Earlier this month, staffers on the Normal Companies Administration, the federal company that oversees, amongst different features, the federal authorities’s huge actual property portfolio and an enormous trove of advantageous artwork amassed during the last two centuries, obtained an electronic mail from its new performing director, Stephen Ehikian, who Donald Trump appointed in January 2025. The Heart for High-quality Arts on the GSA has solely about three dozen staffers; it’s not likely identified outdoors of presidency circles, nevertheless it’s constructed one of many largest and oldest collections of artwork within the nation and controls the purse strings to a good growth price range. Every of the roughly 1,500 buildings the GSA owns is allotted at the very least 0.5% of its price range’s development value to fee or preserve artworks for its partitions. There are greater than 26,000 artworks below the company’s purview, together with Civil Battle–period work, the expansive mural initiatives of the WPA, and a 60-foot-tall Alexander Calder sculpture in entrance of the Mies van der Rohe–designed federal middle 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 throughout the partitions of museums. Ed Ruscha gave a shocking diptych to a federal constructing in San Francisco in 2007. Robert Mangold normal a big tricolored sculpture for a courthouse in Buffalo in 2011. Jenny Holzer’s scathing marble message benches dot a analysis middle in Silver Spring, Maryland. An enormous Mark di Suvero stands in entrance of the Coast Guard headquarters in DC. Catherine Opie’s photographs 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 electronic mail.
“This electronic mail serves as discover that your organizational unit is being abolished together with all positions throughout the unit—together with yours,” Ehikian mentioned in his notice. He added that abolished teams “now not align” with the administration’s priorities.
Instantly, tens of 1000’s of artworks had almost no stewards. Chaos adopted. A supply who lately labored for the GSA informed me staffers had been involved about buildings being quickly offered to additional the cult of value slicing that has marked the early months of the second Trump administration. The positioning-specific commissions at some buildings, the considering went, may even jack up costs. There was additionally worry for the way forward for the 1000’s of extra movable items. With out anybody there to verify in on particular person works, may they be broken, misplaced, or looted? Jennifer Gibson, the director of the Heart for High-quality Artwork, began reaching out to her deputies and requested them to retain all their paperwork pertaining to particular person artworks and 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 mentioned, in accordance with a duplicate 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 inner 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 slim views on such issues. In some ways, it’s the end result of a conservative dream. Suppose Jesse Helms calling Robert Mapplethorpe’s paintings “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 resembling 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 accepted 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 Heart, the place Trump kicked the Biden appointees off the board, acquired 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 Companies, which gives tons of of thousands and thousands in funding for cultural establishments. Trump appointed Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling as director to supervise the dismantling. On Monday, the group’s board introduced Sonderling with a letter stating that he couldn’t proceed with Trump’s needs, because the IMLS’s existence had been “approved by legislation and funded by Congressional appropriation.” As with so many different Trump-backed plans in the intervening time, a courtroom battle appears inevitable.
By Edward Ruscha, Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, U.S. Normal Companies Administration.
Arguably probably the most instant results of Trump 2.0 within the arts might come from the ordered layoffs on the GSA. Over 30 large-scale commissions had been funded within the final 10 years, and within the many years earlier than that, the company commissioned works by mid-century American masters resembling Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, Beverly Pepper, Louise Bourgeois, and John Chamberlain. The drastic cuts to the Heart for High-quality Arts—the shuttering of 5 discipline places of work and the dismissal of greater than half of the three dozen staffers—locations your entire operation in peril, as the staff on depart weren’t capable of tie up unfastened ends on ongoing commissions and restoration initiatives, 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,” mentioned Julie Trébault, the director of Artists at Threat Connection. The Paris-based worldwide group helps shield inventive freedom in autocratic-leaning states and different at-risk international locations; it has lately prolonged that mission to the USA.
“I really feel that past the preservation and survival of current paintings, 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.
A lot of the giant commissions got here by means of a program known as Artwork in Structure, which was based in 1972 in a bipartisan effort to help the humanities in public federal buildings. The trouble has produced many years of thrilling and impressive collaborations with the best dwelling American artists, leading to one thing like an ongoing sculpture biennale enjoying 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 large installations by Maya Lin and Sol LeWitt.
All of those works at the moment are at risk of being uncared for or offered together with the tons of of buildings that the administration initially deliberate to place in the marketplace. (That record was faraway from the company’s web site in early March; on Tuesday, the GSA introduced it will promote eight buildings.) Whatever the plans to promote the buildings, the works could begin deteriorating with out the 5 disappeared discipline places of work to verify 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 might occur and never simply ultimately. “I feel very fast,” she mentioned. “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 consider that they may promote rapidly as a result of it’s very dramatic, very harsh, very abrupt.”
Gibson, the Heart for High-quality Arts head, understands the fraught nature of public artwork signifies that those that aren’t asking to be confronted with modernism or the avant-garde must face it on a regular basis, possibly even day by day on their solution to work. This has backfired up to now. 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 help from fellow artists, public hearings, and ultimately a ruling by a courtroom of appeals.
“Typically [the art] appears to be well-received—folks not surprisingly have very robust opinions about artwork, so there’ll all the time be the one that says, ‘Ugh, I hate it’ or ‘I do not prefer it’ or ‘My baby might have performed it,’” Gibson mentioned in December 2022 on the podcast Preservation Views. “And there are different individuals who marvel at each the work and on the truth the federal authorities has this dedication to together with artwork in these federal buildings, and see this as a legacy for the long run.”
Trump is firmly within the “my baby might have performed it” camp. The president’s antipathy towards advantageous artwork and design goes again to when he met Andy Warhol, who left their assembly with the thought 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 mentioned 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 a giant lattice-work bronze above the doorway and two giant limestone reliefs depicting girls dancing with scarves.
As a substitute of the items being donated, they had been destroyed.
Throughout his first time period, Trump tried to at the very least tamper with the Artwork in Structure program. In 2020, he declared by government motion that every one artworks should “depict a traditionally important American” and that these artworks should not be “summary or modernist illustration.” However at the moment, the GSA’s artwork employees remained of their jobs. Of the dozen large-scale commissions within the years after that order, all are summary, and none depict People.
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 creative freedom globally, additionally by means of grants, by means of cultural diplomacy,” Trébault mentioned. “And I really feel there’s a actually robust want from this administration to essentially crush creative mobility, inventive expression, to weaken this very flourishing sector and cut back this type of both cross-border or change 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 offered to Salesforce. He then joined the software program firm run by Salesforce (and Time) proprietor Marc Benioff, left for one more startup, and rejoined Salesforce after it acquired that startup as effectively. Ehikian’s spouse, Andrea Conway, labored at X with Elon Musk. His brother, the actual property developer Brad Ehikian, tried to purchase a GSA constructing in February for a lowball supply, prompting an nameless criticism to the inspector normal, as reported by the Put up. 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 baby following Musk’s takeover—and Davis has develop into the shadowy avatar for all DOGE actions all through authorities companies. Ehikian mentioned at a latest city corridor that “there isn’t a DOGE workforce at GSA.” Wired has reported that along with Hollander, identified DOGE associates resembling Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran have been noticed within the headquarters. “Like we didn’t discover a bunch of younger children working behind a safe space on the sixth ground,” a supply contained in the GSA informed the journal.
