Look, I understand how reporting works, and why it’s being covered the way it is, because that is how the story got out, and that is who has gone on the record.
But as shocking and admirable as it seems that Amy Sherald canceled her retrospective’s appearance at the National Portrait Gallery, that is not the really important part.
The important and frankly dire thing is that the NPG, and the Smithsonian’s chancellor Lonnie Bunch, attempted to join Trump’s extremist movement to erase trans representation. They sought to censor one of Sherald’s paintings, of a trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty, remove it from the exhibition American Sublime—organized by SFMOMA and moving in a couple of weeks from the Whitney to, well, not the NPG now, so who knows?—and replace it, somehow, with a video of people debating or reacting to the painting? The painting they would refuse to show? And letting people decide for themselves whether trans people should exist?
The quote being attributed to Bunch, via Sherald, is that they didn’t want to “provoke” Trump by showing a work. So instead they join him by censoring it. This comes just weeks after Bunch and the board of regents also acceded to Trump’s calls to review Smithsonian exhibitions for unapproved ideologies. Like, I guess, the applicability of “with liberty and justice for all” to trans people.
Project 2025 calls for a takeover of the Smithsonian and the removal of Bunch, saying he’s not the right man for the job. Maybe he’s trying to prove to them that he is their guy after all. This immediately calls the resignation of NPG director Kim Sajet into question, too. When did all this censorship conversation go down? Why was Lonnie Bunch even weighing in on single artwork decisionmaking?
Sherald did the right thing when she needed to, exercising the power she has in the context where she has it. Every one of us should do the same. But what matters on a larger scale is that faced with the same situation, the people at the Smithsonian Institution betrayed their mission, their principles, trans people, and all of us.