Kehinde Wiley Responds to the Trump Administration’s Removal of His Painting With an ‘Aesthetically Terrifying’ T

Kehinde Wiley’s artwork at the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic continues to cause a stir. Erin Scavino, director of Art in Embassies in a podcast interview with Sean Spicer, called the painting Young Artists After Siamesas 1960 (2013) “aesthetically terrifying” last week, but now in an unearthed radio interview from April, US ambassador Leah Campos described the painting as a lesbian picnic, according to the New York Times. In the interview conducted in Spanish, Campos said that she saw a “huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians.” She wrongfully contends in the interview that the Biden administration wanted being “that ideology here to the Dominican people.” The painting was commissioned during the Obama administration by the State Department in 2013. Wiley hasn’t come out publicly to address the controversy around his painting, but on his official e-commerce Instagram, he posted a black T-shirt retailing for $120 with the words “aesthetically terrifying,” which he borrowed from Scavino, who describes his work as such. “A response. A reclamation. A reminder that art has never needed permission to be beautiful, provocative, or powerful,” Wiley’s post reads. The Trump administration has been slowly changing artwork in its embassies to reflect “American patriotism and the beauty of our great country” as Campos put it in an Instagram post in August when describing the swap of Wiley’s painting for an image of the American flag accompanied by the Twisted Sister’s song We’re Not Gonna Take It.” At the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the same act is taking place as workers began to disassemble Joel Shapiro’s monumental 24-foot-tall sculpture Blue. The American sculptor gave the center the work as a gift in 2019. The New York Times reported that Shapiro’s work was “targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center.” In December, the center’s board, led by Trump and filled with his allies, voted to inscribe his name on the building’s facade, triggering an ongoing legal struggle with the federal court system.