This paper investigates the mechanism by which the federal government's funding of the arts through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) displaces private charitable contributions to non-profit arts organizations. I estimate that private charitable contributions to arts organizations increased by 50 to 60 cents due to a major funding cut to the NEA during the mid-1990s. These increases, however, also coincided with, on average, a 25 cent increase in fund-raising expenditures by arts organizations for every dollar decrease in government grants. The estimate of crowding out found in this paper is relatively large, particularly for a study using a micro-data set. I argue that an appropriate interpretation of an estimate of a crowding-out parameter, in general, depends crucially on the context.