Curating Under Trump’s Culture Wars

President Trump's second term has brought an extraordinary number of executive orders targeting a wide range of political enemies. These actions have spanned sectors within the intelligentsia, from health science researchers to national museums.

Public institutions are under direct attack and regularly threatened with mass layoffs, and the funding structures that sustain many arts organizations have been significantly altered. These grant submission revisions deliberately exclude programs advancing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion.

This panel examines the first-year repercussions of Trump’s culture war orders, focusing on their impact on curating and exhibiting art in the United States.

We invite curators, art critics, museum administrators, artists, and designers to submit personal case stories. Our goal is to collect important cases of contemporary curatorial practices under this unprecedented attack—the most serious since the effective defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts.

We also seek practitioners who can help interpret policies and strategies for navigating these deliberately confusing bureaucratic challenges. We welcome case studies informed by global events and related contexts.

We aim to highlight strategies and lessons learned, giving the art and curatorial communities language to articulate their challenges and space to consider ways to continue presenting high-quality exhibitions in the U.S.