Now more than ever, Florida has become a destination for art. Miami’s reputation as an art hub has continued to grow since Art Basel Miami Beach began over two decades ago. Museums, studio and residency programs, and buzzing commercial galleries led to the New York Times declaring last year that the city had “matured into a cultural capital.”1 Elsewhere in the state, St. Petersburg’s The Dali Museum and The Jon and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota were listed in the book 101 Art Destinations in the U.S.: Where Art Lives Coast to Coast (2018).
Those who see the varied and valuable contributions art makes to the state were shocked on June 24 when Governor Ron DeSantis announced he had cut the entire $32 million state arts budget.
DeSantis has spent years turning the state into a laboratory for reactionary conservative politics, which he unsuccessfully tried to parlay into a presidential run against former President Donald Trump. He kept the state open during the pandemic, leading to a boom in migration to Florida from mostly Conservative transplants fleeing COVID restrictions and attracted by the state’s business-friendly policies such as its lack of income tax.2 That decision also led to the fourth-highest COVID death toll in the country, many of them in nursing homes and retirement communities—paradoxical considering voters aged sixty-five and older make up a large part of his voting base.3
In keeping with his conservative agenda, DeSantis has also waged a protracted war against what he calls “woke,” passing bills designed to disempower and oppress female-identifying people, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. He tightened abortion restrictions and his “Don’t Say Gay” bill largely banned transgender healthcare for minors.4 His “Stop WOKE Act” attempted to place limits on discussion of diversity and race in workplaces, but was recently ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.5
There is an ideological crusade at the heart of the decision to cut the arts budget. When pressed on the reasoning behind the decision, the governor cited “sexual” festivals, specifically the Orlando International Fringe Theater Festival. The organizers rejected DeSantis’ characterization of the event in an open letter to the governor.6 “Our festivals are uncensored, not unlawful,” they wrote. “Defunding Florida’s entire arts & culture sector because of Fringe Festivals, which account for just .002% of the vetoed $32M, is akin to canceling Florida’s entire sports industry based on an objection with one player on one team.”
Anna Eskamani, a state representative for Orlando, also criticized the governor’s reasoning, posting on X (formerly Twitter).7 “It’s a popular international event that attracts tens of thousands of people from across the country and state,” she wrote. “It features independent artists, drag performers, and other forms of artistic expression that DeSantis has wanted to censor despite courts telling him otherwise.”
The decision makes even less sense from an economic perspective. Art, especially as a facet of the tourist economy, is a big business in Florida. DeSantis, who sacrificed thousands of lives to keep the tourist economy afloat during the pandemic, alienated even the wealthiest and most esteemed in the state’s arts community. One very prominent critic is Jorge Pérez, a billionaire property developer who has pledged his entire art collection to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which bears his name. “A lot of the people who are coming from New York are involved in the arts,” he told Bloomberg.8 “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.”
The budget cuts for large institutions like PAMM aren’t dire. A spokesperson for the Pérez Art Museum Miami said that the museum relies on multiple funding sources, including Miami-Dade County and private donations. “We will take appropriate measures to compensate for any potential shortfall by generating continued revenue from other sources, including individuals, foundations, and various other channels,” they said in a statement.9 “Additionally, we will strive to increase our income through admissions, our museum shop, and our new digital sign.”
However, many small visual arts organizations rely on state grants to sustain themselves. These organizations are scrambling to make up for the loss in funding. Naomi Fisher, an artist and founder of the arts nonprofit Bas-Fisher Invitational says, “I just think it’s foolish for the government to cut the arts, because they are hurting themselves. They are hurting industry, they’re hurting tourism, they’re hurting jobs. What the arts brings to a state’s economy is so outsized compared to the investment by local governments that it just seems harmful to them.”10
Fisher says her organization has lost a $33,000 grant that would have supported staffing and other costs. That grant had been downsized from the $40,000 originally requested, and although the organization has other funding sources, they’re currently assessing their options and reconsidering planned projects in order to stay afloat. “We’re really going through our budget in an insane way to determine how we can move forward,” she says.
Fisher said addressing the scope and impact, “There’s so much great art all around Florida. It’s not just supporting obscure, complex conceptual art in the big cities. The state art grants are also supporting things like bluegrass in Central Florida, they’re supporting small theater companies for retirees. The art budget in Florida is not just for what is considered by some to be pretentious. It’s everything—a community dance theater, a nature photography club. These are the kinds of projects Florida arts grants fund, in addition to what we’re used to in South Florida. That’s getting lost too.”
Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, a Miami arts nonprofit focused on Caribbean and Latin artists, lost a $25,000 grant according to Prism Reports.11 That money would have gone to pay for residencies and individual artist grants. “The impact of not having the funding in small communities is going to be detrimental to people’s quality of life,” said Rosie Gordon-Wallace, the organization’s founder and executive director.
Of course, Miami and Florida at large depend on private funding along with state issued support. The arts are supported by large donations from billionaires like Pérez and high-profile collectors like the Rubell family. In fact, it was a coterie of those collectors that coaxed Art Basel into starting a fair in Miami Beach in the early 2000s.12 The presence of collector-driven institutions like the Rubell Museum funded by the Rubell family and the Margulies Collection at the WAREhOUSE funded by real estate developer Martin Z. Margulies has even made its way into marketing materials published by the city tourism bureau.13
But there are also indications that even these private funding sources are not a solution. Dimensions Variable, another nonprofit which provides studio and exhibition space to emerging and underrecognized artists, has also faced uncertainty due to the loss of a $25,000 state grant. Even before the budget veto, the artist-run organization had had to raise studio rents and start a membership program in order to afford the rising rent on their own building. As co-founder Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova notes, many in the same situation are reaching toward raising private funds, only to find their backers are saturated with similar requests and “fundraiser-ed out.”
“Everything is going up in terms of inflation, the economy, rents, property values, taxes,” he says. “And so now we’ve got this budget cut, so everybody’s trying to fill in and trying to have more fundraisers, and the funders and philanthropists out there are just getting exhausted.”
There is an ideological crusade at the heart of the decision to cut the arts budget.
While most major organizations receive some kind of state funding, the dominance of private collectors comes with complications, such as attempts to influence and censor art and artists. Miami Beach art center Oolite Arts, recently removed a pro-Palestinian work by Khánh Nguyên Hoàng Vũ at a storefront gallery, leading to a call from some artists to boycott the organization.14 Similarly, The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami faced a backlash after taking down a portrait by Charles Gaines of Palestinian-American scholar and statesman Edward Said prior to a fundraising gala celebrating Irma and Norman Braman, billionaires who have close financial ties to Israel and who funded the ICA Miami’s current building in the Design District.15
The full effect of the cuts is still unknown. Some have speculated that the lack of funding and rise in censorship could cause a chilling effect throughout the arts and may cause artists to leave the state. Famously a swing state, Florida’s political disposition was laissez-faire towards business (including art) but generally socially permissive. Yet the recent budget cuts have some in the state’s arts communities believing the worst is yet to come. For Rodriguez-Casanova, who immigrated from Cuba with his parents in 1980 to escape its “repressive” government, such politically-motivated measures are alarming.
“The idea of me having a career in the arts, part of it was always this kind of homage to my parents in that every day I get to think about exercising the most absolute freedom,” he says. “And to have a governor use the state’s funding and his powers to try to stifle this place, where the First Amendment blossoms, where it’s so important, is really crazy.”16
[1] Brett Sokol, “Miami Has Matured into a Cultural Capital. What’s Next?” The New York Times, December 5, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/arts/design/miami-new-art-capital-effects.html.
[2] Steven Lemongello, “The ‘Great Sort’ Draws Transplants Pushing Florida to the Right, Experts Say,” Orlando Sentinel, January 31, 2024, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2023/12/27/the-great-sort-draws-transplants-pushing-florida-to-the-right-experts-say/.
[3] Florida Leads Nation in Number of COVID-19 Deaths of Nursing Home Residents and Staff,” AARP, Accessed August 6, 2024, https://states.aarp.org/florida/florida-leads-nation-in-number-of-covid-19-deaths-of-nursing-home-residents-and-staff; Tarik Minor, “Analyzing the Data: DeSantis Wins by Largest Margin of Any Fla. Governor in 40 Years,” News 4 Jax, November 9, 2022, https://www.news4jax.com/vote-2022/2022/11/09/analyzing-the-data-desantis-wins-by-largest-margin-of-any-fla-governor-in-40-years/.
[4] Anthony Izaguirre, “DeSantis Signs Florida GOP’s 6-Week Abortion Ban into Law,” Associated Press, April 14, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/florida-abortion-ban-approved-c9c53311a0b2426adc4b8d0b463edad1; Andrew Atterbury and Arek Sarkissian, “From Drag Shows to Pronouns: Florida GOP Takes Aim at LGBTQ Issues,” Politico, March 28, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/28/florida-gop-lgbtq-bills-00089099.
[5] Curt Anderson, “Court Rules Florida’s ‘Stop Woke’ Law Restricting Business Diversity Training is Unconstitutional,” Associated Press, March 5, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/stop-woke-florida-race-unconstitutional-fcf6c1678bb90709f5941f89d0c193af.
[6] Scott Galbraith, Trish Parry, and Tempestt Halstead, “Open Letter to Governor Ron DeSantis,” The Orlando Fringe, Accessed August 6, 2024, https://www.orlandofringe.org/open-letter.
[7] Anna Eskamani (@AnnaForFlorida), “I attended @OrlandoFringe this year and do almost every year — it’s a popular international event that attracts tens of thousands of people from across the country and state. 1/3″, X (formerly Twitter), Post, June 27, 2024, 12:10 p.m., https://x.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1806359348542583200; Anna Eskamani (@AnnaForFlorida), “It features independent artists, drag performers, and other forms of artistic expression that DeSantis has wanted to censor despite courts telling him otherwise. DeSantis once again shows his true colors and disdain towards the LGBTQ+ people and First Amendment. 2/3″, X (formerly Twitter), Post, June 27, 2024, 12:10 p.m., https://x.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1806359350954414389
[8] Michael Smith and Anna J. Kaiser, “Billionaire Perez Slams DeSantis for Eroding Miami’s New Appeal,” Bloomberg, July 3, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-03/miami-condo-king-slams-desantis-for-defunding-arts-as-transplants-seek-more.
[9] Statement sent to the author, July 19, 2024.
[10] Interview with the author, July 22, 2024.
[11] Alexandra Martinez, “DeSantis’ Veto of Millions in Florida Arts Funding Will Disproportionately Impact Queer, BIPOC Organizations,” Prism Reports, July 8, 2024, https://prismreports.org/2024/07/08/desantis-arts-funding-veto-queer-bipoc-organizations/.
[12] Robin Pogrebin, “20 Years of Art Basel Miami Beach: Present at the Creation,” Art Basel, Accessed August 6, 2024, https://www.artbasel.com/stories/20-years-art-basel-miami-beach-oral-history-part-one?lang=en.
[13] Patricia Azze, “Miami’s Finest Private Art Collections,” The Official Website of Greater Miami & Miami Beach, February 14, 2023, https://www.miamiandbeaches.com/things-to-do/art-and-culture/galleries/miamis-private-art-collections.
[14] Miami Arts Accountability (@miamiartsaccountability), “Join us as we boycott @oolitearts…”, Instagram, tile post, June 6, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C7352NiuiPX/.
[15] Valentina Di Liscia, “Questions Remain After ICA Miami Removes Portrait of Edward Said,” Hyperallergic, March 13, 2024, https://hyperallergic.com/876404/questions-remain-after-ica-miami-removes-portrait-of-edward-said/.
[16] Interview with the author, July 22, 2024.
