When federal arts funding collapses, fifty curators ask what public engagement still means

The question that animates Curating Engagement — what does it mean to work with communities when the margin for error is narrowing — was already urgent before the Trump administration terminated more than $27 million in previously approved NEA grants and proposed eliminating the agency entirely. By the time the publication arrives, the field has absorbed twelve months of compounding damage: federal arts grant cancellations, the effective dismantling of NEH staffing, the targeting of diversity programming that has supported community-rooted cultural work for decades. Against this, forty practitioners gathered in Philadelphia to ask not just how to survive, but what the practice actually requires.

The resulting publication does not pretend these conditions are background. They are the argument. And the argument begins with who gets access to it.

Curating Engagement, edited by Aaron Levy, Abigail Satinsky, and Daniel Tucker and published jointly by Wagner Foundation and Public Trust, is available as a free PDF — a distribution choice that the editors frame as a commitment to practitioners, students, and communities regardless of institutional affiliation or resources. In a field where professional publishing typically means cost, gatekeeping, and institutional credentialing, the free PDF is a structural claim about whose knowledge belongs to whom. Standard art publishing economics assume a paying audience; this model assumes a field that cannot afford to be siloed.

The book documents the June 2025 national field-building retreat hosted at Public Trust in Philadelphia, where forty curators, educators, and artists gathered to work through the tensions that most institutions make it difficult to name openly. The four facilitated small-group dialogues that emerged do not read as conference proceedings. They read as something closer to testimony. The dialogue on alliances and solidarity, facilitated by independent curator Alliyah Allen, examines what distinguishes genuine partnership from transactional arrangement — a live question at every institution that has ever co-branded a community program without changing its decision-making structures. The dialogue on sustainability and wellness, facilitated by Lu Zhang of A Blade of Grass, takes up burnout, pacing, and what it costs to work at the speed of trust rather than the speed of deliverables.

One-third of US museums lost government grants or contracts in 2025 American Alliance of Museums, and the majority of those institutions could not replace the funding. The practitioners in this book were already working in that context when they gathered. Damon Reaves, Head of Learning and Engagement at the National Gallery of Art, draws on a landmark collaboration with Philadelphia’s ball and vogueing community — a project that tested what institutional co-creation could look like when the institution actually cedes something. Sue Bell Yank of Clockshop describes a decade at Taylor Yards in Los Angeles: twelve artist commissions, ninety public programs, and years of civic advocacy to reclaim a former rail yard for public use. These are not success stories offered as templates. They are accounts of what sustained, relational engagement actually requires, and what it costs.

One of the book’s three extended project dialogues documents an ongoing collaboration between the Colored Girls Museum — the first institution of its kind dedicated to the lives of ordinary women and girls of the African diaspora, led by founder Vashti DuBois — and Public Trust. The conversation navigates sovereignty, storytelling, and the terms on which institutional partnership either enables or constrains community-led work. It is the kind of documentation that rarely survives into publication because it requires naming what went wrong as clearly as what worked.

The editors describe their hope that the book serves practitioners working to reimagine institutions as “genuine civic spaces.” What that phrase means in practice, and whether the publication proposes any theory of how institutions actually change, is a question the book raises more than it resolves. The documentation is real. The candor is real. Whether that constitutes a field-building resource or a field-recording — a plan or an archive — is the harder question the work leaves open.

Curating Engagement is available now as a free PDF through Public Trust at publictrust.org, with physical copies available via Bookshop. The publication was officially presented at the Curatorial Forum of EXPO CHICAGO in partnership with Independent Curators International on April 10, 2026. Wagner Foundation and Public Trust co-produced the publication; Public Trust is based on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia.