Biden Reverses Trump’s Retrograde Rules for Federal Art Commissions

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has announced updates to its Art in Architecture programme, which commissions visual art displayed in federal buildings. The new rule removes restrictions on subjects, themes, and styles that excluded many artists from consideration.

‘Public art is for the people, and we want to make sure our public spaces reflect the rich diversity and creativity that strengthens and inspires them,’ said GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan.

The change unwinds the Trump Administration’s executive order ‘Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes’, which was issued in July 2020 in response to attacks on sculptures of racist figures by people affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

The order required any work commemorating ‘a historically significant American’ to be ‘a lifelike or realistic representation of that person, not an abstract or modernist representation’. It also mandated that works depicting America’s founders, former presidents, leading abolitionists, and the people who ‘discovered’ America should be prioritised.

Trump planned a National Garden of American Heroes to display such sculptures but no concrete steps were taken, and Biden revoked his executive orders relating to it in May 2021. He also asked four Trump appointees to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts to tender their resignations.

In February 2021, the Biden Administration knocked down another Trump rule, which required Federal buildings to be constructed in the classical style. Then head of the American Institute of Architects Robert Ivy responded to Trump’s architecture rule in February 2020.

‘In the 21st century, we’re very different people from the people who popularised Greek Revival architecture in the 19th century, as beautiful as it was,’ he said. —[O]

Main image: Heri Dono, Donald Trump (2017). Acrylic on cardboard, bamboo. 77.47 x 29.21 cm. Courtesy Baik Art.