By Melanie Grayce West 

The nonprofit Flushing Town Hall has for decades put on cultural events aimed at appealing to the highly diverse Queens neighborhood, receiving regular support for its programming from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Take, for example, a "Global Mash Up" series, which brings artists with different music styles from different cultures together for a jam session. That series, which kicks off this month, was funded in part with a $25,000 grant from the NEA. Additional funds for the series, said Ellen Kodadek, executive and artistic director of Flushing Town Hall, were secured in part because of the NEA backing.

A budget proposal released last week by President Donald Trump calls for abolishing the NEA, which last fiscal year gave roughly 10% of its nearly $150 million annual budget to arts groups in New York City.

Congress will ultimately decide the size of any cutbacks in arts funding. But many New York City administrators and artists--especially those representing small or nascent arts groups--say they are preparing for the worst.

"It's so heartbreaking I want to cry," said Ms. Kodadek of the proposed cuts. "I almost don't know how to talk about it."

A White House official said NEA funding of the arts represents a small portion of funding for these programs, and the vast majority of funding comes from the private sector. State arts agencies are funded at about $300 million, said the official. Nationally, 2015 private sector giving to the arts, culture and humanities, either by individuals, foundations and corporations totaled approximately $17 billion.

The NEA budget is approximately $147 million, said the official.

By city, New York City arts groups receive the most contributions from the NEA.

According to the Center for an Urban Future, a New York based nonpartisan policy group, from 1998 to 2016, more than 7,500 grants totaling almost $270 million flowed to the city's cultural organizations. In fiscal year 2016, $15.5 million in NEA money was awarded to 425 arts organizations in New York City.

Most grants went to small organizations without sophisticated channels to major philanthropists.

Nearly 100 NEA grants in the amount of $10,000 were made to groups across the state in 2016, including a grant to the American Tap Dance Foundation to support educational activities and performances. The largest grant in 2016, more than $750,000, went to the New York State Council on the Arts to support partnership agreements with arts groups.

Grants touched mega organizations like Lincoln Center, and smaller places like the Children's Museum of Manhattan, which used a recent grant of $15,000 to support a Muslim artist series. The NEA grants, said Andrew Ackman, executive director of the museum, are vital to jump start new initiatives and attract private and city funding to serve a children's audience "that is often not part of the arts and cultural community."

The proposed cuts now, said Mr. Ackman, seem "broader in terms of devaluing the arts and humanities."

Lane Harwell, executive director of Dance NYC, an advocacy and trade group, said that many arts groups are wrestling with a new narrative against the cuts and are working to develop a fresh case for federal support of arts funding.

That new argument, said Mr. Harwell, could be the so-called arts-multiplier, in that art drives tourism, ticket sales, business at restaurants and hotels, creates artistic and technical jobs and, ultimately, tax revenue. Eliminating the NEA, in turn, is bad business.

"Arts organizations don't like to make those cases because those aren't the reasons they do their work," said Mr. Harwell. "But the data is there and any case for eliminating the endowment should take it into account."

Write to Melanie Grayce West at melanie.west@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 26, 2017 08:52 ET (12:52 GMT)