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    The ongoing fight to replace racist monuments in the US: ‘requires a lot of perseverance’

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    After nearly half a decade, Vinnie Bagwell, a self-taught sculptor-artist, is still waiting for the million dollars that the New York City department of cultural affairs promised for her to work on monument Victory Beyond Sims, after winning the artist competition to replace the monument of Dr J Marion Sims in 2020.“It just requires a lot of diligence and perseverance,” she said to the Guardian. “A lot of times, people don’t realize how important and impactful art in public places is until they see it.”Sims was a 19th-century gynecologist known for experimenting on 12 enslaved and poor immigrant women without consent. City officials removed his monument in April 2018 after a unanimous vote by the Public Design Commission.Bagwell will be the first Black woman to have a memorial on Fifth Avenue. Bagwell began sculpting in 1993 and created the First Lady of Jazz in Yonkers, the first public artwork made by a contemporary African American woman commissioned by a municipality in the United States.Her 9ft (2.7-meter) monument is of a Black woman with 14ft wings, only the second Black Angel statue to be visible publicly in the US.The shape of Africa cut away from the woman’s heart symbolizes the enslavement of 12 million people over hundreds of years. On her right side the braille will read “My Soul looks back and wonders how I got over!” and on the left it will read “Primum non nocere!” (First do no harm).View image in fullscreenTo honor the suffering of Sims’s victims, whose anguish brought advancement to the field of gynecology, there will be 12 women silhouetted on her back. A slave ship is also depicted on the back to illustrate the inhumanity of slavery. The names of the survivors we know will be emblazoned into the helm of the garment.Bagwell hopes that the monument, which will be across the street from the New York Academy of Medicine, will function as a vehicle of change for the community. “Women are more under fire now than we were before. So many of us women have lost a lot of the right to control our bodies. New York is still safe, but [women in] Arkansas aren’t,” she says. “When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they’re talking about going backward; that is still something to be concerned about.”Bagwell’s situation is not unique, with many other cities also stalling progress to replace Confederate statues and symbols. However, Vinnie has encountered many obstacles.First, a committee chose artist Simone Leigh as the winner, even though community members had voted for Bagwell. After a heated debate, the city ultimately reversed its decision. Then, the city attempted to cut $250,000 from its budget but failed. Bagwell has been waiting longer than the typical 90 days after signing her contract to receive the money.In a statement to the Guardian, the department stated its excitement about the project moving forward. “New York City has taken bold steps in the effort to foster a collection of public artworks that better reflect who we are as a city, including this project – long called for by the local community – to commission a new monument for this site in East Harlem,” they note.“This administration remains committed to fostering a diverse, vibrant public art collection that more fully represents the vast range of stories, experiences, and backgrounds that define New Yorkers. We’re excited for the Victory project to move ahead.”View image in fullscreenOn 23 June, the design commission voted unanimously to approve Bagwell’s designs, and she can now begin work.Bagwell’s situation reflects a broader failure to follow through on legislation and promises made following the 2020 racial justice protests, where Americans dismantled statues of Confederate soldiers that stood in their communities after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.In 2021, Joe Biden passed legislation to replace the monument of Roger Taney, a pro-slavery chief justice who served on the court from 1836 until 1864, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American supreme court justice, in the United States Capitol. The intended deadline for the building of the statute was December 2024, but that month, a source familiar with the matter said the joint committee on the library had only just signed off on a memorandum to begin the process.Now, a 2025 executive order signed by Donald Trump mandating that the secretary of the interior restore monuments removed in the last five years puts in jeopardy the already fragile progress made by past laws to diversify the public landscape in the US.Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson said that it’s “very possible” that more people are now in support of removing objects that help tell Black stories. “It’s the risk we take that is part of the struggle,” he said. Watson worked to replace a Confederate monument with a John Lewis memorial in Decatur, Georgia. “It would be a tragedy if it were to be removed, but then we’ll just have to do it again,” he said. “The journey cannot be stopped.”In 2017, Trump tweeted: “the beauty [Confederate monuments] that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”This debate on the rise and fall of monuments dates back to the 1870s. In 1876, Frederick Douglass called into question the making of the Emancipation Memorial, built by artist Thomas Bell in Washington DC. The creation of the statute was funded using donations from recently freed people.View image in fullscreenWhile the city created the monument to honor emancipation, it depicted a white man holding out his hand over a chained kneeling Black man, a design Douglass found problematic. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the Negro, not couched on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man,” he said. DC officials removed the statute in 2021, and advocates are still discussing its replacement.Nearly 150 years after Douglass’s speech, only 10% of the top 50 national monuments are of Black and Indigenous people, according to an audit completed by the Monument Lab, a non-profit public art and history studio.“The story of this continent is not reflected in our monument landscape in full,” said Paul Farber, the director and co-founder of the Monument Lab. “The monuments we have tell a partial story. Adding a monument or the selective removal of a monument can have a profound effect for a city or town. If we don’t respond to the erasures, the lies by design we will be doomed to repeat. Our audit also showed that 99.4% of monuments were not taken down in 2021 or 2022.”The Trump administration’s influence has now rolled back even that little bit of progress. This year, Pete Hegseth rolled back the names of two military forts to their namesakes of confederate soldiers. Following pressure from Republicans, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, also ordered the destruction of the Black Lives Matter plaza in front of the White House.Trump has proposed reviving his controversial National Garden of American Heroes, using money cut from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which ended hundreds of grants for libraries, museums and archives. The garden would include George Washington and Christopher Columbus statues alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Kobe Bryant and Whitney Houston.“When you look at some of the things that this particular administration is talking about, they’re talking about going backward,” Bagwell says. “That is still something to be concerned about.”View image in fullscreenNationally, Republicans have been mixed on the issue of inclusion in public spaces. A Kentucky state senator, Chris McDaniel, is still advocating for the replacement of a Confederate statue. In 2020, he pre-filed a bill that would replace Jefferson Davis in the Capitol Rotunda with Carl Brashear, the first African American US navy master diver born in Tonieville, Kentucky.“His story is inspirational,” he says. “That’s what monuments are supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be able to point to people and say: ‘This is somebody you can look up to.’”McDaniel’s bill to replace Davis in the Capitol is at a standstill as the Kentucky Capitol Arts Advisory Committee and other legislators must weigh in on who they believe deserves to be honored.Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, has shown mixed messages about Confederate symbols in his state. During the 2020 election, almost 73% of people in Mississippi voted to remove the Confederate flag with a new state’s flag. “This is not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together, to be reconciled and to move on,” Reeves said after the vote and before it was eventually replaced.In the same year, Reeves simultaneously opposed the removal of Confederate monuments. “I reject the mobs tearing down statues of our history, north and south, Union and Confederate, founding fathers and veterans,” he says. “I reject the chaos and lawlessness, and I am proud it has not happened in our state.” ​Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who led the building of Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, a civil rights museum that works to reshape the racist narratives about African Americans in Alabama, explains Reeves’s messaging.“I think it’s a struggle, a competing narrative, and sometimes they give away a little something by holding on to something that makes what they’re giving away feel acceptable,” he tells the Guardian. Stevenson says it “is about power, because most of the people who are kind of in control of these things [are] aligned, in my view, with this problematic history. We can’t accept just what [they’re] gonna give” us.Some artists who have worked to replace Confederate monuments with ones that honor Black history have succeeded and received praise despite government resistance. In Roanoke, Virginia, the city sculptor commissioned Lawrence Bechtel to replace a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee with one of Henrietta Lacks.View image in fullscreenLacks’ cells, now called HeLa, were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and have now become vital to medical research; they have been used to develop polio and Covid-19 vaccines. It took about four years for the city to raise the money for the statue and a year from the contract being signed for Bechtel to build the monument.“I had bought a veil to cover it over, and everyone was invited to come close as the veil was pulled off, and people just mobbed it. It was fantastic,” he says. “It was just wonderful. It was very uplifting.” Bechtel said he has yet to receive a negative email.Watson, who built a monument of John Lewis to replace a memorial put in place by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, recalls the community’s excitement about the monument before he even finished. “The idea of putting up John Lewis in its place was quite exciting for the community, and since it has been up, I have had nothing but positive responses,” he says.Watson remains steadfast in his belief that the inclusivity of public art is crucial. “I think we artists need to represent our community; we need to have our values represented in our environment,” he says. “I think it’s important that we do have art in our community that represents the truth, represents our values, represents our history, and points our way forward.”Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, believes that reclaiming the narrative in public spaces can challenge the racist narratives embedded into some Americans’ mindset.When he first started working in public art, there were 59 markers and monuments honoring the Confederacy in his state yet none paid tribute to Alabama’s history of being the state with one of the largest slave populations, so he and his team worked to create plaques in public spaces that honored those who were enslaved.View image in fullscreenHe refers to the process of reframing public conversation as narrative work, responding to the racist views long perpetuated by institutions. With the building and taking down of monuments, he suggests that we need a new framework to tell the full story of American history as a nation.“I think we have to find a better way to help people in this country recognize that there’s a place for people of African descent in this country and that our stories can’t be denied any longer,” Stevenson says.Bagwell also emphasizes the importance of honoring African Americans’ vital contributions to American society through public art. “It’s just stunning that we have made so much out of so little,” she says. “The contributions we’ve made to this country are phenomenal, and they should be remembered because we are very much a part of what made America great in the first place.” More

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      Trump says he fired National Portrait Gallery chief in latest conflict with arts

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      Donald Trump says he is firing the first female director of the National Portrait Gallery, which contained a caption that referenced the attack on the US Capitol that his supporters carried out in early 2021.The president announced the termination on Friday in a post on his social media platform that accused Sajet – born in Nigeria, raised in Australia and a citizen of the Netherlands – of being “a strong supporter” of diversity initiatives that his administration opposes as well as “highly partisan”. He cited no evidence for either claim.Legal experts, including Eric Columbus, a former litigator for the January 6 select committee, suggested Trump does not have the power to fire Sajet, since the gallery is part of the Smithsonian, which is not run by the executive branch.In its collection of portraits of American presidents, the gallery had this text about Trump: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”Sajet arrived in the US with her family in 1997, held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, according to a Guardian profile of her.The National Portrait Gallery is an art museum in Washington DC that opened in 1968 and is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It boasts the only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.After beginning his second presidency in January, Trump issued an executive order directing the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the institution’s storied museums.Sajet had said the gallery under her leadership tried “very hard to be even-handed when we talk about people and that’s the key”.“Everyone has an opinion about American presidents, good, bad and indifferent,” Sajet said. “We hear it all, but generally I think we’ve done pretty well.” More

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      Casualties in Trump’s war on the arts: the small museums keeping local history alive

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      For the past two years, a small arts non-profit has been telling stories about the communities living alongside the Los Angeles river, one voice at a time.The organization, called Clockshop, has collected the oral histories of nearly 70 local residents, activists and elected officials. Their knowledge is compiled in a vast cultural atlas – which contains videos, an interactive map and a self-guided tour exploring the waterway and its transformation from a home for the Indigenous Tongva people to a popular, rapidly gentrifying urban space.But in April, the future of the ever-growing atlas was thrown in uncertainty, when a three-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency that supports libraries, archives and museums, was terminated 17 months early. The grant, originally for $150,000, still had $20,000 left to pay out. “There is no recourse to recover the funds still in the grant project activities,” the organization said in a post on Instagram.Now, executive director Sue Bell Yank says their mission to preserve the stories of residents ousted by gentrification could lead to “erasure of the past, of cultural self-determination, and a lack of understanding about how communities can successfully advocate for the kinds of neighborhoods we deserve”.Clockshop’s post foreshadowed an alarming message that would eventually be delivered to hundreds of other arts and cultural institutions across the US. As the Trump administration directed federal agencies to cancel grants that did not support the president’s new priorities, which focused on funding “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” and targeted anything broadly deemed “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion), millions of dollars dedicated to preserving local history and culture suddenly disappeared.Shortly after IMLS grants were terminated, so too were those awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). By Friday 2 May, a spreadsheet created by writer and theater director Annie Doren was being passed around the internet, aiming to catalog every organization that had lost their NEA funding. With more than 500 organizations on the list, the question shifted from who lost their funding to who didn’t.View image in fullscreenWhile organizations of all kinds were impacted, it is the small and midsized institutions that lack endowments, prominent donors, and broad outreach whose futures are particularly in jeopardy. The cuts have affected a broad swath of projects – from a documentary film-maker in Fresno making a film about a woman who has played Harriet Tubman in civil war reenactments for 30 years; to a dance performance about south-east Asian mothers in New York City, to an organization that brings films, book clubs and other cultural events to rural Montana.Rick Noguchi who runs a non-profit called California Humanities, said he has seen the 112 NEH grants it awarded across the state suspended indefinitely by the Trump administration. “There are many newer immigrant communities that don’t have deep donors and struggle with being able to find individual donors that step in to tell their stories.”‘The country is abandoning its citizens’Back in Los Angeles, the cuts have blanketed cultural institutions with feelings of anxiety and urgency. But their leaders are also fighting back, vowing to continue the work of preserving local history in spite of the administration’s threats to revoke non-profit status if they continue to champion DEI programs.The Japanese American National Museum (JANM), an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood that focuses on the history, culture and legacy of Japanese immigrants, initially lost grants that amounted to roughly $1.45m – though some have since been temporarily restored after a court order. Among those cut was a NEH landmarks of American history and culture grant, which funded a workshop helping teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration during the second world war. JANM CEO Ann Burroughs said that the program benefits approximately 20,000 students a year.“It was very much to ensure that the history was never forgotten,” Burroughs said about the museum’s mission and outreach. “It was also to ensure that what happened to Japanese Americans never happened to anybody else.”View image in fullscreenLos Angeles’s One Institute, which houses the largest queer archive in the world, also uses their collection to help educate others on queer history and marginalization. They lost a $15,000 NEA grant to support their upcoming annual festival in October, and now they are scrambling to hold fundraisers to keep the festival on track.Tony Valenzuela, the organization’s executive director, said that their event is important because it covers a gap in education. “Even in liberal states like California, only a fraction of students learn about the contributions of queer people to society,” Valenzuela said. “If the government abandons funding non-profits and other individuals and organizations providing a social good, this country will also be abandoning whole swaths of its citizens who greatly benefit from this work.”Another organization that was hit hard was the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which operates the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, located just a few blocks north of the neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. They lost four grants administered by IMLS, NEH, and California Humanities, and are unlikely to receive an NEA grant that normally keeps the organization running – a total value of nearly $144,000 dollars, or 22% of the organization’s annual budget.Like Clockshop, the LAPD’s exhibitions, public programs and archives chart the ways Skid Row has been transformed – and nearly erased – due to development and gentrification. “Not everyone sees Skid Row as a community, let alone a thriving arts community,” said Henry Apodaca, LAPD’s media archivist. “This is a critical counter narrative to popular narratives that we’ve all been inundated with when talking about Skid Row.”View image in fullscreenOne of the terminated grants was an IMLS grant for small museums, which was being used to support a project called Welcome to the Covid Hotel. The project, named for the temporary medical treatment centers that popped up in vacant hotels during the pandemic to care for unhoused people, culminated in an exhibition and a series of theatrical performances based on interviews with patients, nurses and social workers.“There’s stories of people coming in blind and getting cataract surgeries,” explains LAPD’s co-founder and artistic director, John Malpede. “Someone with gangrene needed to have his legs amputated, and it saved his life. And most people got and accepted some form of next-step housing.”Malpede’s performance is a creative way for policymakers to notice the Covid Hotels’ impact and potentially make the sites into permanent fixtures. When the grants were canceled, LAPD was still waiting on more than $38,000 to come through: money that was supposed to pay venues, crew and performers for events that took place in April, as well as upcoming performances in May and June, and a forthcoming publication. While LAPD aims to move forward with their plans, they are uncertain on how to fund it.After going public on social media, private donors have since stepped up to help the JANM and Clockshop recoup their losses. LAPD and the One Institute, however, are still looking for support. Without this funding, not only could the non-profits disband, but also the communities that have flourished as a result of their work.As Malpede warns: “It’s only because of the neighborhood standing up and using its own history that it continues to be present.” More

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      ‘Love, hope, community and resistance’: ACLU to unveil 9,000 sq ft quilt for trans rights

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      “It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t anxious,” Abdool Corlette said while discussing his latest project with the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom to Be. An award-winning film-maker and head of brand at the ACLU, Corlette has been working for nearly two years with hundreds of trans people across the country to create a 9,000 sq ft quilt, composed of 258 panels that are packed with responses to the question: what does freedom mean to you?Corlette is anxious because Freedom to Be is all about trans joy and trans freedom, and it will make a defiant stand for both on 17 May in Washington DC in spite of the war that Donald Trump has waged against the trans community since his inauguration.“We have been doing everything we can to create contingency plans to make sure we have every scenario accounted for,” Corlette said. “This is what keeps me up at night, making sure our guests are safe.”This was not the celebration that Corlette had hoped for. When Freedom to Be kicked off in September 2023, it was focused more around combating the tsunami of anti-trans legislation that has taken over statehouses since 2020, as well as the related wave of anti-trans rhetoric that has seeded the ground for such legislation. The first two prongs of the campaign have already occurred: with the first, Corlette helped tell the stories of trans kids whose lives had been transformed by gender-affirming medical care, and with the second he spearheaded a rally on the steps of the supreme court on 4 December 2024, in conjunction with oral arguments in the case of United States v Skrmetti. The eventual ruling on that case will decide on the legality of bans against gender-affirming care for trans minors.The third prong of Freedom to Be happens this weekend as part of WorldPride, an annual global celebration of the LGBTQ+ community that just happens to occur in DC this year. The festivities will play out during the upswing of one of the most virulently anti-queer governments in US history, and, already, attenders from all over the world have pulled out, as have many of the event’s corporate sponsors.View image in fullscreenIn spite of the potentially dangerous situation, Corlette is hoping that the trans community will be able to find joy as he publicly displays the completed quilt. “I want someone who is feeling heavy to walk into that space and see that across the United States there’s 9,000 sq ft of messages of love, hope, community and resistance,” Corlette said. “Joy is what I want to blanket that day.”Lee Blinder, founding executive director of Trans Maryland, took part in helping create some of those messages that Corlette hopes trans people and their allies will see in DC. On 9 February this year, less than three weeks into the Trump administration, Blinder walked into a local queer bar to host more than 100 members of the trans community in creating squares for the quilt. According to Blinder, coming together to make the quilt instilled hope amid the onslaught against trans people that filled Trump’s first weeks in office. “People walked into that room feeling extraordinarily grateful to be there,” Blinder said. “There were these gorgeous multicolored sewing machines; there was so much thought and intention that went into the event. Multiple people came up to me and said, ‘We’re so grateful that y’all had this event. This is what I needed.’ It was really nice to be there and take time out of that impossible week.”Blinder’s comments speak to the power of being in community, even when confronted by the profound threats to basic human rights and bodily autonomy posed by the Trump administration and Republican-led state governments. It is a power Blinder is quite familiar with, as for years they have led Trans Maryland in hosting weekly trans support groups and organizing a program in which trans people help each other with name and gender marker changes. “It’s trans people who have been through the process helping other community members,” they told me.View image in fullscreenBlinder plans to be in DC for the unveiling of the Freedom to Be quilt, and they are extremely thrilled to be participating. “I’m really excited to see it all stitched together in person,” they said. “I saw all the quilt squares stacked there [in the bar] after everyone had made them – there’s this pool table in the space, and they’d lay them out there where we could see a little bit of the vision of how they would all come together.”Blinder echoed many who have posed art as an important element in fighting back against the Trump administration and other anti-LGBTQ+ governments. In particular, they see the way that art can bring together communities, while also opening minds and hearts, as integral to pushing back against authoritarian political movements. “The process of creating art has been a longstanding element of resistance for the trans and queer community,” they said. “It’s a key component with the resistance against fascism – it’s played a key role in the past, and I think it will continue to play a significant role in the resistance as it is right now.”According to Corlette, working with trans people at a particularly dangerous time for the community has been a powerful and often painful experience, as he has built personal relationships with individuals who have been harmed by repressive governmental policies. “Individuals who were storytellers in the first part of this campaign have had to pick up and leave their home states for fear of safety for their own bodies,” he said. “That’s what makes it so personal.”View image in fullscreenCorlette hopes that Freedom to Be will not just reach trans people and their allies but also connect with anyone who is feeling demoralized amid the authoritarian ambitions of the Trump administration. “No matter how daunting this fight is, hope has not been lost,” he said. “If the most marginalized community in the country is remaining in the fight, everyone else should be as well.”Ultimately, Corlette sees Freedom to Be as continuing a legacy of transformative community action taken by the queer community in support of itself. For him, spreading stories and joy while giving the community ways to be together is what’s most important. “This monument is a direct descendant of the Aids memorial quilt,” he said. “We wanted to really be in the legacy of those who came before us, to use art and advocacy to not only memorialize but to create pockets of joy for communities to tell their stories and come together to celebrate their existence.” More

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      ‘It’s all very sad’: Trump’s attack on arts funding has a devastating effect

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      On the afternoon of 3 May, arts organizations around the US began receiving cryptic emails from a previously unknown government email account. The missives declared that these organizations’ missions were no longer in line with new governmental arts priorities, which included helping to “foster AI competency”, “empower houses of worship” and “make America healthy again”.Chad Post, a publisher at Open Letter Books, a program of the University of Rochester that specializes in publishing translated literature, got his email just before entering a screening of Thunderbolts*. He put a quick post on Instagram, and when he came out of the movie his phone was full of responses. “I seemed to be the first one to receive this,” he recounted. “But then, all of a sudden, everyone was getting these letters.”Post told me that he had been in touch with 45 publishers who had had their NEA grants terminated, and he suspected that all 51 publishers receiving grants for 2025 supporting the publication of books and magazines had now received the letter. Although Open Letter expects to still receive funding for 2025, Post is convinced that no further money will be forthcoming from the National Endowment for the Arts.“According to rules of the email, we should get the money, although if you come back in two months and they never sent it, I wouldn’t be shocked,” he said. “The chilling part of that email is that they’re eliminating the NEA entirely. It lists all these insane things that are the new priority, and says our venture is not in line with the new priority, so we can’t ever apply again.”The grant termination won’t deal a lethal blow to Open Letter Books, but it will alter the kinds of literature that they are able to publish. Post said that he would have to give preference to books from nations that can offer funding – which tends to favor books from European languages and from wealthier countries.This sentiment was echoed by other arts organizations, who see the loss of NEA money as a significant blow, but not a deadly one. Kristi Maiselman, the executive director and curator of CulturalDC, which platforms artists that often are not programed at larger institutions, shared that NEA grants account for $65,000 of a roughly $1.1m budget. Thanks to proactive work between her team and the NEA, Maiselman received her grant this year, but does not expect any further such money. “It’s a pretty significant chunk of the budget for us,” she told me. “What has been hard for us this year is that we really do provide a platform for artists to respond to what’s going on in the world.” Continuing to promulgate those kinds of artists would be more difficult in future.View image in fullscreenAllegra Madsen, the executive director of the LGBTQ+-focused Frameline film festival, said that her grant funding had been in limbo ever since the inauguration of Donald Trump, and was ultimately terminated last week. “I think we could all kind of sense that it was going to go away,” she told me. “I think these blows that came this week are going to be felt very intensely by a lot of different organizations.”Frameline is housed in the same building as a number of other arts organizations dedicated to film, including the Jewish Film Institute, the Center for Asian American Media and BAVC Media, and it also sits adjacent to SF Film and the Independent Television Service, all of which Madsen says were affected by the termination of NEA grants. “We’ve all been hit, and we’re all just sort of figuring out what our next steps are.”One fear that Madsen raised was that many private funders take cues from the Federal government, and now with NEA grants terminated – and possibly the NEA itself getting axed – she is unsure if other donors will get cold feet. “This year we have a cohort of sponsors that are very much sticking by us, and I am incredibly thankful for those organizations standing up. But it is a bigger ask now, it’s a bigger risk for them.”Despite the often seemingly indiscriminate cuts made to the federal government by the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, the organizations the Guardian spoke with all believed that they had been targeted in some way because of the programming that they offer. “Just because it’s being done in mass, I don’t think that takes away from the idea that this is pointed and intentional,” Madsen told me. “Governments like this try to attack the populations that seem to have the least power, and right now they are mistakenly thinking that’s going to be our trans and gender-nonconforming siblings.”Taking a similar perspective, Maiselman sees these cuts as perpetuating a broader cultural turn away from arts programs, in particular those that significantly represent people of color and the queer community. “Prior to losing the NEA, we had lost about $100,000 in sponsorships this year,” she said. “We’re hearing from our sponsors that there are a lot of eyes on them. They’re not exactly saying no, but they are saying saying, ‘not right now’.”View image in fullscreenPost sees private money as a possible way to make up some of the lost NEA funding but fears that there will be a stampede of indie presses all toward the same few donors. “Everyone is feeling a little more broke and a little more strapped right now,” he said. “Arts orgs writ large are going to be competing for funds from the same few individuals and that just scares me.”He also argued that, while a press like Open Letter will be able to continue functioning without NEA money, organizations that only publish literary magazines may fold without significant infusions of private cash. “Those literary magazines don’t have the opportunity to rely on a book breaking out,” he said. “They’re not suddenly going to have an issue of the magazine take off. This might be a massive blow to literary magazines.”Although some arts organizations appear poised to survive the loss of NEA money, they nonetheless feel existentially frightened by the general turn of the political culture away from diversity and toward authoritarianism. “It’s hard right now to see any light at the end of the tunnel,” said Maiselman. “With the rate at which things are changing, it’s going to take years to course correct – that is, if and when the administration changes.”Maiselman further argued that the cultural shift brought in by the aggressive moves of the Trump administration had the potential to profoundly transform the landscape of the arts world. “There’s going to be a reckoning,” she told me. “A lot of organizations won’t survive this.”For her own part, Madsen struck a defiant tone, placing the current repressive political atmosphere in the context of other such threats to the LGBTQ+ community. “We will survive, we have the privilege of being an almost 50-year-old org,” Madsen said. “The LGBTQ+ community has been down this road before. We got through McCarthyism, we got through the Aids crisis, we’ll survive this.”In hopes of surviving, arts organizations are again turning toward one another, finding a community sentiment that many of the people I spoke to called reminiscent of the Covid years. “There are a lot of conversations right now about how we can help one another,” Maiselman told me. Post echoed that, positioning this as a time of collective grieving. “It feels like the end of something,” he said. “It’s sad, it’s all very sad, but we have to keep going somehow. We are damaged but not defeated.” More

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      ‘It’s a scary time’: artists react to White House’s recent targeting of Smithsonian Institution

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      Artists, academics and politicians have shared their outrage in reaction to the Trump administration’s latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network.Late on Thursday, Trump announced that his administration had ordered a large reshaping of the Smithsonian in an attempt to eliminate what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” read the order.Trump’s order specifically criticized the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Saam) exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture. The exhibit features 82 sculptures from more than 70 artists to “[examine] the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States”, according to the museum’s website.The artist Roberto Lugo, who is featured in the Shape of Power exhibit, said it felt “scary” to watch the Trump administration attempt to censure his and others’ work.“The idea of something that I’ve made being in such an important exhibition, and being targeted by people who run the entire country,” Lugo said. “It’s a scary time because you just don’t know if your work is going to be used to help people understand one another or if it’s going to be used as a tool to further divide people,” he added.To create his featured sculpture, DNA Study Revisited, Lugo had to physically encase his entire body in plaster and rubber for hours at a time. It then took more than a month to create the finished piece.The creation of art, Lugo said, allows him to “process experiences”.“I have faced violence in my life because of racism,” Lugo, who is Afro-Latino, said. “As a child, I was assaulted with a baseball bat for trying to play in the wrong neighborhood.” He added: “This was a very therapeutic experience to feel like my DNA is represented in such an important exhibition.”Trump also condemned the widely lauded National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The museum, which formally opened in 2016 at a ceremony with then president Barack Obama, has been celebrated for its thorough curation process of Black American history.As a part of the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, Trump has ordered his vice-president, JD Vance, to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s museums, educational centers and more.Trump’s executive order has already sent shocks through the art and museum spaces, as officials weigh how to continue their work with an administration focused on limiting truth.Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett shared her frustration at Trump’s order and broader opposition to diversity and inclusion on social media.“First Trump removes any reference of diversity from the present – now he’s trying to remove it from our history. Let me be PERFECTLY clear – you cannot erase our past and you cannot stop us from fulfilling our future,” she said in a post on X.US representative Steven Horsford accused the Trump administration of “trying to erase Black history and silence conversations about systemic injustice” with this latest executive order. “By defunding institutions and banning critical conversations, they’re rewriting the narrative,” he said in a statement on X.The attorney and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump emphasized how Trump had specifically called out the NMAAHC, despite its historical archival work that benefits the national as a whole.“The National Museum of African American History and Culture reveals the truth about our nation’s past. Yet a new executive order calls for removing “divisive ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution and singled out the NMAAHC,” he said on X.Educators have also voiced their dismay at Trump’s attempts to attack the work of reporting on American history.Eddie S Glaude Jr, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, wrote on X, “And they said it was about eggs … ,” referring to Republicans’ purported focus on inflation and egg prices.In comments to the Washington Post, Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University, said: “It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that.”Of his Saam exhibit, Lugo said it is an opportunity for selected artists and the communities they represent to have a chance to share their own experiences.“The exhibition is really about telling people’s stories, just as human beings. For some of us, how we appear on the outside has driven people to act a certain way towards us and stereotype us,” said Lugo. He added: “My work is really about harmony and showing people how we’re alike and how we should celebrate each other’s histories. A blanket overall statement that anything regarding race is divisive is really misunderstanding the role of the artists and what it is that we’re trying to achieve with our work.”How and when Trump’s executive orders will take place remain unclear. The Smithsonian has not released a statement on the orders or how it plans to address ongoing attempts at the federal level to shape its content. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is offended by a painting of himself. For once, I get where he’s coming from | Dave Schilling

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      While his friends are getting messy in the group chat, Donald Trump simply has more important things on his mind. Namely, himself. The United States’ war plans are being divulged to journalists like gossip on a second-rate Real Housewives spinoff, but the focus of the American president is squarely on a painting of himself that he doesn’t care for. Trump posted on Truth Social, his personal squawk box for various grievances, that he takes umbrage with a depiction of his face in the Colorado state capitol.The painting depicts Trump as full-faced, cherubic and without wrinkles. He almost looks younger, like a large baby in a suit. A boss baby, if you will. You might assume that at 78, Trump would jump at the chance to shave a few years off his face, but sadly, it seems he’d prefer to look like he was lit by the director of photography from Nosferatu.If I had to put my art critic hat on, I’d say Trump almost looks regal in the Colorado painting. Squint, and he resembles Henry VIII after a shave. You’d think he’d be flattered by that association. After all, Henry VIII had twice the number of wives Trump has. So far.But no, the ire of Trump came down fully on Sunday – and the painting was swiftly removed. “Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” Trump said in his social media post.The state of Colorado is an easy target for Trump. He lost it by 11 points in 2024. The governor, Jared Polis, is a Democrat. The painting was actually crowdfunded in large part by Republicans, but even then, for Trump, it was a perceived insult. And Trump is the kind of person to perceive insults around every corner.“The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst,” he continued. I’m sure that compliment for Obama was one he typed with stubby-fingered frustration. No one should be getting the royal treatment but him. In a sense, that’s the most relatable thing about the man.Take a photo of me without my consent and chances are I will be horrified by the finished product – angles that make me look heavier, show off my ever-expanding bald spot or generally remind me of what I actually look like. The worst pictures are the ones that capture you in some gruesome motion – chewing your food, preparing to launch into a conversation or scratching some intimate area on your body. We’re used to our reversed image in a mirror, our own personal fantasyland where we can pick and choose how we see our flip-flopped face to ensure we leave the house with some semblance of self-esteem intact. Photos reveal what people – strangers and familiars alike – actually see when they look at us: the facial tics, the gestures, the lumps and bumps and frown lines.Worse yet is a painting or drawing. That anyone submits to one of those exaggerated drawings from carnivals or the beach is beyond me. Why would you want a caricature of you drawn by someone you’ve never met, giving you a giant head and a pair of rollerblades or a large pencil? Maybe someone should get one of these for Trump and see if he prefers it to the Henry VIII boss baby painting. “Sir, we thought you’d like this drawing of you surfing while wearing a backwards baseball hat and carrying a puppy in one hand.”There’s a caricature drawing of me on the wall of a bar in Los Angeles called Capri Club, if you ever find your way out here. My drawing sits among those of other regular patrons and luminaries of the neighborhood. It’s based off of a photo of me in front of said bar, having a martini. The moment captured is a lovely memory for me of a summer night well spent with friends and cocktails. The drawing, on the other hand, gives me deep anxiety. I look puffy, for starters. My substantial, jowly cheeks seem to grow every time I look at it, as though I have Dorian Gray-ed myself inside this bar. It’s very clearly me up there, but it’s not who I see myself to be. Granted, if I drew myself, I’d just be a wobbly stick with a circle for a head. So perhaps I shouldn’t be giving notes to artists.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe very act of existing is to perceive and to be perceived, often without you even knowing it. I am pained when I think about how other people look at me. I know I’m not alone in that self-conscious whinging and navel-gazing. I wish I could blithely ignore the cacophony of doubt, but I can’t manage it, and countless people in the world feel the same way.Perhaps that’s why I’m mildly shocked Trump is so concerned with how he looks in a painting in Colorado. This is a man who tells the world he never doubts himself, that he is resolute in his decision-making and is always in control. The first few months of his second term in office have been almost exclusively about proving how strong he is and that anyone who wrongs him will be punished.So why be so worried about a painting? Perhaps it’s that the painting exposes him, casts him as soft, childlike and ill-prepared to wear the clothes of an adult. His preferred image of himself is a backlit Batman villain rather than the backwards-aging Benjamin Button in Colorado. In that case, maybe the painting did its job.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      in US Politics

      Creating art under Trump will become harder but it will remain vital | Seph Rodney

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      One of the most pernicious effects of a bully’s intimidation is making victims afraid of being true to themselves, because it’s the essential and authentic parts of them that incite the bully’s contempt.During his first week in office Donald Trump issued a blitzkrieg of executive orders. Among them, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity and Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, among the things these orders direct the administration’s agencies and staff to do are:
      Terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, positions, and programs in the federal government; terminate equity-related grants and contracts; and repeal prior executive orders designed to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace, including a decades-old executive order from the Johnson Administration … ”
      In the art scene these moratoriums had almost immediate consequence. Cheryl Edwards, a visual artist and curator based in Washington DC, had been working on an exhibition titled Before the Americas which was to be mounted at the Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization established in 1948 that includes all 35 independent nations of the western hemisphere. In 2021 Edwards was approached by the current museum director, Adriana Ospina, and the previous director, Pablo Zúñiga, to, in her words, curate an exhibition to include African American artists in the DC area. They agreed on a framework engaging the question “Because we are people in a society that existed before slavery, how does that manifest itself in the work of artists in this area and the work of artists in their collection?” She was given a budget of $20,000 (with a $5,000 curator’s fee), the money being allocated by the previous US ambassador to the OAS under Joe Biden, Francisco O Mora. Edwards’s show was scheduled to open on 21 March, but she was informed by Ospina on 6 February that her show was “terminated”. Edwards attests this happened “because it is DEI”.Similarly, Andil Gosine, a Canadian artist and curator, who is also a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, invested several years into an exhibition at the same museum. His show, titled Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, was essentially a collaborative project with 50 artists, writers and technicians exploring the themes he had examined in his book of the same title. It was to include artwork by a dozen artists from across the Americas, many of them LGBTQ+ people of color. He received a phone call from Ospina on 5 February informing him that the show had been canceled, despite none of the funding for it coming from OAS (that came from Canada Council). For him that that was “heartbreaking news”. He says: “This is the most time, money and heart I’ve put into anything. This was going to be the pinnacle of my last 15 years of work in the arts.”View image in fullscreenWith his background in international relations (working at the World Bank after graduate school) Gosine understood that the museum’s response had to do with fear of losing their budget by showcasing queer artists in the wake of yet another executive order, this one promising a process of “Reviewing United States Support to all International Organizations”. He explains: “This is a content question, a gamble on how to deal with a shifting political tide: to conform enough, sacrifice some people, sacrifice your values to survive, and then maybe not get the budget.” According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2023 OAS had a budget of $145.2m, with the US contributing 57% of that. Having the United States rescind their support would clearly lacerate the organization’s operations. Nevertheless, Gosine thinks that their anticipatory acquiescence may be for nought. He asks how an organization that is fundamentally concerned with human rights and social justice can reinvent itself enough to mollify this vengeful and disdainful regime.The cancelation of art exhibitions negatively impacts the lives of curators, but these executive orders have an even more corrosive effect on the lives of artists – particularly those whose immigration status is in flux. Erika Hirugami, a formerly undocumented Mexican-Japanese immigrant, doctoral candidate at UCLA, and Los Angeles-based curator who has been working in the arts for 10 years, told me that the pressures placed on immigrants impel them to erase themselves, anticipating law enforcement officials incarcerating and deporting them. She attests that she knows more than 80 artists who “are terrified because having an exhibition at a museum that says that this artist is undocumented signals a reality that generates a kind of violence”.To better understand this, it helps to think of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who extensively studied European art museum visitors in the 1960s, concerned with why most art museum visitor profiles seemed to be correlated with a certain socio-economic class. What he found was that given the proliferation of middle-class aesthetics throughout the museum, the majority of working-class people self-selected to not attend, feeling that the museum was not the place for them. He called this de facto rejection of the poor and working class “symbolic violence”, meaning a non-physical violence expressed through the imposition of social norms by a group with greater social power. Worse still, these norms are internalized by all social groups who come to believe that social hierarchy and inequality are natural and inevitable.View image in fullscreenHirugami explains that for artists who are undocumented, this administration has sought to normalize living in fear. Practically this means that some artists now forgo being paid for their work for fear of having their means of remuneration traced. Thus, their labor goes unrecognized and unpaid. To protect themselves some artists, according to Hirugami, go “zero social”, making themselves digitally invisible by taking down their websites and social media pages.Arleene Correa Valencia, a formerly undocumented artist living in Napa, California, understands this dread. “There’s no handbook to how to lose that fear,” she says. Valencia was an enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, and a college student during the previous Trump administration, when she was under almost constant threat of losing her scholarship and means of staying in the country legally. Even now, having achieved permanent resident status, she still worries. “I still feel like I’m very much a target, especially having come to my residency as a Dreamer. There is this feeling that I did it the wrong way.”Less than two months after taking charge of the federal government, Trump and his agents have devised ways to not only erase certain artists and certain types of art; but also to compel these artists to erase themselves, in the name of self-protection. This is exactly the opposite of their most essential work: to engage the public to experience their work and to move them toward transformation. What is a possible solution? Valencia turns toward her art. She says:
      My practice has changed in that now I’m more grounded in knowing that my people have this beautiful language of painting. And with that I also, tattooed my head to recognize, my Indigenous background and my connection to Mexico. This is the time where we have to make our markings known, not just on our bodies, but in our work, marks that are true to ourselves.”
      Indeed, it’s crucial to refuse the option of doing violence to oneself by denying those very aspects of the self targeted in the culture war being waged by this administration. To maintain who you are can be its own kind of victory. More

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      in US Politics

      Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook

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      In 1937, leaders of Germany’s Third Reich hosted two simultaneous art exhibitions in Munich. One, titled the Great German Art Exhibition, featured art viewed by the regime as appropriate and aspirational for the ideal Aryan society – orderly and triumphant, with mostly blond people in heroic poses amid pastoral German landscapes. The other showcased what Adolf Hitler and his followers deemed “degenerate art” (“Entartete Kunst”). The works, chaotically displayed and saddled with commentary disparaging “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil”, were abstract, profane, modernist and produced by the proclaimed enemies of the Reich – Jewish people, communists or those suspected of being either.The Degenerate Art exhibition, which later toured the country, opened a day after Hitler declared “merciless war” on cultural disintegration. The label applied to virtually all German modernist art, as well as anything deemed “an insult to German feeling”. The term and the dueling art exhibitions were part and parcel of Hitler’s propaganda efforts to consolidate power and bolster the regime via cultural production. The Nazis used culture as a crucial lever of control, to demean scapegoated groups, glorify the party and “make the genius of the race visible to that race”, argued the French scholar Eric Michaud in The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Political control and suppression of dissent were one thing; art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war”.Earlier this month, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, one of the nation’s premier cultural centers, after purging the board of Biden appointees and installing a slate of unqualified donors and loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”, the US president wrote on Truth Social. (The center hosted a nominal amount of acts with drag elements.) Days later, Trump was formally voted in by the board – “unanimously”, he noted on Truth Social in a Putin-esque flourish. “There’s no more woke in this country,” he told reporters.The move drew outcry from performers, artists and more, but still went through. The Kennedy Center’s trustees are presidential appointees, so technically it is vulnerable to such flexes of control, as are other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DC’s consortium of national museums. Some of Trump’s cultural decrees trend ridiculous, such as an executive order calling for a “national garden of American heroes”, or the continued presence of Kid Rock. Others are more insidious – after long threatening to defund the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term, Trump has imposed restrictions on its terms, barring federal grants for projects concerning Maga’s favorite targets – diversity and “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreenWhile the takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem less dire and court less furor than, say, his dismantling of the civil service, Trump’s efforts to exert control over art typify the strategy of a dictator. Comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany may be overdone and easily dismissed – even with Republican efforts to ban books in schools deemed “inappropriate”, among many other parallels, Maga and the Third Reich are not the same – but the new administration’s cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power.Pick your oppressive regime throughout time and you will find efforts to control the arts. Some of the most renowned artefacts from ancient Rome, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Trajan’s Column, were commissioned by emperors to vivify their divine right to power, celebrate military conquests and cement preferred narratives. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s Soviet Union abolished all independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party, and systemically executed all of the country’s Ukrainian folk poets. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution identified “old culture” as one of the four threats to be eradicated as part of his reshaping of Chinese society, which killed more than a million people. After Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in 1973, the regime arrested, tortured and exiled muralists. In her 2012 book Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, the art historian Claudia Calirman recalls how the museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of “dangerous” images – a claim not far removed from the Trump administration’s fearmongering around “gender ideology” and “threats” to children.These tactics continue in the present, carried out in some cases by Trump’s expressed allies. The same Brazilian dictatorship that overtook and blocked art exhibitions between 1968 and 1975 is today championed by the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who worked during his time as president to rewrite the regime’s reputation. On his first day in office in 2019, Bolsonaro dissolved Brazil’s ministry of culture. He also halved funding for the Rouanet Law, a measure that publicly supports artists, and appointed rightwing cultural figures with little relevant experience to prominent cultural positions. In Poland, the rightwing Law and Justice party has tried to rewrite history at the second world war museum in Gdańsk and dismissed its director, Paweł Machcewicz; in recent years, Italy’s rightwing minister of culture, Alberto Bonisoli, threatened to not renew the contracts of non-Italian museum directors. Much ado was made in the western press when Cuba jailed the performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime in 2017, or when China’s ruling party placed the renowned artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest.View image in fullscreenBut perhaps no one models what Trump aspires to be, and hopes to do, more than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who since his election in 2010 has rewritten the constitution, changed electoral law to favor his Fidesz party, positioned allies as heads of most media outlets and overhauled the justice system. And as part of his consolidation of power into full dictatorship, he has taken control of the country’s cultural institutions, managing their output and enshrining censorship. Starting when Fidesz first gained municipal power in 2006, the party has purged the boards of local theaters and installed Fidesz loyalists. In 2010, Orbán took over public institutions via appointment of governing bodies that could grant or withhold funds according to the organization’s willingness to heed demands. In 2013, he dismissed the artistic director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi, on account of his resistance to political interference and his sexuality, viewed as offensive by the homophobic regime.By 2019, Orbán could feasibly declare an era “of spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste … determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is the task we are now faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.” His government subsequently banned funding for gender studies at universities and passed a “culture law” tying funding of theaters to their ability to “actively protect the interests of the nation’s survival, wellbeing and growth”, a censorship measure that significantly chilled the country’s art scene.Such a measure is not dissimilar, in intent and execution, from Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, nor his new mandates on the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already been subject to decades’ worth of US culture wars. Those wars are heating up – if history and very recent precedent are anything to go by, then Trump and his party’s efforts to chip away at US cultural autonomy, at individual and institutional creative expression, will be one of his most corrosive and anti-democratic legacies. More