What the National Gallery’s Closure Says About the Politics of Culture in America
At midnight on October 1, the U.S. government shut down after Congress failed to agree on a new public budget. With no guidance from federal authorities, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., announced on Instagram that as of October 5, it would “be temporarily closed and all programs will be canceled until further notice.” There’s no indication of when the museum might reopen.
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution, according to its website at the time of writing, will keep its museums, research centers and the National Zoo open through Saturday, October 11. A notice at the top of the page already warns, however, that if the shutdown continues beyond that date, all Smithsonian locations will close to the public. Earlier this week, the Institution wrote on X that the museums and Zoo would remain open “at least through Monday, October 6”—kept open with leftover funds from the prior fiscal year. The problem, as always, is the uncertainty surrounding how long those reserves will last and whether Congress will ultimately allocate enough for the Smithsonian and other public museums to stay on budget for the coming year.
Since returning to power in January, President Donald Trump has issued roughly one hundred executive orders that have progressively reshaped the U.S. legal and cultural landscape, particularly with regard to public funding for the arts and arts institutions. While executive orders cannot override constitutional protections such as freedom of speech and expression, many of the measures enacted so far have little precedent in American history and already test the limits of those very principles.
Trump’s war on the arts
From the beginning, the Smithsonian has faced mounting scrutiny from the White House, which has publicly criticized what it calls “woke” or “divisive” content in exhibitions and demanded reviews—an apparent effort to monitor and control the nation’s cultural and identity narrative. Trump has repeatedly condemned the institution’s curatorial approach, accusing it of portraying American and Western values as “inherently harmful and oppressive” for reflecting the country’s multicultural identity and acknowledging legacies of inequality and injustice. “Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” one executive order declares, warning that the Smithsonian has fallen “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Mounting pressure soon led Kim Sajet, then director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, to resign on June 13, 2025. She described her decision as “the best way to serve the institution.” Her resignation followed Trump’s public announcement on Truth Social in late May that he was “terminating” her role, calling her “a highly partisan person and a strong supporter of DEI”—despite lacking legal authority to remove her. One of Trump’s earliest acts upon taking office in January was signing an executive order dismantling all federal DEI programs, with sweeping implications for cultural institutions across the country—not just the Smithsonian network, which is unique in being federally chartered and publicly funded.
Behind these measures lies the narrative Trump is determined to impose: the revivalist “Make America Great Again” myth, which echoes older totalitarian fantasies of a purified national identity while leaving dangerously unanswered the question—great for whom? In a nation built on immigration and diversity, whose strength comes from a mix of cultures, none “pure” or “original,” the promise of greatness starts to sound like an exclusion.
Curators and artists fighting back
Fully aware of the risks of a clear authoritarian turn in the national narrative—one increasingly imposed through censorship, surveillance and fear, particularly amid an aggressive ICE recruitment campaign and expanded enforcement nationwide—artists began to pull out of Smithsonian exhibitions, citing censorship and intimidation. The first to make headlines was Amy Sherald, who in late July announced she was canceling her upcoming National Portrait Gallery show after learning the museum was considering removing her painting Trans Forming Liberty—a Black transgender reinterpretation of the Statue of Liberty—from “American Sublime.” In September, artists Margarita Cabrera and Nicholas Galanin withdrew from a Smithsonian American Art Museum symposium tied to the exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” after learning that what was meant to be a public event would instead be closed and unrecorded. “The decision to make the symposium a private event with a curated guest list and request that we not record or share it on social media effectively censors those of us who would be participating,” Galanin wrote on Instagram.
Each of these moves—and the policies behind them—reflects an increasingly alarming pattern of cultural restriction whose implications extend far beyond the museum world. For anyone even faintly aware of global history, the parallels are chilling: the substitution of ideology for truth, the policing of art and identity and the slow normalization of censorship as patriotism. History has shown, and continues to show, where such trajectories lead.
This is not the first time the Smithsonian has been at the center of a national debate over who controls cultural memory and artistic speech. In 2010, when the National Portrait Gallery hosted its groundbreaking exhibition on LGBTQ+ identity in American art, it came under political pressure from the right-wing Catholic League and Republican lawmakers, forcing the institution to remove David Wojnarowicz’s short film A Fire in My Belly after just one day. The removal triggered resignations, protests and public boycotts; in response, several D.C. museums screened the film in solidarity. In 2020, the National Gallery of Art first postponed and then partially recontextualized “Philip Guston Now,” an extensive survey of the artist’s work, after concerns were raised about his inclusion of Ku Klux Klan imagery.
Museum closures aren’t inevitable
It’s worth noting that the Smithsonian, as a federally funded network, has shut down alongside the government several times. The first major closure in modern memory occurred in 1995-1996, during President Bill Clinton’s standoff with Speaker Newt Gingrich over budget cuts: all sixteen Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo closed for twenty-one days, from mid-December through early January. The next major closure arrived during the Obama administration, driven by Tea Party opposition to the Affordable Care Act in 2013. Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo closed for sixteen days. Only animal care and security staff remained on duty. The live “Panda Cam” went dark, becoming an instant meme; even the pandas were furloughed. In the years that followed, those animals came to mirror Washington’s diplomacy: by 2023, they had left the city amid cooling U.S.-China relations, and their planned return in 2025 was read less as scientific partnership than as détente—a national symbol caught between cultural soft power and political hard edges, their meaning—somehow like the Smithsonian’s—is rewritten every time Washington changes mood.
Returning to historical precedents, the longest-ever shutdown came under Trump’s previous administration in 2018-2019, when the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art were closed for thirty-five days beginning January 2, 2019, after short-term reserves ran out. The Institution had initially stayed open for eleven days using prior-year funds but was ultimately forced to close—a likely preview of what to expect next.
By contrast, in France—a country whose museums also depend primarily on public funding and where, in the same days, cabinet reshuffles have followed one another as leaders repeatedly fail to agree on a national budget—museums rarely, if ever, close for political reasons. The Louvre did not dim its lights even after October 6, 2025, when Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu resigned just hours after naming a new cabinet, deepening France’s governmental crisis and forcing President Emmanuel Macron to seek yet another replacement after François Bayrou’s resignation in September and Michel Barnier’s earlier in the summer. That’s because cultural funding in France is a political constant, managed through the Ministry of Culture and protected from short-term budget battles. Even amid the Yellow Vest protests, the COVID lockdowns and the Macron-era pension strikes, national museums reopened as soon as public safety allowed. French culture is regarded as an arm of the state, not a discretionary service—something to preserve as a marker of identity and continuity.
Similarly, when technical administrations governed Italy, or when Greece faced its sovereign debt crisis from 2009 to 2018, museums remained open, underscoring how cultural institutions were treated as essential to both national identity and economic recovery. In these countries, as in France, funding for cultural institutions is administered by a separate Ministry of Culture with an autonomous, legally protected budget. While those budgets can face cuts during austerity cycles, they are automatically reauthorized during caretaker periods or political deadlock, insulating culture from partisan paralysis.
In Washington, by contrast, which has no American analog to the European Ministry of Culture, national museums depend directly on the federal government for their governance, funding and, increasingly, their programming. Art and history appear to remain contingent—and often instrumentalized—shut down or politicized whenever Congress deadlocks or the White House decides that the narratives it foregrounds are controversial or uncomfortable. In this increasingly polarized political climate, museums in the United States, like elsewhere, are now toggling between courage and compliance in a deepening cultural war—one in which the national narrative, and the very idea of American identity, is at stake.
