From Patrons to Platforms: Race, Labor, and the Uneven Terrain of Arts Funding in the Digital Age

A-SIDE: “Arts Endowment Cuts Grants Dedicated to Underserved Communities”

Cultural institutions nationwide are navigating a treacherous funding landscape as the Trump administration moves to change federal arts policy as we know it. For example, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced in February 2025 that it would cancel the next round of funding under its “Challenge America” program. The program was established to support projects that extended the reach of the arts to underserved groups with $2.8 million in small grants. According to the New York Times, the NEA is instead soliciting applications to its general grant program, prioritizing projects that “celebrate and honor the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” during the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of American independence in July 2026.

The recent rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives – driven by federal orders and shifting corporate priorities – has already begun to undermine previously hard-won gains for marginalized artists and cultural workers. It is a reminder that we must continue to ask not only *who* funds the arts, but *what* they expect in return – and at what cost to the integrity, autonomy, and future of artists.

Welcome to the B-Side.

What you need to know: Artists have always depended on some form of patronage to sustain their creative labor.

Patronage has never been neutral because it has always shaped who gets to make art, what kind of art is considered valuable, and how that labor is funded. As a cultural anthropologist studying race, labor, and technology, I see the current moment not as a break from historical funding systems but as their digital and ideological mutation.

Historically, artists operated under the authority of patrons – royalty, the church, or wealthy elites – who commissioned and controlled cultural production. In the Harlem Renaissance, this meant Black artists like Zora Neale Hurston were funded by White philanthropists like Charlotte Osgood Mason, whose support came with heavy oversight and racialized paternalism. Mason’s insistence on being called “Godmother” wasn’t symbolic – it was structural. In a chapter on patronage in her book Zora Neale Hurston: And A History of Southern Life (2005), scholar Tiffany Ruby Patterson explains that the relationship between patron and artist often reflected a “settled relationship of unequal exchange,” where creative freedom came at the cost of personal autonomy.

Access to funding has always been inequitable, especially for Black artists. A little secret that most people don’t know is that I almost didn’t launch The BLK IRL Podcast in 2020 because I was overwhelmed by the thought of funding the project as a graduate student with little disposable income to spare. I had applied to various podcasting-focused incubator programs and fellowships for emerging podcasters that had popped up during that period, which all prioritized bringing in more podcasters of color into the space. I was rejected by them all. In fact, after receiving five back-to-back rejections in one week in the summer of 2020, I considered giving up on BLK IRL completely. It was only from the encouragement of my little sister, who suggested that I go the independent route, that I stayed the course at all. And here we are, five years later, still trucking. 

Applying for fellowships, grants, and residencies has become a grueling and hyper-competitive process that disproportionately favors those with institutional fluency, existing networks, and the ability to tailor their work to fit shifting thematic agendas. It can seem at times that knowing how to perform the right kind of relevance by aligning applications with whatever topics are currently in vogue among funders is more important than talent and vision. At the same time, with so many talented people with vision to choose from, funders have set more hoops (and traps) for applicants to jump through during the application process as a means of narrowing down the field. As a graduate student and artist, I am very familiar with the ins and outs of these funding systems. Many calls for participation in 2020 prioritized issues of “social justice.” These days, there’s a lessened focus on “social justice” and a heightened focus on “technology” and “artificial intelligence” from my vantage point. 

While these themes can be powerful, the demand for alignment can also be reductive, pressuring artists to produce work that is legible to predominantly White institutions. The risk is that Black artists become cultural translators of their communities, crafting work that satisfies the funder’s expectations rather than their creative imperatives. In some cases, artists are rewarded not for disrupting the system, but for embodying its preferred optics of "diversity" without threatening its traditional mode of operations. Meanwhile, as some corporations and nonprofits roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in response to political pressure, institutional support for Black artists has become even more precarious. References to DEI are quietly being swapped out for terms like “talent development” or “inclusion,” which is language that dilutes the political and historical urgency of equity while offering little in the way of material investment. 

Against this backdrop, the growth of the Creator Economy has been framed as a democratizing force. Platforms like Patreon and Substack allow Creators to earn directly from fans, bypassing institutional gatekeeping. But this model has its limitations: Success is often contingent on visibility, virality, and the ability to constantly produce, market, and monetize one’s identity. Artists can no longer just be artists to survive, they must also be Creators – and not of the Alice Walker “In Our Mother’s Gardens” variety either, but Creators of content and brands. Labor is still being extracted, just in different, more corporatized forms. The Artist has gone public, and their labor is increasingly subsidized by a crowd-based system that is as unstable and seductive as the New York Stock Exchange itself. From Godmothers to gig economies, today’s artists are not necessarily freer, but differently constrained by audiences, algorithms, application cycles, and the aesthetics of funding.