Earlier this year, Gov.Matt Bevin announced his state budget that will be ratified in April.

In the days leading up to Bevin’s State of the Commonwealth speech, rumors swirled across the state in Vincent van Gogh proportions. 

The Kentucky Arts Council, which is part of the Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet, with the new budget has an immediate cut of 4.5 percent followed by a nine percent decrease in each of the next two years. 

The Arts Council helps various programs across the state, including providing grant money to LexArts, an organization that promotes the arts in Lexington. 

According to Nan Plummer, director of LexArts, the organization has already received their grant money from the Arts Council. Since grant money has already been given to various organizations across the state, money will now have to be cut from other programs to fill the estimated $120,000 gap in funding. 

“We would certainly feel it, and we will feel it,” Plummer said. “Over the next couple of years this puts at threat some of the programs that help individual artists get their works to market.”

At a university where the covering and uncovering of a wall issues a campus  debate, it’s hard to argue that art isn’t worth the funding. Art creates emotion, helps to chronicle our culture, and represents humanity in a way that science, technology, engineering and math fields cannot.

It cannot be argued that STEM fields aren’t necessary, as advances in science and technology have changed the world. But as leaders like Winston Churchill have said, if we lose our art and creative spirit, we lose our will to fight. 

If funding goes solely to STEM,  a machine is created. Where is the color that chronicles our communities, where is the passion to work, where is the pride in the beauty that is all around us?

UK spokesman Jay Blanton said it is too early to tell how budget cuts to the arts will affect UK, and more information will come in April when the budget is finalized. 

Plummer said she’s working in other states who have had funding cut, and that it takes a while to build back the level of support a department found before the cuts. 

While the cuts aren’t the worst case scenario, they aren’t the best, and in a state that Plummer said has an identity that is centered in the arts more than other states, the repercussions of a lack of funding could mean that deserving organizations slip through the cracks. 

“I think as citizens we should be asking more,” Plummer said.

With a city where murals from world renowned artists color the skyline, art has become part of our identity as a city. Fighting to protect it should be a priority.

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