The U.S. State Department has ordered the removal of a portrait of former President Barack Obama that had been displayed at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic until recently. The painting was commissioned in 2013 from artist Kehinde Wiley, who was chosen that year to portray the then-president. The decision has drawn defense from Trump administration officials and pushback from former program leaders.

Erin Scavino, an ally of President Donald Trump who now heads the State Department's Art in Embassies program, is among those who have attacked the painting as "woke." Scavino, a former contestant on the reality series "The Apprentice" — which Trump hosted during the 2000s — defended the removal during an appearance on former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's podcast. "It was very woke. It was by the gentleman who did Obama's portrait, and it was aesthetically terrifying," she said.

The Daily Beast posted on X, formerly Twitter: "The State Department has removed a painting by an Obama portrait artist from a U.S. embassy, with the Trump goon running the agency's art operation trashing the piece as 'very woke' and 'aesthetically terrifying.'"

Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, has also defended the removal. In a video posted on social media, Campos accused the portrait of promoting "globalist and woke ideologies."

But according to Daily Beast reporter Leah Kimmins, neither Scavino nor Campos "explained what was actually wrong with the image itself."

"A State Department spokeswoman dodged discussing the canvas' contents when the New York Times reached out for comment on Monday," Kimmins reports. "Instead, she dredged up a 2023 quote from Wiley about an entirely different painting, 'Judith and Holofernes,' which he had dubbed 'a play on the kill whitey thing,' alongside sexual assault allegations Wiley has denied."

"Judith and Holofernes" reimagines the biblical story of a woman who saves her town by killing an invading army's general. In Wiley's version, Judith is depicted as a Black woman holding the severed head of a white woman. The painting is Wiley's contemporary take on a 17th-century work by Italian painter Giovanni Baglione. Recasting historical Western compositions with Black subjects has been the throughline of Wiley's career as a portraitist.

Virginia Shore, who led the Art in Embassies program under former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, is pushing back against the criticism of Wiley's portrait. "Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand. This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders," Shore told the New York Times.

Kimmins describes the removal as "just the latest salvo in a scorched-earth campaign to reshape the embassy art program, an initiative dating back to the Kennedy administration." The program, created under President John F. Kennedy, commissions and exhibits American art — much of it loaned by artists, museums, and collectors — at U.S. embassies and ambassadors' residences around the world, a practice long framed as cultural diplomacy.

The Beast reporter notes that Scavino, a Trump appointee who co-runs the program and is married to Trump's longtime aide Dan Scavino, recounted on Katie Miller's podcast how fast she scrubbed art from the ambassador's residence in Bucharest, Romania, after Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna claimed she spotted "satanic baby art" during a trip — an indication that the current review extends beyond a single post.

Source: Alternet