Trump and the Fate of the Government’s Massive Art Collection

Earlier this month, staffers at the General Services Administration, the federal agency that oversees, among other functions, the federal government’s vast real estate portfolio and a massive trove of fine art accumulated over the last two centuries, received an email from its new acting director, Stephen Ehikian, who Donald Trump appointed in January 2025. The Center for Fine Arts at the GSA has only about three dozen staffers; it’s not really known outside of government circles, but it’s built one of the largest and oldest collections of art in the country and controls the purse strings to a decent expansion budget. Each of the roughly 1,500 buildings the GSA owns is allotted at least 0.5% of its budget’s construction cost to commission or maintain artworks for its walls. There are more than 26,000 artworks under the agency’s purview, including Civil War–era paintings, the expansive mural projects of the WPA, and a 60-foot-tall Alexander Calder sculpture in front of the Mies van der Rohe–designed federal center in Chicago.

The GSA might not be the sexiest independent agency in town, but those working the art desk on F Street were tasked with maintaining commissioned works by American masters that would usually be seen within the walls of museums. Ed Ruscha gave a stunning diptych to a federal building in San Francisco in 2007. Robert Mangold fashioned a gigantic tricolored sculpture for a courthouse in Buffalo in 2011. Jenny Holzer’s scathing marble message benches dot a research center in Silver Spring, Maryland. A giant Mark di Suvero stands in front of the Coast Guard headquarters in DC. Catherine Opie’s photos of Yosemite are installed throughout a courthouse in Los Angeles. The list goes on and on.

Ehikian, a Silicon Valley journeyman with no experience in government, was curt in his email.

“This email serves as notice that your organizational unit is being abolished along with all positions within the unit—including yours,” Ehikian said in his note. He added that abolished groups “no longer align” with the administration’s priorities.

Suddenly, tens of thousands of artworks had nearly no stewards. Chaos followed. A source who recently worked for the GSA told me staffers were concerned about buildings being rapidly sold to further the cult of cost cutting that has marked the early months of the second Trump administration. The site-specific commissions at some buildings, the thinking went, might even jack up prices. There was also fear for the future of the thousands of more movable pieces. Without anyone there to check in on individual works, might they be damaged, lost, or looted? Jennifer Gibson, the director of the Center for Fine Art, started reaching out to her deputies and asked them to retain all their documents pertaining to individual artworks and how to care for them, as well as documents about in-progress commissions she hoped would be carried out at some point.

“This needs to be a priority,” she said, according to a copy of the email obtained by The Washington Post. Gibson directed a request for comment for this story to the GSA’s spokesperson, Jeff White, who declined to comment on personnel and internal discussions.

The dismantling of the GSA’s arts programming is just a small part of the Trump administration’s all-out attack on the arts and culture—or arts and culture outside its very narrow views on such matters. In many ways, it’s the culmination of a conservative dream. Think Jesse Helms calling Robert Mapplethorpe’s artwork “garbage” on the floor of the Senate, or Rudy Giuliani trying to shut down a show at the Brooklyn Museum because Chris Ofili made a Virgin Mary out of, among other media, elephant dung. The Heritage Foundation in recent years has been pleading for the elimination of the National Endowment of the Arts, making an example of performance spaces such as the Kitchen in New York, and artists such as Pope.L and Edward Kienholz.

Trump couldn’t quite get rid of that organization in his first term, as any funding to the NEA or the NEH has to be approved by Congress. This time, the administration seems to have found a work-around. Trump has yet to appoint an active director to either agency, effectively beheading them. And that’s to say nothing of his complete steamrolling of the Kennedy Center, where Trump kicked the Biden appointees off the board, got himself elected chairman, and promptly installed a loyalist as the interim director.

He’s also issued executive orders attempting to shut down the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides hundreds of millions in funding for cultural institutions. Trump appointed Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling as director to oversee the dismantling. On Monday, the organization’s board presented Sonderling with a letter stating that he could not proceed with Trump’s wishes, as the IMLS’s existence had been “authorized by law and funded by Congressional appropriation.” As with so many other Trump-backed plans at the moment, a court battle seems inevitable.

Arguably the most immediate effects of Trump 2.0 in the arts could come from the ordered layoffs at the GSA. Over 30 large-scale commissions were funded in the last 10 years, and in the decades before that, the agency commissioned works by mid-century American masters such as Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, Beverly Pepper, Louise Bourgeois, and John Chamberlain. The drastic cuts to the Center for Fine Arts—the shuttering of five field offices and the dismissal of more than half of the three dozen staffers—places the entire operation in peril, as the employees on leave were not able to tie up loose ends on ongoing commissions and restoration projects, according to the Post.

“The decision by the current administration really jeopardizes the preservation, the security, and the continued public ownership of this work that are really integral parts of the country’s cultural patrimony and heritage,” said Julie Trébault, the director of Artists at Risk Connection. The Paris-based international group helps protect creative freedom in autocratic-leaning states and other at-risk countries; it has recently extended that mission to the United States.

“I feel that beyond the preservation and survival of existing artwork, the decision of this administration to gut the art and preservation division of the GSA has really major implications for the commissioning of future work,” Trébault continued.

Most of the large commissions came through a program called Art in Architecture, which was founded in 1972 in a bipartisan effort to support the arts in public federal buildings. The effort has produced decades of thrilling and ambitious collaborations with the greatest living American artists, resulting in something like an ongoing sculpture biennale playing out in federal buildings across the country. The ’70s brought Louise Nevelson to Philadelphia, Isamu Noguchi to Seattle, and Claes Oldenburg to Chicago. The ’80s brought Dan Flavin to Anchorage, Robert Irwin to DC, and Robert Longo to Iowa City. The ’90s brought Michael Heizer to Reno, Martin Puryear to DC, and a truly life-changing Ellsworth Kelly installation to a courthouse in Boston. That’s to say nothing of the wall works commissioned by Alex Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, and the massive installations by Maya Lin and Sol LeWitt.

All of these works are now in danger of being neglected or sold along with the hundreds of buildings that the administration initially planned to put on the market. (That list was removed from the agency’s website in early March; on Tuesday, the GSA announced it would sell eight buildings.) Regardless of the plans to sell the buildings, the works may start deteriorating without the five disappeared field offices to check on them. Or perhaps the administration will take the logical next step of the DOGE-ification of the GSA’s art collection—and sell it?

Trébault believes it could happen and not just eventually. “I think very quick,” she said. “Will they go and start selling what they feel that they can get money out of?… It’s very difficult to say, but those moves lead me to believe that they will sell quickly because it’s very dramatic, very harsh, very abrupt.”

Gibson, the Center for Fine Arts head, understands the fraught nature of public art means that those who aren’t asking to be confronted with modernism or the avant-garde have to face it all the time, maybe even every day on their way to work. This has backfired in the past. In 1979, the GSA commissioned Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc to be displayed at a federal plaza in Manhattan, only to dismantle the work after widespread outcry, fierce support from fellow artists, public hearings, and eventually a ruling by a court of appeals.

“Generally [the art] seems to be well-received—people not surprisingly have very strong opinions about art, so there will always be the person who says, ‘Ugh, I hate it’ or ‘I don’t like it’ or ‘My child could have done it,’” Gibson said in December 2022 on the podcast Preservation Perspectives. “And there are other people who marvel at both the work and at the fact the federal government has this commitment to including art in these federal buildings, and see this as a legacy for the future.”

Trump is firmly in the “my child could have done it” camp. The president’s antipathy toward fine art and design goes back to when he met Andy Warhol, who left their meeting with the idea to make a series of work about Trump Tower, but Trump declined to buy the paintings. (“I think Trump’s sort of cheap, though, I get that feeling,” Warhol said at the time.) And while building that Fifth Avenue high-rise, Trump initially promised to donate the Art Deco artworks on the side of the former Bonwit Teller building he was demolishing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was a big lattice-work bronze above the entrance and two large limestone reliefs depicting women dancing with scarves.

Instead of the pieces being donated, they were destroyed.

During his first term, Trump tried to at least tamper with the Art in Architecture program. In 2020, he declared by executive action that all artworks must “depict a historically significant American” and that these artworks must not be “abstract or modernist representation.” But at that time, the GSA’s art staff remained in their jobs. Of the dozen large-scale commissions in the years after that order, all are abstract, and none depict Americans.

Now, the new administration seems hellbent on dismantling the art-funding mechanism of government as part of a broader shunning of a liberal-arts-supporting globalism.

“The US has historically played a critical role in supporting artistic freedom globally, also through grants, through cultural diplomacy,” Trébault said. “And I feel there is a really strong wish from this administration to really crush artistic mobility, creative expression, to weaken this very flourishing sector and reduce this kind of either cross-border or exchange nationally between artists. “

Ehikian, the acting GSA director, has no history in government or the arts. He is the cofounder of RelateIQ, a data-scraping startup he sold to Salesforce. He then joined the software company run by Salesforce (and Time) owner Marc Benioff, left for another startup, and rejoined Salesforce after it acquired that startup as well. Ehikian’s wife, Andrea Conway, worked at X with Elon Musk. His brother, the real estate developer Brad Ehikian, tried to buy a GSA building in February for a lowball offer, prompting an anonymous complaint to the inspector general, as reported by the Post. Brad Ehikian did not respond to a request for comment. “At no time was there any consideration of selling the property at a discount or outside of GSA’s normal competitive process,” a spokesperson for the agency told the newspaper at the time.

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In January, a former X employee named Nicole Hollander was placed at the GSA to oversee real estate. Hollander is the wife of Musk’s longtime capo Steve Davis—they slept at Twitter HQ with their newborn child following Musk’s takeover—and Davis has become the shadowy avatar for all DOGE activities throughout government agencies. Ehikian said at a recent town hall that “there is no DOGE team at GSA.” Wired has reported that in addition to Hollander, known DOGE associates such as Luke Farritor and Ethan Shaotran have been spotted in the headquarters. “Like we didn’t notice a bunch of young kids working behind a secure area on the 6th floor,” a source inside the GSA told the magazine.

Asked for comment about the fate of government-held works, GSA spokesperson White said that the Fine Arts Program “makes decisions regarding final disposition of artworks in disposed buildings on a case-by-case basis. The overarching goals are to protect the artwork in the best way possible and to ensure the public’s access to the artwork.”

Asked about how real estate sales might affect GSA-stewarded artworks, White said the agency had several options depending on the case. Those include transferring “limited ownership” of pieces to new owners with signed agreements to protect the work; the agency keeping full title itself while agreeing that new owners should protect the work; relocation of work to other GSA-owned facilities; and, the kicker, transferring “full title of artwork to new owner” with the work “formally removed from GSA’s Fine Arts Collection.”

Perhaps the parties most concerned are the artists themselves. In 2013, the GSA commissioned Odili Donald Odita to make a work to adorn the wall at a courthouse in Orlando. He threw himself into the process, interviewing judges and lawyers at the site as he conceptualized a piece. His finished work, Infinite Horizon, was meant to inspire those who were coming to the courthouse to declare bankruptcy, showing them there is still the possibility of hope and happiness someday.

“The judges came to me afterwards, and they’re like, ‘This is a beautiful piece. It really resonates with the building and with the people,’” Odita told me this week.

Previously, staffers had called him up to provide updates on the upkeep of the work, and the budget included funding that enabled his studio to travel to Orlando and repair the work if needed. Now that’s all up in the air.

“I think it’s really upsetting when you think about it,” said Odita, who has a large-scale commission opening at MoMA next month—it will hang in the lobby for a full year. “Some guy is politicizing art to get revenge on whomever, or to do whatever in his agenda on Make America Great Again, and this important function falls by the wayside and becomes a casualty of some agenda.”

He said he considers Infinite Horizon an important work for him, especially because it’s installed in the context of works by Al Held, also featured in the courthouse. Odita hopes it can stay there forever. He’s not too sure it will.

“As these things start to get taken away and disappear, you realize that was a good thing, and we should really try to make sure that doesn’t get destroyed,” Odita said.

The Rundown

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…Breaking news: Christophe Cherix will be the next director of the Museum of Modern Art. The Swiss-born 55-year-old has been the chief curator of drawings and prints since 2013, and first joined the museum in 2007. After months of feverish speculation among the art world chattering classes, the museum’s board went with an internal pick over what must have been a deep bench of curatorial minds from around the world. “He rose to the top of an impressive pool of global candidates,” the museum’s chair, Marie-Josée Kravis, and its president, Sarah Arison, said in a letter to staff. The board’s vote, they added, was unanimous. Cherix will start in September, succeeding Glenn Lowry, who served as director for three decades.

…It’s the end of an era on the Upper East Side. When Larry Gagosian first opened an office at 980 Madison Avenue in 1987, Sotheby’s had just moved out of the building custom-built for the bygone Gotham-born auction house Parke-Bernet in 1949. Gagosian held its first gallery show at the address in 1989—an exhibition of Jasper Johns’s Map paintings that, decades on, looks like an insanely sick thing to have as a debut gallery show. Now, after 36 years of continuous programming at the building, Gagosian is set to leave, along with the other tenants, to make way for Bloomberg Philanthropies. Billionaire and former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg bought the building last year for a cool $560 million. Gasgosian is not going far. He’s opening in a storefront adjacent to the building, and you better believe that Kappo Masa, his beloved upscale hand roll joint with Chef Masa, is staying put downstairs. This week, we got word on the final show: “Picasso: Tête-à-tête,” a blockbuster survey of more than 50 of Pablo’s works curated by his daughter, Paloma Picasso. It opens April 18 and will be up until July 3.

…Speaking of the Upper East Side, artists such as Mickalene Thomas, Dustin Yellin, Derrick Adams, and Jeffrey Gibson trekked up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Wednesday to honor the collector Jordan Schnitzer, the Portland-based real estate titan who has built the largest collection of prints and multiples in the US. Appropriately enough, he’s endowed a curatorial position at The Met in the drawings and prints department. Met director Max Hollein was on hand to toast the king of multiples: “He may seem like a mild-mannered man, but when it comes to collecting art, Jordan is out of control, he flies across the Atlantic, he does whatever it takes.”

…Yorgos Lanthimos might be a perennial Oscar favorite—the director of 2023’s Academy Award–winning Poor Things, as well as The Favourite and The Lobster—but did you know that he’s also an accomplished photographer? His first gallery show opens Saturday and runs to May 18 at Webber Gallery in Los Angeles, in collaboration with MACK, the London-based publisher.

…In May 2023, two collectors filed a civil suit against the prominent art adviser Lisa Schiff, saying she defrauded them of millions in a deal for an Adrien Ghenie painting. But they also alleged that she had orchestrated “a much larger Ponzi scheme,” “taking money from one client to pay another” to fund a “lavish lifestyle.” Federal prosecutors eventually accused Schiff of defrauding at least 12 clients out of $6.5 million. In October, she pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Last week, a little less than two years after the allegations were raised, a judge sentenced Schiff to 30 months in federal prison. She’s due to start her sentence by July 1.

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