When the National Endowment of the Humanities announced in January its first round of grants since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, one recipient stood out from the rest: Grand Central Atelier.
Based in Queens, the New York art school was awarded $2 million, one of only a handful that exceeded $1 million to a single recipient. The school says that it promotes “art untouched by modernism” and teaches methods “rooted in traditions pre-dating the 19th century and the advent of photography.” Its founder, the realist painter Jacob Collins, has been an outspoken critic of modernism and avant-garde art; he was also a speaker at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in September. There he argued that American modernism was “an error” and that European abstraction complicated the “natural American empricism” that had existed in art prior.
Now, in an interview with the New York Times, Collins says the school’s mission is to stay out of politics. “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.”
According to Collins, he has always had an affinity for Old Master, but finding that out of fashion, started a classical arts academy in the 1990s, Water Street Atellier. That school became Grand Central Academy under a partnership with the Institute of Classical Architecture in Manhattan. In 2014, it became independent and began operating under its current name.
Perhaps most curiously, Collins gave conflicting accounts, according to the Times, as to how the Atelier received the grant. First, he said that he was approached by Michael McDonald, the agency’s acting chairman; then he said that he had reached out to McDonald in August at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance.
The NEH said in a press release that Grand Central Atelier’s grant will support a public lecture series, studio lectures for students, a symposium, a digital publication, and the creation of two new postdoctoral fellowships.
Other recipients of seven-figure NEH grants include University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, a grant-making body headquartered at a conservative think tank, the conservative-aligned Abigail Adams Institute, and Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution.
