The Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue run by the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D.C., has canceled two upcoming shows featuring Black and LGBTQ+ artists.

According to the participants, the exhibitions were canceled to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order rooting out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts from the federal government.

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An exhibition featuring a survey of Black artists was abruptly canceled earlier this month with a phone call from Adriana Ospina, the museum’s director, said Cheryl D. Edwards, curator of the exhibition.

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“‘I have been instructed to call you and tell you that the museum [show] is terminated,’” Edwards told the Washington Post, quoting a message left by Ospina. “Nobody uses that word in art: terminated,” Edwards said.

A exhibition from Andil Gosine, a Canadian artist and a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, was also canceled.

His show featured works by a dozen artists, many of them queer people of color and most of them Canadian. He received a similar message from the museum director.

“‘I’ve been directed to cancel your show,’” Gosine says, quoting Ospina. “There was no explanation.”

The museum is funded in large part, although indirectly, by the U.S. government. It’s administered by the Organization of American States, comprising over 30 member nations from North, South and Central America, and run similarly to United Nations. The U.S. contributes about $50 million a year to the OAS’s operations through the State Department.

Multiple executive orders issued by Trump have directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review all U.S. relationships with international organizations, with an eye to withdrawing from those “contrary to the interests of the United States.” Trump has pulled federal funding from all projects that seem to reflect DEI efforts.

In a message to the OAS in January, Rubio made clear the Trump administration’s America First policies would be reflected in its relationship with the organization, including a vow to “combat genuine enemy propaganda with the fundamental truth that America is a great and just country whose people are generous.”

Edwards show, titled Before the Americas, featured artworks by noted African American, Afro-Latino and Caribbean artists and illustrated the influence of the transatlantic slave trade and African diaspora across multiple generations.

“This is an anticipatory move,” Gosine said, pointing to Rubio’s charge to realign U.S. foreign policy in Trump’s image.

“I fear, at this moment, that means throwing queer people, queer artists, marginal people, under the bus,” he said. 

Edwards, 71, said the push to root out DEI in American life is “silencing artistic voices.”

She was born and raised in Miami under segregation, Edwards said, and has long been the object of institutional racism over the course of her career.

But this, she added, “is just direct.”

Earlier this month, Trump anointed himself chair of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., declaring a new “golden age of arts and culture” free of drag shows and “anti-American propaganda.”

Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked elements of Trump’s DEI executive orders affecting federal contractors, grantees, publicly traded corporations and large universities, calling them “textbook viewpoint-based discrimination.”

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