‘It goes against the democracy of our nation’: How DOGE’s GSA cuts endanger the future of Philadelphia’s iconic public art

“Walking past sculptor Louise Nevelson’s Bicentennial Dawn is like strolling through the city of your dreams. It’s sheer poetry,” The Inquirer society columnist Ruth Seltzer wrote on Jan. 15, 1976.

Two days before that, former first lady Betty Ford was at Center City’s James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse attending the dedication of Nevelson’s wooden sculpture, which comprises three groups of intricate columns. Colored in white, the columns rise upward. Three white slabs hang downward from the ceiling; all of it frozen forever in the act of reaching out, rising, signaling the ascent of the 200-year-old young country.

“I hope the Bicentennial will help us reflect how good and how strong our country really is,” Ford said at the dedication. Nevelson’s sculpture, which the federal government commissioned using 0.5% of the funds from the courthouse’s construction budget, “celebrates what we have done and what we have yet to do,” she said.

Bicentennial Dawn is one of the 20,000+ artworks owned by the General Services Administration whose future maintenance and upkeep are now uncertain after, as the Washington Post reported, “more than half of” its three dozen fine arts and historic preservation workers “were abruptly put on leave pending their terminations” by the Trump administration, last month.

Works like Nevelson’s, commissioned through GSA’s Art in Architecture program, were paid through allocations of at least 0.5% of the total estimated construction cost of the building project that houses the artwork.

“They belong to the citizens of the United States who paid for it with their tax dollars and through our federal government revenue, and capital budgets,” said Charlotte Cohen, executive director of Philadelphia’s Association for Public Art, who served as GSA’s fine arts officer for the Northeast and Caribbean region, from 2005-2015.

More than 70 of those artworks are installed in Pennsylvania, including in Philadelphia, Allentown, Erie, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Scranton, and Williamsport. Thousands of works are lent out to area institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Free Library.

The Region 3 Mid-Atlantic office, located in Center City’s Macquarie Building, oversees Pennsylvania, Delaware, parts of New Jersey, parts of Maryland and Virginia, and West Virginia. Its fine arts staff, which stewards and maintains the GSA’s art collection in the region, has now lost at least 100 workers, including fine arts and preservation officers, project managers, communications specialists, engineers, and probationary employees. Only a quarter of the workforce remains.

The GSA staff assesses each work of art every two years to identify maintenance issues, and is in constant touch with building managers, who keep them informed of needs and concerns. The staff vets and employs skilled contractors who carry out specialized processes of moving, handling, dismantling, assembling, conserving, or cleaning of the art.

“GSA had a very good system for both inspection of the works and care of the works,” Cohen said. “The policies and procedures around all of that were really best practices in the sector in the field of public art, and incredibly important. And this is why the loss of the employees is so detrimental to the collection.”

When the Byrne Courthouse foyer moved to make space for a library in the 1990s, Bicentennial Dawn had to be moved. The move, overseen by GSA staff, was risky and complex. Each construction or repair in the building calls for a plan to safeguard the sculpture.

In September 2007, the sculpture was moved to Oberlin, Ohio, so it could undergo “a complete recoating project” undertaken by McKay Lodge Art Conservation — a process that involved an “original color research” and collecting of paint samples from the sculpture.

Outside the courthouse sits David von Schlegell’s 1977 fountain sculpture Voyage of Ulysses. Like all water fixtures, Voyage of Ulysses, too, leaks. According to Cohen, a leak would usually be noticed by a building manager who contacts the regional GSA staff who then bring in a qualified engineering firm to fix it.

Artworks that appear in public spaces, often exposed to traffic, are painted with a special paint so they stay unweathered. When artworks get tagged or graffitied, as often happens in Philadelphia, it falls upon the GSA staff to identify the kind of paint used and then to find an antidote.

The cuts at GSA not only result in a loss of the workforce doing this labor but also signal the overnight disappearance of institutional knowledge.

No one from the GSA’s central office in Washington, which oversees the lending of artworks, has contacted the PMA or the Free Library since the cuts were announced, their spokespersons said.

Whenever there is a construction or major renovation of a federal building, the GSA gauges the budget and decides upon a new artist to commission. This process involves setting up a panel comprising a regional GSA fine arts officer, a fine arts specialist from GSA’s central office in Washington, experts from the local arts community, the architect of the federal building housing the art, and a federal tenant representative.

The panel short-lists artists from a long list, judge their potential and credibility, conduct a detailed technical evaluation, and, finally, offer a commission.

» READ MORE: Three DOGE-targeted buildings in Philly could be sold, leaving their historic art at risk: ‘It really will be a travesty’

For artist Monique van Genderen, whose 2022 abstract painting I Thought of You … The People’s Painting — a lively swath of blues, pinks, and yellows — runs along the lobby of Harrisburg’s Sylvia H. Rambo U.S. Courthouse, the GSA commission is the “pinnacle” of her career.

Van Genderen was in the middle of corresponding with regional GSA staffers, discussing plans to fix a crack in the painting, when the cuts were announced. Her point person no longer works at GSA. “The contracts have been frozen … So now it’s a broken piece of artwork. It’s still enjoyable but inappropriate to just leave it like that,” she said.

She made the piece, she said, “for the [people] … It’s our artwork, our courthouse. We paid for it all with our taxes every year, and for one person to reverse a program that has contributed to our society, it goes against the democracy of our nation,” she said.

In February 2022, when Philadelphia artist Moe Brooker’s abstract painting The Fruit of the Spirit was installed in the first floor lobby of the William J. Green Jr. Federal Building, it effectively marked the overturning of Trump-era limitations on public art, as noted in a 2020 executive order.

Amid a national outcry against Confederate statues, the order argued against “abstract or modernist representations” and urged the GSA “to prioritize the commission of works of art that portray historically significant Americans or events of American historical significance.”

Brooker’s painting, the artist’s largest ever, is a bold, colorful play of shapes and textures. Its dedication was the event in which former GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan stressed the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to ensuring that “public spaces and public art reflect the rich diversity and creativity that strengthens and inspires all our people.” Last month, Carnahan was replaced by software entrepreneur Stephen Ehikian.

Brooker, like his friend Charles Searles, whose 1977 mural Celebration also hangs in the same building, was a PAFA alum. He died in January 2022, barely a month before the artwork’s dedication.

Under the present Trump administration, “no new AiA selections have been made,” a GSA spokesperson said to The Inquirer. “New commissions,” they added, “will be done in compliance with recent Executive Orders and policies. All current artist contracts remain active and unaffected pending funding availability.”

In a Jan. 29 executive order, President Donald Trump reinstated plans for a “National Garden of American Heroes.”

A survey of the GSA-owned artworks tells the history of American art itself. What starts with bas-relief and statues from the 1930s, meanders through murals, portraits, sketches, collages, and sculptures. It navigates all the -isms, tinkers with technology, plays with light — all while asking both the maker and the observer, what does America mean? What does it mean to be from here? What does it mean to come here, stand here, and see this art?

“I love to travel, and when I go all over the world, one of the things that helps me find out about a country is its art,” said Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz, author of The Private Eye in Public Art and a longtime public arts administrator who worked closely with Louise Nevelson. “That’s what identifies different cultures and people throughout time. So it becomes a thing that remains.” And in America, art remains largely because of the GSA.

The Works Projects Administration, and later GSA, employed artists and eventually became a model for art programs across the country. But, most important, they provided cities with an identity. “They could all have their shopping malls, but what would make each one distinctive was a work of art that was especially made for a particular place in a city,” said Pomeroy Schwartz. When that is taken away, she said, “they also take away what makes a culture and a city, a specific place, unique. “A building is a building is a building, and streets are streets. What makes the difference in buildings? Art, public art.”

It also turns a city’s gaze toward the future. “Artists’ works are always a little ahead of their time, so they’re always doing something new and unique, things that haven’t been done before,” Schwartz said.

Public art, therefore, makes us look beyond our present, a respite among the bustle of a city, a shining thing that stands apart among a skyline of homogeneity.

Having lived in Philadelphia since 1982, Maria Nevelson, Louise Nevelson’s granddaughter and the founder-director of the Louise Nevelson Foundation, has only known this city with her grandmother’s tall white columns in it. “If I’m passing it in the dark, the Bicentennial Dawn is all lit up, and I go, ‘There’s Grandma!‘”

“My America is defined through art. Art is my America vs. apple pie and baseball. And public art is accessible to everyone, anytime 24/7. The only thing you pay to see it is with your mind,” said Maria Nevelson. “This is the fabric of your life. If you take that away, what even remains?”