Happy Colorado Sunday, friends! I hope you’ve all gotten your tomato plants in the ground, scouted an interesting outdoor adventure for the summer and at least thought about adding a play, or concert, or museum to your warm-weather itinerary. Those precious community theaters, arts spaces and performing artists need your support always, but especially now, and particularly if they are among the 22 far-flung Colorado groups, like The Tank in Rangely, that had National Endowment for the Arts grants canceled last month.
This week’s cover story takes a look at the ways philanthropic foundations are stepping up to fill the financial gap for organizations that find themselves suddenly short on programming cash. The deep-pocketed do-gooders are providing a stopgap, but as Parker Yamasaki reports, it’s on all of us to help carry these groups into the future.
Dana Coffield
Editor
The Cover Story
Grant cuts slash access to the arts
Backstage at the Creede Repertory Theatre artistic director Emily Van Fleet said the performance group is lucky not to be funded only by its NEA grant. “Of course losing that funding is a hit and we will definitely feel that, but it’s not like some other organizations that are really taking a hit right now. It’s not just this one grant to be concerned about, but the future of what’s to come … so we are just waiting to see what comes down the pike.” (John McEvoy, Special to The Colorado Sun)On May 3 the news releases started filling my inbox:
NEA Grant to support local communities terminated …
A statement on the NEA cuts …
Update on NEA grant terminations and more …
NEA grant termination tracker …
It didn’t take a lot of effort to figure out what had happened the night before: The Trump administration wiped out a bunch of outstanding grants that arts organizations across the country were counting on.
Very quickly, on May 6, another email showed up:
Announcing Our Arts & Culture Rapid Response Grant from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. It was like they were ready for this to happen.
It turns out they were. So were a bunch of philanthropic foundations around the country that remembered Trump’s attempts to eliminate the NEA during his first term as president and took the more recent cuts to the NEA’s sister department, the National Endowment for the Humanities, as a sign of what was to come.
Philanthropy and the arts have a long history together, which led me to wonder whether we could count on that relationship to hold over the arts sector until the federal government gets back on board.
The short answer, as you may have guessed, is not really. But not because the money isn’t there — it cannot be stated often enough that the NEA’s total annual budget is $207 million nationally, more than three-quarters of which is spent on grants — but because of the implications this has on inequity in the arts.
Public funding has a democratizing effect on arts access, distributing dollars much further afield than large endowments and foundations, which tend to focus on dense metro areas. Colorado’s rural organizations will have to get creative with their appeals without the federal funds — and they are.
A curator I spoke with last week for a different story told me that “culture is like smoke, you try to suppress it, it will just spread out.” While I agree with him, this week I found myself thinking that smoke needs fuel, something to burn. In this case, that fuel is money.
So who’s fueling this cultural fire? And how long can it last?
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
The Colorado Lens
It’s really starting to feel like summer out there, which means Colorado folk are inclined to gather. Here are a few of our favorite recent images from people getting together for art and protest.
Artists prepare for the 37th annual Taste of Creede at the Quick Draw event where they begin with a blank canvas and then have one hour to complete their paintings May 25. (John McEvoy, Special to The Colorado Sun) Del Norte artist Denny Wetmore prepares his canvas May 25 during the Taste of Creede Quick Draw event. (John McEvoy, Special to The Colorado Sun) Protesters shout during a news conference Thursday on the steps of the Colorado Capitol in Denver. U.S. Reps. Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert spoke alongside other GOP elected officials about Republicans’ federal funding measure, known as the “big, beautiful” bill. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun) Protesters hold signs attacking U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans over Medicaid funding during a news conference outside the Colorado Capitol on Thursday. “Gabe, you suck!” they chanted. Evans defended his vote. “There’s a lot of good in this bill and, unfortunately, that good is being lost because of a lot of fearmongering that is occurring.” (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun) U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Windsor, speaks to reporters Thursday during a news conference about the “big, beautiful bill” on the steps of the Colorado Capitol. She was flanked by U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Fort Lupton, state Rep. Carlos Barron, R-Fort Lupton, Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams and state Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling. “This is an amazing opportunity that we have to deliver on the mandate that President Trump was given in his overwhelming victory,” she said. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)Eric Lubbers | CTO & Newsletter Wrangler
Flavor of the Week
Eating like the planet depends on it
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We’re always a little excited when the James Beard Award nominees are announced, even if mere nomination puts at risk our chances of eating at places such as Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder, Bin 707 Foodbar in Grand Junction, Alma Fonda Fina, Yacht Club, Yuan Wonton in Denver and Poulette Bakeshop in Parker.
We’ll know June 16 whether our hopes for landing a table, a seat at the bar or a tarte au sucre must be suspended indefinitely.
In the meantime, we’ll be busying ourselves contemplating the environmental implications of all this eating and drinking as laid out by Fort Collins ecologist and researcher Mark Easter in “The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos.” Easter, who describes himself as a greenhouse gas accountant, contemplates whether “we can eat our way out of the climate crisis” in his book, which is also nominated for a James Beard Award. (It’s also a Colorado Book Award finalist for Creative Nonfiction.)
The book casts a global view, but uses personal stories and familiar Colorado people, places and plants to frame how regenerative and organic agriculture and eating local foods in season might help to slow climate change. The picture is a little bleak — even if it is printed on paper made from 100% post-consumer waste — but we leave the story knowing that if we purchase our beloved Colorado peaches this summer from a farmer using regenerative techniques, the net carbon emissions, including transportation, are in the negative zone.
“The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos,” Patagonia, $30 in hardcover, $14.95 for the more climate-friendly e-book
Dana Coffield | Editor
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“No Lie Lasts Forever” links a shamed reporter, retired serial killer
“How to navigate this conundrum? Michael Martin is negotiating on the basis of a partial truth but needs to gain access to a reporter’s raw notes without seeming too eager or in any way suggesting the newspaper might be sitting on the answer to Robbie McGrath’s demise.”
— From “No Lie Lasts Forever”
EXCERPT: In the first slice of “No Lie Lasts Forever,” the new thriller by Mark Stevens, readers catch a glimpse of protagonist Flynn Martin, a shamed TV reporter, and her retired print journalist dad paying a visit to a hollowed-out Denver Post newsroom looking to gain access to a murdered reporter’s notebooks. In the second, we see inside the mind of a reformed serial killer upset that some copycat has deflected attention his way in the ongoing investigation. With wildly divergent motives, the two parties ultimately find common cause.
READ THE SUNLIT EXCERPT
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: The narrative framework for this novel came to Stevens “in a flash” as he was driving down I-25 through Denver. Among the topics he discusses in his Q&A: why the story took more than two decades to actually appear in print.
SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Stevens: Well, I wish I could remember. Why do I say that? Because I wrote the first draft of “No Lie Lasts Forever” in 2001. It’s been a work-in-progress ever since. I would pull it out every once in a while and work on it, applying things I’d learned along the way as I published the five books in the Allison Coil Mystery Series and then “The Fireballer,” which came out in 2023.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH MARK STEVENS.
LISTEN TO A DAILY SUN-UP PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR.
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
Mary Hannon and Cecil McDonald settled in unincorporated Custer County 40 years ago. Despite some lifestyle and health challenges, they enjoy the life they’ve made for themselves 10 minutes outside of Westcliffe. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)? For the latest piece in our Aging in Colorado series, Jennifer Brown visited the oldest county in the state and learned about an interesting phenomenon, where services for older people are short and “young” seniors help close the gap in “God’s waiting place.”
? Congress overturned an EPA waiver allowing California to ban the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2031, and that’s put Colorado’s electric vehicle and greenhouse gas emissions work at risk, experts told Michael Booth. But Colorado Energy Office boss Will Toor says the fight is not over.
? Speaking of rolling federal implications, Jason Blevins reports on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that cleared construction of an 88-mile stretch of railroad track from the Uinta Basin in Utah to tracks rolling along the Colorado River through Colorado. The decision was about the railroad, but was really about narrowing the National Environmental Policy Act. The ruling has Jerd Smith wondering about the implications for a federal court judge’s ruling Thursday that Denver Water’s project to raise Gross Dam in Boulder County can continue, but permits found to violate NEPA must be redone.
? Colorado’s quantum Tech Hub has so far dodged the federal budget ax, and that has given Elevate Quantum and IBM the confidence to go ahead with a training program intended to cultivate 3,500 new workers to the burgeoning industry, Tamara Chuang reports.
? In the CEO revolving door, Rob Katz is back at the helm at Vail Resorts, Jason Blevins reports, and Revel Bikes founder Adam Miller has bought back the Carbondale bikemaker and will give it a second go.
? Entrepreneurs in the psychedelic mushroom space have been waiting for a key piece of the state’s regulatory puzzle to fall into place. They finally got that good news, but Gabe Allen writes that even the best prepared psilocybin growers and therapists are anxious about how the market will shape up.
? Remember how excited people were last year when Buc-ee’s opened a giant gas station in Johnstown? Now the Texas company has its eye on a second location right at the edge of the massive Greenland Ranch on Interstate 25 near Palmer Lake and the opposition is fierce and powerful (think cable magnate John Malone and political power broker Ken Salazar). Olivia Prentzel reports from the thick of the fight.
? If you weren’t convinced of how contagious measles is, John Ingold offers a timeline that shows the impact of one infectious passenger on a flight from Istanbul that landed in Colorado.
Dana Coffield | Editor
Thanks for spending time with us, friends. We appreciate your support — spiritual, social and financial. See you back here next week!
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
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