Circle the Wagons
The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. has been targeted by President Trump over its exhibition program. (Carolina A. Miranda)
The arts — and everything they stand for — are on the chopping block. The Department of Government Efficiency has been gutting long-running grant programs that support small and large cultural organizations, and President Donald Trump’s executive orders are stifling intellectual freedom. No one institution can fight the onslaught alone, which is why it’s important for museums to stand as a united front.
But before I get to that, let’s start with the cuts — which are devastating:
— The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has canceled many of its grants programs, and, according to a report on NPR, 80% of the agency’s staff have been put on administrative leave. Among the local institutions losing funds: the Japanese American National Museum in downtown LA, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which had received grants in support of infrastructural upgrades and educational programming.
— The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), a small federal agency that provides grants to libraries and cultural organizations, has been slashed. California libraries are bracing for deep cuts, as are museums. Last year, the Fowler Museum, for example, received a $188,808 grant toward its ongoing exhibition on Indigenous fire practices (which I covered in January).
— The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has scrapped its Challenge America grants geared at small arts nonprofits in underserved communities. Past recipients include a youth ballet in Maryland and a Native arts residency program in North Dakota.
These cuts will have a trickle-down effect on regional and local arts organizations. But more worrisome are the ways in which Trump is trying to elevate art that glorifies U.S. history and banish everything else.
Shortly after he took office, for example, the NEA announced it would prioritize projects that celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and that it would bar organizations from using NEA funds “to promote gender ideology.” Those directives remain up in the air after a legal challenge. But the President has now trained his sights on the Smithsonian Institution, declaring in an executive order that its museums promote “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture. (Carolina A. Miranda)
The order singled out the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and declared that race is “a biological reality” rather than “a social construct” — an appalling statement, since the idea that race is biological is the basis of eugenicist thinking. The order charges Vice President J.D. Vance with the task of removing “improper ideology” from the institution.
In the New Yorker, editor David Remnick likened Trump’s order to the propagandistic tendencies of the old Soviet premiers. “This urge to police the past is hardly unique to the Trump Administration,” he wrote in a column published over the weekend. “It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere. The history museums that were once a feature of many Soviet cities did not interrogate the life of Lenin. They were places of orthodox worship.”
Already, Trump’s decrees have had an effect. Public museums in D.C. have dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs after Trump issued an executive order prohibiting DEI initiatives among federal agencies. Exhibitions related to queer life and Afro diasporic art that were years in the making have been cancelled. Even institutions that are not governed by the federal government are under pressure to scrub DEI language from websites and mission statements or face the loss of federal funding.
LA’s Japanese American National Museum (JANM), which has been vital to telling the story of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, has — very admirably — refused to make such concessions. The institution stands to lose as much as $2 million in federal grants, but as the museum’s board chairman Bill Fujioka told The Times’ Jessica Gelt last week, they will “scrub nothing.”
JANM — a small institution with an annual budget of less than $15 million — shouldn’t be going at it alone. Other museums should be backing them up.
An installation view of Glenn Kaino's temporary exhibition, Aki's Market, at the Japanese American National Museum in 2023. (Carolina A. Miranda)
Last week, I saw a terrific talk on the New York Public Library’s YouTube channel by Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. During the question and answer portion, he discussed how Trump has targeted universities and what these and other institutions might do in response.
“My view is that US institutions of higher education are going to have to work together,” he said. “If you don’t work together, you get picked off one by one. … This is authoritarianism 101 … you break civil society by making an example of one institution. … And you can’t beat that logic by hoping that you’re not going to be next. You have to preemptively band together and you have to be aware that you’re going to take a hit. … And when somebody takes a hit, you have to be prepared to help.”
LA institutions are good at banding together. The Los Angeles Visual Arts Coalition, a network of almost three dozen small- and mid-sized arts organizations, came together to support each other during the pandemic, and it is still going strong. The J. Paul Getty Trust has also played a key role in teaming up with other organizations. When the Eaton and Palisades fires tore through the LA area in January, the Getty helped establish a fire relief fund. Plus, there is the every-few-years PST Art exhibition series that is heavily subsidized by the Getty Foundation — in which arts organizations around Southern California come together to stage exhibitions around a single theme.
Now would be a good time for the Getty (which, as of 2023, had an endowment of $8.6 billion) and its partner institutions to gather with local arts organizations large and small to see how they can support each other in the coming months and years. In March, the most recent PST series, devoted to art and science, came to its conclusion; the theme for the next series has not yet been announced.
Perhaps it’s time to set aside the idea of a theme and focus instead on how LA’s arts organizations can continue to challenge convention, cultivate new ideas, and resist demagogic mandates — you know, all those things that are essential to a thriving, democratic society.
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