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    Why Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian matters | Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley

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    In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMuseums allow us to reckon with the brutality of the American legacy as well as expose our citizens to the people, institutions and strategies that charted a different course towards becoming a “more perfect” union. Fascist erasures like Trump’s hide behind the claim that truthful encounters with the past inflame and divide. This instinct is the opposite of the truth. A functioning democracy does not restrict perspectives to those of the dominant group, much less make it illegal to teach alternative ones.A people who cannot remember their past are a people who cannot resist a fascist future. Knowing our history can give us the weapons and wherewithal to battle Trump’s efforts to catapult us back to a time when the majority of Americans lacked both the civic and economic power that we have now. The fight for our museums and for our memory is a critical bulwark against the unraveling of American democracy. It is vital that we fight to protect our repositories before it’s too late.

    Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues

    Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth

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      It should surprise no one that former cast members from reality shows that ran for more than 15 seasons are running out of new material. Days ago, Donald Trump, former star of NBC’s The Apprentice and current US president, posted a lengthy Truth Social rant in which he (again) threatened the country’s leading cultural institutions to adhere to his political ideology. The target was one he has had in his crosshairs before – the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) – which Trump called “OUT OF CONTROL” in his post. “Everything discussed [in NMAAHC exhibits] is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” Trump unloaded. “WOKE IS BROKE,” he continued through his customary use of all caps and misplaced capitalization of common nouns. “We have the HOTTEST Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”The tirade left many wondering what exactly Trump saw as the upsides of slavery, but also where they had previously heard this recycled talking point. The comment seemed to echo comments made just days prior by his fellow reality show bully Jillian Michaels, a former trainer on NBC’s The Biggest Loser, the weight-loss competition show that launched alongside The Apprentice in 2004. Michaels had been making her rounds in media and public appearances, rebranding from verbally abusive fat shamer to Maga influencer.On CNN’s NewsNight, the host Abby Phillips moderated a roundtable discussion on Trump’s months-long overreach into cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the NMAAHC. Michaels hijacked the conversation into a lament about slavery’s prominence in the massively popular museum’s displays on US history. “[Trump] is not whitewashing slavery, he’s not,” Michaels said. “You cannot tie slavery to just one race, which is what every single exhibit [at NMAAHC] does.” Turning towards the representative Ritchie Torres, who was seated beside her, Michaels unloaded popular far-right talking points. “Do you realize that only less than 2% of white Americans owned slaves?” she continued. “Do you realize slavery is thousands of years old? Do you know who was the first race who tried to end slavery?”Torres’s interjections that slavery was a system of white supremacy, not a set of individual white acts, went unaddressed by the TV star. (From 20% to 50% of the white population in southern US states owned enslaved people, and all white people nationwide benefited from slavery’s racial order. Michael’s false claims prompted Phillips to later post a public correction.)The tirade was an escalation of Trump’s previous open declarations to “restore truth and sanity to American history”, an effort to overhaul exhibits and installations across federally operated museums and galleries and politicize their content, with the NMAAHC locked squarely in the administration’s sights for what it called “corrosive ideology”. Previous edicts about the museum, lovingly nicknamed “The Blacksonian” by many of its patrons, had not specifically identified slavery as the White House’s gripe. But Trump’s Truth Social post more directly reflected a return to a century-old tactic to minimize chattel slavery as “not that bad”.If we have learned anything from reality television, it is that every narrative is scripted. No matter how easily their claims were debunked, both Michaels and Trump were in lock step in their effort to vindicate white people from their role in slavery, both by insisting that slavery’s conditions and aftermath are overblown, and refuting that it played a major role in US history.These assertions are a refresh of a century-old “lost cause” myth spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an organization of more than 100,000 white women who set out to make slavery respectable again by rebranding the Confederacy’s bloody image. The “genteel ladies” campaign euphemized slave trading as a “celebration of memory” and “a southern way of life”. Like Michaels, Trump and like-minded slavery deniers, proponents of “the lost cause” promoted an outlandishly misleading account of history in which slavery was both irrelevant as the cause of the American civil war, and benevolent because Christianity and plantation life, they said, benefited African-descended people who were otherwise unfit for civilization.UDC members capitalized on their social status as wives and mothers to indoctrinate children, notably through catechisms, the control and production of school textbooks, essay and scholarship contests, and their spinoff organizations, like the Children of the Confederacy. Their purported concern for white children provided a gender-appropriate cover for their goals to terrorize Black people in the south. They took full advantage of the threat of lynching that loomed over any Black person, including children, who dared to challenge a white woman. Confederate statues and memorials, which UDC lobbied to have strategically placed outside courthouses and in public squares, parks and other spaces, were meant to intimidate African Americans who were merely engaging in civic life.Trump’s obsessive preoccupation with the Smithsonian’s 19th installation signals that history is repeating. Since its 2016 opening, the NMAAHC has welcomed more than 10 million in-person visitors, with families and school groups driving much of that number. Across seven floors and 12 galleries, the museum offers a remarkably comprehensive deep dive into the story of Black life in the US. It is as accessible to grammar school pupils as it is impressive to nationally celebrated historians.On his initial tour in 2017, Trump lauded the institution as “a shining example of African Americans’ incredible contributions to our culture, our society and our history”. Today, the museum serves as a go-to supplement for the Black history curriculums that many American public school systems have stripped or disbanded under Republican state legislatures’ “anti-woke” policies.Trump’s Truth Social post went on to announce that he had instructed his attorneys to “go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities”, comparing the funding cuts the administration has wielded over university curricula and research to an overhaul of NMAAHC’s exhibits relevant to slavery.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s a play right out of the UDC’s book: the daughters understood that they had lost the war but could win the battle for the national narrative if they could successfully undermine Black progress and Black accounts of slavery in educational institutions. Vindication, as the organization deployed it, was a tool for vengeance, not justice – divorced from all reality and set on a narrative in which they insisted they were the victims of the very war their families provoked. They perfected a manipulation of public memory that controlled the racial hierarchy by controlling education.The late sociologist and historian James Loewen, who studied Confederate monuments across the US, once explained that the past is what happened, history is what we say about the past, and some of us believe that should be the same thing. We are locked in a battle, however, with those who seek to pervert history and replace it with a fiction that absolves their present-day wrongdoing.UDC members continued to lobby for revisionist school curricula and the placement of Confederate memorials well into the 20th century, where they fought against Black progress in the civil rights movement. Ultimately, backlashes against Confederate monuments successfully removed nearly 100 of them in the protests following the state murder of George Floyd. Still, hundreds more remain, including those Trump has recently replaced. He is clinging to a century-old storyline hoping to be renewed for another political season. But it’s old material that isn’t nearly as effective when your opponents already know the playbook.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration’s anti-woke campaign targets seven flagship museums

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      Amid the Donald Trump administration’s heavy-handed review of Smithsonian museums, the Guardian has seen a document compiled by the White House that details examples of how the widely visited cultural institutions have overly negative portrayals of US history.The document, based on public submissions shared with the administration, points to what it says are problematic exhibits at seven different museums, including a Benjamin Franklin exhibit that links his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people and a film about George Floyd’s murder that it says mischaracterizes the police.“President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable,” a White House official said. “Until we get info from the Smithsonian in response to our letter, we can’t verify the numbers of artifacts that have been removed because the Smithsonian has removed them on their own.”Trump announced the initiative on Truth Social earlier this week, writing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”The seven museums that have so far been flagged for review include the National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Latino, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African Art, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art.The administration argues exhibits at these museums focus excessively on oppression rather than American achievements. At the National Museum of American History, the document flagged the ¡Presente! Latino history exhibition for allegedly promoting an “anti-American agenda” by examining colonization effects and depicting the US as stealing territory from Mexico in 1848.Examples from the document also shames the museum’s Benjamin Franklin exhibit for linking his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people, and the Star-Spangled Banner display for focusing on American historical failures and controversies rather than celebrating national achievements.The National Portrait Gallery is being singled out for focusing on how the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist immigration laws contradicted the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming message. The African art museum is targeted over the George Floyd film. And the Asian art museum is flagged for exhibitions for claiming to impose western gender ideology on traditional cultures.Last week, the White House budget director, Russ Vought, sent letters to eight museums demanding information about exhibits within 30 days and instructing officials to implement “content corrections” including replacing “divisive” language.The review follows similar Trump administration pressure on universities, which resulted in institutions paying hundreds of millions to the government and walking back diversity initiatives.Separately, the Smithsonian has already made changes to exhibits referencing Trump, removing all mention of his impeachments from a presidential power display at the American history museum in July, leaving only generic references to three presidents facing potential removal from office.The Smithsonian Institution did not immediately respond to requests for comment. More

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      Trump administration to review 19 Smithsonian museums to ensure exhibits are ‘patriotic’

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      The Trump administration is evidently extending its control of cultural representation at the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex.In a letter posted on the White House website, the administration told the Smithsonian that it plans a wide review of exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2026.The letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, from Trump administration officials said the White House wants the museums’ program to reflect “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in keeping with an executive order issued in March that ordered the elimination of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums.Museums will have 120 days to replace content the administration finds “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions”.Donald Trump’s order from March, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, said the president “aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud”.Earlier in August, the museum removed and later amended an exhibit on US presidential impeachments that mentioned Trump’s two impeachments during his first term. Officials at the Smithsonian later said museum officials “were not asked by any administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit”.But Monday’s letter to the institution, which was first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, places the institution under curatorial scrutiny ranging from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the letter is reported to say.It was signed by Lindsey Halligan, White House senior associate; Vince Haley, the director of the domestic policy council, and Russ Vought; the director of the office of Management and Budget.Halligan was appointed to effectuate JD Vance’s oversight of the Smithsonian. In a statement, she said the review was “about preserving trust in one of our most cherished institutions”.Halligan added: “The Smithsonian museums and exhibits should be accurate, patriotic, and enlightening – ensuring they remain places of learning, wonder, and national pride for generations to come.”The formal review comes as the Trump administration placed Washington DC’s police department under direct federal control and deployed the national guard into the city, citing a public safety emergency related to crime and homelessness, though data shows a sharp decrease in violent crime.In January, Washington DC’s metropolitan police department and US attorney’s office released a report showing that total violent crime in DC in 2024 was down 35% from the prior year, resulting in the lowest violent crime rate in more than 30 years. Meanwhile, data have consistently shown that unhoused people are more likely to be victimized by crimes than commit them.The review will initially focus on eight of the following Smithsonian museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House’s letter noted that others will be reviewed at a later date.The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents had previously agreed to conduct a thorough review of all its museum and zoo content to eliminate political influence and bias. That preceded the resignation in June of Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery who Trump said was involved with diversity initiatives he opposed.Separately, figurative painter Amy Sherald cancelled a career review of her work – including a portrait of Michelle Obama, the former first lady – at the Smithsonian over concerns that the institute would not show Trans Forming Liberty, a portrait of a transgender woman with pink hair and a blue dress holding a torch as the Statue of Liberty.Monday’s letter later goes further, however, ordering a review of exhibits planned for the US’s 250th birthday. It also is part of a broader push to assert oversight over a broad swathe of cultural and academic institutions.The White House states that museums should correct “divisive or ideologically driven” language with text that is “unifying, historically accurate”.A team from the White House reportedly plans to conduct observational visits and museum walk-throughs to document themes and messaging. The letter also said that the White House had asked to review organizational charts, visitor surveys, exhibited artists who received Smithsonian grants, outside partners and internal communications related to section and approval processes.The outlet said the White House had given 30 days for requested materials to be turned over and that it expected to complete its review by early 2026. More

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      in Elections

      After a Fire, Rebuilding the National Museum of Brazil

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      Years after a devastating fire, Brazil is slowly rebuilding an institution dedicated to the country’s cultural heritage.This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.Steel beams hanging in the air,twisted by the intense heat.Shattered glass scattered across the floor,melted by the flames.Iron intertwined in all directions,exposed by collapses.Walls blackened by soot,resulting from the burning of a country’s memory …I wrote these lines shortly after Sept. 2, 2018. It is a day I will never forget.That day, the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro was devastated by an intense fire. For those of us who work in Brazil’s cultural sector, the fire was the realization of our worst nightmare. The tragedy did not come without warning. The risks the museum faced were well-known. The lack of proper maintenance was obvious throughout the building. Along with my fellow museum officials, I frequently pushed government officials for more resources, but these efforts were not successful.If I had to choose one building in Brazil that should be protected and preserved, it would be the museum, and not just because of its collections. The site is connected to many notable moments in Brazil’s history. Since 1892, the museum has been housed in the former royal palace. The building was home to the Portuguese royal family after they fled to Rio de Janeiro to escape Napoleon. After Brazil’s independence, it was the residence of Brazil’s emperor.The museum, which was founded on June 6, 1818, by King John VI of Portugal, is Brazil’s first scientific institution. Before the fire, the museum contained over 20 million items, including unpublished documents from Empress Maria Leopoldina, ethnographic objects from Indigenous Brazilians, significant specimens of the country’s biodiversity, fossils and rare minerals. The blaze destroyed about 85 percent of the museum’s collection.The interior of the National Museum of Brazil following the fire in 2018. Many in Brazil blamed the fire on funding cuts and a lack of proper building maintenance.Diogo VasconcellosIn the aftermath, one of the hardest moments for me was paradoxically also one of the most inspiring. The day after the fire, while smoke was still everywhere, a large group of people, including some high school students, approached the remains of the museum. For security reasons, the police did not let them get close to the building. After some tense negotiations, the group was allowed to do what they came for: The members formed a human chain and embraced the remains of an institution that — in reality — belongs to them, the public. When I remember this scene, it is hard to hold back my tears. We, the guardians of their cultural heritage and history, failed them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Defying Trump’s Firing, Smithsonian Says It Controls Personnel Decisions

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      The Smithsonian is challenging the president’s authority to dismiss the leader of the National Portrait Gallery but says it will look into his complaints.In a challenge to President Trump, the Smithsonian said on Monday that the president did not have the right to fire Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, despite his recent announcement that she had been terminated.“All personnel decisions are made by and subject to the direction of the secretary, with oversight by the board,” said a statement from the Smithsonian, which oversees that museum and 20 others, as well as libraries, research centers and the National Zoo. “Lonnie G. Bunch, the secretary, has the support of the Board of Regents in his authority and management of the Smithsonian.”The statement came hours after the Board of Regents, including Vice President JD Vance, discussed the president’s announcement at a quarterly meeting. When Mr. Trump said 10 days ago that he had fired Ms. Sajet, he called her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Sajet was not mentioned in the Smithsonian’s statement. But the board said it was asking Mr. Bunch to take steps to ensure the institution’s nonpartisan nature.“The Smithsonian must be a welcoming place of knowledge and discovery for all Americans,” the statement said. “The Board of Regents is committed to ensuring that the Smithsonian is a beacon of scholarship free from political or partisan influence, and we recognize that our institution can and must do more to further these foundational values.”The statement said the board had directed Mr. Bunch to articulate expectations to museum directors about what is displayed in their institutions and to give them time to make any changes needed “to ensure unbiased content.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jillian Sackler, Philanthropist Who Defended Husband’s Legacy, Dies at 84

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      Though the Sackler name was tarnished over Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis, Arthur Sackler’s should not be, she insisted; a company founder, he died well before the trouble began.Jillian Sackler, an arts philanthropist who struggled to preserve the reputation of her husband, Arthur, by distinguishing him from his two younger Sackler brothers and their descendants, whose aggressive marketing and false advertising on behalf of their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, triggered the opioid epidemic, died on May 20 in Manhattan. She was 84.Her death, in a hospital, was from esophageal cancer, said Miguel Benavides, her health proxy.Dr. Arthur Sackler, a psychiatrist and researcher who became a pioneer in medical marketing, bought Purdue Frederick, originally based in New York City, in the 1950s and gave each of his brothers a one-third share. They incorporated the company as Purdue Pharma in 1991. (Its headquarters are now in Stamford, Conn.)Dr. Sackler died in 1987 — nine years before the opioid OxyContin was marketed by the company as a powerful painkiller. Shortly after his death, his estate sold his share of the company to his billionaire brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, for $22.4 million.The company’s misleading advertising claim that OxyContin was nonaddictive prompted doctors to overprescribe it beginning in the 1990s. The proliferation of the medication ruined countless lives of people who became dependent on it.Ms. Sackler in 2012. She spent decades defending her husband, who died nine years before the opioid crisis.Fairchild Archive/Penske Media, via Getty ImagesIn 2021, the company proposed a bankruptcy settlement in which members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $4.2 billion over nine years to resolve civil claims related to the opioid crisis. In return, they sought immunity from future lawsuits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ready for Their Reboot: How Galleries Plumb Art History’s Forgotten Talent

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      Saara Pritchard, an art adviser, was visiting a friend in Miami when a painting in the bedroom caught her eye. Bordered in silver leaf, it was a close-cropped, black-and-white image of John F. Kennedy, eyes skyward and mouth slightly agape. The haunting image resembled a death mask — as if made by the love child of Andy Warhol and the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. Who, Pritchard wondered, had painted it?The answer was Marcia Marcus, a popular artist in the downtown New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s who had since faded from view. Pritchard, 40, set out to learn everything she could about Marcus. Within a year she was standing in the home of one of the artist’s daughters, Jane Barrell Yadav, in Yonkers, N.Y., who had more than 200 of her mother’s canvases. The paintings were packed tightly in closets and makeshift storage racks in the living room.Marcia Marcus from “The Human Situation.” Left, “Tyna, Alvin, Baby,” 1970-71; right, “Family II,” 1970. The two girls are modeled on her daughters Kate, left, and Jane, with their father. via Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York; Photo by Elisabeth BernsteinThrough June 21, many of those artworks are on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, a stately Upper East Side gallery, as part of “The Human Situation,” an exhibition conceived by Pritchard that put Marcus’s work in dialogue with two better-known female painters from the era, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh. Over the past two and a half years, Pritchard has worked alongside Barrell Yadav and her sister Kate Prendergast to piece together Marcus’s story in the hope of turning her from an art-historical footnote into a blue-chip star.Marcus is among a growing group of artists who have benefited from what could be called “the rediscovery industrial complex”: a cottage industry within the art market that looks to the past to find figures — often women and artists of color — neglected by the establishment. By repackaging them for a contemporary audience, savvy dealers hope to enrich the art-historical canon even as they make a healthy profit.The upside can be considerable. Consider the case of the painter Lynne Drexler, who lived on a remote island in Maine. Before she died in 1999, she sold her work to tourists for as little as $50. In recent years, her lyrical landscapes have sold for more than $1 million at auction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      We in the cultural sector must stand up to Trump’s attacks – if not now, when? | Gus Casely-Hayford

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      In one of his recent Truth Social posts, Donald Trump appeared to fire Kim Sajet – the fearless and utterly brilliant director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The president used his social media platform to claim that Sajet’s support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) made her unsuitable for her role. “Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am hereby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery”, Trump wrote. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”Where to start? By now, we all know the arts has become the terrain for a brutal proxy battle for hearts and minds. A culture war 2.0, where not just reputations are at stake, but institutions, whole sectors and ways of thinking. But I am hoping that even Trump’s support base have begun to grow a little bored with these attacks on figures and institutions in the cultural sector. The culture war has moved beyond farce into the deeply tragic.I am sure even many of the president’s most loyal supporters know deep down that the Smithsonian (a vast complex of 21 museums) is a genuine force for good, an institution that represents so much of the US at its very best. And like the Kennedy Center, the cultural institution that Trump took control of earlier this year, or the universities his administration has attacked, the Smithsonian is a fish in a barrel: easy to bully, its financial destiny in significant part tied to public funding, with limited scope to defend itself. This contrived political theatre damages critical institutions, threatens the careers of talented, dedicated people, and its repercussions will be deep and long-lasting.Good museums are not sleepy institutions trapped in heritage-aspic. Across its 178-year history, the Smithsonian has consistently evolved to reflect ambient change and address public need. Like many other national museums around the world, these changes, particularly in recent years, have been driven by an aspiration to engage and enfranchise, to broaden audiences and to catalyse national conversations. I would have thought that seeking to give value back to a greater number of the population is uncontroversial. Institutions this important, mostly sponsored by the public, must simply, continually, work to be ever more universal, inclusive and open. Left or right, that has value. In times like these, when we are, as citizens of western democracies, so riven and divided, the arts have a job to do of being a space for inclusive debate.But the truth is that DEI isn’t some new-fangled indulgence. That drive to be inclusive is what good museums were created to deliver. Twenty-five years ago, I began my career at the British Museum. I still remember reading its founding purpose for the first time. The British Museum was created for “all studious and curious persons”. I remember thinking that the word that does the really hard work in that statement is “all”. The British Museum was created in the mid-18th century around an inclusive imperative, around the idea that we might all hope to find ourselves reflected in its spaces and concerns.Its founders must have recognised the powerful need for a national museum: it was created at a time when Britain was going through a period of existential anxiety, when Scots were rebelling; the country needed a unifying narrative. I am sure the British Museum’s founders knew exactly what they were doing when they committed the institution to that beautifully enfranchising ambition of being for us all. And yes, I know museums have so often failed miserably to live up to these inclusive objectives, but we must never stop trying, nor relinquish the basis on which the public can hold us to account.Universities and museums are vital for healthy societies, and their independence, their bravery, their sometimes maddening honesty, underpins so much that is important. We undermine that at our peril. I spent a number of treasured years as a Smithsonian museum director and fell for its ethos and its dedicated people. It was founded on an ambition to propagate “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. It was created to enable transformational change through sharing and empowering US citizens with knowledge, with truth. I cannot think of a time when this has been more important.It is unclear whether Trump has the authority to fire Sajet. What is clear is that his move is designed to demoralise her and all my former Smithsonian colleagues. That’s why, directing a different museum now, across the Atlantic, I feel moved to write. We in the cultural sector everywhere need to stand up and be counted, we need to celebrate Kim Sajet, we need to not retreat from diversity here in Britain. To my former colleagues, I say that speaking the truth and having the courage to do so when it is difficult does not make you unsuitable for your roles in a demographically complex democracy; it is probably the most important aspect of what we are called upon to do. It is easy writing the diversity action plan, but having the moral courage to stand up for those principles when they are needed – that is heroic.

      Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, cultural historian, broadcaster and lecturer who is currently the director of V&A East More