The Yale Art Gallery, the renowned university museum in New Haven, Connecticut, has withdrawn two federal grant applications for an African art exhibition after rejecting the new, anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) stipulations introduced by the Trump administration on federal funding. The news was first reported by Connecticut Insider.
The museum is now responsible for raising the $200,000 cost of mounting the show, and has announced its plan to dip into its endowment to ensure it opens as scheduled. Roland Coffey, director of communications for the Yale University Art Gallery, confirmed to CT that the gallery withdrew its grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as it “objects specifically to the grant compliance stipulation that ‘the applicant does not operate any programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.’”
The exhibition, which is still set to open fall 2026, centers on the migration of Nguni peoples from southeastern Africa. The gallery requested $100,000 grants each from the NEA and NEH for its financing, as additionally reported by Hyperallergic. This marks the second round of NEA grants withdrawn from the gallery, which previously fell back on Yale University’s significant coffers, as well as its robust fundraising machine, to offset the lost grant money. The Ivy League University reported an endowment of $46 billion for the 2024 fiscal year.
Earlier this year the NEA cancelled a $30,000 grant dedicated for the gallery’s September exhibit on Indonesia textile tradition, titled “Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles.” In June, a museum representative said that it would move forward with the show after receiving support from the Robert Lehman Endowment Fund, a decision clarified as made solely by gallery leadership.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has taken aggressive measures to realign the United States arts and culture to its vision. This has included the redirection of millions of dollars worth of local and national arts financing into federally-approved projects, including $40 million to Trump’s so-called “American heroes” sculpture garden. Staffing cuts have been deep across federal agencies, from the caretakers of the federal art collection to the stewards of national parks, and according to proposed 2026 budget plans, the administration has eyed the effective elimination of the NEA.
In April, the NEH, which nominally necessitates the approval of Congress to distribute funds from its 2024 fiscal year budget of $207 million, stated that federal grants would be awarded to “projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”
