NEH Awards $2 Million to Grand Central Atelier as Founder Jacob Collins Calls for Artists to Stay “Unpolitical”
A $2 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has put Grand Central Atelier, a realist art school based in Queens, at the center of a widening debate over public funding, cultural priorities, and the politics of taste.
Announced in January as part of the NEH’s first round of grants since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the award to Grand Central Atelier was among only a handful of grants topping $1 million. The school describes its program as promoting “art untouched by modernism,” teaching methods “rooted in traditions pre-dating the 19th century and the advent of photography.”
The Atelier was founded by realist painter Jacob Collins, who has been a vocal critic of modernism and avant-garde art. In September, Collins spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., where he argued that American modernism was “an error” and said European abstraction complicated what he called “natural American empricism” in art that existed previously.
In an interview with the New York Times, Collins framed the school’s mission as an effort to avoid partisan alignment, even as he acknowledged that art and institutions rarely sit outside public life. “To say things aren’t politics — that’s just not true,” Collins said, in his first major comments since the award. “But the artist is very wise to be as unpolitical as possible.”
Collins told the Times that his commitment to Old Master traditions began early, but that he found such approaches out of step with prevailing art-world fashions. In the 1990s, he started a classical arts academy called Water Street Atellier. That school later became Grand Central Academy through a partnership with the Institute of Classical Architecture in Manhattan. In 2014, the program became independent and began operating under its current name, Grand Central Atelier.
Questions have also surfaced about how the grant came together. According to the Times, Collins offered differing accounts: he initially said he was approached by Michael McDonald, the NEH’s acting chairman, and later said he contacted McDonald in August at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance.
In its own announcement, the NEH said the $2 million award will fund a slate of public-facing and academic initiatives at Grand Central Atelier, including a public lecture series, studio lectures for students, a symposium, a digital publication, and the creation of two new postdoctoral fellowships.
The Atelier is not the only recipient of a seven-figure award in the latest NEH round. Other grants exceeding $1 million went to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, a grant-making body headquartered at a conservative think tank.
The scale of the award to a school explicitly positioned against modernism underscores how federal humanities funding can become a proxy battleground for larger arguments: what counts as cultural heritage, which traditions deserve institutional support, and whether “staying out of politics” is possible when public money and public values are at stake.
