DOGE cuts

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There’s this little studio in the Birmingham suburbs, just across the tracks from the Irondale Cafe that Fannie Flagg made famous as her Whistlestop, where for decades artists with autism have gathered to paint, to draw. To work.

Sydney Windham paints flowers that burst with joy. Inés Orihuela’s charming works have evolved over the decades she has spent at that place.

And the U.S. government thinks people like Sydney and Inés are a waste of money.

Studio By the Tracks, like hundreds of other groups across America, learned last month it had lost the National Endowment for the Arts grants it received just last year to expand the program, to stay open longer and hold more classes and serve more people. About $50,000 over the next two years is gone. Poof. Like vapor, or the ability to plan for an uncertain future. Or common sense, it seems.

This is not some daycare, some Bohemian way to pass the time. It is a working studio for working artists who happen to be on the spectrum. Autistic artists, they prefer to be called,

But they are artists.

Watch John Miller work, head down and too focused to look up, pulling cityscapes from his head until they sweep across the page. Or Byron Pickett, who offers a fist bump and an explosion of color. Or a young woman named Morgan Shockley, who last week was finishing up a painting of an owl beneath the deep blue night sky.

If their small needs are somehow a financial burden to this country, we need to examine what kind of country we have, or want.

This studio is in its 36th year, serving 58 adults and about 20 children now. It’s a haven for these artists, a place for them to work in a supportive environment, to show and sell and profit from their art.

“They feel an ownership of this space,” the studio’s Lauren Cushman said. “They feel like this is their job. For a lot of them this is their job. It is the check they receive.”

It’s not an art school, though the artists can find support and supplies and instruction by visiting artists in residence. They do not graduate, so some, like Orihuela, have remained for decades. They do not pay to come. It is free. And their work is sold in the store, or in fundraising events, or in some cases it is licensed, with the artists receiving 60% of the sales. They get quarterly checks, and everyone gets something.

Merrilee Challiss is the studio’s executive director, and she swells when telling the stories of these artists. Of Garrett Bailey who builds worlds and his brother Gabriel Bailey, who loves architectural styles. And of so many more.

They have changed her world as much as she has changed theirs.

So it was shocking to learn in May that the grant to the studio, like all those other theaters, art studios and literary projects, was terminated because they fell outside the new priorities of the Trump administration.

It is hard for me to think of Sydney and Inés and John and Byron and Morgan and Gabriel and Garrett – or Merrilee and Lauren, for that matter – as falling outside the priorities of my country.

But Studio by the Tracks will carry on, as it has all these years, selling art in its gallery store, counting on local foundations and big fundraisers, like one coming up next month at Protective Stadium in downtown Birmingham. Challiss will try to get help from Alabama’s Congressional delegation, from those in both parties. She and the others will keep smiling, because you can’t really help but smile in a place like this.

It is only when Challiss talks of the list that keeps track of cuts to groups like hers – $27 million at least – that a tear comes. Not for her studio but for all those others. When she reads it she knows what those dollar figures mean. Salaries that will disappear, jobs gone, services ended. People deprioritized.

“I’ll get emotional,” she said. “It’s just kind of shocking to me in a free democratic society that values everyone.”

It is clear, in this democratic society, in this particular moment, that arts are not a priority. Literature and drama do not fit with the president’s plan, and neither do those who make art or absorb it, who express themselves through it and understand the world better because of it.p

should not be a political issue. It is a human one.

But hundreds of agencies, tens of thousands of people who would have benefited from these grants at a cost far less than the president’s military parade, do not seem to matter in this moment. They are not America’s priority.