The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a new grant program for the design and creation of statues for President Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes.
The sculpture garden is one of the president’s central priorities for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year, and was first announced in 2021.
The sculpture garden will feature life-size statues of “250 great individuals from America’s past who have contributed to our cultural, scientific, economic, and political heritage,” according to a news release from the NEH. The garden’s location is still “to be determined” but intended to “create a public space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes,” the release stated.
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Interested applicants, who must be US citizens, are requested to submit a “two-dimensional or three-dimensional graphic representation of the preliminary concepts for up to three statues of selected individuals, accompanied by a description of the proposed project and workplan.” The application deadline is July 1.
The submissions must depict figures from a litany of names detailed in Executive Order 13978. The list includes historical figures like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Sacagawea, Alexander Graham Bell, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers alongside figures such as Sacagawea, Kobe Bryant, Julia Child, Alex Trebek, and Hannah Arendt.
Photographer Ansel Adams, painter John Singer Sargent, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, early American portraitist Charles Wilson Peale, and Carnegie Museum of Art founder Andrew Carnegie are also on the list.
Selected artists will receive awards of up to $200,000 per statue, which must be made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass.
The New York Times reports that President Trump “has also directed that subjects be depicted in a “realistic” manner, with no modernist or abstract designs allowed.”
The press release confirms that the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts “have jointly committed a total of $34 million” for the sculpture garden.
The planned sculpture garden will be funded by federal grants initially distributed to arts and cultural groups across the United States, but cancelled by the Trump administration.
Among the rescinded grants was the NEH Fellowships and Awards for Faculty, worth $60,000, and most recently awarded to Dr. Say Burgin, an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Burgin was awarded the fellowship after three or four previous applications, only to receive its termination notice this April.
“I feel personally, incredibly sad. This is the most prestigious opportunity that I’ve had in my academic career,” Burgin told ARTnews.
Burgin planned to use the grant for a research sabbatical, with the intent to publish a book about state repression as it related to American Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
When asked if there was any appealing candidates provided by the Trump administration for its sculpture garden, or any figures she would like to see represented, Burgin said, “Not a single one.” She added that her answer does not reflect on the importance of these figures, but rather that “statues aren’t the history we need.
“If the NEH wanted to give a bunch of money over to some truthful artists and let them pick their own mediums—somebody like an Amos Kennedy Jr. to tell some Black history of Detroit in his own way—I would almost be happy to see the money funneled to him instead of me. But not for this garden,” she said. “Not for these statues, no.”
