H.R. 2664: To amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to provide for additional uses of funds for grants to strengthen historically Black colleges and universities, and for other purposes.

Every year, HBCUs receive federal strengthening grants under the Higher Education Act. The law spells out what that money can be spent on: lab equipment, faculty development, tutoring, construction, endowment building, and a list of other approved uses. Arts programs are not named on that list.

H.R. 2664 would add five arts-specific uses, so an HBCU could put its federal grant toward arts students, arts departments, and its Black art collections. Colleges could fund aid for students in arts, arts education, and cultural programs, and build outreach and fundraising offices for those departments.

Students could also get mentoring from faculty and peers, work-based learning, counseling, and career advising. Colleges could pay for well-paid apprenticeships, internships, and fellowships arranged through nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, and could partner with the National Endowment for the Arts to run any of it.

The fifth use is the collections themselves. Many HBCUs hold significant Black art, and the bill lets grant money cover exhibiting, maintaining, monitoring, and protecting those works, whether they hang in a gallery or sit in storage.

The bill adds no new money, so any dollar a college steers toward the arts is a dollar it does not spend on labs, tutoring, or buildings. Whether arts programs actually gain depends on each campus's choices and on how much Congress appropriates for the strengthening program overall.

The bill's findings make the case with numbers: only 1.4% of artists featured in America's top museums are Black, only 4% of top-museum directors are Black, and in 2018 at least 18 colleges nationwide planned to severely curtail or eliminate their arts departments, according to the College Art Association.