In a new Vanity Fair play-by-play of the Trump administration’s meddling with the Smithsonian over the past six months, artist Mika Rottenberg, who has a piece in an upcoming show at the Smithsonian-run Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, called Amy Sherald’s decision to cancel a Smithsonian show “amazing,” and added that “Amy Sherald stood up to them.”
Earlier in the piece, Rottenberg had even stronger words for the recent situation: “The whole thing is fucked up.”
Rottenberg’s work is included in a show that opens at the Hirshhorn in November. Another artist whose work is included in the same show, British artist Richard Long, also expressed concern about the Trump administration “strangl[ing] everything” at the Smithsonian, but what is perhaps most notable about the Vanity Fair article is how many artists didn’t want to speak about the ongoing turmoil.
Nick Cave, Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch and Rashid Johnson all have artworks being presented at a Smithsonian institution in the coming months; all of them declined to speak. “None of them agreed to interview requests for this story,” the magazine notes, “a common theme in a cautious environment.”
Aside from Sherald, few artists have been vocal during Trump’s second term. In a segment that ran earlier this week on NPR, New York Times journalist noted, “You see a kind of—much more of a cowed, capitulating stance on the part of the art world, I think a sense of resignation.”
One of the few who has been vocal is Dread Scott, whose artworks have provoked American politicians in the past. “For humanity’s sake, we need to drive this regime from power,” Scott told Artnet earlier this year. “Art institutions need to be standing up and stepping up and finding ways to elevate the voices of radical dissenting artists. To show that art, but also find ways to fund it and support it and withstand the legal attacks that will come.”
