As US president Donald Trump’s administration continues to crack down on free speech in the culture sector, the non-profit organisation Art at A Time Like This is addressing censorship head-on in the new exhibition Don’t Look Now in the Nolita neighborhood of New York City (10-25 October).
In bringing together 24 contemporary artists whose work has been censored or blacklisted—including Marilyn Minter, Shepard Fairey and Dread Scott—Don’t Look Now asks big questions about the future of creative expression in an increasingly surveillant political climate. The exhibition elevates the voices of artists whose choices in subject matter have come at personal, professional or political costs, whether that be through rescinded invitations, canceled opportunities or lost federal funding. “We’re looking at this from the impact on the artists”, Barbara Pollack, co-founder of Art At A Time Like This, tells The Art Newspaper.
Don’t Look Now‘s organisers are intimately familiar with the issues: in 2023, Art At A Time Like This faced censorship during its public art campaign 8×5: Artists Responding to Mass Incarceration, when billboard companies in Houston, Texas refused to platform the project.
Danielle SeeWalker, G is for Genocide, 2024 Courtesy the artist and Art At A Time Like This
The exhibition highlights individual works and the stories that led to their inclusion. The Lakota painter Danielle SeeWalker had a residency opportunity rescinded in Vail, Colorado, over her painting G is for Genocide (2024), which depicts a Native American woman in a keffiyeh (Vail reached a settlement with the artist last month). A quilt by fiber artist Yvonne Iten-Scott, Origin (2023), was removed from an exhibition for its visual references to female anatomy and reproductive justice. Officials in Arizona attempted to remove Shepard Fairey’s print My Florist is a Dick (2023) from the artist’s traveling exhibition because of its critique of police brutality.
These examples attest to an increasingly dangerous ecosystem for overtly politically art. The Trump administration has laid off staff at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) en masse, and proposed slashing funding for both agencies. The president declared the Smithsonian Institution a font of “divisive race ideology”. Exhibitions perceived to be commenting on US politics and the war in Gaza have either closed early or been pre-emptively canceled, including the Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s 2024 solo show at Indiana University and Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald’s Smithsonian exhibition.
According to a January 2025 survey conducted by Artists at Risk Connection, Pen America and the Association of Art Museum Directors, 65% of museum directors reported experiencing pressure to remove a work or call off an exhibition at least once over the course of their careers, while 55% agree that censorship is a “much bigger problem for museums today” than a decade ago.
Yvone Iten-Scott, Origin, 2023 Courtesy the artist and Art At A Time Like This
“We started working on this show a year and a half ago”, Pollack tells The Art Newspaper. “We found more and more instances of museums being afraid and pulling work, and now under Trump, canceling shows because of his executive orders governing the NEA. We’ve found many institutions self-censoring, but we also found other things happening that are very troubling, like artists getting canceled because of their Instagram posts. A new wrinkle in censorship. There are cases that get a lot of high visibility, like in shows with the Smithsonian, but it really hurts a lot of artists that are having their first university museum show or their first commission.”
The curatorial ethos of the show reflects subjects that are becoming increasingly taboo in art spaces, Pollack says. “There are certain topics that now across the board presenting institutions don’t want to deal with,” she says. “One is women’s rights and reproductive rights. Two is trans rights. Three is [diversity, equity and inclusion]. Four is pro-Palestinian work. So many of the artists are really grateful to us because they can’t get their work shown anywhere.”
The exhibition also interrogates the broader economic engines driving rightward trends in art taste and production. Pollack adds: “With some of the economic challenges in the art world right now, we have to ask, what kind of shows are going to get funded or not funded? And how do we define museums? Are they just seals of approval on a market showing artists as commodities, or are they supposed to provoke dialogue?”
- Don’t Look Now: A Defense of Free Expression, 10-25 October, 127 Elizabeth Street, New York
