According to the State Department, Kehinde Wiley Is Just the Beginning: More Art Could Be Removed and Sold From Embassies

It’s no secret that the current presidential administration has a passion for interior decorating. That extends to Donald Trump’s diplomatic corps—and, conveniently enough, ambassadors always have the purview to switch up the look and feel of their respective consulates through the artwork on view. And so, in July, the local emissaries of the State Department decided to tweak the decor at the US Embassy to the Dominican Republic in Santo Domingo—including removing artwork that had been commissioned to hang permanently on the walls.

Trump’s ambassador to the DR is Leah Campos, an Arizona-born former CIA officer, whose sister, former Real World contestant Rachel Campos-Duffy, is a co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend married to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. This spring, Leah Campos’s residence manager, Paola Rivera, posted a tour of the new art on Campos’s walls, which was chosen from the collection of Art in Embassies, the organization that has acquired and commissioned hundreds of artworks to be displayed in embassies and ambassadors’ homes. There’s one rather unexpected curatorial choice. On one wall, the ambassador installed Marc Lipp’s Fight Fight Fight, a depiction of Trump with a bloody ear and raised fist painted by one of the president’s favorite Palm Beach watercolorists. And on another, there’s Jasper Johns’s Tattered Banner, a lithograph that was donated to the Art in Embassies collection by Leo Castelli.

But more changes were in store for the embassy itself. Earlier this summer, Kehinde Wiley’s Young Artists After Siamesas—a commissioned painting that depicts four local art students, and that is described in official State Department literature still available on its website as a work that “masterfully weaves together disparate historical and cultural elements into a cohesive image”—was not just obscured, but fully covered up by a jingoism-plastered tarp.

In August, Campos posted a video of the painting being removed from the wall, getting stuffed into storage material, and being carted off to an undisclosed location.

“In the Trump Administration and under my leadership we are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country! 🇺🇸” she wrote.

On Friday, the State Department sent me a statement from the Ambassador Leah Campos.

“It is my intention that everything we project from US Embassy Santo Domingo, including the art and decor, reflect the beauty, strength, and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people,” Campos said.

When I reached her for comment on Friday, Erin Scavino, the director of Art in Embassies at the State Department, told me she defended the decision to take down the painting. Simply put, the Wiley went against the embassy’s mission.

“The painting depicts four Dominican artists whom Wiley selected after immersing himself in the local art community,” Scavino says. “In my view, the mission of an America First State Department is not simply to use American diplomatic facilities to promote the people and culture of another nation. Cultural exchange and works that meaningfully connect American and host-country history and culture would be a more appropriate expression of cultural diplomacy.”

The artwork wasn’t just getting carted away. Scavino told me the department is trying to sell it—and that, hypothetically, other artworks could be sold as well.

“With respect to the potential sale or other disposition of Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, my answer remains the same: We are consulting with our legal team to determine what options are legally available and what course of action is most appropriate,” Scavino tells me. “The same review and process would apply to other works of art for which similar concerns arise. I would surmise that an auction would be the most appropriate, but that is very far in the future at this point, and there is no point in conjecture.”

‘Young Artists After Siamesas 1960’ Kehinde Wiley.Courtesy of United States Embassy, Santo Domingo

According to a source with knowledge of the situation, the practice of selling works commissioned for the collection of Art in Embassies—intended to be permanently installed in specific parts of an embassy—is virtually unprecedented. But according to the organization’s bylaws, doing so would technically be legal, as long as the artwork’s deaccession from the AIE collection was approved by the Office of Art in Embassies, which falls under the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations.

Still, one source stresses to me that it would be very unusual to sell an artwork that had been specifically commissioned for a specific place in an embassy, especially one by an American artist as prominent as Wiley—who, despite the disturbing allegations of sexual assault against him, remains incredibly well represented in American institutions. Scavino also cited the allegations in her reasoning for backing the removal, saying that “I have reviewed the pending civil complaint in its entirety, and I consider the allegations set forth in that litigation to be extremely serious.” (In a reported cease-and-desist letter sent after the 2024 accusations were made, lawyers for Wiley called the accusations “categorically false and defamatory.” Regarding a 2025 sexual assault lawsuit filed against him, he claimed to have never met the woman.) Yet that source also admitted that this administration could sell this Wiley painting because it was commissioned for a particular embassy at a particular time—specifically, under the administration of President Barack Obama.

While speaking last week with former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer on a podcast, Scavino—who Trump appointed to run Art in Embassies in 2025—mentioned that the Wiley work had been commissioned during Obama’s second term. “Leah Campos, who’s one of our great ambassadors, she had a piece of art hanging in her embassy that we worked very hard to get taken down,” Scavino said on the podcast. “It was very woke—it was by the gentlemen who did Obama’s portrait, and it was aesthetically terrifying.”

Scavino is correct in saying that no Americans are depicted in the painting. But to call Young Artists After Siamesas “aesthetically terrifying” is pretty baffling. It’s a straightforward portrait of four Dominican art students lounging, with flowers as the background. The comment makes a lot more sense when I realized Scavino was referring to a completely different Wiley painting, one that the State Department mentioned in a statement to The New York Times.

That painting, Judith and Holofernes, references the Biblical story of the widow Judith holding the severed head of the general Holofernes. It’s in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art, not the US Embassy to the Dominican Republic. But Judith and Holofernes is also the painting that the State Department decided to mention when justifying taking down a Kehinde Wiley that’s permanently installed in an embassy.

Is Judith and Holofernes “aesthetically terrifying?” Kind of! Severed heads are not for the faint of heart, sure, but…it’s inspired by the Bible. This Wiley painting is a play on a Giovanni Baglione painting at the Galleria Borghese, at the Borghese family’s villa on the Pincian Hill in Rome. Wait a minute: Is the Galleria Borghese…very woke?

Judith and Holofernes does have a spicy quote associated with it. Wiley, in a 2023 interview with The Guardian, referred to his Judith and Holofernes as “a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing,” before winking and saying with a smile: “Artists are tricksters. The ultimate goal of a trickster is to say, ‘You think you know what something is, but let me show you the inverse.’”

“I have serious concerns regarding Kehinde Wiley, the artist who painted President Barack Obama’s official portrait, and particularly his 2012 painting Judith and Holofernes,” she tells me. “That work depicts a Black woman holding the severed head of a white woman in one hand and a sword in the other. Wiley himself described the work as ‘a play on the “kill whitey” thing.’ I find that imagery aesthetically disturbing, and, given the artist’s own characterization of it, I believe the racial implications are deeply problematic.”

Wiley did not respond to an email to his studio and other messages.

If a Kehinde Wiley can be removed and potentially sold, what removals come next—what would be considered, as Scavino put it, “other works of art for which similar concerns arise?”

There’s the painting that’s currently installed in Dakar’s US Embassy: Equilibrium by Amy Sherald, completed in 2009 and installed at the embassy since 2012. Sherald, of course, was commissioned to paint Michelle Obama’s official portrait. Like Wiley, she will always be associated with the Obamas—but she’s also gone head-to-head with the current administration. In July 2025, Sherald cancelled her show at the National Portrait Gallery over the fact that the curators wanted to exclude Lady Liberty, a painting of a trans woman, from the exhibition.

“When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel,” Sherald said in a statement at the time. “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility, and I was opposed to that being a part of the ‘American Sublime’ narrative.”

Equilibrium currently remains on the Art in Embassies website. So does Aurora by Jeffrey Gibson, which Marc Straus Gallery donated and has been installed at the N’Djamena Embassy in Chad since 2017. In 2025, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for Gibson’s work was cancelled when the country’s new cultural czars said that the NEA organization was “updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”

And then there’s the permanent installations at the US Embassy in London, which feature two of the most celebrated living American artists—neither of whom has shied away from social and political action. One is Jenny Holzer, who’s made a career out of elevating agitprop into formally innovative conceptual art. The other is Mark Bradford, who turned the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a pointed criticism of the American prejudices that led to Trump’s election.

But there’s little worry that either of these works will go anywhere anytime soon. Holzer’s work is engraved into the building’s stone, and Bradford’s consists of a painting the size of a football field. It would take more than an Instagram video to get these carted off and shunted into storage.

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