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.”