In early 2025, upon Donald Trump’s return to the White Home, exhibitions on the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC that includes Black and LGBTQ+ artists had been out of the blue canceled. The choices appeared to be in response to an government order Trump signed on his first day in workplace that restricts range, fairness and inclusion (DEI) “mandates, insurance policies, programmes, preferences and actions”.
On 14 March, President Trump signed an government order in search of to get rid of the Institute of Museum and Library Providers, the one federal company devoted to funding museums and libraries, and on 27 March he signed one other government order placing strain on the Smithsonian Establishment over exhibitions and programmes he claimed “degrade shared American values”. The chaos created by these orders has precipitated marginalised artists to concern exclusion and erasure. Museum leaders are additionally involved, questioning what this implies for the way forward for their establishments. And these adjustments come at a time when queer and trans individuals are beneath widespread assault from the Trump administration.
Zachari Logan, an artist from Saskatchewan, Canada, who was affected by the cancellation of exhibitions on the Museum of the Americas, says he was devastated when work he had spent years making out of the blue had no residence. “I used to be caught in a fog of disbelief once I first heard the information of Nature’s Wild being cancelled,” Logan says. “It grew to become far more gutting because it sank in that this was due not less than partly to Trump.”
He provides: “This units a really harmful precedent, and it turns into a bellwether second for creators and cultural employees globally.” The artist, who’s in his forties, says that “queers my age or older will keep in mind not that way back that there was little to no institutional programming for something aside from (largely) white, heterosexual males”. Programming and exhibitions that had been queer in any discernible method had been usually met with obstacles and silenced via censorship “together with elimination of funding”. Logan provides: “The parable of progress has supplied a false sense of security to many people.”
Some museum leaders really feel that’s exactly the rationale to be loud and proceed to unapologetically placed on exhibitions that includes queer and trans artists—along with offering bodily protected areas for marginalised folks. The chief of the Nationwide Museum of Girls within the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, DC emphasises each imperatives.
Samantha Field, One Sort of Story, from the collection Caribbean Goals, 2020, was lately included within the artist’s solo exhibition on the Nationwide Museum of Girls within the Arts, Samantha Field: Confluences Courtesy of the artist; © Samantha Field
“The protection of the museum’s guests, employees, artists and group companions is of the utmost significance to us. That is about bodily safety after all, but additionally about being a very inclusive and welcoming, protected area,” Susan Fisher Sterling, the museum’s director, tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Our programmes, our exhibitions and our assortment embrace LGBTQIA+ artists and communities. However past this important illustration, we wish to be a spot the place historically marginalised communities and people beneath menace at this time can come collectively.”
Sterling emphasises that the museum was based with the mission to counter gender-based discrimination within the arts and that though its title has “ladies” in it, “the expertise of gender inequity is extra expansive, as is our mandate. This contains cis ladies, and transgender and nonbinary people.” She provides that “the necessity for advocacy is a long-term actuality and we have now a duty to proceed our work and our mission”.
The museum’s programming displays that sense of duty. The NMWA lately closed a solo exhibition by the Bronx-based photographer Samantha Field highlighting her documentary and studio-based work capturing and conveying the experiences of queer communities of color. The museum will quickly open an exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Girls’s Studio Workshop (25 April-28 September). The workshop helps marginalised communities via artists’ books, zines, printed supplies, ephemera, archival supplies and residencies to “serve a sustainable and extra equitable artwork ecosystem”, because the exhibition textual content states. To this point, the workshop has revealed greater than 245 artists’ books, of which greater than 20 might be within the present. The museum has additionally been collaborating with drag artists, that includes them in public programming centered on the function of drag in constructing connections and creating areas of belonging, at the same time as conservative politicians have made drag exhibits scapegoats for funding cuts and censorship.
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork in Manhattan, recognized for gathering, exhibiting and supporting the work of LGBTQ+ artists, activists and students, has carried on with its programming and can host a portion of the Andil Gosine exhibition that was cancelled by the Museum of the Americas. The museum’s upcoming programming contains “Arte y Alma: Latinx LGBTQ+ Storytelling“, a bilingual efficiency that includes storytellers celebrating Latinx LGBTQ+ contributions to the humanities, on 10 April.
“We’re deeply dedicated to offering an area the place queer and trans artists and communities can discover not solely illustration but additionally refuge, affirmation and energy,” says Alyssa Nitchun, the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s government director. “In a time when LGBTQIA+ lives and inventive expression are more and more beneath assault, we’re setting the usual for what it means to indicate up—boldly, unapologetically and with unwavering dedication to the artists and audiences we serve.” She provides: “At this second, exhibiting up for queer and trans folks just isn’t non-compulsory.”
Different museums that aren’t but open however intend to showcase LGBTQ+ artwork embrace the American LGBTQ Museum, nonetheless developing its bodily area in New York Metropolis, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is about to open in a brand new constructing in autumn of 2025.
Emma Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 1870. The Heckscher Museum of Artwork, Museum Buy from the Charlotte Cushman Basis, Philadelphia Courtesy the Heckscher Museum of Artwork
Some establishments, just like the Heckscher Museum of Artwork on Lengthy Island, are making a degree to unequivocally state that queer and trans artwork and artists need to be included always, in all methods. The museum has devoted all the 12 months of 2025 to LGBTQ+ artwork, knowledgeable by an intergenerational queer advisory board with members of all ages. The Heckscher’s year-long Satisfaction Initiative contains the current exhibition Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, curated by Jessica Rosen, and an upcoming exhibition dedicated to the sculptor Emma Stebbins (28 September-15 March 2026), who’s best-known for her Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, although not often referenced by title or talked about for being an out and proud lesbian within the nineteenth century.
“We’re going out of our method, and the museum as an entire goes out of its method, to make a press release that we’ve at all times been a part of historical past, we’ve at all times been a part of artwork and we’re not going wherever,” says Evie Knell, a member of the Heckscher’s board.
Joanne Mulberg, Fireplace Island Pines, August 1982. Reward of the artist, the Heckscher Museum of Artwork Courtesy the Heckscher Museum of Artwork
For Satisfaction Month in June, the museum will open the exhibition All of Me with All of You: LGBTQ+ ART Out of the Assortment (7 June-14 September), which might be accompanied by a dwelling queer historic timeline created by the intergenerational queer advisory board.
“As an artwork museum, I do suppose we have now an obligation to be an area the place marginalised group [members] really feel welcome and might specific themselves and be snug,” says Heather Arnet, the Hecksher’s government director. “Museums aren’t only a residence for the work, however a house for the individuals who create the artwork, the people who find themselves in our group—a spot for folks to attach with each other, the place folks can have difficult conversations with each other. To be taught and develop empathy and respect and be a protected area to have interaction in deep conversations with out animosity.”
