A painting booted from our embassy in Santo Domingo, replaced by a baseball jersey. And then there’s Passport to Patriotism, the inaugural Washington art exhibition done by the Art in Embassies program at the State Department. It’s packed with schlock. A dud in Venice and a defenestration from the Smithsonian’s castle. What do these have in common? Bad judgment among people in power and, here and there, a double scoop of bad taste.
As I wrote earlier this month, I’m fixed on the purge of a painting that our Dominican Republic ambassador hates. Ambassador Leah Campos had a Kehinde Wiley painting removed from the embassy walls, saying that the Trump administration wants to turn away from “globalist and woke ideologies” and that “we are . . . instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country.” Wiley’s painting is a nearly life-size, in-your-face whopper that depicts four young people. Two are black, and two look mixed-race. The models were artists, and they’re in casual street wear, not cotillion wear, and the theme, it seems, is the look and feeling of the intense friendships of the till-a-new-school-year-do-us-part variety. Campos seemed to be resorting to stereotypes. As I noted, “Campos said in an interview in Spanish with a radio program in the Dominican Republic, ‘I saw a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians.’” I’m not a mind reader, but maybe she thought, and it’s not very nice, The fat one looks like a dyke?
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