For 10 years, Erika Nelson, an artist in Lucas, Kan., has been making miniature models of giant pieces of Americana, putting them in a van and driving around the country to show people.
She has made tiny copies, for example, of the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, which is down the road in Cawker City, and the World’s Largest Can of Fruit Cocktail, which is in Sunnyvale, Calif.
She calls her mobile museum the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things.
But this year she may not be able to travel far. Kansas, which has one of the country's smallest state arts budgets, has decided to shrink it even further, to zero.
“I think it’s a sad day for Kansas,” said Ms. Nelson, who lost a $2,000 state grant that had helped underwrite her van’s trips to colleges and county fairs.
Across the country, this is a tough time for small arts groups, because state grants have largely shriveled up. Thirty-one states, still staggered by the recession, cut their arts budgets for the 2012 fiscal year, which began on July 1, continuing a downturn that has seen such financial aid drop 42 percent over the last decade, according to data compiled by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
The impact may hardly be felt at places like the Metropolitan Opera in New York, established regional theaters or other large organizations that rely primarily on loyal donors and ticket revenues to underwrite their budgets.
But much of America’s artistic activity does not happen in major recital halls and theaters; instead it occurs in places like Lucas, population 407, where the cultural attractions include S. P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden historic folk art site and where smaller arts organizations are highly dependent on state grants.
“When any form of government funding is cut, the organizations that tend to get hit the most are rural, organizations of color, avant-garde institutions — those that have a harder time raising individual and corporate money,” said Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
Nationwide, state aid represents just a small portion of the money used to underwrite the arts, perhaps 2 to 5 percent of total expenditures, according to Americans for the Arts, a lobbying group. Budgets adopted this spring in the 50 states call for a total of $259 million in spending on culture, or slightly more than the yearly spending of the Metropolitan Museum of Art alone.
The impact of state cuts is magnified, though, in smaller settings, where operating margins are slender and where state money is often used to leverage other public funds or to convince private donors that an organization is worth backing.
In Kansas, for example, where a proposed budget of $689,000 was vetoed by Gov. Sam Brownback, groups like the Music Theater of Wichita stand to lose their matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The endowment notified the state last month that it would not receive a planned $700,000 grant unless it puts forward a new viable state arts agency. (In May, Governor Brownback fired the entire staff of the Kansas Arts Commission, which distributed the funds.)
