Back in 2013, artist Kehinde Wiley was commissioned to paint a portrait of then-President Barack Obama. And until recently, it was displayed at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic. But the painting has been removed on orders from the U.S. State Department, with Donald Trump ally Erin Scavino and other MAGA Republicans attacking the painting as “woke.”
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Scavino, a former contestant on the hit reality “The Apprentice” — which Trump hosted during the 2000s — now heads the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. And she defended the removal during an appearance on former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s podcast, saying, “It was very woke. It was by the gentleman who did Obama’s portrait, and it was aesthetically terrifying.”
On X, formerly Twitter, the Beast posted, “The State Department has removed a painting by an Obama portrait artist from a U.S. embassy, with the Trump goon running the agency’s art operation trashing the piece as ‘very woke’ and ‘aesthetically terrifying.'”
The removal is also being defended by Leah Campos, U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic. In a video posted on social media, Campos attacked the Obama portrait for promoting “globalist and woke ideologies.”
But according to the Daily Beast’s Leah Kimmins, neither Scavino nor Campos “explained what was actually wrong with the image itself.”
“A State Department spokeswoman dodged discussing the canvas’ contents when the New York Times reached out for comment on Monday,” Kimmins reports in the Beast. “Instead, she dredged up a 2023 quote from Wiley about an entirely different painting, ‘Judith and Holofernes,’ which he had dubbed ‘a play on the kill whitey thing,’ alongside sexual assault allegations Wiley has denied.”
Kimmins continues, “‘Judith and Holofernes’ reimagines the biblical story of a woman who saves her town by killing an invading army’s general. In Kehinde Wiley’s version, Judith is depicted as a Black woman holding the severed head of a white woman. The painting is Wiley’s contemporary take on a 17th-Century work by Italian painter Giovanni Baglione.”
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Virginia Shore, who led the Art in Embassies program under former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, is pushing back against MAGA attacks on Wiley’s Obama portrait.
Shore told the New York Times, “Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand. This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders.”
Kimmins describes the removal as “just the latest salvo in a scorched-earth campaign to reshape the embassy art program, an initiative dating back to the Kennedy administration.”
The Beast reporter notes, “Trump appointee Scavino — who co-runs the program and is married to Trump’s longtime aide Dan Scavino — bragged on Katie Miller’s podcast about how fast she scrubbed art from the ambassador’s residence in Bucharest, Romania, after MAGA Rep. Anna Paulina Luna claimed she spotted ‘satanic baby art’ during a trip.”
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