WASHINGTON — After intensifying its critique of how the Smithsonian presents American history, the Trump administration has decided to stage a museum exhibition of its own.
In the past month, the White House has accused the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of presenting an ideologically biased and negative view of U.S. history. President Donald Trump even signed an executive order requiring that signs be placed outside the museum, to encourage visitors to go elsewhere for “accurate information regarding America’s history.”
Offering an alternative view of national identity, the State Department has organized “Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy,” which opened Thursday at the Art Museum of the Americas, steps from the White House. The show includes 68 versions of the American flag, including one made with 44,500 toy soldiers, as well as realistic images of the Founding Fathers generated by artificial intelligence and a wedding dress inspired by Betsy Ross. Artist Pablo Barba also contributed classical-style paintings of three women symbolizing the virtues of valor, purity and justice.
According to four people involved in the show, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from the administration, no historians or professional curators collaborated on the exhibition, which also features artworks by friends of the planners and by two artists who serve on the board of a nonprofit, the American Arts Conservancy, that helped organize the show. Several museum experts said they worried that officials had ignored ethics rules meant to safeguard institutions from political influence and conflicts of interest.
“The government is calling the shots,” said Sally Yerkovich, a Columbia University professor who recently led revisions to the ethics code of the International Council of Museums. “The public trusts museums because they are independent sources of information.”
Tommy Pigott, a spokesperson for the State Department, said that its “career and civil service officers, who have served under several presidents apolitically, work on this team and are art professionals with curatorial expertise. We don’t need professional revisionists to dictate our nation’s history to us; we all know what our flag stands for, who our Founding Fathers are, and the exhibition will speak for itself.”
One of its organizers, Erin Scavino, who leads the State Department’s Art in Embassies program, has described the exhibition as a signature part of the president’s celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary, adding that she has a mandate to “make visual arts great.”
“This exhibition isn’t one that’s going to make you think about horribly dark things or things that have been a blemish on the face of America,” Scavino told Axios.
She collaborated on the exhibition with Jenni Parido, a friend she previously tapped to serve as the commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opened in May. That was the last time the Trump administration tried its hand at cultural diplomacy. Much of the art world gave the sculptures by Alma Allen the cold shoulder, saying the pavilion’s exhibition was “insubstantial” and “pretentious.”
The State Department also took heat for bypassing its own selection rules to choose the friend of a White House insider to organize the pavilion, despite Parido’s having more experience in pet food than art curation. (The State Department insisted that it had mounted a rigorous selection process.) When the officials toasted the exhibition at a private reception, Allen wasn’t there — he and the pavilion’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip, were no longer on speaking terms.
Whether those same officials can gain a hometown advantage in Washington remains to be seen. “Passport to Patriotism” runs through Oct. 18 in a museum managed by a nonprofit that receives substantial funding through the State Department. The Art Museum of the Americas gained notice last year after its leaders canceled programming featuring Black and queer artists. Curators said those exhibitions would have contradicted Trump’s executive order that banned diversity and inclusion programs from federally funded groups.
Many artists included in the new exhibition have personal connections to Scavino, who in 2005 was a contestant on “The Apprentice,” the NBC reality show that Trump hosted. She has remained in the president’s orbit, marrying Dan Scavino, a White House deputy chief of staff, this year.
Scavino has included in the exhibition a silk wedding gown by a fashion designer, Kate Wasserbach Moore, whom she discovered while searching for her own wedding dress. She asked Moore to “create a dress that looks like something one of the wives of our Founding Fathers would have worn,” as she put it to Fox News. The designer told The New York Times that she planned on donating it to the Art in Embassies permanent collection.
Another artist in the exhibition, Romero Britto, is a Brazilian entrepreneur who attended Scavino’s wedding and gave the couple a custom portrait. Britto said he also designed banners for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yerkovich, the ethics expert, said museums made great efforts to demonstrate their authority and independence. “The processing of curating a show is supposed to be done with certain artistic standards,” she explained. “It begins to look suspicious if a lot of the artwork happens to be from friends of the curator. You begin to wonder what kinds of judgments were made.”
In April, the Art Museum of the Americas said that a former director of the International Center of Photography, Mark Lubell, would curate the exhibition. One of the people involved in the show, who is familiar with the conversation, said Lubell decided not to work on the exhibition after he was told that participating artists would be screened for their political views. (Lubell declined to comment.)
The State Department and the exhibition’s organizers did not respond to questions about whether artists’ political views had been considered. But one artwork in the exhibition was a glittering red jacket by fashion designer Deborah Yanna, founder of “Make America Sparkle Again.” Exhibition materials describe the artist as having been selected by Trump as a national delegate for the state of Iowa in 2024. During rallies or political events, Yanna would wear jackets like these, described as “sequined, bold and patriotic.”