Five New York arts nonprofits — BRIC in Brooklyn, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, the Bronx Children’s Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection on Staten Island, and the Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater — have joined the city’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG). The Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) announced the news in a performance-filled press conference in Downtown Brooklyn today, September 30.
Their induction into the coalition of museums, gardens, performing arts centers, and zoos represents the largest cross-borough expansion of the institutional group in nearly five decades. It is supported by $3 million in funding that Mayor Eric Adams added to the city’s operating budget, DCLA said today.
Created in 1869 when the city agreed to construct a new facility for the American Natural History Museum, the CIG is a group of 34 privately managed institutions operating on city-owned property whose members include mostly larger museums and organizations like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Queens Museum.
In exchange for significant funding and energy subsidies from the DCLA as part of the city’s annual operating budget, the coalition members provide discounted programming, such as free membership, for city residents. For the 2026 fiscal year, the DCLA received $299.6 million in funding, $183 million of which was allocated to the CIG.
Because the new CIG members already offer free or low-cost programming, their incorporation into the group will primarily allow them to maintain and expand their work.
Musicians with the Louis Armstrong House Museum closed out today’s press conference with a trumpet-filled performance.
The expansion of the CIG comes at a time of increasing economic volatility in the city’s arts and culture sector, which has been rocked by recently reduced federal spending and growing expenses. Layoffs have rippled through organizations like the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, and BRIC. Guaranteed financial support from the city has become increasingly critical, especially for smaller cultural nonprofits that heavily depend on assistance from grantmakers like the Cultural Development Fund, a DCLA program that provides annual funding to more than 1,000 nonprofits. (For the 2026 fiscal year budget, the fund was apportioned $75.7 million).
“This is a step towards stability,” Lucy Sexton, executive director of the advocacy organization New Yorkers for Arts and Culture (NY4CA), told Hyperallergic. She referenced organizations like the Noble Maritime Collection in Staten Island, which has been weathering financial challenges, understaffing, and reduced programming in recent years.
The last time that such a large number of nonprofits joined the CIG was in the 1960s and ’70s, when institutions including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio were incorporated into the group as part of an effort to increase its diversity and meet the needs of long underserved communities.
Bronx Children’s Museum staff performed a musical reading of the 2024 children’s book My Block Looks Like, which pays homage to the Bronx’s diverse cultural heritage and hip-hop artistry.
This recent expansion similarly focuses on communities historically in need of arts and culture funding, like the Bronx Children’s Museum. A two-decade-old organization that used to operate out of a purple school bus, it found a permanent home on the Harlem River waterfront two and a half years ago and has since served more than 325,000 children with programs spanning art, history, science, technology, and engineering.
At today’s press conference, the organization led a musical reading of the 2024 children’s book My Block Looks Like, written by Bronx-born author Janelle Harper and illustrated by graffiti artist Frank Morrison, which celebrates the borough’s cultural heritage and hip-hop history.
“What our Cultural Institutions Group has said to our kids is that ‘Your culture matters, your education matters, your learning matters, and we are here for you,’” Denise Rosario Adusei, the museum’s executive director, said at today’s press conference.
