum, an arts organization with a larger operating budget than many mid-to-small groups in the region. Yet it was not immune from the federal cuts, executive director Bruce Barnes said.
The museum had three ongoing projects, including creating new exhibition space, funded by grants from the IMLS at about $250,000 each. Staff received notices of grant termination in May, around the time of the federal cuts. But shortly after, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered a temporary restraining order to halt the Trump administration’s gutting of the IMLS.
Less than a month after the news of termination, Barnes said the museum received a notice of grant reinstatement. This has placed the museum in a fortunate position for now, though the cuts will likely impact its future operations.
“The bad news is that we do not see, to my knowledge, any IMLS grant opportunities coming that are meaningful in the foreseeable future,” Barnes said.
Banding together
While grant funding can be the difference between a project getting off the ground or stagnating, it’s never guaranteed for a nonprofit organization.
“You never know if you’re going to be selected,” Rapp said. “We don’t hold our breath and count on that money.”
The Eastman Museum, meanwhile, uses money from the IMLS as a starting point for private donations and endowments, Barnes said, which account for a bulk of the organization’s funding.
At the midsize level, the canceled grants to local nonprofits prompted partnership. After the news of federal funding cuts arrived in May, leaders from more than 10 different midsize arts organizations including VSW and Boa gathered to talk about strategies for seeking new sources of financial support.
Bleu Cease, executive director of the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, said the group’s goal was to show state government officials the collective power of what he called “the middle strata of our art community.”
“We are significantly smaller than the big museums and the Gevas or the [Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra], but in many cases, we own property in town,” Cease said. “We employ somewhere between three and 10 people and we certainly attract hundreds of thousands of visitors.”
RoCo did not lose federal funding; the organization receives about one state grant per year. But Cease called the loss of reimbursement grants “a worst-case scenario” for small and midsize nonprofits.
Ultimately, Cease said, conversations with State Senator Jeremy Cooney urged the group to seek “a specific funding mechanism” to help offset skyrocketing utility costs from RG&E, another potentially existential threat to local midsize organizations, especially those that own buildings.
Help from New York State
With federal funding dried up, many local arts organizations have looked to New York State to help close the gap. The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) can provide critical support; recent data shows the council awarded grants to nearly 1,500 different organizations this year and $90 million to artists and arts organizations in 2023.
Rapp called NYSCA “a very consistent funder” for Flower City Arts Center, and Johnston noted that VSW has received $50,000 a year from NYSCA and will again in 2026. Conners said that NYSCA has supported Boa “at a really significant level,” and Cease likewise referred to the council as “a great ally.”
“There’s only a couple in this whole country that are on par with NYSCA,” he said.
NYSCA also has a new local member in Erica Fee, the CEO and producer of Rochester Fringe Festival. This doesn’t mean special treatment for Rochester-based organizations, Fee told CITY earlier this year, but it does mean a dedicated member of the council who can represent the region and speak to the climate of its arts scene.
“Everyone is really hurting,” Fee said. “Luckily, there are some philanthropists who are stepping up to try to fill the void. Another thing that you’re seeing is a lot of groups trying to collaborate with each other in ways that they haven’t before.”
2026 and beyond
The loss of federal funding has led to feelings of great uncertainty in the arts scene (Barnes said that it will slow down the Eastman Museum’s future progress “without question”), but with that threat has also come an outpouring of love and support from the community.
Johnston said the private donations to VSW have been nice, and so have the kind messages. The goal is to reflect the gestures in VSW’s culture.
“We’ll do the best we can to make sure all the people that come to our programs and all the artists that we serve are welcome here and feel that kind of acceptance in our community,” she said.
Flower City Arts Center is continuing its partnerships with other local organizations as well.
“We had another small nonprofit organization come to us today, out of the blue, and they had a plumbing issue, and the roof started caving in, and they came over here and said, ‘Do you think you’d be able to offer us some space to run classes?’” Rapp said. “We’re definitely open to those types of collaborations because we need to do those kinds of things for our neighbors and for our community. We have to be there for each other.”
Cease, meanwhile, is looking to meet with city and county officials along with the collective of other midsize arts organizations to continue to raise awareness for the scale of their work, how they operate and how they can benefit from additional support.
“A $5,000 grant or a $10,000 grant to a midsized organization is a really big deal,” he said.
After all, Conners added, the arts are easy to take for granted.
“People don’t realize what it takes to have those places stay in operation and the value that they add,” he said.
Conners hopes that additional attention given to arts organizations will help people see the value of them as small businesses that operate as part of the larger local economy, especially as employers of local workers.
“Those people have cars that break down. They need daycare. They have doctor’s appointments. They go to Wegmans and buy food. This is what an economy is, right?” he said. “We are part of that as well.”
