Trump and the Fate of the Government’s Massive Art Collection

Earlier this month, staffers on the Basic Providers Administration, the federal company that oversees, amongst different features, the federal authorities’s huge actual property portfolio and an enormous trove of positive artwork amassed during the last two centuries, obtained an e mail from its new performing director, Stephen Ehikian, who Donald Trump appointed in January 2025. The Middle for Wonderful Arts on the GSA has solely about three dozen staffers; it’s probably not identified outdoors of presidency circles, but it surely’s constructed one of many largest and oldest collections of artwork within the nation and controls the purse strings to an honest enlargement price range. Every of the roughly 1,500 buildings the GSA owns is allotted no less than 0.5% of its price range’s building price to fee or keep artworks for its partitions. There are greater than 26,000 artworks below the company’s purview, together with Civil Conflict–period work, the expansive mural tasks of the WPA, and a 60-foot-tall Alexander Calder sculpture in entrance of the Mies van der Rohe–designed federal heart in Chicago.

The GSA won’t be the sexiest unbiased company on the town, however these working the artwork desk on F Avenue had been tasked with sustaining commissioned works by American masters that may often be seen inside the partitions of museums. Ed Ruscha gave a shocking diptych to a federal constructing in San Francisco in 2007. Robert Mangold long-established a big tricolored sculpture for a courthouse in Buffalo in 2011. Jenny Holzer’s scathing marble message benches dot a analysis heart in Silver Spring, Maryland. A large Mark di Suvero stands in entrance of the Coast Guard headquarters in DC. Catherine Opie’s images of Yosemite are put in all through a courthouse in Los Angeles. The record goes on and on.

Ehikian, a Silicon Valley journeyman with no expertise in authorities, was curt in his e mail.

“This e mail serves as discover that your organizational unit is being abolished together with all positions inside the unit—together with yours,” Ehikian stated in his notice. He added that abolished teams “not align” with the administration’s priorities.

All of a sudden, tens of hundreds of artworks had practically no stewards. Chaos adopted. A supply who not too long ago labored for the GSA informed me staffers had been involved about buildings being quickly bought to additional the cult of price slicing that has marked the early months of the second Trump administration. The location-specific commissions at some buildings, the considering went, would possibly even jack up costs. There was additionally concern for the way forward for the hundreds of extra movable items. With out anybody there to examine in on particular person works, would possibly they be broken, misplaced, or looted? Jennifer Gibson, the director of the Middle for Wonderful Artwork, began reaching out to her deputies and requested them to retain all their paperwork pertaining to particular person artworks and methods to take care of them, in addition to paperwork about in-progress commissions she hoped can be carried out in some unspecified time in the future.

“This must be a precedence,” she stated, in accordance with a replica of the e-mail obtained by The Washington Put up. Gibson directed a request for remark for this story to the GSA’s spokesperson, Jeff White, who declined to touch upon personnel and inside discussions.

The dismantling of the GSA’s arts programming is only a small a part of the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the humanities and tradition—or arts and tradition outdoors its very slender views on such issues. In some ways, it’s the fruits of a conservative dream. Suppose Jesse Helms calling Robert Mapplethorpe’s art work “rubbish” on the ground of the Senate, or Rudy Giuliani attempting to close down a present on the Brooklyn Museum as a result of Chris Ofili made a Virgin Mary out of, amongst different media, elephant dung. The Heritage Basis lately has been pleading for the elimination of the Nationwide Endowment of the Arts, making an instance of efficiency areas such because the Kitchen in New York, and artists equivalent to Pope.L and Edward Kienholz.

Trump couldn’t fairly do away with that group in his first time period, as any funding to the NEA or the NEH needs to be accredited by Congress. This time, the administration appears to have discovered a work-around. Trump has but to nominate an lively director to both company, successfully beheading them. And that’s to say nothing of his full steamrolling of the Kennedy Middle, the place Trump kicked the Biden appointees off the board, received himself elected chairman, and promptly put in a loyalist because the interim director.

He’s additionally issued government orders trying to close down the Institute of Museum and Library Providers, which supplies a whole lot of tens of millions in funding for cultural establishments. Trump appointed Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling as director to supervise the dismantling. On Monday, the group’s board presented Sonderling with a letter stating that he couldn’t proceed with Trump’s needs, because the IMLS’s existence had been “licensed by regulation and funded by Congressional appropriation.” As with so many different Trump-backed plans for the time being, a court docket battle appears inevitable.

By Edward Ruscha, Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, U.S. Basic Providers Administration.

Arguably essentially the most quick results of Trump 2.0 within the arts may come from the ordered layoffs on the GSA. Over 30 large-scale commissions had been funded within the final 10 years, and within the a long time earlier than that, the company commissioned works by mid-century American masters equivalent to Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, Beverly Pepper, Louise Bourgeois, and John Chamberlain. The drastic cuts to the Middle for Wonderful Arts—the shuttering of 5 area places of work and the dismissal of greater than half of the three dozen staffers—locations the complete operation in peril, as the workers on go away weren’t in a position to tie up unfastened ends on ongoing commissions and restoration tasks, in accordance with the Put up.

“The choice by the present administration actually jeopardizes the preservation, the safety, and the continued public possession of this work which might be actually integral components of the nation’s cultural patrimony and heritage,” stated Julie Trébault, the director of Artists at Risk Connection. The Paris-based worldwide group helps defend inventive freedom in autocratic-leaning states and different at-risk nations; it has not too long ago prolonged that mission to america.

“I really feel that past the preservation and survival of current art work, the choice of this administration to intestine the artwork and preservation division of the GSA has actually main implications for the commissioning of future work,” Trébault continued.

Many of the giant commissions got here by a program referred to as Artwork in Structure, which was based in 1972 in a bipartisan effort to assist the humanities in public federal buildings. The hassle has produced a long time of thrilling and impressive collaborations with the best dwelling American artists, leading to one thing like an ongoing sculpture biennale taking part in out in federal buildings throughout the nation. The ’70s introduced Louise Nevelson to Philadelphia, Isamu Noguchi to Seattle, and Claes Oldenburg to Chicago. The ’80s introduced Dan Flavin to Anchorage, Robert Irwin to DC, and Robert Longo to Iowa Metropolis. The ’90s introduced Michael Heizer to Reno, Martin Puryear to DC, and a very life-changing Ellsworth Kelly set up to a courthouse in Boston. That’s to say nothing of the wall works commissioned by Alex Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, and the huge installations by Maya Lin and Sol LeWitt.

All of those works at the moment are in peril of being uncared for or bought together with the a whole lot of buildings that the administration initially deliberate to place available on the market. (That record was faraway from the company’s web site in early March; on Tuesday, the GSA introduced it could promote eight buildings.) Whatever the plans to promote the buildings, the works could begin deteriorating with out the 5 disappeared area places of work to examine on them. Or maybe the administration will take the logical subsequent step of the DOGE-ification of the GSA’s artwork assortment—and promote it?

Trébault believes it may occur and never simply finally. “I feel very fast,” she stated. “Will they go and begin promoting what they really feel that they will get cash out of?… It’s very troublesome to say, however these strikes lead me to imagine that they are going to promote shortly as a result of it’s very dramatic, very harsh, very abrupt.”

Gibson, the Middle for Wonderful Arts head, understands the fraught nature of public artwork implies that those that aren’t asking to be confronted with modernism or the avant-garde need to face it on a regular basis, perhaps even day by day on their technique to work. This has backfired previously. In 1979, the GSA commissioned Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc to be displayed at a federal plaza in Manhattan, solely to dismantle the work after widespread outcry, fierce assist from fellow artists, public hearings, and finally a ruling by a court docket of appeals.

“Usually [the art] appears to be well-received—folks not surprisingly have very sturdy opinions about artwork, so there’ll all the time be the one who says, ‘Ugh, I hate it’ or ‘I do not prefer it’ or ‘My little one may have carried out it,’” Gibson stated in December 2022 on the podcast Preservation Views. “And there are different individuals who marvel at each the work and on the reality the federal authorities has this dedication to together with artwork in these federal buildings, and see this as a legacy for the longer term.”

Trump is firmly within the “my little one may have carried out it” camp. The president’s antipathy towards positive artwork and design goes again to when he met Andy Warhol, who left their assembly with the concept to make a collection of labor about Trump Tower, however Trump declined to purchase the work. (“I feel Trump’s kind of low-cost, although, I get that feeling,” Warhol stated on the time.) And whereas constructing that Fifth Avenue high-rise, Trump initially promised to donate the Artwork Deco artworks on the facet of the previous Bonwit Teller constructing he was demolishing to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. There was an enormous lattice-work bronze above the doorway and two giant limestone reliefs depicting ladies dancing with scarves.

As a substitute of the items being donated, they had been destroyed.

Throughout his first time period, Trump tried to no less than tamper with the Artwork in Structure program. In 2020, he declared by government motion that every one artworks should “depict a traditionally vital American” and that these artworks should not be “summary or modernist illustration.” However at the moment, the GSA’s artwork workers remained of their jobs. Of the dozen large-scale commissions within the years after that order, all are summary, and none depict Individuals.

Now, the brand new administration appears hellbent on dismantling the art-funding mechanism of presidency as a part of a broader shunning of a liberal-arts-supporting globalism.

“The US has traditionally performed a vital position in supporting inventive freedom globally, additionally by grants, by cultural diplomacy,” Trébault stated. “And I really feel there’s a actually sturdy want from this administration to essentially crush inventive mobility, inventive expression, to weaken this very flourishing sector and scale back this sort of both cross-border or alternate nationally between artists. “

Ehikian, the performing GSA director, has no historical past in authorities or the humanities. He’s the cofounder of RelateIQ, a data-scraping startup he bought to Salesforce. He then joined the software program firm run by Salesforce (and Time) proprietor Marc Benioff, left for an additional startup, and rejoined Salesforce after it acquired that startup as properly. Ehikian’s spouse, Andrea Conway, labored at X with Elon Musk. His brother, the true property developer Brad Ehikian, tried to purchase a GSA constructing in February for a lowball provide, prompting an nameless grievance to the inspector normal, as reported by the Post. Brad Ehikian didn’t reply to a request for remark. “At no time was there any consideration of promoting the property at a reduction or outdoors of GSA’s regular aggressive course of,” a spokesperson for the company informed the newspaper on the time.

In January, a former X worker named Nicole Hollander was positioned on the GSA to supervise actual property. Hollander is the spouse of Musk’s longtime capo Steve Davis—they slept at Twitter HQ with their new child little one following Musk’s takeover—and Davis has turn into the shadowy avatar for all DOGE actions all through authorities businesses. Ehikian stated at a latest city corridor that “there is no such thing as a DOGE crew at GSA.” Wired has reported that along with Hollander, identified DOGE associates equivalent to Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran have been noticed within the headquarters. “Like we didn’t discover a bunch of younger youngsters working behind a safe space on the sixth flooring,” a supply contained in the GSA informed the journal.