Regina artist ‘gutted’ after Trump’s orders shutter D.C. exhibit

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The Washington, D.C. exhibit had been years in the making — and in Regina, artist Zachari Logan had put the finishing touches on the sculpture he’d been commissioned to create for the show: A flower crown; a “quite intricate labour of love” out of ceramic, paper and paint.

Logan, looking forward to seeing his work on display in the Art Museum of the Americas and eager to celebrate this moment with fellow artists featured in the show, had just booked his plane ticket to attend the opening night.

“And then,” he says, “boom.”

Just over a month before the exhibition Nature’s Wild with Aldil Gosine was set to open, the show was abruptly cancelled. 

As first reported in the Washington Post, museum officials said they were calling off upcoming exhibitions that could fall afoul of United States president Donald Trump’s executive orders since the start of his second term, including one that orders “the termination of all … diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

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The Art Museum of the Americas is operated by the Organization of American States, an international organization representing 35 independent states across North, South and Central America. In 2023, the United States accounted for nearly half of the organization’s regular funding — tens of millions of U.S. dollars.

So Nature’s Wild, based on Canadian artist and curator Andil Gosine’s same-named book about art, activism and queer identity in the Caribbean, featuring queer artists primarily from Canada, now seemed a risky bet. At the same time, the museum cancelled a separate show that would have featured Black artists from across the Western hemisphere. 

Logan got the news from Gosine on Feb. 14 — the same day Gosine was formally notified by the museum director that the show could not open on March 21 as planned, and would not be going forward at all.  

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“I just felt gutted,” Logan recalled. “It was surreal. I was sitting in my car, and my husband and I were just about to go in and have lunch on Valentine’s Day, and I got this awful email from Andil confirming this. I read it and read it again, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. It was so unexpected and strange. It was just this awful, hollow feeling.”

Logan, an award-winning artist whose drawings and sculptures have been featured in museums across Canada and internationally, said he has been “obsessed with the news” ever since the second Trump administration began, and has been deeply concerned with “all of these absurdities that felt very much tied to Canada and Canadian politics and our lives for the next four years.” But he had never expected the political headlines to hit so close to home. 

Now, he says, even if the show had been going ahead as planned, he wouldn’t have travelled to see it open. With so many cases of international travellers to the United States being detained at the border, Logan said going Stateside “was no longer an option.”

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And for this to be happening at the Art Museum of the Americas in particular — that the museum and its supporting organization would apparently choose to axe programs and exhibits that might seem tied to diversity and inclusion when the spectre of funding cuts appeared — was a hard blow.

“The real tragedy about this — well, of course, there are several overlapping tragedies — but one of the main ones was that this space (was) purported to be, in terms of its programming, a beacon of expression and advocacy for human rights and visibility,” said Logan.

Despite this setback, Nature’s Wild will live on. After the D.C. show was cancelled, art galleries and spaces in New York, Montreal and Toronto reached out to Gosine with offers to host and display a version of the show in each of the three cities.

“One of the really magical things — and it says a lot about the galleries — is that these museums have just jumped on this and figured out how to do it,” said Logan.

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But Logan worries about the audiences who won’t get to see these stories, and stories like them, in the years ahead — in all the empty spaces on gallery walls, he sees nothing more than so many missed opportunities for human connection.

“I think any time something like this happens, it limits our ability to share information and to simply say ‘I see you; you see me,’ ” he said. “When that is limited, I think that is really troublesome; it’s a bellwether for things to come.”

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