Who Funds the Italian American Story?
- daniellemariefusco
- 16 minutes ago
- 8 min read
A Call for the Italian American Community to Sustain Its Artists
By Danielle Marie Fusco
I am an Italian-American artist.
I am a dancer, choreographer, aerialist, educator, cultural preservationist, and storyteller of ancestral memory. I am also a practicing shamanic lineage healer and mystic.
I live in the space where Southern Italian traditions breathe into contemporary diasporic life ....where lineage meets innovation, where memory becomes movement.
And I have to ask:
Where is our community’s support for its artists?
This is not an attack.
This is a call to accountability.
A call to responsibility.
A call to love our culture enough to sustain it.
Because if we do not support the arts, we do not document our existence.
And if we do not document our existence, we allow others to define us.
What Our Institutions Fund
Across the United States, Italian American organizations distribute millions of dollars annually through scholarships, grants, and philanthropic initiatives.
Major institutions along with regional cultural foundations and civic associations, primarily support:
Academic scholarships
Educational programs
Religious and heritage events
Leadership initiatives
Youth development
Cultural festivals
Historical preservation projects
Many scholarships prioritize medicine, law, business, and finance — professions historically linked to immigrant upward mobility.
There is nothing wrong with this.
But we must ask:
Where do the artists fit in?
Are Recipients Tracked?
Many organizations proudly announce scholarship recipients and emphasize academic merit and leadership. Yet there is little publicly available data tracking long-term contributions back into Italian American cultural life — especially in the arts.
Few programs follow:
Whether recipients contribute to cultural preservation
Whether they mentor within the community
Whether funded artists are sustained long-term
Whether funding generates cultural output
This raises a deeper question: Are we investing in individual success — or in cultural continuity?
The Arts Are Not a Hobby — They Are an Industry
In the United States, the arts and cultural sector contributes over $1 trillion annually to the economy and supports millions of jobs.
The arts are business.
The arts are workforce.
The arts are economic engines.
And yet, within many ethnic philanthropic models, including our own, art is still viewed as secondary to “serious” professions.
Why?
Is a lawyer more valuable to cultural survival than a choreographer?
Is a surgeon more essential to collective memory than a filmmaker?
Is a business owner more critical than a composer?
We celebrate opera.
We revere ballet.
We honor theatre shaped by commedia dell’arte.
We praise Italian cinematic brilliance.
Italian artistic innovation shaped the world.
And yet within our American diaspora, artists often struggle without structured support.
The Narrative Question
Another difficult question must be asked:
Who decides what “Italian American” art looks like?
Dominant narratives often center:
Early 20th-century immigration stories
Catholic imagery
Narrow regional identities
A limited historical timeline
But Italy itself is vast and layered. Southern Italian ritual traditions, regional cultures, pre-Christian practices, folk healing, women-centered traditions, and Indigenous Mediterranean roots are often underrepresented in funding priorities.
Not all Italians are Catholic.
Not all Italian Americans resonate with a single narrative.
Not all heritage expressions are religious or conservative.
When funding consistently supports only certain themes, representation narrows.
And when artists exploring ancient roots, Southern ritual traditions, feminine archetypes, marginalized histories, diasporic evolution, and contemporary reinterpretation are underfunded, we must ask whether preservation is inclusive ... or selectively curated.
Cultural Erasure vs. Cultural Evolution
Art is not decoration.
Art is documentation.
Dance, film, poetry, choreography, performance, and interdisciplinary work preserve living culture in ways textbooks cannot. If we fund only static heritage celebrations and not living artists, we risk freezing identity in one era.
But culture evolves.
Diaspora evolves.
Italian American artists today are reinterpreting folk traditions, creating contemporary repertory rooted in ancestry, exploring migration, gender, mysticism, and identity, and building bridges between Italy and the diaspora.
They are not rejecting tradition.
They are keeping it alive.
Without support, innovation slows.
Without innovation, culture fossilizes.
The Value of the Artist
What is the true value of artistry?
An artist documents the emotional truth of a people, preserves intangible heritage, creates visibility, builds bridges across generations, shapes identity, challenges erasure, and invites dialogue.
Artists do not simply reflect culture.
They shape it.
If we do not invest in those who shape culture, we surrender authorship of our narrative.
Where is the complete story?
Italian American narratives have often centered patriarchal migration structures.
But where are the folk healers, the village women, the matriarchs, the mystics, the ritual leaders, the agricultural women whose dances shaped the tarantella, and the fimminielli and gender-fluid people who have always existed within our communities — people who carry dignity, value, and cultural wisdom?
Southern Italy also carries Indigenous Mediterranean, Greek, Arab, Norman, Spanish, and North African influences.
Diversity is not new to us. It is foundational.
If funding frameworks do not reflect this diversity, we flatten our own heritage.
Artists in the In-Between
Across the country, Italian American artists are preserving and evolving tarantella and pizzica, telling underrepresented regional stories through film, exploring ancestral memory through visual art, reviving regional songs, blending contemporary performance with folk lineage, and researching marginalized histories.
Many self-fund projects, crowdsource travel, work multiple jobs, struggle to secure grants, and fall between mainstream arts funding and ethnic philanthropy.
They are "too ethnic" for mainstream grants.
Too contemporary for heritage institutions.
Too innovative for traditional boards.
Too traditional for contemporary institutions.
They live in the in-between.
And yet it is in the in-between where culture evolves.
A Call to Our Community
This is not about division.
It is about expansion.
It is about recognizing that sustaining artists is sustaining identity.
If we want our children and grandchildren to know who we are beyond stereotypes…
If we want our history told through our own voices…
If we want our traditions to remain living, breathing, evolving…
Then we must invest not only in memory — but in the makers of memory.
Support the dancer.
Support the filmmaker.
Support the musician.
Support the storyteller.
Support the keeper of ancestral wisdom.
It lives in bodies.
In breath.
In rhythm.
In voice.
In art.
And the future of Italian American identity will be written not only by HIStorians,
but by the artists courageous enough to carry it forward.
What Can We Do?
This conversation does not require division.
It requires expansion.
It asks us to move from preservation alone into participation.
From nostalgia into stewardship
From pride into practice.
If we truly believe our culture matters, then we must build structures that allow it to live, breathe, and evolve.
We can:
Create designated arts funds within Italian American organizations to support working artists, culture bearers, and tradition keepers.
Track post-award community contributions so funding reflects not only achievement, but ongoing cultural impact.
Develop artist-in-residence programs within cultural foundations, museums, and heritage centers.
Support interdisciplinary and contemporary diasporic work that bridges tradition with present-day expression.
Fund research into underrepresented histories, including Southern Italian traditions, women’s roles, folk practices, migration narratives, and regional cultural memory.
Include professional artists, tradition bearers, and cultural workers on organizational boards to ensure creative voices help shape priorities.
Expand narrative representation beyond a single religious, regional, or historical lens to reflect the true diversity of Italian identity.
Create grant categories dedicated to living cultural evolution, not only historical preservation.
Invest in youth mentorship and apprenticeship pathways connecting elder tradition holders with emerging artists.
Build partnerships between U.S. and Italian cultural communities to strengthen transnational cultural exchange.
Support performance, ritual arts, and embodied traditions — the forms of heritage that live in the body, not only the archive.
Recognize culture bearers as essential workers of memory, not hobbyists.
Unity does not require sameness.
Unity requires space for difference.
It requires listening across generations, regions, faiths, identities, and artistic forms.
Our culture has never been singular. It has always been layered, adaptive, and resilient.
If we make room for its full expression, we do more than preserve heritage, we ensure its future.
SIDE NOTE: Why “General Arts Funding” Isn’t Always a Guarantee
Many organizations will tell artists to apply for general arts funding such as federal grants, state arts councils, community foundations, as if those mechanisms are a dependable safety net. But the reality is more complex and far less reassuring.
At the national level, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) remains the largest federal arts funder in the United States, yet even at its peak it has received a tiny fraction of federal spending — roughly 0.003 % of the U.S. budget. In fiscal year 2024, its total appropriation was about $220 million — modest within a $6 trillion federal budget and distributed across thousands of applications and disciplines.
Even when federal funding exists, the competition is fierce and the success rate is low. For programs like the NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects, hundreds or even thousands of applications pour in from every state, and only a fraction receive awards. For individual artists and small cultural projects — especially those without institutional backing or grant-writing teams — the odds can feel nearly impossible.
And the situation is getting more precarious. In recent years, sudden cuts and cancellations of NEA, NEH, and other federal arts and humanities grants have left organizations and artists in limbo, even after awards were announced. Smaller museums, theaters, and grassroots cultural programs have faced abrupt funding withdrawals, eroding trust in public funding as a stable resource.
State and local arts agencies — another potential source of support — have also seen significant declines in appropriations, with some reporting decreases of nearly 20–22 % as pandemic-era relief fades and budgets tighten. That’s public arts money that once helped sustain community arts engagement, youth programs, and regional cultural initiatives.
The result? General arts funding, though essential, is neither abundant nor dependable. It often favors established institutions over independent cultural makers, requires matching funds artists don’t have, and can vanish or shift direction with changing political priorities.
So when organizations say, “Just apply for general arts funding,” it’s important to understand that:
The pool is small and oversubscribed compared to the number of creators seeking support.
Selection processes are competitive and unpredictable.
Federal, state, and local priorities can shift suddenly, canceling grants already promised.
Many grants require budgets and infrastructures most individual artists don’t have.
In other words: general arts funding, as it currently exists, is not a sustainable substitute for intentional, community-rooted investment in Italian American artists, tradition bearers, and living culture. It’s a pipe dream — admirable in theory — but insufficient in practice without targeted, consistent support from within our own community.
Citations
1. Federal arts funding is extremely limited compared with total government spendingThe National Endowment for the Arts constitutes roughly 0.003 % of the entire U.S. federal budget, despite its reach supporting artists and organizations nationwide.
2. In fiscal year 2024, the NEA’s total federal arts funding was about $220 million — a modest sum relative to overall federal spending and compared with allocations in fields like science and medicine.
3. The NEA awards only a slice of the grants it receives applications for — for example, in one cycle the agency received 2,195 eligible projects and awarded 1,127 grants.
4. Funding to the arts is vulnerable to political shifts and budget proposalsRecent federal budget proposals have included plans to reduce or eliminate the NEA and similar agencies, leading to canceled or withdrawn grants across communities.
5. Terminations of previously awarded NEA grants have already occurred in cities like Philadelphia and the Bay Area as funding priorities shifted.
Arts as an economic force: Arts and cultural industries contribute over $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy — yet federal funding remains a tiny fraction of national investment in creative work.
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