The Art Trump Doesn't Want and the Artists Left Behind
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled.
The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives.
Angela Sutton and a team of archaeologists were in the middle of excavating a long-forgotten Black neighborhood in Nashville when she got the news: “Just got an email out of the blue saying, ‘Please stop. You're done.’”
This week on Reveal, reporter Jonathan Jones travels to Nashville and beyond one year after the cancellations to meet the people living with the fallout. From musicians to visual artists, historians, and arts administrators, they’re confronting a new reality: Federal support now depends on the shifting political priorities in Washington. Some organizations are scaling back their work. Others worry artists will censor themselves just to survive. But many are fighting back.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.5 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. |
| 0:30.5 | I'm Al Letson. |
| 0:32.6 | South of downtown Nashville, Interstate 65 cuts through the city and over a piece of American history |
| 0:39.1 | that's literally buried underground beneath the soil and concrete. |
| 0:45.7 | Just above the highway here, near a guitar sign, construction cranes, new luxury apartments, |
| 0:51.7 | and even a brand new soccer stadium, there's a hill that most people |
| 0:55.7 | driving by don't even notice, and on it a massive stone fortress called Fort Negley. |
| 1:01.8 | The Union Army built it during the Civil War to defend Nashville from the Confederacy. |
| 1:06.6 | But what makes this fort remarkable isn't the generals who commanded it. |
| 1:10.5 | It's the people who built it. |
| 1:12.0 | Thousands of black men, women, and children. |
| 1:14.9 | Many who had just escaped slavery were enlisted as labor to quarry the stone and raise these walls. |
| 1:21.4 | And after the war, some of them stayed. |
| 1:23.2 | The entire fort was surrounded by neighborhoods of people who had descended from the Black veterans of the Civil War. |
| 1:29.5 | Angela Sutton runs the Fort Negli Descendants Project. |
| 1:33.1 | She says that for decades, the heart of this community was Bass Street. |
| 1:37.8 | Then, in the late 1950s, came the interstate. |
| 1:41.1 | When it was time to put the highways in, most cities in the nation sort of put them |
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