The Woodmere, a museum on the grounds of a 19th century mansion in Philadelphia, is suing the administration of US President Donald Trump after he signed an executive order revoking a $750,000 federal grant the institution had been awarded. On 27 August, the Woodmere filed a lawsuit seeking the remainder of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant that Congress had agreed to fulfil prior to the executive order. The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported news of the lawsuit.
The museum had already received roughly $195,000 of the allocated funds. But when Trump signed an executive order titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” on 14 March, one of its effects was to revoke funding for “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary”. This included IMLS and its grant programme Save America’s Treasures, which supports historic preservation projects and the safeguarding of collections deemed to be of national significance.
Woodmere does not exclusively show American artists, but its collection and historic space, including a new education facility opening in November, fit the qualifications for the Save America’s Treasures grant funding. Charles Knox Smith, the collector who gifted the bulk of the Woodmere’s permanent collection, was born in 1845 and was deeply affected by the American Civil War. Much of his collection, including Sarah Fisher Ames’s bust of Abraham Lincoln, serves attests to his wartime experiences. The artist Edith Emerson was the museum’s director from 1940 to 1978 and focused on exhibiting women artists; Emerson’s partner was Violet Oakley, the first American woman to receive a public mural commission.
In its lawsuit, the Woodmere argues that the institution is reliant on the IMLS grant money to fund projects they are already underway and had been planned with the understanding that the government would honour the full $750,000 grant. The Save America’s Treasures funds were to go towards conservation efforts, catalogue updates and digitisation of collection items. Those efforts would in turn help the museum prepare for its 2026 exhibition of artists from Philadelphia, Arc of Promise, timed to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence.
The lawsuit also notes that the IMLS grant stipulated that the Woodmere would have to raise a matching sum from donors, which it did, but that requirement is now irrelevant in light of the revoked funding.The Woodmere has already signed contracts with outside parties to have the necessary conservation or digitisation work done, relying on money it will no longer receive to fulfil those contracts. Though its decision to go to court is unique, the Woodmere is one of several Philadelphia institutions whose funding has been cut, including the Penn Museum, the South Asian American Digital Archive and the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
Some institutions that lost funding have seen it restored in the months since Trump’s executive order. The Woodmere was at first optimistic that it might be one of them. “When the Save America’s Treasures grant awarded to Woodmere in 2024 was terminated in 2025, we made several requests for review by the IMLS and sought assistance from our elected officials,” William R. Valerio, the director and chief executive of Woodmere, tells The Art Newspaper in a statement, but those requests were unsuccessful.
“When we exhausted all non-litigious avenues for reinstatement, we filed our complaint,” Valerio says. “We remain committed to this action until the grant is fully restored, so that we can continue our critical work preserving, archiving, and conserving our museum collection.”
