Call it entrumpy—a “gradual decline into disorder” (riffing on “entropy”), attributable to the unpredictability of our unprecedented President.
Exploiting his “new” (more accurately: “renewed”) position on the White House bully-pulpit, Donald Trump has impelled U.S. museum heads to change their acronymic imperatives from DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) to DWI—Directing While Intoxicated (by MAGA vapors). It’s astonishing (not to mention dispiriting) to see even Darren Walker, the Ford Foundation’s former president-turned-National Gallery president, betray his own stated beliefs by ending diversity programs at his current institution in the face of Trump’s chipping away at the previously bedrock principals of DEI (now undermined and redefined by Trump as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”).
What’s immoral (if not illegal) is the decimation of the institutions and programs that have been sustained by infusions of federal support, long before such democratic (with a small “d”) objectives were reduced to facile initials and politicized slogans.
I completely agree with the conservatives’ viewpoint that another “E” word—Excellence—should be of the highest importance in hiring candidates for government-funded positions. But under the Trump Administration, political and personal connections appear to trump substantive qualifications.
It bears remembering that art museums did not roll over and play dead the first time that Trump brought his uncultured sensibility to the Oval Office. During his first term, the National Gallery, Washington, began transforming itself into a DEI powerhouse under the directorship of its current head, Kaywin Feldman.
Here’s what an NGA spokesperson had proudly told me about that transformation:
- The leadership team has gone from 0% BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] to 60% BIPOC, and is also 60% female.
- · Elected Trustee leadership has gone from 0% BIPOC to 40% BIPOC.
- · The percent of BIPOC staff in higher-grade-level positions (GS 9 and above) has increased by 5% from 25% to 30%.
- · Between our new Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging department and existing Equal Employment Opportunity office we have three full time staff devoted to advancing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion in our work.
- · We have a new division devoted to visitor experience and evaluation that centers the importance of the visitor in our work.
- · In addition to appointing a renowned scholar of Latinx art as Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer in 2021, we have added two curatorial positions to better represent the United States of America: a specialist in African American and Afro-Diasporic Art and a specialist in Latinx Art.
- · We have hosted a series of six seminars to engage our curatorial staff with leading voices in the field on topics such as expanding collections, new narratives, curating indigeneity, colonial Latin American art, and feminist perspectives in the museum.
Why have art museum heads and other cultural leaders self-censored from forceful outspokenness to restrained acquiescence? Has Trump’s aggressive rhetoric cowed them into cowardice? Sadly, the operative imperative now seems to be: “Don’t bite the hand that might (or might not) feed you.”
Does no one in the artworld have the guts (and donor support) to stand up to assaults by the commander-in-chief?