Art, too, must come to terms with Trump’s vision

Until recently, a painting entitled "Young Artists After Siamesas 1960" depicting four young Dominicans hung in the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo. Kehinde Wiley created the work as part of "Art in Embassies," the U.S. State Department programme that employs art as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Commissioned with public funds in 2013, the work therefore belongs to the US government. After being covered with a US flag, the work has now been removed. The new US ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Leah Campos, appointed by Donald Trump, explained the decision as part of a wider shift. Embassies should no longer promote ‘globalist and woke’ ideologies but reflect ‘American patriotism and the beauty of our great country’, the ambassador wrote in an Instagram post, in which the artwork was shown to have been replaced by an image of the American flag. The post was accompanied by the song ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ by Twisted Sister. Erin Scavino, director of Art in Embassies, had previously described Wiley’s painting as ‘very woke’ and ‘aesthetically terrifying’. For Scavino, the two things are likely directly linked. Now, the New York Times reports that the State Department is looking into the possibility of selling it. It is this latter possibility that transforms a controversy over whether to display a painting into a far more interesting issue.

Every government has the right, and the duty, to choose how it wishes to present itself; it may change the furnishings of an embassy, select certain artists, or alter cultural policy (on this point, one could launch into a lengthy digression on our embassies and the works of art that adorn them). However, a public collection is not the same as the government that temporarily administers it; otherwise, every change of government would result in a new museum. Selling a work means permanently altering the institution’s memory. There is a difference between having a cultural policy and politically owning culture. The question raised by the Wiley case is therefore simple: to whom does a public collection belong? To the state, or to whoever is governing the state at that moment?

The fact that Kehinde Wiley is at the centre of this story makes the case particularly telling. A few years ago, Wiley occupied an almost opposite position in the American institutional imagination. In 2015, the US State Department awarded him the ‘Medal of Art’ for his contribution to the ‘Art in Embassies’ programme. Three years later, Barack Obama chose him to paint his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, making Wiley the first African-American artist to be commissioned to paint an official presidential portrait. That choice, too, broke with tradition. Wiley had built his artistic practice by appropriating the conventions of great Western portraiture: the aristocratic pose, monumentality, and the symbols of power. But instead of kings, generals and nobles, he featured young African Americans he had encountered on the streets. In his portrait, Obama does not appear beside a flag or in front of a desk. He is seated on a chair in front of dense foliage that almost seems to be advancing towards him. The portrait retains the frontal composition and dignity of the official image but alters its visual language. Choosing Wiley did not merely mean entrusting the portrait of the first African-American president to an African-American artist. It signalled something more interesting: namely, the institution’s willingness to allow contemporary art to reshape the way it was represented, thereby effectively bringing contemporary art into the tradition. Eight years later, the same artist is deemed incompatible with the image of America that another administration intends to project. It is not Wiley who has changed, but the America that looks upon him.