Dominican Painting Caught in Trump’s Culture War

A monumental painting of four young Dominican artists has become a symbol in the American culture war after its removal from the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo.

Kehinde Wiley’s "Young Artists After Siamesas 1960" shows the artists against a background of sunflowers, peonies and tulips. The U.S. State Department commissioned it in 2013 for the Art in Embassies program, after Wiley studied the work of Dominican artists Celeste Woss y Gil and Gilberto Hernández Ortega.

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globalist and woke

Ambassador Leah Campos posted a video of the removal on Aug. 11. Covered by a tarp printed with the U.S. flag, the painting was lowered from the building on a lift while Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Gonna Take It" played. Campos said the embassy was leaving behind "globalist and woke" ideologies and embracing "American patriotism."

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American patriotism

Erin Scavino, the Art in Embassies director and wife of presidential deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, described the work as "very woke" and "aesthetically terrifying." The State Department is now considering whether it can sell the painting.

The controversy has reached U.S. media and publications in the Dominican Republic, Britain and Spain. The New York Times noted that the painting itself contains nothing obviously subversive: four fully dressed, largely expressionless people stand in a floral setting. The article’s central argument was that "the meaning of this removal lies in the psychology, more than in the painting."

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very woke

The criticism does not amount to an unqualified defense of Wiley. The coverage also describes his repeated formula of placing mainly Black young people in poses derived from European historical painting, often against ornamental backgrounds, with some production carried out by assistants in China and elsewhere. Critic Rachel Hunter Himes called it "a kind of court style of the Obama era."

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a kind of court style of the Obama era