On February 26, the Washington Post reported that the Organization of American States (OAS) had canceled two major exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, which is funded by the OAS. Founded in 1948, the OAS consists of 30 member countries across the Western Hemisphere, with its unofficial headquarters in Washington, DC. The canceled exhibitions were Before the Americas, curated by Cheryl Edwards, and Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, which featured Canadian artist Andil Gosine and other queer and Canadian artists of color. Both exhibitions were part of the OAS’s broader cultural mission, but their cancellation reflects broader political shifts in the US government’s cultural and diplomatic approach.
Before the Americas focused on Black artists from the Americas, including Elizabeth Catlett, whose major retrospective had just concluded at the Brooklyn Museum in February. The second exhibition, Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, revolved around Gosine’s 2022 book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press), which explored the historical impact of colonial law and doctrines on queer existence in the Caribbean. Gosine’s work addressed how colonial systems of law reinforced restrictive binaries, such as human versus non-human, that shaped societal structures across colonized territories.
Two weeks before the shows were dropped, the US Mission to the OAS issued a statement outlining a new mission focused on making America “safer,” “stronger,” and “more prosperous.” This new focus seeks to redefine US foreign policy to prioritize national interests over political and cultural causes that the statement claims are “divisive at home and deeply unpopular abroad.” The statement emphasizes the need to “return to the basics of diplomacy” by eliminating domestic political agendas like Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), suggesting that these policies have hindered US foreign relations. For context, it is important to note that when formed, the OAS’s involvement in the Cold War era reflected US fears of socialism gaining ground in Latin America and the Caribbean, leading to covert operations and interventions aimed at preserving capitalist dominance. US cultural diplomacy sought to transform former colonies into allies in the global fight against socialism.
On February 14, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued another statement supporting the dismantling of DEI programs, arguing that American educational institutions have “discriminated against students on the basis of race.” The statement further criticized DEI initiatives for perpetuating racial stereotypes and creating racial divisions, particularly in the areas of admissions, hiring, and training. It was at this time that small arts organizations around the country were forced to rewrite or altogether give up requests for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) due to mandates echoing a broader right-wing backlash against diversity initiatives, positioning DEI as an obstacle to individual rights.
The broader political context of these cancellations — the rise of far-right movements and the push for a more nationalistic foreign policy — reveals a deepening political divide. As governments around the world embrace authoritarian tendencies, the struggle for equality, justice, and human dignity becomes more urgent. Artists, scholars, and activists who challenge the status quo, resisting colonialism, racism, and heteronormativity continue to be vital.
Scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou, Māori) writes about how colonial universities, education systems, and museums were not neutral entities; they were part of the historical processes of imperialism, designed to reinforce Western dominance. Education became a means of silencing Indigenous knowledge systems and worldviews, imposing Western norms and structures while erasing the voices and histories of the colonized. The rise of totalitarian regimes and the ongoing climate crisis highlight the urgency of confronting systemic injustice rather than using identity and representation as token solutions. The US Mission to the OAS’s recent statement reveals not only their acknowledgement of the “woke” liberated exchanges people have with one another in combating the authoritarian ideologies taking hold on a global scale, but that our connections matter and are working.
What we are witnessing today is not an anomaly; it is the culmination of a long history in which the United States has never truly been a constitutional democracy. From the electoral college to the 13th Amendment, the US Constitution was explicitly crafted to defend the rights of a select group: wealthy, WASP cisgender heterosexual men. The founding fathers, who themselves held significant privileges, wrote a system that ensured their continued dominance, at the expense of everyone else.
The US has been inching closer every decade to the current situation we have now, particularly through fear of “the other,” a persistent marker of settler colonial states throughout history, ramped up significantly since 9/11. The terrorist attacks on that day provided conditions for the consolidation of power and the perpetuation of a narrative that paints outsiders — especially people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals — as threats to the American way of life.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt offers a historical analysis of antisemitism, imperialism, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. Arendt concludes that totalitarian regimes were driven by the strategic manipulation of race, fostering an “us versus them” mentality. In doing so, they created a dangerous and divisive social dichotomy. These regimes specifically targeted the arts and universities because of their potential to challenge state power. Arendt argues that the coordination of ideological control over academia and art served as a tool for enforcing conformity, silencing public discourse, and eliminating reasoned debate.
The last few decades have seen in the arts corporate sponsorship allowing companies to exert significant influence over the content and direction of cultural production. This intervention is often seen as a form of soft censorship, where works that critique corporate interests or address sensitive social issues have been either toned down or eliminated altogether. The neoliberal turn, cemented by figures like Ronald Reagan, reshaped the political, economic, and cultural landscape in the West. The ideological control over arts and education, particularly through policies aimed at privatization, union suppression, and the alignment of cultural institutions with neoliberal values, has evolved over time.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the culture wars and the consolidation of media outlets under corporate control reshaped cultural production. The media became less focused on educational content and more aligned with entertainment, promoting neoliberal ideologies that emphasized consumerism, individualism, and market-driven thinking. This corporate-driven approach has helped to prioritize market values over collective social concerns, often overshadowing discussions of social justice or collective action. Issues related to race, gender, and sexuality were framed in moralistic terms, and arts and education policies became battlegrounds for these ideological struggles of conservative and Christian nationalist values.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 under then-President Bill Clinton deregulated the telecommunications industry, allowing for greater consolidation in the media sector, enabling corporate giants to acquire multiple types of media outlets within a single market. In the hands of a few corporate entities, the outcome was a less diverse media landscape, with fewer independent voices and a stronger corporate influence over public communication. We saw far-right conservative ideologues like the Koch brothers funding pundits on talk radio programs such as host Rush Limbaugh, which fed into the fears of disenfranchised, poor White Americans by scapegoating BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities to divert from the fact that they might be the ones responsible for lost jobs, poor working conditions, the opioid crisis (the Sacklers), and intractable wars.
The growing conservative backlash against public funding for the arts, especially following controversies in the late 1980s and early ’90s succeeded in pushing for budget cuts to the NEA, aligning with the broader neoliberal agenda of reducing government intervention in cultural affairs emphasizing a traditional, family-friendly vision of American culture. Reagan’s administration sought to reduce the NEA’s budget and influence, often using conservative rhetoric to justify these cuts, claiming that taxpayers should not fund art deemed morally objectionable. In 1981, Reagan launched the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, which sought to strengthen public and private partnerships. His administration sought to reduce federal funding for controversial works, advocating for a form of art that reflected “traditional American values.”
As artist Martha Rosler points out in her 1991 essay “Place, Position, Power and Politics,” “the role of the artist in society has been undermined by a capitalist marketplace … The system of galleries, museums, and magazines that prioritize economic power over cultural value exemplifies this.” All preceding administrations have continued to embrace trends of privatization and corporate sponsorship as alternatives to public funding, calling for reducing public funding of cultural initiatives and instead encouraging partnerships between the public and private sectors. The arts have been framed by past democratic administrations as part of the “creative economy,” positioning it as a key component of economic development (focused on tourism and creative tech). These administrations also expanded tax incentives for corporate sponsors of the arts, encouraging businesses to invest in cultural initiatives. As a result, art institutions increasingly have relied on private donations and corporate sponsorships. While sponsorships often provide “much-needed” funding, they also lead to concerns about corporate influence over what gets exhibited and of art washing.
While fascism achieved control through direct authoritarian means, neoliberalism has accomplished it by exerting economic pressure and pushing for the privatization of the arts, social programs, and higher education, leaving these areas under the oversight of corporate interests and the beliefs of the executives running them. As our students, scholars, and activists continue to call on society to the moral imperatives to end genocide, robbery of the poor, and environmental devastation, we have seen universities cave in to what amounts to extortion. We are also seeing some cultural institutions resisting DEI elimination demands, such as the Japanese American National Museum. The subversive, autonomous potential of art and the responsibility of education to expose contradictions all stand as threats to any regime seeking to maintain unchallenged power. These are some of our powerful tools for resistance that we must defend.