Opinion: As Federal Support for Culture Falls, We Need a New Generation of Giving

Kimberly Pirtle is the founder of Gabriel Advisory Group, an art advisory and philanthropy advisory firm working with collectors and institutions. Previously, she worked at Sotheby’s.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, and the first museum I loved was the Detroit Institute of Arts. Before I even knew what a museum was for, I knew the building and its treasures: the Diego Rivera murals wrapping the courtyard, the Vincent van Gogh self-portrait that was the first of his works to enter an American public collection. I understood, with a child’s certainty, that something important happened there and that I was allowed to be near it. Years later, when the city of Detroit went bankrupt in the largest municipal failure in American history, the art inside that building was nearly sold off to pay the city’s creditors. The masterpieces I had grown up walking past were put on a list and given a price.

What saved them was neither the market nor Washington, D.C. It was a coalition of foundations, the state, and, crucially, the museum’s own donors who collectively put up roughly $816 million to keep the collection whole and protect the city workers’ pensions at the same time. They decided, together, that the culture was worth keeping.

Some version of that decision now sits in front of all of us. Over the past year, the federal government has moved to dismantle its support for arts and culture. The proposals to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have not succeeded; Congress funded all three at roughly their prior levels. But the money surviving on paper is not the same as the money arriving. Grants already in motion were canceled, staff were cut, and the machinery that delivers the funding was hollowed out while the line items stayed intact. A 2025 national survey of museum directors found that one-third of American museums had government grants or contracts canceled, and two-thirds of those museums have not replaced the money at all. The administration has proposed zeroing out all three agencies again. The institutions cannot plan against that, and planning is the whole job.

Great foundations like Mellon, Ford, and their peers have said plainly that they cannot replace what the government is withdrawing. So it is private giving that will have to carry our culture forward. The question is which kind: institution-changing gifts from the top, or a broader base of giving from people who may never endow a wing but whose participation makes culture worth defending at all. For a generation, the art world has become extraordinarily good at cultivating the first, but what I cannot stop thinking about is the second, and what becomes of a culture if it fails.

The broad base is where tomorrow’s major donors need to come from, but the share of American households giving to charity has been declining for years, even as the total amount Americans give has grown. And that base is built long before someone writes a major check. It begins when people are given access to culture, develop a relationship to it, and come to believe that they have some responsibility for what happens to it. We have spent so long courting the few that we have half forgotten how to invite the many—and that is the work now.

TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP ways of giving are different engines that do different kinds of work. I have spent my career watching both. I started in the art world at an auction house, where I trained as an auctioneer and learned how the market moves and what makes a serious collector decide to bid. Over time, I started being asked to serve as a benefit auctioneer, and have since raised more than $50 million that way—for museums and foundations, dance companies and cultural nonprofits, parks and schools, preservation campaigns and health clinics. The list goes on.

Charity auctions teach a lesson that the rest of philanthropy often forgets: People do not give from calculation—they give from feeling. No one raises a paddle to fill a budget gap—they raise it to put a smile on the face of a child, or to affect one thing they can picture changing. My whole job in the five minutes of a live ask is to make a guarded room imagine that one thing until they feel it. I have watched three strangers each pledge $50,000 in response to a single ask, with no plant and nothing prearranged. The cause stopped being an abstraction, and the courage of the one who went first gave the others permission to follow. That works the same whether the gift is $50 or $50 million.

I see the other side of it with the boards I sit on—in the world of dance, at A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham, and in civic life, at the Governors Island Foundation—where you learn what becomes of the money long after the applause. But, from any vantage, the hardest part of earning support is shaping the emotional connection a giver has to the cause. That is what I discovered when I left the auction world to create my own firm, where I guide collectors in building collections of postwar and contemporary art and advise them on the philanthropy that can give those collections a purpose beyond the wall.

Collecting and giving cease being two separate decisions when a collector begins to see a collection as a philanthropic instrument—whether by lending a work to an exhibition, structuring a gift, or supporting the institutions and artists that made the collection possible. And, as it happens, there is a generational tell in it: Bring an idea to a younger collector and the answer is often yes, because they are still building; bring it to an older one and it is often no, because they feel tapped.

The art world frets endlessly over how to get young people to collect and less over how to get them to give, which is backward. The appetite is there. Millennials now coming into real money are caught between two extremes: more power than any generation in memory to decide what survives, and grief for the loss of the more felt and humane culture of their own childhoods. That grief is not a weakness. It is an opening.

So how do we bring everyone along? It won’t be with a better tax argument but with the way we move a room. We need to lower the barrier and let people feel they belong inside the culture rather than outside it, just writing checks. It begins with access—and artists are showing how. Over dinner after the final dance performance of her recent show, staged at Marian Goodman Gallery, Julie Mehretu told me what she helped create away from her work in her studio: a residency in the Catskills, a pan-African film initiative, and—the thing that stayed with me most—a donation of more than $2 million to the Whitney Museum, so that anyone under 25 years old gets in free. Mehretu spent her own money—not on a wing with her name on it but on removing what’s often the one barrier between a young person and art.

My hometown did that at scale, and the timing matters more than I understood at first. In 2012, a year before the city filed for bankruptcy, voters across metro Detroit agreed to tax themselves to support the DIA in exchange for free admission for residents and expanded access for local schools. By the time the creditors came for the art, the region had already decided the museum was theirs. In 2020 they voted to renew the legislation, by wider margins than the first time. That is the bottom-up engine made real, and it is worth considering how much the collective push had to do with the rescue that followed.

ONE OF THE MOST SERIOUS collectors I know gives almost entirely to the causes his friends bring him into, which is a common mechanism but also a potential trap, because a circle drawn only by friends inviting friends keeps turning up the same faces. Taking someone on the journey of appreciating art deliberately, someone who wasn’t already in the room, can widen a closed loop, which is why an introduction you make can matter as much as a check. And none of it survives without the people who do the patient, unglamorous work of building a base one relationship at a time. We are quicker to fund a named gallery than the salaries that deliver the mission, as if the people doing the work were overhead rather than the engine itself.

I think of Misty Copeland, who, until I auctioneered at a gala for American Ballet Theatre, I did not realize had only begun dancing at 13. Today, through her foundation, she is expanding access to dance and ballet for children in under-resourced communities, creating the possibility that another child might be given the same chance she was. Her philanthropy is not a line in a budget. It is an investment in who gets to participate, who gets to be seen, and, ultimately, who gets to shape the culture next.

If any corner of American life can connect the capital at the top to the base at the bottom and make giving feel like belonging rather than a duty, it is the art world. We have the collectors, the artists already leading, the institutions that hold the memory, and the one thing no other field has in the same measure: the power to make people feel something true in a room together. We have long thought of ourselves as a market, a status game, a refuge for the few. We could instead be one of the country’s most powerful spaces for culture and philanthropy, because we already have everything it takes.

The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts was saved in part by a few foundations. But the museum now belongs to its city because a whole region of ordinary people voted to call it their own. That is the entire answer: the top and the bottom deciding together that something is worth keeping. The only question left is how many of us will decide the same, and how many others we each bring along when we do.