[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-2217872022.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen the National Endowment of the Humanities announced in January its first round of grants since the start of President Donald Trump\u2018s second term, one recipient stood out from the rest: Grand Central Atelier.<\/p>\n
\n\tBased 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 \u201cart untouched by modernism\u201d and teaches methods \u201crooted in traditions pre-dating the 19th century and the advent of photography.\u201d 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 \u201can error\u201d and that European abstraction complicated the \u201cnatural American empricism\u201d that had existed in art prior.<\/p>\n
\n\tNow, in an interview with the New York Times<\/em>, Collins says the school\u2019s mission is to stay out of politics. \u201cTo say things aren\u2019t politics\u2014that\u2019s just not true,\u201d Collins said, in his first major comments since the award. \u201cBut the artist is very wise to be as unpolitical as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAccording 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.<\/p>\n \n\tPerhaps most curiously, Collins gave conflicting accounts, according to the Times<\/em>, as to how the Atelier received the grant. First, he said that he was approached by Michael McDonald, the agency\u2019s acting chairman; then he said that he had reached out to McDonald in August at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance.<\/p>\n \n\tThe NEH said in a press release that Grand Central Atelier\u2019s grant will support a public lecture series, studio lectures for students, a symposium, a digital publication, and the creation of two new postdoctoral fellowships.<\/p>\n \n\tOther 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\u00a0<\/em>Abigail Adams Institute, and Philadelphia\u2019s Museum of the American Revolution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/grand-central-atelier-neh-grant-interview-1234777515\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-2217872022.jpg?w=1024″] When the National Endowment of the Humanities announced in January its first round of grants since the start of President Donald Trump\u2018s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1830005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1830005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1830005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1830005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1830005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}