US president Donald Trump has done away with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), which advises the president on policy decisions and engagement with the philanthropic and private sectors. It also endeavours to boost support for the arts, humanities and museum and library services at the federal level.
The committee had been re-established by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden in 2022. Trump had disbanded it in 2017, following the mass resignation of nearly all its members in protest of the president’s response to the white nationalist rally and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Biden’s executive order re-creating the PCAH was one of 78 orders and memoranda he had issued that Trump revoked on his first day in office, 20 January.
The PCAH was established in 1982 under president Ronald Reagan and could include up to 25 people, among them the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In December 2022, Biden appointed Tsione Wolde-Michael—a curator at the Smithsonian Institution—to be the committee’s executive director.
Representatives of the NEA, NEH and IMLS did not respond to The Art Newspaper’s requests for comment.
In April 2023, Biden named 31 people to serve on the PCAH and appointed the pop star Lady Gaga and film producer Bruce Cohen to serve as co-chairs. Other Biden appointees included the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, the curator Nora Halpern, the actors George Clooney, Jennifer Garner and Kerry Washington, the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, the screenwriter and producer Shonda Rhimes and Steve Israel, a former US representative for New York.
“Not only did he fire us all, but he disbanded the actual committee,” Israel told The New York Times. “It suggests that there’s a proactive hostility toward arts and humanities.”
The Times reports that the committee met six times in all between when Biden re-established it and Trump re-disbanded it, most recently on 9 January. Its total budget for 2024 was around $335,000.
Another advisory committee that Biden revived during his term, the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts, appears to still exist. In March 2022, Biden named 14 people to serve on that committee, including a co-founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the first director of cultural affairs for the city of New York and a trustee of the Menil Collection in Houston. A page on the website of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, which that committee supports and advises, lists a chair and 38 members as of 2 October 2024.
During his first term, Trump repeatedly sought to do away entirely with the NEA, NEH and IMLS. Thus far in his second term, his administration has not proposed any cuts to those agencies, though he does seem intent on funding a major outdoor sculpture garden devoted to “American heroes” that he has stipulated should open by 2026 to mark the US’s semiquincentennial.
Among others, the sculpture park would honour many influential figures in arts and culture including the musicians Woody Guthrie, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, the actors Jimmy Stewart and Lauren Bacall, the film-makers Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan, the poets Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the artists Ansel Adams, John James Audubon, Charles Willson Peale, Norman Rockwell, Gilbert Stuart and John Singer Sargent.
