Trump’s Inauguration: Museums Lay On Special Events

American museums, which usually receive at least some form of public funding, tend to steer clear of politics, but Donald Trump’s presidency was never going to be business as usual, and early signs point to a tense four years ahead. One day before his inauguration, the incoming president’s team

revealed plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts

and Humanities. Even before that news broke, spaces around the country have taken action to give the pro-arts public a place to gather on inauguration day.

In New York, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Museum of Arts & Design, the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, and the Museum of Chinese in America, will all be free to the public 20 January—as was the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Other museums hosted special programming, like a marathon reading of the Langston Hughes poem Let America Be America Again at the Brooklyn Museum, and the slightly more lighthearted Swear In, Breathe Out, yoga and meditation at the Himalayas-focused Rubin Museum of Art.

The organisers of the J20 art strike called for museums to close on inauguration day, which the Queens Museum partly did, although it opened again to host an afternoon of poster-making for upcoming protest marches.

Other institutions seemed unsure about the degree to which they should participate in the lead up to the inauguration. When the St Louis Art Museum agreed to send

George Caleb Bingham’s painting of an early American election, The Verdict of the People (1854-1855), to an inauguration luncheon, two local arts supporters launched a petition to stop the loan.

In an interview, the museum's director Brent Benjamin made it clear that the board thought deeply about the loan, which did go forward, and came at the request of Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, not anyone related to the incoming White House. "When the US Senate requests a loan from the St Louis Art Museum and we're able to provide that, that is an honour for us," Benjamin said.