Trump Executive Order asks the National Gallery to complete the diversity programs

Four years after it mounted a redirect campaign that focused on diversity, justice and inclusion, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced this week that it would end these programs because of An executive order signed by President Trump Monday described such initiatives as “illegal and immoral.”

“The National Gallery of Art has closed its office for affliction and inclusion and removed related language from our site,” said a spokesman for the museum.

The institution removed the words “diversity, equity, access and inclusion” from A list of its values ​​online and replaced them with the words “inviting and available.”

Other museums and art organizations are still considering how to respond to President Trump’s executive order. The Smithsonian institution, separated from the National Gallery, said it had no comment on how the executive order would affect its own diversity programming.

The National Gallery, established by Congress in 1937, receives almost 80 percent of its operating budget from the federal government. Leaders of the institution who are in the shadow of the US capital have preferred not to anger incoming presidents whose state secretaries also act as ex -officio -thrustes for the museum. Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, appeared at a dinner at the museum with the cabinet -nominated as part of the inauguration week.

The museum’s most important diversity, inclusion and associated officer retired last year before the election, so the position was already unemployed. Two other employees in the office, who were indicted to make the museum “more visiting-focused, inclusive and fair”, were allocated to vacant positions elsewhere in the museum, officials said.

It was a quick turn for a museum that adopted a new vision and mission declaration in 2021 and said that as a Strategic priority It would “focus on diversity, equity, access and inclusion through our work to diversify the stories we tell, the ways in which we tell them, and our staff.” That year, the museum revealed a $ 820,000 Ommarking Campaign that Redid Redid its logo and signage and highlighted its commitment to diversity.

By 2020, the National Gallery announced that it would delay a retrospective of modernist painter Philip Guston and said his depictions of the clan to be better contextualized. The move, where it became with several other museums, stunned the art world and led to calls from prominent artists that the works were shown.

While some saw the delay as an overreaction, it highlighted the lack of diversity in the National Gallery’s leadership and curatorial ranks, which had been almost all white, at a time when museums looked at their demographics after racial protests that followed George Floyd’s murder.

In the years that followed the museum, diversified its leadership team hired it First curator of African American artRecruated Trustees of Color to the Board of Directors and began mounting more shows of women and artists of colors. Within the museum’s world, it was seen as a trailblazer in the effort to become more inviting for people with different socio -economic backgrounds.

“Our core collection mirrors the demographics in America when we were founded in 1941, when the country was almost 90 percent white,” said Museum’s director, Museum’s director, at the time of redirection. “But we have our work carved for us to expand the representation.”

A spokesman for the National Gallery said Feldman was unable to talk about the museum’s political shifts this week because she was traveling.

On Thursday morning, the concerns that cultural leaders have about the new rules of the White House were treated at a meeting of the Association of Art Museum’s directors. A director who spoke was Darren Walker, board president of the National Gallery and the Deputy Manager for the Ford Foundation, who has given millions of dollars to diversity initiatives at museums.

“My advice at the meeting was to comply with the law and be aware of your principles and values,” Walker said, adding that museums should focus on expertise. “And diversity contributes to expertise.”