When the National Endowment for the Humanities announced its first round of funding since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January, one winner stood out: Central Studio.
The New York art school in Queens received $2 million in funding, one of the few schools to receive more than $1 million. The school says it promotes “art uninfluenced by modernism” and teaches methods “rooted in traditions that predated the 19th century and the advent of photography.” Its founder is the realist painter Jacob Collins, who has been an outspoken critic of modernism and the avant-garde; he also spoke at the National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., in September. There he argued that American modernism was “a mistake” and that European abstraction complicated the “natural American empiricism” present in previous art.
Now, in an interview new york timesCollins said the school’s mission is to stay away from politics. “To say things are not political — that’s not correct,” Collins said in his first major comments since winning the award. “But the artist was very sensible about being as apolitical as possible.”
Collins said that he had always had a strong interest in the Old Masters, but found that this style was no longer appropriate, so he founded a classical art school, Water Street Atellier, in the 1990s. The school partnered with the Manhattan School of Classical Architecture to become Grand Central College. In 2014, it became independent and began operating under its current name.
Perhaps most bizarrely, Collins gave conflicting accounts, according to eraas to how the studio is funded. First, he said he was approached by the agency’s acting president, Michael McDonald; then, he said, he contacted McDonald in August at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance.
The Grand Central Atelier grant will support a series of public lectures, student studio lectures, workshops, digital publications and the establishment of two new postdoctoral fellowships, NEH said in a release.
Other institutions receiving seven-figure NEH grants include the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the Foundation for Higher Education Excellence, a grantmaking arm of the Conservative Alliance, a conservative think tank Abigail Adams Institute and Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia.
