$32 million in Florida state arts funding and grants have been removed from all public theaters and art galleries, and many places are scrambling to make up the gap.
“You’d have your tax dollars being given in grants to things like the Fringe Festival, which is a sexual festival. How many of you think your tax dollars should go to fund that?” DeSantis said during a press conference about his funding cuts.
Bill Adams, professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts, doesn’t agree with the veto.
“It was political. Those of us in the arts feel free to speak our minds. And Gov. DeSantis does not want us to be able to say we’re gay,” Adams said. “I donated to the theaters and to the companies that were impacted by that.”
Currently, many publicly funded arts installations in Florida are affected by the large gap in their funding, including Bonnet House, Flamingo Gardens, Coral Springs Museum of Art, Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, Lovewell Institute for the Creative Arts, Museum of Discovery and Science, Slow Burn Theatre Company, Symphony of the Americas, Fort Lauderdale Children’s Theatre and the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and more.
Funding for the arts hits very close to home for certain people, especially for students like Eddie Hammans, sophomore exceptional student education major and IOC chair for NSU’s Stage for Change.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Hammans said. “I think the arts, it takes a lot more work than people realize. Like stage plays. They need money for props. They need money for costumes.”
Philip Dunlap, director of Broward County Cultural Division, wrote in a public statement that while Florida ranked third in the United States for arts funding less than 10 years ago, the new “FY25 budget puts Florida squarely at the bottom.”
“For Broward County, this means 54 grant requests will go unfunded and $3.3 million in arts funding will no longer be coming to our community. In economic impact terms, this loss translates to more than $30 million loss to the local economy, which sees a 9:1 return on investment in arts and culture,” Dunlap wrote.
The American Civil Liberties Union has also weighed in on this issue, stating on its website: “DeSantis likely decided to gut the state’s arts budget in its entirety to avoid the perception that he’s enforcing his personal viewpoint through the selective defunding of cultural works he dislikes.”
The bill may lead to performances being canceled and staff cuts. In the most drastic of cases, arts installations may be forced to close altogether.
Some people in the arts, like Grace Telesco, faculty adviser of Stage for Change from the Fischler School of Criminal Justice, believe that this has been coming for a long time, and that people need to speak up if they want the arts funding problems to change.
“It’s just mind-boggling that in the year 2024, this is where we are. But legislation can’t just happen. Somebody can’t just make that statement of ‘we’re going to cut funding for the arts’ in a vacuum. This is because there are people that back that legislation, and so our voices have to be louder,” Telesco said.
Bryce Johnson contributed to this story
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