The Arts at Risk: A Convening

The following essays by Vincent Brown, Paul Chan, and Kim Lane Scheppele are edited versions of talks given at the panel discussion “The Arts at Risk: A Convening” on May 27, 2025, at the Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, organized by members of the October editorial board.¹ We asked these thinkers to address the issue of “rewriting history ” in the first months of Donald J. Trump's second term as president. Censorship of the arts in the service of right-wing politics is nothing new in the United States—indeed, the culture wars prosecuted by Senator Jesse Helms in the late 1980s and ’90s offer a prefiguration of our current cultural conjuncture. But whereas Helms & Co. targeted individual artists, ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe to Karen Finley, who were typically engaged in queer or otherwise sexually non-normative practices, the Trump administration has focused more of its energy on historical narratives.² It has attempted, among its many fiats and diktats, to displace the New York Times’ 1619 Project of critical historiography with its own MAGA version of 1776; to restrict the discussion of race in the art-historical stories told at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere; and to erase figures such as Harriet Tubman from national parks and monuments. In the texts published here, each author develops a powerful model of how history is currently being rewritten and how this affects the practice of art. Brown shows how the fitful efforts to introduce Black histories and perspectives into American education have been aggressively foreclosed by the administration; Scheppele outlines the “constitutional revolution” that the Supreme Court is facilitating by rewriting the laws of the land to consolidate a unitary presidency; and Chan proposes that a “fog of wealth” in American politics and culture has deadened our senses to experience. By bringing together the perspectives of a legal scholar, a historian, and an artist, we hope to offer a preliminary road map to the Trump administration's policy of rewriting history.