As US president Donald Trump’s administration continues to crack down on free speech within the tradition sector, the non-profit organisation Artwork at A Time Like This is addressing censorship head-on within the new exhibition Don’t Look Now within the Nolita neighborhood of New York Metropolis (10-25 October).
In bringing collectively 24 modern artists whose work has been censored or blacklisted—together with Marilyn Minter, Shepard Fairey and Dread Scott—Don’t Look Now asks massive questions on the way forward for artistic expression in an more and more surveillant political local weather. The exhibition elevates the voices of artists whose selections in material have come at private, skilled or political prices, whether or not that be by rescinded invites, canceled alternatives or misplaced federal funding. “We’re this from the impression on the artists”, Barbara Pollack, co-founder of Artwork At A Time Like This, tells The Artwork Newspaper.
Don’t Look Now’s organisers are intimately acquainted with the problems: in 2023, Artwork At A Time Like This confronted censorship throughout its public artwork marketing campaign 8×5: Artists Responding to Mass Incarceration, when billboard firms in Houston, Texas refused to platform the venture.
Danielle SeeWalker, G is for Genocide, 2024 Courtesy the artist and Artwork At A Time Like This
The exhibition highlights particular person works and the tales that led to their inclusion. The Lakota painter Danielle SeeWalker had a residency alternative rescinded in Vail, Colorado, over her portray G is for Genocide (2024), which depicts a Native American lady in a keffiyeh (Vail reached a settlement with the artist final month). A quilt by fiber artist Yvonne Iten-Scott, Origin (2023), was eliminated from an exhibition for its visible references to feminine anatomy and reproductive justice. Officers in Arizona tried to take away Shepard Fairey’s print My Florist is a Dick (2023) from the artist’s touring exhibition due to its critique of police brutality.
These examples attest to an more and more harmful ecosystem for overtly politically artwork. The Trump administration has laid off employees on the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) en masse, and proposed slashing funding for each businesses. The president declared the Smithsonian Establishment a font of “divisive race ideology”. Exhibitions perceived to be commenting on US politics and the conflict in Gaza have both closed early or been pre-emptively canceled, together with the Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s 2024 solo present at Indiana College and Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald’s Smithsonian exhibition.
In accordance with a January 2025 survey carried out by Artists at Threat Connection, Pen America and the Affiliation of Artwork Museum Administrators, 65% of museum administrators reported experiencing strain to take away a piece or name off an exhibition no less than as soon as over the course of their careers, whereas 55% agree that censorship is a “a lot larger downside for museums at this time” than a decade in the past.
Yvone Iten-Scott, Origin, 2023 Courtesy the artist and Artwork At A Time Like This
“We began engaged on this present a yr and a half in the past”, Pollack tells The Artwork Newspaper. “We discovered an increasing number of cases of museums being afraid and pulling work, and now beneath Trump, canceling exhibits due to his govt orders governing the NEA. We have discovered many establishments self-censoring, however we additionally discovered different issues occurring which might be very troubling, like artists getting canceled due to their Instagram posts. A brand new wrinkle in censorship. There are instances that get a number of excessive visibility, like in exhibits with the Smithsonian, but it surely actually hurts a number of artists which might be having their first college museum present or their first fee.”
The curatorial ethos of the present displays topics which might be changing into more and more taboo in artwork areas, Pollack says. “There are particular matters that now throughout the board presenting establishments do not wish to cope with,” she says. “One is girls’s rights and reproductive rights. Two is trans rights. Three is [diversity, equity and inclusion]. 4 is pro-Palestinian work. So lots of the artists are actually grateful to us as a result of they can not get their work proven anyplace.”
The exhibition additionally interrogates the broader financial engines driving rightward tendencies in artwork style and manufacturing. Pollack provides: “With a number of the financial challenges within the artwork world proper now, we have now to ask, what sort of exhibits are going to get funded or not funded? And the way can we outline museums? Are they simply seals of approval on a market displaying artists as commodities, or are they supposed to impress dialogue?”
Don’t Look Now: A Protection of Free Expression, 10-25 October, 127 Elizabeth Road, New York
