Democratic leaders need to understand that cultural funding cannot stop at large museums and institutions; it must reach the people whose labor makes it possible.
In the afterglow of the blue-nami, those of us who make, organize, fund, and sustain cultural life are feeling a twinge of hope. But I find myself slipping into a spiral of anxiety as the everyday reality of economic precarity sets back in. Our newly elected Democratic congressional leaders have an opportunity to change that reality — pushing back against Trump is necessary — but it cannot be the full extent of their ambition.
As a curator and the co-director of an arts nonprofit, I’ve been asked what the results mean for the so-called “art world.” My first response was cynical: “not much.” At least not immediately. An election does not directly restore a canceled grant or pay an artist’s rent. And even a return to the funding landscape that existed before Trump took office in 2025 would leave us with a system that was already failing the people expected to sustain it.
Instead, the midterm election results should serve as an opening to hold Democrats in Congress accountable for making arts and cultural life materially sustainable, not simply to defend an inadequate system from further attack. That mandate concerns whose histories are told, who gets paid to make art, and who gets to define the country’s future. It also concerns whether the people doing that work can afford to keep going.