Four years after it mounted a rebranding campaign that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, the National Gallery of Art in Washington announced this week that it would end those programs because of an executive order signed by President Trump on Monday that described such initiatives as “illegal and immoral.”
“The National Gallery of Art has closed its office of belonging and inclusion and removed related language from our website,” a museum spokesman said.
The institution removed the words “diversity, equity, access and inclusion” from a list of its values online and replaced them with the words “welcoming and accessible.”
Other museums and arts organizations are still considering how to respond to President Trump’s executive order. The Smithsonian Institution, which is separate from the National Gallery, said it had no comment about how the executive order would affect its own diversity programming.
The National Gallery, which was established by Congress in 1937, receives nearly 80 percent of its operating budget from the federal government. Leaders of the institution, which is in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, have preferred not to anger incoming presidents, whose secretaries of state also serve as ex officio trustees of the museum. Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, appeared at a dinner at the museum with cabinet nominees as part of inauguration week.
The museum’s chief diversity, inclusion and belonging officer resigned last year, before the election, so the post was already vacant. Two other employees in the office, which was charged with making the museum “more visitor-focused, inclusive and equitable,” were reassigned to vacant positions elsewhere in the museum, officials said.
It was a rapid turnabout for a museum that adopted a new vision and mission statement in 2021 and said that as a strategic priority 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 year the museum unveiled an $820,000 rebranding campaign that redid its logo and signage and highlighted its commitment to diversity.
In 2020 the National Gallery announced that it would delay a retrospective of the modernist painter Philip Guston, saying that his depictions of Klansmen needed to be better contextualized. The move, in which it was joined by several other museums, stunned the art world, and led to calls from prominent artists for the works to be shown.
While some saw the delay as an overreaction, it highlighted the lack of diversity in the National Gallery’s leadership and curatorial ranks, which had been almost all white, at a time when museums were looking at their demographics after the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s murder.
In the years that followed the museum diversified its leadership team, hired its first curator of African American art, recruited trustees of color to the board and began mounting more shows by women and artists of color. Within the museum world it came to be seen as a trailblazer in efforts to become more welcoming to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
“Our core collection does mirror the demographics of America when we were founded in 1941, when the country was almost 90 percent white,” Kaywin Feldman, the museum’s director, said at the time of the rebranding. “But we have our work cut out for us to expand representation.”
A National Gallery spokesman said Feldman was unable to speak about the museum’s policy shift this week because she was traveling.
On Thursday morning, the concerns cultural leaders have about the new White House rules were addressed in a meeting for the Association of Art Museum Directors. One executive who spoke was Darren Walker, the board president of the National Gallery and the departing leader of the Ford Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to diversity initiatives in museums.
“My advice at the meeting was to comply with the law and to be clear about your principles and values,” Walker said, adding that museums should focus on excellence. “And diversity does contribute to excellence.”
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