After Florida governor Ron DeSantis cancelled the state’s funding for arts and culture, Miami Beach has stepped up to ensure its museums won’t take a hit. The city commission will provide a one-time contribution of nearly $1 million to help local arts and culture organizations meet the budget gap created by the state for the 2025 fiscal year.
The city’s upcoming budget had already planned to cover about 50 percent of the lost state funds with a one-time expenditure of $492,676. Instead, in an unanimous vote, the city has opted to cover the full shortfall, with about $960,000 that will be split between 17 organizations.
Those include the Bass Museum of Art, the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, and the Wolfsonian FIU, at Florida International University.
“Miami Beach’s arts and culture institutions not only provide jobs and tremendous economic impact to our city, but also extend benefits and free programming to our residents and students,” Miami Beach commissioner Tanya K. Bhatt said in a statement. “As we transition from a party-till-you-drop city to one with robust diverse entertainment options, this one-time stop-gap funding will continue to cement our reputation for a city which values our cultural anchors.”
The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach in 2022. Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images.
Miami Beach, of course, is home to perhaps the largest art event in the United States, with Art Basel Miami Beach and its many satellite fairs bringing a week-long carnival of art events to the city and surrounding municipalities each December.
With it comes a major boost to tourism—to which the arts are a major contributor all year round. According to a 2023 study by Americans for the Arts, the nonprofit arts and culture sectors spent a total of $334.9 million in Miami Beach in 2022. That figure is $2 billion in Miami Dade County.
And yet, statewide, DeSantis’s budget, passed in June, eliminated $32 million in state arts and culture grants. This was part of close to $1 billion in cuts that reduced the state’s overall spending to $116.5 billion.
Guests arriving at the Wolfsonian FIU Vanity Fair Art Basel Miami Beach Celebration at Wolfsonian on December 4, 2015 in Miami Beach, Florida. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Vanity Fair.
When asked about the elimination of all cultural funding, DeSantis cited “sexual festival[s]” as being inappropriate recipients of taxpayer dollars.
“This unprecedented decision marks a historic departure from the bipartisan support that arts and cultural institutions have traditionally received. For the first time, a governor has decided to withdraw crucial support for the arts, effectively pulling the rug out from under the very foundation of our state’s cultural vibrancy,” Markus Gottschlich, executive director of the St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District Association (WADA) in St. Petersburg, said in a statement.
WADA launched a grass roots campaign advocating on behalf of the local arts organizations that the city council replace the lost funding. In September, local politicians did just that, adding $695,000 in arts funding to the budget, as reported by Tampa news outlet 83 Degrees.
And Orange County, home to Orlando, has earmarked some $75 million in tourist development tax dollars to 11 organizations over the next four years, as reported by Click Orlando. That includes $10 million to the Rollins Museum of Art and $4 million to the Winter Garden Art Association, both of which plan to construct new museum buildings, and $2 million to the Orlando Museum of Art for roof and HVAC projects.
But those funds are separate from institutions’ regular annual budgets, which count on receiving state funding each year. Outside of Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, most art organizations across the state will not be lucky enough to have their budgets made whole.
A report from Burnaway found that smaller institutions are “scrambling to make up for the loss in funding,” while Prism, a nonprofit newsroom run by journalists of color, warned in July that the cuts “will disproportionately impact queer and BlPOC organizations.”
