In a post Friday (30 May) on his social media platform Truth Social, US President Donald Trump claimed he has fired Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). His administration will name a replacement for her shortly, he added.
In his post, Trump claimed that Sajet—who has served as the gallery’s director since 2013, when she became the first woman to lead the NPG since its founding in 1962—is a “highly partisan person” and alleged that she is “a strong supporter of [diversity, equity and inclusion programmes], which is totally inappropriate for her position”. A spokesperson for the Smithsonian declined to comment; a representative for the NPG did not immediately respond to The Art Newspaper’s request for comment.
It is unclear whether Trump has the authority to fire employees of the Smithsonian, which is not a government agency. The institution—which oversees 21 museums across the US as well as the National Zoo in Washington, DC—is governed by a board of regents and receives 53% of its funding from the federal government via appropriations made by Congress.
Trump has targeted the Smithsonian and its institutions repeatedly since returning to office. In late January, in response to an executive order Trump signed the day he was inaugurated directing federal agencies and federally funded institutions to stop their DEI initiatives, the Smithsonian ended its diversity efforts. Another executive order, signed in late March, directed Vice President JD Vance (in his role as a member of the Smithsonian’s board of regents) to oversee the removal of what it termed “divisive, race-centered ideology” from all of the Smithsonian’s properties and deny funding to any exhibitions or works that “degrade shared American values”. That order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, singled out exhibitions and programmes at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but did not mention the NPG.
The gallery, which shares a building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum—a short walk from the White House—is home to the collection of official state portraits of US Presidents and First Ladies, as well as portraits of important figures from the country’s history. On the occasion of Trump’s inauguration in January, the NPG put a 2019 portrait taken during the president’s first term by the photojournalist Pari Dukovic on temporary display. Another Trump portrait in the gallery’s collection, by photographer Matt McClain, is a fixture of the popular America’s Presidents exhibit that features portraits of every US president.
Sajet, a citizen of the Netherlands, was born in Nigeria and raised in Australia. Prior to her appointment to lead the NPG, she served as the president and chief executive of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for around six years. Her previous roles included seven years as the senior vice president and deputy director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and three years as the director of corporate relations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She had previously been the leader of two Australian art institutions—the Morning Peninsula Regional Gallery and the Monash Gallery of Art—from 1989 to 1995. At the NPG, in addition to her activities as director, she has been the host of the Portraits podcast and co-wrote The Obama Portraits (2020), a book about Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald's portraits of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, respectively.
In addition to targeting the Smithsonian, Trump made good on his promise to fire the head of the National Archives and has sought to remake the US capital’s foremost performing arts institution since returning to office. In February, Trump dismissed 18 board members of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and appointed new trustees—among them Second Lady Usha Vance—who promptly elected him board chair.
Trump and the billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) have also attempted to drastically reduce the staff and funding of the three federal agencies that fund cultural institutions, libraries and arts programmes—the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
In the cases of the NEA and the NEH, the president has sought to redirect their funds toward one of his pet projects, the "National Garden of American Heroes", a sculpture park intended to be completed in time for the US semiquincentennial in July 2026. Last month, the NEH put out a call for artists to propose designs for the 250 monuments that are to be created for the park, whose intended location has not yet been revealed.