National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chair Shelly C. Lowe, the first Native American and second woman to hold the agency’s highest-ranking post, has stepped down from the role “at the direction of President Trump,” an NEH spokesperson told Hyperallergic.
Lowe, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, was nominated to head the agency — which is the largest public funder of humanities in the United States — in 2021 by then-President Joe Biden. The agency funds museums, libraries, scholars, nonprofits, and other research institutions through 47 separate grant programs. Prior to Lowe’s NEH leadership, she was appointed by former President Barack Obama to serve on the National Council on the Humanities in 2015, an NEH advisory body which she remained a part of until her 2022 Senate confirmation.
Among her priorities as NEH chair was helping small and lesser-known organizations, tribal communities, and educational institutions thrive, as she expressed during a roundtable discussion at the Albuquerque Press Club in 2022. “My vision is really simple,” Lowe said. “Why don’t we fund these smaller places?”
The NEH spokesperson told Hyperallergic that Michael McDonald, who has served as the agency’s lawyer, has assumed the vacant position until “the President nominates and Senate confirms a new NEH Chairman.”
Lowe’s pressured departure, initially reported by the New York Times, comes as the Trump administration moves to seize control of federally funded arts and cultural institutions to usher in what he has referred to as a “golden age of arts and culture.” Recently, Trump’s cuts to the General Services Administration sparked concerns for the future of thousands of public artworks in federal custody.
Maria Rosario Jackson, chair of the NEH’s sister agency National Endowment for the Arts, stepped down from her role in January ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
Last month, Trump became the chair of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, DC, drawing condemnation from artists and prompting show cancellations. A slew of executive actions, including eliminating DEI programs in federally funded museums and promoting an anti-trans view of gender, have reverberated through the art world. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has eliminated a program for “underserved communities” and is prohibited from funding projects that affirm trans and nonbinary experiences, pending a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Lowe previously was a trustee for the National Museum of the American Indian, the director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and the executive director of Harvard University’s Native American Program.
“I just want to reach the people we haven’t reached, and I want tribal colleges, medium-sized colleges, small colleges, community colleges, I want them to apply all the time, in great numbers,” Lowe said in a 2022 interview published to the NEH website.
