to U.S. Culture, Arts, Humanities Institutions
current threats
Track the most recent developments affecting federal agencies responsible for cultural heritage, arts, humanities, and environmental stewardship.
Updated frequently to reflect proposed and enacted changes, budget cuts, institutional restructuring, and other high-impact threats.
destruction.
Deliberate demolition or defacement of cultural sites, artifacts, or records to erase public memory of certain events or historic figures.
Image of a defaced Ancient Egyptian sphynx (shesep-ankh or “living image”) at the great Pyramids of Giza.
deaccessation.
Deaccession, the formal removal of cultural resources from public collections in libraries, museums, and art galleries, leads to cultural erasure. When books, artifacts, and artworks are removed without consultation, they become vulnerable to loss, erasure, or private transfer, often becoming unretrievable. Deaccession excludes cultural workers from the process, and denies communities access to ancestral objects, sacred rights, and important historical documentation.
A placard at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC on 29 April 2025. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA.
suppression.
Governments actively suppress culture by restricting, outlawing, or targeting the exercise of fundamental expressive freedoms. This can involve persecuting individuals for speaking ancestral languages, wearing specific attire, or performing religious practices. The government’s cultural suppression may escalate to profiling or persecuting individuals from targeted communities based on their perceived heritage or national origin. Authorities often criminalize organizations and attendance at cultural gatherings or protests. Sacred sites are frequently closed off, renamed, or repurposed, not only to frustrate cultural gatherings or religious exercise but also to entirely erase their cultural meaning. Under such social pressures, knowledge keepers and cultural workers are often silenced or criminalized. This pervasive suppression encourages people to conceal their cultural identities, leading to the vanishing of ancestral practices and ultimately denying communities the fundamental right to culturally exist.
Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia takes its name from two pioneering Black Army officers: Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg (left) and Lt. Col. Charity Adams. Photo credit: Army; photo illustration: Grace Widyatmadja/NPR
neglect.
Neglect is a nuanced yet destructive form of cultural erasure that manifests as the governing authority's failure to adequately maintain, fund, or prioritize the preservation of cultural archives, landscapes, or institutions. This inaction invariably leads to cultural resources’ gradual decay or disappearance over time. Historical sites collapse. Knowledge keepers integral to preservation efforts, operate without sufficient support, recognition, or institutional safeguarding, effectively leading to forced departures from their lives' work. Fundamentally, the government's lack of funding and lack of administrative inaction in cultural resource preservation is a quiet and effective means of erasing a community’s cultural heritage.
The Royal Theater in Philadelphia was demolished in 2017 after 47 years of vacancy, neglect, and broken promises of saving the African American landmark. | Photo: Michael Bixler
digital displacement.
Digital displacement is the unauthorized digitization of cultural heritage by institutions, lacking community consent or involvement. This devalues cultural resources by creating incomplete digital substitutes, automating cultural practices, and falsely representing artifact availability or ownership. It can impede the return (repatriation) of artifacts or limit access to historical records, causing community knowledge keepers to lose influence over public representations and interpretations of their cultural traditions. Ultimately, these digital representations become barriers, not bridges, between people and their cultural heritage.
Walters Art Museum Digitization Equipment named “Omar”.
sale.
Governments facilitate cultural erasure by selling ceremonial artifacts, artworks, manuscripts, historic documents, and access to culturally significant lands and waterways. This includes authorizing private companies to extract minerals from sacred landscapes. State-sanctioned auctions, private deals, state-sanctioned transfers, and complex licensing agreements allow the government to profit from our loss. Some administrations secretly deaccession and sell items, bypassing public notice and community input. Once sold, communities lose access to their heritage, and cultural practices tied to these places or objects are irrevocably severed.
obfuscation.
Obfuscation hides or distorts the origins of cultural materials, severing them from the communities that created them. Specific obfuscation practices include mislabeling cultural treasures, placing them in overboard catalogs, or ignoring their community-based origins and meanings to erase or discredit communal memory. In cultural institutions, the act of obscuring or making things unclear often looks like the removal of community leaders and prioritizing outside "experts" who then strip away context and misinterpret the original meaning.
privitization.
Privatization involves the government’s transfer of public cultural resources to private entities, often through methods like auctioning artifacts or artworks, outsourcing cultural preservation services, or historical and environmental deregulations that endanger places, practices, and treasures of deep cultural meaning. Access to cultural resources becomes paywalled, selective, or entirely cut off. Communities’ history is commodified for the benefit of others. Communities are excluded from meaningful decision-making about their own cultural resources. Ultimately, privatization is a quiet but devastating form of cultural erasure that fragments cultural heritage by removing it from public accountability.
dilution & appropriation.
Dilution and appropriation happen when government bodies take symbols, practices, or stories from historically underrepresented minority groups and turn them into decorative slogans, removing their true meaning. Governments repurpose these practices and symbols for state promotion or tourism, without giving credit or compensation to the communities they came from. Important symbols might be mass-produced or used in government messages, and traditional ceremonies might be copied without their real spirit or context. Instead of elevating the true culture keepers, government bodies may employ performers they approve of. What survives is caricature, not culture.