U.S. President Donald Trump, in front of a painting of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, smiles during an event to announce that the Space Force Command will move from Colorado to Alabama, in the Oval Office (REUTERS)
If you’ve ever wanted to burn gas and drive somewhere to see the same AI-generated artbarf crawling across MAGA social media sites on a wall, Slate writer Christina Cauterucci has a suggestion for you. Or maybe not.
“Have you ever wanted to see John Adams’ facial pores? Examine the precise hairline of Alexander Hamilton’s unibrow? Admire the sheen of James Madison’s pillowy lips? Then you’ll love a series of portraits by Brandon Ralph currently on view in Washington,” said Cauterucci.
As part of an exhibition titled Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy, mounted by the State Department at the Art Museum of the Americas, blown-up images are suspended on walls with the familiar faces of the Founding Fathers “in granular detail.”
Cauterucci said Ralph created the art by funneling other peoples’ famous paintings through an A.I. model that mimicked his personal photographic style. According to his Instagram he calls them the “first-ever photographic portraits” of America’s dads.
“I suppose one could take away something profound from the sight of George Washington’s stubble as imagined by a computer program. … But Passport to Patriotism does not encourage such searching interpretations,” Cauterucci said. “A declaration of uncomplicated national pride, the exhibition comes as a rebuttal of sorts to Smithsonian displays that the Trump administration has deemed insufficiently flattering to the American ego. In this context, Ralph’s portraits read not as an invitation to ponder the founders’ imperfections but as a symbol of Donald Trump’s war on the arts.”
Other works include Henri Reed’s paint-spattered canvas depicting an angry eagle in flight, which Cauterucci describes as “objectively hideous, and not in a deliberate, statement-making way.”
“Some are merely amateurish, like a thickly daubed painting of a heart in turquoise and gold spangles by Fer Da Silva, a friend of the exhibition’s organizers who bragged in an Instagram video that the piece’s inclusion would raise its monetary value,” Cauterucci said.
Others are technically adept “but banal works you might find at a tourist gallery on the main drag of a seaside town,” said Cauterucci. “Taken together, the overarching impression is of a seasonal HomeGoods display around the Fourth of July.” And these appear to be the good ones.
The exhibition’s title, in fact, is so out of step with its content that Cauterucci reasons it was “slapped on as an obligatory justification for State Department sponsorship.” It wouldn’t be the first time the museum’s programming has accommodated the president’s agenda.
“Museum leaders canceled two shows last year after deciding that their focus on international Black and queer artists would run afoul of Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts,” said Cauterucci. “Now, in service of an ideology that brooks no deviation from blind nationalism, Passport to Patriotism advances a shallow vision of U.S. identity with all the nuance of a propaganda reel and all the sophistication of the art project your first grader brought home on Flag Day.”
There a visitor will find “five dozen” interpretations of the U.S. flag, and some abstract nonsense that likely survived because they had a red, white and blue color palette.
“It will not shock you to learn that this MAGA art exhibition is the product of a cascade of underqualified nepotism hires,” Cauterucci adds, with one of the organizers, Art in Embassies Director Erin Scavino, a former Apprentice contestant and the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Another is Scavino’s friend, who “owned a pet-food store before being tapped by Scavino for a top national arts post.” And both women have personal connections to several artists in the show.
Not a single historian or art curator had a hand in the exhibition, said Cauterucci — and it shows. And “not just in the breathtakingly simplistic art on view.”
“In the broadest sense, Passport to Patriotism is an embarrassing travesty of a public art exhibition. But on Trump’s terms, it’s exactly as it should be,” Cauterucci concludes.
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