Selling America’s Sistine Chapel: The Trump Administration’s Effort to Sell Federal Buildings and the Artworks Trapped Inside

Seymour Fogel, Wealth of the Nation, 1942 (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, 2011)

By Sam Brady-Myerov

As United States of America celebrate the 250th anniversary and President Trump continues his efforts to reshape the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. has become the center of national attention. Recent headlines have focused on the demolition of the White House East Wing to accommodate a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch, naming disputes over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, renovations to the Reflecting Pool, and a UFC fight held on White House grounds.^[1] But a quieter transformation has been simultaneously reshaping the aesthetic landscape of the capital: the accelerated disposition of federal property and the uncertain future of the historic artworks trapped inside.^[2]

One such building, the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, built in 1939 and located at 330 Independence Avenue SW, is known by preservationists and art historians as the “Sistine Chapel of New Deal Art.”^[3] Throughout the building, giants of twentieth-century American art, including Philip Guston and Ben Shahn, painted monumental murals and carved reliefs depicting both the devastation of the Great Depression and the promises of the New Deal.^[4] These 1940s works are not only enormous, but painted directly onto the building’s walls. The Cohen is currently up for sale, opening the possibility that the structure could be radically altered, gutted, or demolished.^[5] As the federal government seeks to rapidly dispose of its real estate portfolio, the Cohen Building raises a larger question: what happens to public art when it is inseparable from architecture the government no longer wants to own?