Trump’s Dismantling of DEI Puts Culture Workers on the Frontlines

On 20 January, the White House issued an executive order that demanded the termination of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes. Following this order, there have been instances of US museums cancelling exhibitions, closing diversity offices and deleting DEI ‘buzzwords’ from their websites. On 27 March, another executive order directly targeted the Smithsonian Institution. Titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’, it seeks to supress any programming that ‘portray[s] American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive’. Here, we gather four US-based curators and directors – Rebecca Pauline Jampol, Daisy Nam, Alyssa Nitchun and TK Smith – to discuss the wide-ranging ramifications of these actions.

Chloe Stead How do DEI principles feed into the running and programming of the arts organizations you work at?

Alyssa Nitchun The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, where I’m executive director, is literally predicated on DEI and advocating for marginalized communities. We were founded in 1969, just weeks before the Stonewall uprisings, by Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman, who decided to publicly show their collection of gay art at a time when it was still illegal and dangerous to do so.

While the current moment is unprecedented, as a museum that serves queer people, we come from a tradition that’s continually resisted oppression and organized in the face of government persecution. We are well-versed in creating networks of mutual support outside of restrictive laws and social norms.

Rebecca Pauline Jampol I’m co-director of Project for Empty Space, a non-profit arts organization now in its 15th year. Our primary hub is in Newark, New Jersey. We were also founded on DEI principles: my Co-Director, Jasmine Wahi, and I started this space because we felt our communities were not represented in art spaces and didn’t have access to them.

Daisy Nam I’m director and chief curator at the Wattis, which is housed within the California College of the Arts (CCA). Like many other institutions during the racial reckoning of 2020, the Wattis thought about what it meant to be equitable and put policies and language in place around that. This also made sense because CCA is very diverse: almost 40 percent of the students are BIPOC. I am the first woman director of the Wattis and the first woman of colour. I wasn’t considered a DEI hire, but I think my appointment last year came about in part because those plans had been put into place. So, DEI does work in as much as it enables folks like me to be part of leading an institution.

TK Smith Simply put, DEI is the institutional response to a lack of diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as access and autonomy. Alyssa, as you beautifully expressed, it’s not that these ideas are new or that they are even that radical. It’s that now there is a power structure – be it the federal government, the administrations of institutions, lending and philanthropy groups – that wants to see efforts made to address this lack. And Daisy, to your point: I am a direct result of that. I’ve been the inaugural everything! I’m the first Black curator at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, where I’m the curator of the arts of Africa and the African diaspora. I was the inaugural Tina Dunkley fellow [at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum], which was part of the Ford Foundation initiative to diversify museum leadership. I’ve done all sorts of pipeline programmes that attempt to address this lack, so I’m approaching this conversation as that person of colour, that Black person who is supposed to be the result of these initiatives.

Cassie Packard It’s been over two months since the first DEI-focused executive order. What effect has this had on your institutions?

AN This moment, for us, is a continuation of what we have always done. The mission of our museum has always been to serve LGBTQIA+ artists and community. And so, in this moment where the administration is trying to erase our identities, we’re digging in deeper to say: actually, we have always existed. And we’ve experienced an uptick in visitors. There is an even more pronounced desire for queer communities to be together and for people to support explicitly queer spaces.

Our current exhibition, ‘Resisterhood’ by the artist Young Joon Kwak, is a mobilizing call for a new queer and trans resistance politics; on 14 February, the same day we opened the show, the National Park Service removed the ‘T’ for transgender from the Stonewall National Monument website. It was this temporal elision where an exhibition we’d been planning for years coincided with this particular political moment.

It is an unprecedented abuse of power, moving even beyond the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. Daisy Nam

DN I feel lucky I’m in California where the governor [Gavin Newsom] is not backing down to President Trump. The California attorney general [Rob Bonta] was also part of a coalition of other attorney generals that issued guidance stating that DEI initiatives are not illegal, and that the federal government doesn’t have the authority to prohibit them in private organizations with an executive order.

In terms of the 27 March order, the Wattis is at such a different scale and governance structure to the Smithsonian, it’s hard to compare. But it is an unprecedented abuse of power by Trump, moving even beyond the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. Like all of us, the Smithsonian will have to transcend and survive these times with new strategies and models. I was heartened to read that [Smithsonian director] Lonnie Bunch is focused on the mission to share knowledge of multifaceted stories and is sticking to the internal review process. This is key: to stay laser-focused on our jobs and what we do. For the Wattis, it is to support artists’ visions.

RPJ Project for Empty Space started with a mission that was a bit of a manifesto. For many years, we described it as a ‘woman-run, femme-powered, BIPOC, queer and unapologetically radical ecosystem for creatives, providing safe and equitable spaces for artistic innovation and public engagement’. It was just last year that we shifted that a bit to focus on artist support and how we’re serving our communities. But I wonder, if that was still how we framed our mission, if it might have impacted us.

At the same time, we are also thinking about how we can stick to that original mission. In the past year, we launched a project called Body Freedom for Every(Body), which is a mobile exhibition inside a box truck that shares the work of more than 100 artists engaging with matters of bodily autonomy. In the planning of that project, it became clear to me and Jasmine that it was likely that this administration was going to exist and that some of the things we’re talking about would be outlawed, erased or jeopardized. This truck project is our way of saying: no matter what happens, we exist, we’re going to celebrate each other and we’re going to create spaces all over the United States to do so.

We are well-versed in creating networks of mutual support outside of restrictive laws and social norms. Alyssa Nitchun

TKS It is clear that we are in a culture war and culture workers are on the front lines. We’re literally fighting for American culture right now, for what it means to be American and to express Americanness. These executive orders are unambiguously telling me that it’s not meant to be me and that I shouldn’t seek to change or impact what constitutes being American.

CS Do you feel DEI programs have been helpful in redressing inequality in art institutions?

TKS What’s interesting about this blatant attack on these kinds of initiatives is that it assumes they are effective in the first place. I spoke on a panel about museum access at the Association of Art Museum Curators conference last year. It was called Qualified to Curate, and the condemnation I gave my peers was: why are we using this language and developing these pipelines when we are not also creating sustainable careers for people of colour, women, queer and disabled people in this field? It invariably ends at training. It’s always a fellowship, an internship or an initiative. It’s six months; it’s two years. Even though a lot of these efforts are making change, the question is: how far does that change go?

Right now we’re seeing a push against a form of equality that we haven’t even been able to achieve yet. The overcorrection and almost celebration of the dropping of these initiatives is shocking. And it’s terrifying that these institutions are just folding like cards.

DN Yes. We thought that institutions were embodying these values in good faith but, in reality, it was all performative. You can really tell which ones willingly did the work to make DEI part of their structure and those that did it because everybody told them they should. And what happens now: are they just going to get rid of anyone who might be seen as a DEI hire? The one thing I hold onto is that the staff at the Wattis is predominantly BIPOC, so we are really part of the structure of the institution now. What Trump wants is white supremacy, but complete erasure of our values, ideas, memories, archives, is not as easy as he thinks – it’s impossible.

AN I do wonder, though, how the economy is going to play into everything because people in every sector are cutting jobs. It’s going to be a sort of red herring in deploying a lot of these anti-DEI policies in deeply disturbing and detrimental ways.

CS These measures come during a time in which many artists’ practices could be described as decolonial – whether that means upending rigid notions around gender or prioritizing a non-Western gaze. What responsibility do museums have to keep showing this work even if it will put them in conflict with the government?

RPJ Now more than ever, art can be used as a place for sharing feelings, expressing resistance and bringing people together. I’m thinking particularly about the show ‘Fragile Intangibilities’ by one of our artists-in-residence, Daphne Arthur, which includes work around immigrant stories. There are major US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids happening in Newark and a lot of fear in our local communities. When that show opened, it brought everybody together like a warm embrace in the middle of a terrible time.

Art can be used as a place for sharing feelings, expressing resistance. Rebecca Pauline Jampol

AN We opened an exhibition a few weeks ago called ‘Ficciones Patógenas’ [Pathogenic Fictions]. It brings together 20 artists and collectives, primarily from Latin and South America, looking at colonial narratives around pathology and deviance and reclaiming queer and trans identities as sites of power and innovation. One of the things that was so valuable for myself, my team and for the institution more broadly is that many of these artists are coming from countries with decades of fascist or autocratic regimes. We found ourselves in this moment of deep learning from artists who’ve been in the trenches.

DN Our colleagues and artists who live in authoritarian places can teach us a lot. We just had a week of programs with Hiwa K., a Kurdish artist who brings in poetics into the space of war and occupation. And there’s an incredible Thai curator who once shared, when she organized film festivals, she would screen really boring works first for government officials until they left. Then she would start showing all the political work! I just love that kind of creative and strategic way to fight censorship because it really is our job as curators to provide context and safe spaces for artists to be able to make and show work.

CP Beyond the strategies you’ve already touched on, what concrete steps have you taken, or observed being taken by others, in response to the executive orders?

RPJ We’re trying to navigate and strategize every day on how to sustain our organization’s missions and support our core community. When I see other institutions doing the same – when they’re explicitly using the term DEI or talking about working with any of the ‘red flag’ words that are being presented in that list – that gives me hope because then I see that our organization is part of a wider group that is going to survive this, that is going to maintain doing this work.

 We’re fighting for American culture right now, for what it means to be American and to express Americanness. TK Smith

DN I do think that the art world can be a little competitive, but this is not that moment. I really feel that we are trying to help each other.

AN I agree. We had an impromptu convening here at the museum about three weeks ago with two dozen directors of different arts and queer arts-focused organizations. It was an informal forum for sharing ideas.

Another real strategy for me is having very good legal support. I have an extraordinary pro bono legal team that help me sleep at night. I have a supportive board of directors who are politically engaged, fierce and determined. In that spirit of collaboration, this is the time when you really know who your allies are. 

The last thing I would add is being contrarian. The administration wants us to respond in fear. They want us to respond in panic. They want us to move quickly and freak out.

TKS Isolation is a big part of this. We’re meant to feel like this is happening only to us, but that’s not the case. This is happening to even the largest, most well-funded, supported institutions. They’re losing years of research work and collaborative community-building. 

I mourn those workers who have sacrificed so much to be in those spaces, to create just a sliver of opportunity for these Indigenous, Black, queer, women artists, to create something close to equitable, because we still, I would argue, have not seen equity yet. We’re just getting to the precipice of what diversity is. We were on the crest of something with large-scale travelling exhibitions like ‘Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica’ and the ‘The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture’ [both 2024–25]. These shows are historically unprecedented on the levels that they were being financially supported and promoted. 

Even though I think the scales will shrink now, we’re going to see some real, powerful, radical, incredible work on the street because artists are going to keep making regardless.

And we might just have to do a little more pro bono work than we were doing before, but we’re going to continue to support them as art workers.

^{Main image: BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY)'s NYC Times Square Kickoff. Courtesy: Project for Empty Space; photograph: Carlos Hernandez}