The National Gallery of Art Announces End of Diversity

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has announced that it will end its diversity program. The New York Times reports that an executive order signed on January 20 by incoming US president Donald Trump is behind the program’s demise. Titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” the directive casts diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as “illegal and immoral” and commands the director of the US Office of Management and Budget to “coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” Founded by Congress in 1937, the National Gallery obtains nearly 80 percent of its operating budget from the federal government and counts whatever secretary of state is currently installed as an ex officio trustee.

The museum’s chief diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer resigned last year ahead of the election and had not yet been replaced when the mandate was issued. Two other employees in the DEI office have reportedly been reassigned to other roles within the institution. “The National Gallery of Art has closed its office of belonging and inclusion and removed related language from our website,” a museum spokesperson told the Times, which reported that the words “diversity,” “equity,” “access,” and “inclusion” had been removed from the list of values posted on the institution’s site and replaced with the phrase “welcoming and accessible.” The museum in 2021 had announced that it would “focus on diversity, equity, access and inclusion throughout our work to diversify the stories we tell, the ways in which we tell them, and our staff.” That same year, the museum devoted $820,000 to an institutional rebrand. Last spring, it hired its inaugural curator of Latin American Art.

The National Gallery is led by Kaywin Feldman, who shepherded the museum’s 2020 pivot to diversification, while its board since this past October has been led by onetime Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, who was the museum’s first Black trustee. At the Ford Foundation, one of the country’s largest and best-known philanthropic organizations, he oversaw the distribution of more than $7 billion in grants to arts and cultural organizations and expanded the foundation’s remit to include the addressing of inequality. Walker told the Times that he had instructed colleagues in the Association of Art Museum Directors during a meeting to “comply with the law and to be clear about your principles and values” and to focus on excellence, noting that “diversity does contribute to excellence.”