Last month, we received an email message from Vicki Bourns: Expect less. “We” being Artists of Utah, the publisher of 15 Bytes, but also every other arts organization that receives funding from Utah Arts & Museums (UA&M). Bourns being the director of UA&M, the state’s arts division. “Expect less” because the state legislature had cut UA&M’s General Operating Support (GOS) funding by 24%. Many of us had just completed our 2025 GOS grant applications, which are awarded for a two-year funding cycle.
This announcement came on the heels of the DOGESAW horror flick, the repercussions of which are still trickling through, when not outright flooding, state and local economies. The cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, which came after the Trump administration’s surprise suggestion to eliminate NEA funding entirely in the 2026 budget, would only be announced after Bourns’ email; but nonprofit organizations were already shaking after the National Endowment for the Humanities was decimated—Utah Humanities was left reeling from the abrupt termination of its annual operating grant of approximately $1 million, and even UA&M lost a grant that had funded its Utah Collections Preservation Program.
UA&M has had a tough time of it recently. In the middle of the pandemic, an earthquake took out one of their offices and main exhibition spaces. The governor’s need for security took out the other. Where arts and culture were once front and center in Utah’s capital—downtown at The Rio and along South Temple at The Glendinning—now they’ve been banished to a generic and unfriendly government building in Millcreek. UA&M did admirable work during the pandemic, better than many other similarly situated state organizations. It managed to help keep much of Utah’s art community afloat, so that five years on we can speak, without hyperbole, about regeneracy, maybe even vibrancy. But then, after the current legislative session, UA&M was told to tighten their belts. Or, rather, help us tighten ours. 126 years since the creation of the Utah Arts Council, Utah’s art world will not be entering an age of abundance, but of austerity.
Which may strike one as odd when reading all the headlines about how well the state of Utah is doing. In fact, the state of Utah’s budget increased this year. The 2025 legislature ended its session with a $30.8 billion budget for fiscal year 2026, up from $29.4 billion last year. Any cuts to UA&M’s budget are born not of necessity but of choice. “Reprioritization” is the term the state legislature is using, like the reprioritization of higher learning, which has resulted in panic at colleges where department chairs and nervous professors are trying to save their programs (art history at Weber State has already gone under the chopping block), so that one wonders if, in a decade, state colleges and universities will teach anything other than engineering, business and nursing.
We like to talk about the secret sauce of Utah’s success. Here’s a thing about a successful sauce: it’s generally unwise to mess with it. (Just ask Coca-Cola).
Utah has been a longtime supporter of the arts. From its early days, in fact. The Salt Lake Theatre was built soon after the pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley. The Utah Arts Council was the first of its kind in the country. In Utah, we’ve had our fair share of fusses about art we don’t like, but our support of the arts, through both pubic and private institutions, is part of our secret sauce. Sure, artists like to complain about the size or funding of Utah’s art scene, but that’s usually because they are comparing us to metropolitan areas twice our size. Match us with similarly-sized areas, like Richmond, Virginia, and we look pretty good. From the state’s growth perspective, we tout a vibrant arts scene as a way both to attract new talent to the state and to keep the homegrown talent home. It seems to be working—net migration is one of the reasons the state’s economy is booming. No doubt the state will want to parade out artists and dancers and musicians and poets when the world comes to watch the Olympics in 2034. So, what gives with these cuts?
It’s hard to know for sure and reckless to impute motives. But we can look at outcomes. In their reprioritization, the state has not changed funding for the staff and operations of UA&M, just to the organizations it supports through grants. We should be glad everyone at UA&M is keeping their jobs. Bourns studied dance before became an arts administrator, heading the Utah Cultural Alliance and Salt Lake County’s Zoo, Arts & Parks before becoming Executive Director of UA&M in 2017. She’s a professional and guides a team of other dedicated professionals who care deeply about our arts community. We consider her a champion of the arts community. She reports, however, to a political appointee, the executive director of the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement, a position currently held by Donna Law. By the nature of her appointment, Law is a champion of the governor. (As a side note, both Bourns and Law make a salary in the six figures; that is, they earn the type of high salaries the state legislature wants colleges to prioritize. And both have degrees in the arts. Law earned her master’s in arts administration from Southern Utah University, a program that was recently reprioritized, at least partially: an online version is still available but the in-person version has been axed). With their 2025 budget realignment, the Republicans in power are fully funding the organization they control directly while weakening the power of those they do not. The state has not hampered its own direct ability to say what the arts are in Utah (the construction of the Utah Museum, slated for opening in 2026, will increase that power), but they have weakened other organizations’ abilities to do so. Defunding UA&M’s program grants is not exactly Cox taking over the Kennedy Center. Neither is it the flourishing of a mighty chorus.
The legislature’s reprioritization has weakened Utah’s plurality of voices, shifting power from individual organizations and shifting it to the state. Generally, an arts organization follows federal guidelines to become a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit. It then operates as an individual entity, governed by a volunteer board representing the public interest, and seeking financial support from the public. To this end, it submits grant applications to private foundations as well as governmental organizations like Utah Arts & Museums and the county ZAP and RAP entities (the county programs, which use tax funds and must be approved regularly by voters, are extremely popular). These grant proposals are graded by a committee, and each organization’s application competes against those of other organizations for available tax funds. People on the grants committee are generally knowledgeable about the arts and know the impact these organizations have within the community. The committee scores the grants, the granting organization approves the funding and then the grantees do their thing, even if that thing is not to the liking of an individual state senator in Layton or representative from Herriman. That’s how it’s been for decades. It’s how we have flourished. Now we should expect less of it.
What does this mean in a nuts-and-bolts way? Each organization operates differently, and UA&M’s GOS grants will represent a different proportion of each organization’s budget. In the case of Artists of Utah, UA&M funds represented just under 10% of our 2024 budget. So, we’re expecting a 2.4% reduction in future budgets. It’s something we can deal with, whether as a short-term reduction or a long-term budgetary adjustment. Artists of Utah is not going under. 15 Bytes will continue to publish. But—and every arts organization affected by these cuts is going to have a “but”—we’ll probably publish less about rural Utah, and less about urban areas outside of the Wasatch Front. The majority of our financial support (as well as Utah’s economic boom) comes from the Salt Lake City area—whether from the county, the city, galleries and museums in the area, private institutions or our individual readers—and our coverage reflects that funding. Proximity to philanthropy comes with benefits, so federal and state monies are often used to help even the field of accessibility, providing arts and culture to all Americans. From a financial perspective, we have relied on UA&M grants to help us cover places far away from our headquarters in Salt Lake City, whether that be large towns like Logan and St. George, or smaller places like Tremonton, Price and Santaquin. That will be more difficult now. While the expected UA&M grant reduction reflects 2.4% of our overall budget, it would represent a 24% reduction in our program budget to reach outside of the Salt Lake area. I’m sure it’s similar for other art organizations, those centered along the Wasatch Front who serve communities across the state. The sad truth, then, is that in an austerity mindset, we all can expect less, but rural Utah more so: less art, less dance, less theater, less poetry. Less of the best of us, less of what makes us thrive.
coda: Shortly after we published this article, Utah Arts & Museums announced that due to funding constraints their Project Grant program (which is separate from the GOS grants and open to a wider variety of applicants) would be suspended for this year.
The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Categories: Public Issues
