Endowing Equity:
The NEA, Cultural Diversity,
and the Battle for Arts Funding
This original artwork was designed by Albert Zhang specifically for Endowing Equity. It is featured on the book’s cover.
Endowing Equity tells the untold story of the U.S. federal government’s first and only sustained foray into affirmative action in national arts funding. Between 1971 and 1995, three charismatic Black leaders spearheaded a bold program within the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), granting over $170 million (more than $500 million today) to minority artists, broadly defined. Called “Expansion Arts,” the program was an unprecedented effort that counterbalanced the agency’s widespread exclusion of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native, and rural white artists. As their core strategy, the directors built a galvanizing, coalition-based community arts field that extended minority status beyond race and ethnicity. What united their diverse constituencies was an intersectional approach that addressed underrepresentation, class, and geography. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with former NEA staff and grantees, Endowing Equity chronicles Expansion Arts’s struggles and obstacles, as well as its pioneering equity-based initiatives and successes in celebrating cultural diversity. At its heart, Endowing Equity tells a story of solidarity and alliance-building, demonstrating the power of the arts to bring forth a more inclusive America.
Available from Oxford University Press in early 2027
“Uy documents the tremendous contributions that the Arts Endowment made through the Expansion Arts program in its efforts to ensure that all people have access to the arts; to transformational experiences as audiences and makers. This has required reckoning with all facets of our society and cultural sector including economic disadvantage, impacts of historic marginalization in several communities, geographic isolation of rural communities, and the reality that we are a country of people with different world views that are deserving of recognition and investment.”
“Uy’s work in Endowing Equity is an invaluable and necessary read for anyone who cares about not only artistic freedom, but also equal opportunity and justice. The book offers a new perspective on the turbulent time 1980s and 90s, informing further lessons that can be applied to similar attacks against federal arts funding and DEI programs today. Uy helps us envision a United States that supports and treasures all of its artists, no matter their backgrounds, where they are from, or what diverse art they practice. ”
From right to left: A. B. Spellman, Expansion Arts Director (1978-1993), Michael Sy Uy, Patrice Walker Powell, Expansion Arts Director (1993-95), and Ana Steele, NEA Senior Deputy Chair
As with Ask the Experts, I will be donating 100% of my royalties to charitable and justice-oriented causes, including the Intercultural Leadership Institute, the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, Plaza de la Raza, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. In complete transparency, my royalties are only 5% of net receipts, and I continue to make other monetary contributions. I am fortunate to have the job security, housing security, food security, and racial privilege to make these donations, while acknowledging that not all are in a position to do so.