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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.

The murderer of US Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Allen R. Schindler had just pleaded guilty in a military court in Japan when Creative Time wheatpasted In Honor of Allen F. Schindler, Bureau’s poster diptych of the two sailors, all around New York City in the Summer of 1993. [J.N. Herlin has an archived press release.]

I realize though I’d seen the posters, and the basics of the situation, I’d never known the brutal details of Schindler’s killing. Or of the violent harassment Schindler experienced and tried to report, repeatedly, from the moment in late 1991 when he’d transferred to to the USS Belleau Wood until his murder October 27, 1992, days before Bill Clinton defeated George Bush in the US presidential election.

Clinton had campaigned to end the military’s ban on gay soldiers. Bush and his Defense Secretary, the draft dodger and parent of a gay child Dick Cheney, and many other Republican politicians, supported the ban, and fostered the atmosphere of homophobic violence and discrimination under the guise of military unity. Actually, gays were the real threat to this culture, they argued, what with the blackmail, and the AIDS.

I also did not realize the vast extent to which the US Navy abandoned and gaslit Schindler’s mother and family, and to which they covered up the culture of abusive bigotry encouraged by the officers on Schindler’s ship, and to which they obstructed investigations and attempts to seek accountability, much less reform. This all unfolded after the posters had gone up and worn down, after Clinton agreed to a compromise with the powerful and bigoted senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, the policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Bureau was the design studio of artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett, a continuation of sorts of Moffett’s involvement with the activist collective Gran Fury. At some point, or eventually, it all just became too much, too intense, too traumatic, and Moffett sought refuge in the studio, and in art, making abstract paintings. He seemed to address it in his 2019 Brooklyn Rail conversation with Dan Cameron, but rereading it now, it’s actually Cameron who does the talking, both questions and answers.

The way I’d remembered the posters installed was the way I’d remembered all Bureau’s posters, in an alternating grid, which was also how they were shown in 2013 at the New Museum’s NYC 1993 time capsule survey. I mention them now because a pair of posters just turned up in LA Modern’s post-Pride queer swag auction. But also because we live with one of Moffett’s earliest abstract paintings at the center of our home; we pass it hundreds of times each day. And its beauty now reminds me of the psychic cost Moffett paid to get to the place where he made it. Also, we’re entering an era where government-led bigotry and violence against its own people are expanding, and we need to remember how it went down before, and how to counter it.

William H. Johnson left South Carolina for New York when he was 17, and began studying painting at the National Academy of Design. He painted this self-portrait in his early 20s, giving himself lighter skin than in later portraits.

He went to Europe in 1926 to study modernism, married Danish artist Holcha Krake, and spent a decade working, showing, and traveling in Scandinavia. He painted several extraordinary, expressionistic views of Lofoten, Norway. These landscapes and his European-era figure paintings feel like they could have evolved from Soutine, or Hartley.

Johnson returned to NYC with Krake in 1938, and began painting in an African American vernacular mode that feels as close to Horace Pippin as to Picasso. After Krake’s death from cancer in 1944, Johnson moved back to Denmark, making American and African American history paintings for a while, but a mental health crisis led to his return to the States, the end of painting, and hospitalization until his death in 1970.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds over 1,000 works by Johnson, and has two dozen on view at the moment. The SAAM bio makes it sound like they rescued these works after Johnson’s death, but I think most, if not all, were donated upon the dissolution of the Harmon Foundation in 1967.

The Harmon Foundation was established by a white real estate developer named William Harmon to collect, promote, and exhibit art by Black artists. There are some problematics in the Harmon Foundation’s story—they removed portraits of W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson from exhibitions because of their communist sympathies, for example—and it’s not clear if Johnson’s reputation suffered from his association. It does feel like he’s been sort of stuck at one museum, though.

There’s a lot that doesn’t immediately make sense. But the most important thing—besides donating its large collection of art to HBCUs and the Smithsonian, and besides Johnson’s own work, of course—is that William Harmon created his foundation after years of pseudonymous philanthropy and non-predatory student loaning—under the name of an ancestor, Jedediah Tingle.