Capstone

June Berk still remembers what her parents were wearing as they boarded the bus on May 7, 1942. Her mother had on a coat with a fur collar and hat, while her father sported a suit with a matching top coat and hat. In fact, all of the families boarding the buses that day in Little Tokyo were in their Sunday best, Berk says. But the line of buses wasn't headed to church. Instead, Berk’s family, along with 120,000 other Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans, were being detained by the federal government in internment camps in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Berk was 10 years old.

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The buses traveled to Santa Anita Race Track, which had been set up as an “assembly center” processing more than 8,500 people who would be forced to live in converted horse stalls for five months. Then, on August 26, detainees were sent to Arkansas, where they would be imprisoned for three years.

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“Each person has their own story, and some suffered a lot more than I did, but I, for one, would not trade one day,” says Berk, now 93. “When these things happen to us, we need to survive. Families need to survive so that the next generation and the following generation can look forward to a better future. You can't give up who you are, you can't give up your background, and you must continue to fight, because if one person's rights are threatened, everyone's rights are threatened.” 

 

Today, Berk volunteers at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), located at the exact spot in Little Tokyo where she and her family boarded the bus to Santa Anita. She comes in weekly to participate in various projects and programs, such as arts and crafts classes, film screenings, and panel discussions, that the museum provides for their volunteers, many of whom are camp survivors. When I spoke to Berk, she had just left a bridal shower for one of the staff members. She showed me a tissue paper flower she had created for the celebration. 

 

Berk says her favorite part of volunteering is sharing her story with students who visit the museum as a part of JANM’s educational programming that allows LAUSD students to explore the museum in person. JANM also educates teachers from all over the country on the subject during summer workshops, which include a day trip to Manzanar Historic Site, one of the two internment camps in California. 

 

In April of this year, shortly after the museum accepted 72 teachers into this program, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) sent an email to JANM that their $190,000 Landmarks of American History and Culture grant funding the program was cut. Teachers were due to start the program in two weeks.

 

The Landmarks of American History and Culture grant was a long-standing professional development program dedicated to "promoting and enhancing humanities education" through funding various workshops across the country, and had celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024. 

 

Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (a.k.a., DOGE) have prioritized “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” according to the White House’s executive order from March 27. In May, Trump proposed his federal budget for Federal Government's Fiscal Year 2026 (FY2026), in which he floated the idea of dismantling the NEH, along with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Institution for Museums and Libraries (IMLS). 

 

This plan had previously been proposed by Trump during his first term in 2017 and 2018, but this year DOGE was allowed free reign to slash federal spending towards specific programs and organizations. Hundreds of grants provided by these federal agencies to museums and cultural institutions across the country were completely eliminated. 

 

The NEH and NEA were established in 1965 out of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiative, under the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. Upon signing the bill into place, Johnson announced, “Art is a nation's most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish."

 

In 2024, the IMLS received an appropriation of $294.8 million, 0.0046 percent of the federal budget, while NEA and NEH each received $207.0 million. Ultimately, they are among the smallest federal agencies within the United States Government. It’s an extraordinary return on investment; museums contribute $50 billion to the U.S. GDP, according to a report from Oxford Economics and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). 

 

If these institutions are beneficial to the United States economy, why is the Trump Administration cutting their funding? Jim Herr, the Director of the Democracy Center at JANM, has a theory. 

 

“When you take history and culture and memory away, it's easier to kind of influence people, to make them think that there's only one story that's being told,” he says

 

One-third of museums in the United States have suffered the cancellation of government grants or contracts this year. Here in Los Angeles County, which is home to more than 800 museums, many cultural and artistic institutions have either experienced funding cuts or face the uncertain threat of having their funding pulled at any given moment. 

 

Downtown Los Angeles is a little over 5 square miles, and is known for being home to two of the most renowned art museums in the nation, The Broad and the Museum of Contemporary Art.  Just down the street from the Broad, are three museums, lesser known but vital to Los Angeles, that are focused on representing the cultures that formed the city into what it is today. 

 

JANM, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and the Chinese American Museum are a five minute drive from one another. Each one celebrates one of the communities within Los Angeles that contribute to the diverse population of the city. They also tell the stories of the history of each of these groups within the United States, which doesn’t always reflect well on America’s leadership. 

 

LA’s Cultural Cornerstones 

 

The Japanese American National Museum opened its doors to the public in 1992 with a mission to educate the nation on the Japanese experience during WWII. In 2003, the Chinese American Museum (CAM) was opened after a 20-year-long community campaign, at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a public park marking Los Angeles’ birthplace and the site of its original Chinatown. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a Smithsonian affiliate, opened in 2011 on the other side of the park as both a museum and cultural center to celebrate Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. 

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These three institutions have made it their mission to share the stories and struggles of each of these cultures as they’ve entered, influenced, and helped define American society. 

 

“You can't have the story of Los Angeles without the story of Latinos,” says La Plaza de Cultura y Artes CEO Leticia Rhi Buckley. One of the first lessons within the museum’s main exhibition examines the “Mexican repatriation” of the Great Depression, when hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent, including American citizens, were deported to Mexico after the U.S. government characterized them as taking jobs away from American citizens. 

 

The Chinese American Museum is the first Southern California museum dedicated to telling the Chinese American experience. It is located in the historic Garnier Building, the last remaining structure of L.A.’s original Chinatown. One of the main issues tackled within the museum is the erasure of the Chinese experience within Los Angeles, specifically through the 1930-1950 destruction of the original Chinatown, which had stood for almost a hundred years prior. 

 

CAM Director Michael Truong explains that minority communities in L.A. are isolated from one another due to issues such as lack of transportation and language barriers. This isolation, he says, is a lasting result of government rulings based on segregation in the form of restrictive covenants and redlining. 

 

“Since people are living in very siloed communities for many reasons, having institutions like the Chinese American Museum and JANM and La Plaza gives an opportunity for people to explore diversity, people to explore different histories, but most importantly, understand our connections,” Truong says. “As people start to explore these museums, understand this history, not only are you understanding this rich history of the Chinese American experience, or the Japanese American, or the Latinx experience, or the Native American experience, you start to really draw a connection between how all our communities connect as well.”

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The three museums have attempted to showcase this connection in order to bring their communities together. In December 2023 they piloted a shared program under the Smithsonian’s national initiative “Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past in Los Angeles.”

 

The initiative was established in order to “explore the history and legacy of race and racism and spark positive social change and build a more equitable shared future,” according to the Smithsonian’s website. Events were held at each of the museums, featuring events celebrating Japanese, Chinese, and Latin culture through art, as well as symposiums on the struggles and discrimination these each of these groups faced in the United States. 

 

This project is one of the many ways in which each museum educates the Los Angeles community. As academic museums, they prioritize education as a pillar of each of their respective missions, and much of what these museums cover “historically, hasn't really been taught as widely in schools,” according to JANM’s Director of Education Lynn Yamasaki.  

 

The Chinese American Museum and the Japanese American Museum have both made it their priority to educate the general public on the ways in which the American government targeted those groups. First, with the Chinese Massacre of 1871 and the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882–1943, and again with the incarceration of Japanese in WWII. 

 

“I think there is this fear, the fact that if we start to acknowledge communities of color and start to think about what they went through, that there is a portion that would have been erased in history,” Truong says. “A lot of it has to do with how we celebrate American history, but also being the need to acknowledge that there are more than just the issues that we've told in the classroom. Sometimes that our history contradicts that history, and I think there is this fear of guilt, from one aspect of it, but it's also this fear of understanding and fear of appreciating culture.”

 

The New American History

 

Two days after his inauguration on January 20, Trump signed an executive order terminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. The executive order read that these programs were to be eliminated as they “demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination….Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.”

 

Following this executive order, various “anti-DEI” measures were undertaken by the U.S. government, such as limiting affirmative action and restricting education of certain curricula on race, gender identity, sexuality or anything labeled as “radical, anti-American ideologies.” This federal mandate had a large effect on museums as well. The Smithsonian Institution effectively closed their DEI office completely in January. According to Carys Kunze, the research and data manager at the American Alliance of Museums, academic museums and galleries are 36 percent more likely than museums operating under local governance to be operating under new legal restrictions related to DEI. 

 

In April, various cultural and artistic institutions across the country began to receive emails from the NEH that read: “Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination.” It went on, “Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” Instead, the NEH would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.”

 

These funding cuts ultimately led to museums being unable to function. According to the American Alliance of Museums 2025 Annual National Snapshot of United States Museums survey, among the museums that lost federal funds, 28 percent of affected museums either reduced or cancelled programming for the general public. Only 8 percent of museums were able to fully replace their losses. 

 

Kunze explained that the recent executive actions against certain museums have caused a chain reaction. “We've been seeing a cooling of non-federal funds in addition — for instance, corporate sponsors have also been becoming more hesitant to give to anything that they could possibly perceive as providing negative media attention or negative government attention, which is a really big concern when it comes to indirect impacts.”

 

In August 2025, the White House escalated its efforts with a letter from three senior assistants to the president: Lindsey Halligan, Vince Haley, and Russell Vought, addressed to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III. The letter ordered an “Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials,” directing eight museums to make “content corrections” by replacing “divisive or ideologically driven language” with “unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions” emphasizing “Americanism.” A federal review to verify these changes is scheduled for early 2026.

 

Later that month, the White House created a press release “President Trump is Right About the Smithsonian,” which listed various exhibitions in Smithsonian Museums that the administration does not agree with. Almost all of the artworks listed explored race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. 

 

Resistance and Response

 

Museums across the nation were faced with having to make a decision on how they would respond to these attacks from the federal government. 

 

In October, The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University shut down their “Hold My Hand In Yours” exhibition because, according to the administration, certain pieces were “overtly political content in violation of their nonprofit status.” The exhibition had been in the works for years and approved multiple times by the museum’s administration according to contemporary Artist Elanna Mann, the first artist to have her work pulled from the exhibit. 

 

Mann’s piece was a video titled “Call to Arms 2015-2025” (2025), which documents 10 years of performances and protests, featuring the demonstrators speaking into a modified bullhorn; a hand that cups the speaker’s mouth has been added in a metaphor for silencing as the speakers address issues such as Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-labor policies, Roe v. Wade, and Supreme Court Justice Bret Cavanaugh’s contentious confirmation hearings. 

 

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“The project is about censorship, silencing, and freedom of speech and so I really didn’t expect that it would get censored, it was very surprising, there should be academic freedom and this is an academic museum,” says Mann. “I wasn’t violating any kind of law that would affect a non-profit. I get that a lot of the Trump directives have made universities scared but in this case there was no way there would be pushback that they would have faced by my exhibit other than some of their donors wouldn’t like it. I really feel like they were using the Trump administration’s threats and legal attacks on education as a cover to push their right wing agenda.”

Censorship affects far more than museums, it reaches directly into the lives and careers of artists. Mann expressed concern about the long-term impact on her work, saying, “I honestly don’t know how this is going to affect my career right now and if there’s going to be a chilling effect.”

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This is especially surprising to witness in Los Angeles, a city that prides itself on being one of the most progressive in the United States. Yet the administration’s executive orders to withhold funding from exhibitions and institutions that do not align with the President’s “directive to celebrate American exceptionalism,” have had lasting consequences for what museums feel able, or permitted, to exhibit. As a large nonprofit institution having received federal support in the past, JANM faced significant financial losses after publicly refusing to comply with the administration’s campaign against DEI, even as many other organizations scrubbed their websites of DEI references.

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The museum responded in a very public way, coining the phrase “scrub nothing.” JANM created the blog “ Skip Spring Cleaning—Scrub Nothing With Us!” as well as T-shirts that sell for $25 each. 

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In total, JANM lost $1.7 million in previously approved federal funding. This included $750,000 from the NEH’s Save America’s Treasures program, intended for a climate-control and HVAC upgrade essential to preserving 160,000 artifacts, and the $190,000 from the NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture grant. 

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The museum sees their public resistance as a way to speak up for all cultural institutions that are facing the threat of censorship. “It's been a very important voice for the community, especially for smaller institutions, arts, and culture institutions, who don't have the luxury of being able to speak up in that way, or who might be afraid to be able to speak up,” says Herr, the director of the museum’s Democracy Center. “As our board chair said, we will scrub nothing, so we will not change our exhibitions, our exhibition wording, we won't change anything on our website just to be in line with what the government wants us to be saying right now.”

 

La Plaza de Cultura y Artes and CAM are much smaller organizations than JANM, and operate on much smaller annual budgets. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes’ 2024 total revenue was $4 million according to Propublica, in comparison to JANM’s revenue of $25.8 million last year, “Our existence is resistance,” says Buckley in response to any political adversary. “ I always say that if somebody did a search for all of the things they're not supposed to be talking about, we come up right away, right? But it doesn’t make a difference. We're going to continue to do what we do, and if that's called resistance, then that's called resistance. We call it Monday.”

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Buckley explained that La Plaza de Cultura y Artes was in the process of applying to California Humanities, NEH’s humanities affiliate in California, when its federal funding was rescinded and all programs and grants suspended. 

 

Smaller institutions have come to terms with the fact that they can no longer apply for certain grants that they thought might be possible in the future. “Federal grants are a lot more complicated, to take a year in order to gather everything, to complete the documents,” Truong explained. “We have to ask ourselves, if we invest that year of time, are we gonna get anything in return? I think with this administration, we have seen their reluctancy to support arts and culture focusing on immigrant and communities of color, which is our work. So we have to really think about, realistically, if we invest that, what we get from that.”

 

Carys Kunze explained that from her findings from the 2025 snapshot report, smaller museums have been recovering in a post-pandemic economy, and that this affected grant applications, “It requires staff time, and for museums that are challenged in fulfilling their core responsibilities, it can be challenging to find the staff bandwidth to pursue the funding that they need.”

 

There are many other ways in which museums can gain funding outside of federal grants. JANM’s staff received the email from the NEH in April, with their workshop slated for June and July. The museum was able to collect the $190,000 that went toward their educational program within one week from private donors and foundations. “We know that's not something that will happen every time,” says Yamasaki. “We know that was really a very fortuitous kind of thing that we were able to do, so we're not counting on that every time, but it certainly gives us hope and encouragement and knowledge that nothing is impossible.”

 

JANM is still awaiting reimbursement from federal grants for various programs, according to Jim Herr. Most federal grants are distributed based on a reimbursement process where the grantee expends their own funds and then requests repayment from the federal government for those expenditures, in short JANM has done the work and now is waiting to be paid back. “It's difficult to navigate that as an institution financially, but we were so lucky that we have such a great amount of support from the community that we're able to weather this,” says Herr.

 

Assembling ample funding is a dire issue for museums across the United States currently. “Just like in the height of the pandemic, there's a situation where the amount of philanthropic giving that's available is being spread kind of thin across a really wide range of needs,” explained Kunze. “That can cause a sense that there’s just not enough funds to go around.”

 

In the 2025 AAM report, 63 percent of museum directors predicted that their biggest disruption to their budget for next would be a shift in philanthropy, and 33 percent identified ideological and political polarization as another likely disruption. 

 

The NEA, NEH, and IMLS have all experienced a change in leadership. Following the threats of termination the agencies faced earlier this year, many senior officials announced their resignation. The director of the IMLS was replaced by a Trump nominee, as well as the Senior Advisor of the NEA, and the chair of the NEH. On October 1, the White House fired members of an advisory group to the NEH in charge of reviewing grants.

 

In April, the NEH announced in a press release that, in keeping with various executive orders by Trump, all future grants would be “merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.”

 

Buckley explained how she witnessed a shift, “We still had an opportunity to apply to the NEA, just under different guidelines and requirements, and we chose not to because we were not gonna agree to the guidelines and requirements that this administration was asking us to agree to.”

 

The NEA announced in June they would be offering 250 museums across the nation grants of $25,000 as a part of the Celebrate America! Initiative for the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026. The NEH also announced that it had awarded $34.79 million for 97 projects that “celebrate the nation's 250th anniversary." Many of the awarded grants involved American historic preservation, American heritage, and Western philosophy. 

 

“Being able to do this makes me feel like there's something I can contribute, and that I can actually help ensure that we counter the narratives that are coming out in places like Washington, D.C.,” says Buckley on being a part of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes. “For me, it is both an inspiration and a big responsibility that I take to heart every day, but feel so lucky that I get to do it.”

 

JANM, CAM, and La Plaza de Cultura y Artes have all spoken out against these narratives in one way or another. Earlier this summer, amid a wave of ICE raids and citywide protests in Los Angeles, the Chinese American Museum hosted a panel discussion,“Advancing Equality: United States v. Wong Kim Ark”, to examine the significance of birthright citizenship and the landmark Supreme Court case that cemented this constitutional right. “We created this program to understand the fact that this issue of birthright citizenship is not exclusively a Latinx community issue, it is an issue for all communities of color, all communities of immigrants,” says Truong. “We're utilizing the space to show the fact that this conversation is not unique, we just need to learn historically, how did we overcome this? What did we do in order to stop these things from happening again? And that program brought to light the actions we can take now, but also what the Chinese went through historically, so we understand what other communities are going through now, and provide the space for empathy.”

 

Although Trump’s FY2026 plan was rejected by Congress, there are still three years remaining in his term. According to the AAM report, 69 percent of directors of academic museums and galleries are anticipating disruption from the reduction or elimination of government funding in the coming year. 

 

Even if these agencies remain in place, the shift in leadership is an indication of how priorities may change. As of now, there is no way of knowing whether grants that have been in place for decades, which institutions across America have relied on, will be available in 2026 and the years following. Museums may soon face a difficult choice to either adapt to new guidelines, or risk losing the critical support they need to operate.

 

“If we censor the arts, if we get rid of the public square, meaning we get rid of the civic space where people can talk with one another and express how they feel and bring artists together, we no longer have that road to empathy,” Herr says. "And if we don't understand what other people are feeling, that has major implications for democracy, because you have to be willing to be in somebody else's place, to understand what they're going through, in order to move together as a country."