Days after Amy Sherald withdrew her acclaimed solo show American Sublime from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) over censorship concerns, the exhibition’s contested artwork graces the cover of the New Yorker magazine’s August edition.
Sherald told the New York Times last week that she learned the NPG had been considering removing “Trans Forming Liberty” (2024), a portrait of trans model Arewà Basit posed as the Statue of Liberty, from the show to avoid attention from the Trump administration.
The artist said Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III proposed replacing the artwork with a video capturing people’s reactions to the painting and discussing transgender issues, a suggestion she opposed as it “would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility,” Sherald told the Times.
In a statement to Hyperallergic at the time of the show’s cancellation, a Smithsonian spokesperson said that the institution “could not come to an agreement with the artist.”
Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s special assistant and reported architect of Trump’s content crackdowns on “divisive” content within the Smithsonian, told the Washington Post that the painting interpreted a national symbol through a “divisive and ideological lens.”
In an audio guide from March available on the Whitney Museum of American Art’s website, Basit, after whom “Trans Forming Liberty” is modeled, said she felt “honored to be a muse of Amy Sherald’s.”
“There are some moments where I think the world tries to tell us that being proud is a negative thing,” Basit says in the audio guide. “Whether that be because of legislation, or the administration, or other social systems that will try to tell me that I shouldn’t be proud of who I am, I can always look back to this image and be reminded that the lack of pride will never serve me like the pride serves me.”
The news of the show’s withdrawal came amid heightened scrutiny over Trump’s efforts to influence exhibitions and programming at the Smithsonian. At the National Museum of American History, a decision to remove a mention of Trump’s two impeachments from a display raised alarms last week. The museum stated that it had not been pressured by the government to make the change and said it would update the display within weeks to include “all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”
