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      The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

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      I don’t know why I was surprised when President Trump went after the Smithsonian Institution, in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture — or as it’s more informally known, the Black Smithsonian. If anything, I should have been surprised he held off for two months. On March 27, he issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that accused the Smithsonian Institution of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” He called out the Black Smithsonian in particular for being subject “to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The federal government, he declared, will no longer support historical projects that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”I think Mr. Trump’s presidency is a national tragedy. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I have some sympathy for the concerns he raised about the agenda of much historical thinking these days. Too often it indulges in sloppy and even childish stereotypes, depicting America’s past as one extended hit job.The boldness of the American experiment, the emergence of the Constitution, the evolution of public schooling, the expansion of the right to vote, the rise of the conservationism and the flourishing of our diverse cultural life — reducing all of this to the machinations of a sinister white cabal is, like the 1980s power ballad, seductive but vapid. That white lady at the supermarket with her 6-year-old daughter has organized her life around defending her privilege? I’m not seeing it.President Trump visited the National Museum of African American History in 2017.Doug Mills/The New York TimesI shudder at suggestions that — as a graphic on the Black Smithsonian’s own website put it a few years ago — “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis” and “decision-making” are the purview of white culture. I despise equally the idea that Black people are communal, oral, “I’ll get to that tomorrow” sorts who like to circle around the answer rather than actually arrive at it.And I am especially dismayed at how this version of history implies that the most interesting thing about the experience of Black Americans has been their encounter with whiteness. I figured that the president was being typically hyperbolic when he said that institutions like the museum deepen “societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe” — I mean, even something as stupid as that guide to whiteness might just be an outlying mistake. But I was wary that a national museum might squander its chance to illuminate complex topics and expand people’s curiosity, instead trying to corral everyone into caricatures and oversimplifications. As I read the executive order, however, it occurred to me that after all these years, I had yet to actually visit the museum. So, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I decided to zip over to the National Mall to take a look. I will not soon forget what I saw.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 Elections

      Fenix, a Museum of Migration, Opens in Rotterdam

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      A new institution in the harbor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, combines art and artifacts to underscore that migrant journeys are part of a universal human experience.More than a century ago, millions of people trying to escape poverty, persecution or war in Europe boarded ships in the harbor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for a trans-Atlantic journey to a new life.Today, people can enter a former warehouse there, climb a winding staircase and look out from a cantilevered viewing deck onto the spot where the ships carrying those people once set sail.This is Fenix, an art museum dedicated to the theme of migration that opens to the public on Friday. A once-derelict pier stockroom has been transformed into an expansive white-box art space and is crowned with a polished steel double-helix swirl that adds a distinctive architectural signature to Rotterdam’s skyline.“It’s all about movement,” said Wim Pijbes, the chairman of the foundation that runs the new museum. “It’s not genealogical, it’s not art historical, it’s not documentary. It’s a mix of objects: high art, low art, personal objects, video, film, photography, ceramics. It’s all there, like a symphony.”Unlike other migration museums in New York, London or Paris, which typically narrate specific histories of immigrants and refugees, Fenix takes a different, more wide-ranging, approach.Visitors first encounter two small exhibitions downstairs — one showcasing photojournalistic images and the other filled with thousands of battered suitcases — that underscore the idea that migration is an integral part of a universal human experience. The main exhibition, “All Directions,” installed in a 75,000-square-foot concrete and glass hall upstairs, displays fine art that either directly or obliquely makes reference to that experience.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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      Koyo Kouoh, Prominent Art World Figure, Is Dead at 57

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      She had recently been named to oversee next year’s Venice Biennale. She died just days before she was scheduled to announce its theme and title.Koyo Kouoh in 2023. As the curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa’s largest contemporary art museums, she had built a global reputation as a torchbearer for artists of color.Tsele Nthane for The New York TimesKoyo Kouoh, one of the global art world’s most prominent figures, who had been slated to become the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday in Switzerland. She was 57.Her death was confirmed by the biennale’s organizers. The announcement did not cite a cause or say where in Switzerland she had died.The biennale said that Ms. Kouoh’s “sudden and untimely” death came just days before she was scheduled to announce the title and theme of next year’s event. The statement added that her death “leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art.”The Venice Biennale is arguably the art world’s most important event. Staged every two years since 1895, it always includes a large-scale group show, organized by the curator, alongside dozens of national pavilions, organized independently.A spokeswoman for the biennale did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what Ms. Kouoh’s death would mean for next year’s exhibition, which is scheduled to run from May 9 through Nov. 22.As the curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa’s largest contemporary art museums, Ms. Kouoh built a global reputation as a torchbearer for artists of color from Africa and elsewhere, although her interests were global in reach. “I’m an international curator,” she said last December in an interview with the The New York Times.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

      ‘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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      in Elections

      The Works of Christo and Jean-Claude Are Experiencing a Revival

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      Known for their outsized and revolutionary art projects, the couple’s work is seen again in Florida, New York and Germany.It was 42 years ago. Miami awoke to a strange, crooked line of hot pink images floating in the waters of panoramic Biscayne Bay.Eleven small islands had been wrapped in wide, rippling swaths of pink plastic. They were almost glowing as the morning sun swept over the beaches and skyscrapers of the city. Crowds came out in helicopters and speedboats and the family car. Some people perched on condo balconies.It was the work of Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, the European artists who had wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and run a billowing, tall white nylon fence 24.5 miles over the cattle ranges just north of San Francisco and into the Pacific Ocean.People flew in from Europe and around the world to see the show, and collectors and museum directors and many others say it lifted the curtain on Miami as a city of natural beauty that would eventually become a dazzling global art center.“It was a world happening,” said Norman Braman, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, a collector and a Miami car dealer with about a dozen brands, from Hyundai to Rolls-Royce.But it was a tough time for Miami. Cocaine seemed to be everywhere. Gunmen were in the streets. Time magazine had put the city on its cover as “Paradise Lost.” In 1984 — a year after the extravaganza on the bay — the “Miami Vice” TV show took the city’s crime and fashion into American living rooms.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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      Trump’s Wishes Aside, Censoring Racial History May Prove Difficult

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      Late last month, when two federal grants to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana were rescinded, the Trump administration seemed to be following through on its promise to root out what President Trump called “improper ideology” in cultural institutions focused on Black history.After all, the plantation’s mission was to show visitors what life was truly like for the enslaved, contrary to the watered-down Black history that the president seemed to back.Then just as quickly, the grants were restored a few weeks later, the Whitney Plantation’s executive director said in an interview.Because the money had already been approved, “maybe it was an exposure for lawsuits,” the executive director, Ashley Rogers, said, “but who knows?”Ever since Mr. Trump issued an executive order in March decrying cultural institutions that were trying to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” sites like the Whitney Plantation have lived with such uncertainty. An order specifically targeting the Smithsonian Institution tasked Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials with “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”But reversals like the one in Louisiana and actions by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seem to indicate some misgivings about the president’s order. They also show that putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes.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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      This Year’s Met Gala Raises the Most Money in Its History

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      The Met’s annual fashion party has become a fund-raising juggernaut, but the lavish event comes with a price tag of its own. How much bang does it get for its buck?The Met Gala has outdone itself, even before it’s begun.The annual gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the flashy fashion extravaganza that highlights the city’s social scene every May — raised a record $31 million this year, museum officials announced on Monday, the biggest gross in the event’s 77-year history.The money haul — and the avid interest the gala inspires — further cements its place as the pre-eminent benefit among the city’s cultural institutions, and one the world’s most sought-after tickets. The Met’s take dwarfs events like a September gala for the New York Philharmonic (which brought in nearly $4 million) and the 2024 event for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which raised some $5.2 million.The $31 million figure does not reflect the seven-figure cost of staging the gala, which will kick off on Monday evening with the procession of pop stars, fashion icons and sporting-world superstars striding the red carpet, enduring countless flashbulbs, and surrounded by a swarm of publicity and eager onlookers.The gala will act, as always, as the opening of a Costume Institute exhibition: This year’s is entitled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” examining 300 years of Black fashion and the vibrant history of Black dandyism.That emphasis is a significant departure from the department’s largely monochromatic past: This is the Met’s first fashion exhibition devoted entirely to designers of color, and is being seen as part of a larger effort to diversify the collection. It is also a rarity for its focus on men’s wear.As such, it drew an array of Black celebrities to help host the event — including Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, ASAP Rocky and Pharrell Williams. LeBron James, whose Los Angeles Lakers were bounced from the N.B.A. playoffs last week, is the honorary chair.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

      These activists are ‘flooding the zone with Black history’ to protest against Trump’s attacks on DEI

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      A coalition of civil rights groups have launched a weeklong initiative to condemn Donald Trump’s attacks on Black history, including recent executive orders targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington DC.The national Freedom to Learn campaign is being led by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a social justice thinktank co-founded by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw is a leading expert on critical race theory (CRT), a framework used to analyze racism’s structural impact. She has fought against book bans, restraints on racial history teaching and other anti-DEI efforts since the beginning of the Republican-led campaign against CRT in 2020.“Our goal this week has been to flood the zone, as we call it, with Black history,” Crenshaw said about the campaign. “We have long understood that the attacks on ideas germinating from racial justice were not about the specific targets of each attack … [but are] an effort to impose a specific narrative about the United States of America, one that marginalizes, and even erases, its more difficult chapters,” she added.The weeklong campaign will conclude with a demonstration and prayer vigil in front of NMAAHC on 3 May.Leading up to the protest, AAPF, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and six other advocacy groups signed onto a statement criticizing Trump’s “attempted mass erasure of Black history and culture”, according to a press release published 28 April. In March, Trump ordered an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network, in order to demolish what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”. He singled out NAAMHC, a museum that has been lauded since its opening in 2016.The coalition’s affirmation read, in part: “We affirm that Black history is American history, without which we cannot understand our country’s fight for freedom or secure a more democratic future. We must protect our history not just in books, schools, libraries, and universities, but also in museums, memorials, and remembrances that are sites of our national memory.”“I wasn’t shocked by it,” said Crenshaw of Trump’s executive order against NAAMHC. “I never did think that these attacks on civil rights, on racial equality, would find a natural limit because there is no limit.”Within this week’s movement, AAPF has led sessions to educate people on Trump’s dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, an element of the broader campaign. About 1,500 people attended a virtual event titled Under the Black Light: Beyond the First 100 Days: Centering Racial Justice and Black History in Our Fight for Democracy. There, panelists, including civil rights leaders and academics, discussed how attendees could organize against Trump’s mounting censorship of history. Coffee meetups and a sign-making session were organized as additional parts of the campaign, providing further conversations between participants and academics about how Trump’s initial executive orders connect to a larger thread of eroding racial justice.The group has also launched a “Black history challenge” where participants are encouraged to find a historical site or artifact and “put it into memory”, or recognize it, “as part of Black history’s role in American history”. As a part of the challenge, Crenshaw posted a video on social media of Bruce’s Beach, in Manhattan Beach, California. There, in 1912, a Black couple purchased oceanfront property and built a resort for Black people. The property was later seized by the city under the auspices of eminent domain. “It’s important to tell these stories so people understand that it’s not a natural reality that many Black folks don’t have beachfront property or that we don’t have transnational hotel chains owned by Black people,” said Crenshaw. “These things are actually created by the weaponization of law to impose white, exclusive rights and privileges.”The weeklong campaign comes as the Trump administration has attempted to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at all levels of local and federal government since the start of his second term. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from any public schools that do not end their DEI programming. He later signed executive orders to crack down on diversity efforts at colleges and universities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCrenshaw added: “If you want to sustain this idea of making America great again, then you’ve got to erase the ways that it wasn’t great all along. We’ve always understood that what the end game was, was the elimination of any recognition that our country has had and still has challenges with respect to racial and other forms of justice.”In response, advocacy groups have come together to channel their outrage into the collective action of the campaign and protest. “We want to be sure that we can preserve, beyond artifacts, the true experiences of those that have [undergone] the oppressive past of African Americans, and how that experience of resilience is important today,” said Reverend Shavon Arline-Bradley, president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).A partnership, especially given the importance of the NMAAHC, felt like the most significant way forward, said Arline-Bradley. “This really is a collective, multiracial, multicultural, multi experience, coalition that is saying no. When you take away our history, when you take away African American history, then you really are trying to take away culture.” More