Fading Stripes, Falling Stars: Censorship, Dialogue, and Institutional Responsibility in Trump’s America

Dane Nakama, If the flag had not been upright (2025). Graphite and acrylic paint on paper. Image courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center. Photo: Dane Nakama.

In early 2026, Dear Uncle Tani, opened at Grand Central Art Center (GCAC), a 45,000-square-foot public-facing institution in downtown Santa Ana, California. The show was Japanese-Uchinanchu artist Dane Nakama’s second iteration of this work, an epistolary exchange with their great-uncle Kyoshi “Tani” Iguchi, a soldier who died in service during World War II. On one wall wartime letters from Iguchi to his family were interspersed with Nakama’s earnest and introspective present-day responses. A clay facsimile of the United States spread across the gallery floor, and behind it, the wall was painted to look like an American flag. The familiar blue starfield held 26 cut-out paper stars, 18 illustrated with graphite portraits of Uncle Tani’s troop mates. The details were hard to make out—the highest star was about eight feet up the wall. Preparing for the GCAC show, Nakama had proposed flipping the flag upside down, with the star portraits at eye-level. “The show warns about blind militarism and blind allegiance to the United States,” Bella Marinos, the exhibition’s curator, told me, “and the upside-down flag is a bipartisan side of distress.” But when Nakama shared this idea, “several individuals associated with Grand Central Art Center expressed their concerns for the symbolism that an upside-down flag would represent.”¹

Since President Trump’s March 27, 2025 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” demanded an end to “divisive, race-centered ideology,”² artists, curators, and institutions have been grappling with the exhibition of works that directly address political oppression in the United States or subvert symbols of American pride. Presenting work that challenges the country’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing”³ has become a risk for government-funded institutions. “Museum neutrality”⁴ —an institutional reluctance or refusal to take sides on a politically-charged issue—has been more frequently invoked. “It’s not lost on me that this is a show about the dangers of nationalism,” Nakama told me when we spoke this February, “and the language that was used to justify pausing the show reflected those same fears.”

Informed by financial realities like government funding, stakeholders’ input, institutional missions, and their personal beliefs, museum staff must weigh competing interests, while artists must decide how they will allow their works to be presented—and potentially altered. The issue, then, is defining the difference between compromise and censorship.

Censorship is a unilateral, homogenizing force—an assertion of ideology, as in President Trump’s order. Compromise can be amorphous and requires dialogue, disagreement, and discomfort. Nakama weighed the possibilities of changes to their plan against the option of cancelling the show entirely.⁵ Prior to the installation of the exhibition, John Spiak, the Director of GCAC, offered three options: keep the flag upside down, but delay the opening a month to prepare public programming; propose an alternative and keep the current show schedule; or choose not to work with GCAC. Nakama decided to flip the flag and proceed on schedule, but to reveal the behind-the-scenes decision-making, they proposed a new piece: a drawing of their original plan for the flag captioned, “If the flag had not been upright, this show would have been postponed.” Spiak said had Nakama proceeded with the inverted flag, GCAC would have paused one month to prepare public programming contextualizing the work. “We were going to be installing in December,” Spiak explained, noting the storefront space would then be closed over the holidays. “[T]here would be no context, and no one here to talk about why the flag looked like this.” Spiak’s curatorial approach foregrounds conversation, and Spiak was adamant that GCAC staff be on site to facilitate discourse if the flag were to be upside down. “[The flag] was more contentious than I expected. The whole meaning of the show could have been lost in the controversy,” Spiak said.

Nakama had already considered the implications of exhibiting in Santa Ana, which has historically leaned Republican, politically and culturally. When Dear Uncle Tani, was exhibited in Hawaii, the flag was abstracted and pulled onto the ground, where people could walk on the stripes made from dirt. “But I didn’t want to do that in Santa Ana,” Nakama told me. “I was aware Orange County was a conservative area, and I was more comfortable exhibiting this work in Hawaii, where it wouldn’t be as vulnerable to backlash.” The upside-down flag was perhaps its own form of self-censorship; in effect, it reads as an attempt at compromise. Originally a sailors’ distress signal, this symbol has historically been used by both the right and left.

But Grand Central is just one part of a large ecosystem in downtown Santa Ana, with dozens of entrenched community members. The nonprofit art space is a collaboration between California State University, Fullerton’s College of the Arts and the City of Santa Ana. The main floor of GCAC houses two retail tenants; a collaborative black box theater run by the Cal State Fullerton theater department and two outside theater companies; and two other nonprofit organizations. Some two dozen second-floor apartments house Cal State Fullerton graduate students.⁶ Among the concerned stakeholders was a GCAC staff member who prizes the American flag displayed on their mantle in remembrance of their parent’s military service, Spiak explained. “So maybe [reverence for the flag] is not blind nationalism. Maybe it’s about homage to family.”⁷

Marinos had their own frustrations with the notion that the flag couldn’t be shown upside down without programmatic priming. “The show was intended to highlight the parallels between Japanese internment and ICE kidnapping people and holding them in horrific conditions,” Marinos told me. Inverting the flag would have been an act of solidarity with these people, and a link across time, an indication of history repeating itself. “It’s important for people to see those connections, and to explore things that make them uncomfortable,” Marinos insisted. When the flag became an internal issue, part of Marinos’s reaction was personal: “Am I going to get fired? Am I going to cause irreparable damage to this place I love?” The community members’ concerns and Spiak’s subsequent solution sparked shame, a fear of being wrong, and potentially being excommunicated. Spiak and Nakama both lauded Marinos’s stalwart support of the exhibition, but Marinos themself lamented the position they were in as the primary liason between artist and institution, institution and public. “Leaving Grand Central would have been an act of solidarity [with Dane], but people don’t understand how solidarity can be so lonely,” Marinos said. “You get pats on the back from artists, then you go home and drop your keys by the door, and you don’t have a job anymore.”

⁂

This was the reality for one curator at Pepperdine University’s Weisman Museum of Art last fall, after the institution altered several artworks on view in Hold My Hand in Yours. Curated by museum director Andrea Gyorody, the group show explored the hand as a tool of artmaking and a metaphor for community and care.⁸ Initially, “museum officials” turned off Elana Mann’s audiovisual piece, Call to Arms 2015 – 2025 (2025), a record of an ongoing performance featuring people shouting into custom bullhorns shaped like hands covering the protestors’ mouths. The title card noted the “unruly sounds” of protests, including proimmigration immigrant chants, the most direct of which is “say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here.” The museum targeted another piece in the exhibition within that same week, a work by Art Made Between Opposite Sides (AMBOS) titled Con Nuestros Manos Construimos Deidades (With Our Hands We Build Deities) (2023).⁹ Previously included in The Hammer’s biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, this piece is a communal monument of clay hands and handstitched fabric scraps made by more than 240 migrants; one fabric swatch is embroidered with the phrase “Abolish ICE.” Museum officials flipped this swatch over, and to prevent anyone from discovering it, removed the wall text that encouraged visitors to touch the artwork. No one at Pepperdine discussed modifications to Mann and AMBOS’s work with the artists beforehand.

Dane Nakama, Dear Uncle Tani, (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center. Photo: Dane Nakama.

Hold My Hand in Yours (installation view) (2025-26). Image courtesy of the artists and Weisman Museum of Art. Photo: Paul Salveson.

When other artists withdrew from the exhibition in protest, the show closed six months early; in a “mutual decision” with the university shortly after, Gyorody resigned.¹⁰ “For an academic museum that exhibits the work of living artists, constituencies are like concentric circles,” Gyorody explained via email, when I asked how she defined institutional responsibility within an institution like the Weisman. “At the center are the artists (and others) with whom the museum partners for exhibitions and programs; then students, staff, and faculty who use the museum as a laboratory for dialogue and research; and finally, the general public,” she continued. To first do right by living artists “ethically morally, and financially—is the best way, perhaps the only way, to be truly responsible to any other audience and to your core mission as a museum.”

Responding to the controversy, Pepperdine’s communications director said the Weisman Museum’s “established practice” has been avoiding “political content,” per the requirements of the university’s nonprofit status.¹¹ Under the current federal administration, this stance has its logic. Since 2024, one third of American museums have reported losing grants or contracts, mostly from federal sources like the National Endowment for the Arts.¹² But to conflate the exhibition of an opinionated piece of art with institutional endorsement of that opinion is a dangerous logical fallacy—one that limits art’s role as a catalyst for conversation, connection, and evolution—and sets a restrictive precedent for institutions and their staff. To obfuscate elements of an artist’s work without discussion is certainly an act of censorship.

“What is censorship?” Spiak posed the question multiple times during our conversation. “Is pausing the show [for] a month censorship? For us to have to answer that constantly—that is institutional responsibility. We should have to say, ‘this is why we did this. And we understand if you agree or disagree.’” Nakama characterized Spiak’s response as a “sign of the times,” explaining, “if the show can’t exhibit a symbol of dissent for fear of backlash, then it’s being censored.” Ultimately though, Nakama appreciated the additional subtext the negotiations and final direction for Dear Uncle Tani, introduced. “Conceptually, I thought it worked,” they said. “The drawings now, which are the stars of the flags, are difficult to see. On the insistence of seeing the nation’s pride, we can no longer see these men.”

⁂

Trump’s ongoing censorship campaign attempts to dissolve specificity and difference in the name of the “restoration” of our national symbols, monuments, and museums. The Smithsonian is the particular focus of the “Truth and Sanity” order, including the National Portrait Gallery, where painter Amy Sherald was set to show her exhibition American Sublime —an expansive collection of portraits of Black Americans—this past fall. During the planning process, Sherald was “informed that internal concerns had been raised” about one of her paintings, Trans Forming Liberty (2024), which shows a trans woman holding a bouquet of flowers à la the Statue of Liberty. Concerned about potential backlash, the National Portrait Gallery curatorial staff had suggested including a video of “people reacting to the painting and discussing transgender issues.” ¹³ The museum staff and Sherald couldn’t reach an agreement, and unwilling to include potentially antitrans views in the context of her work, Sherald pulled the exhibition from the Portrait Gallery. ¹⁴ Kim Sajet, the museum’s director, quit shortly after Sherald withdrew.

If the responses to the upsidedown flag at Grand Central and Sherald’s Lady Liberty are any indication, the enforcement of American symbology is directly correlated with the experience of national instability; for the Trump administration, this enforcement is a direct bid for control. The administration stated that “the Statue of Liberty is not an abstract canvas for political expression—it is a revered and solemn symbol of freedom, inspiration, and national unity.”¹⁵ “Unity” here is a dog-whistle for white-washing and scrubbing dissenting or difficult stories from the cultural record— “unity” becomes a monologue, not a dialogue. Sherald’s Smithsonian decision was not necessarily an acquiescence to Trump’s demands, but perhaps a prescient, mutual understanding that there was no real discussion to be had about American ideology here. The inverted flag “is not a call to arms or an implication of violence,” Nakama said. “It’s a symbol of distress to say we’re not okay. For this to be controversial exemplifies the state we’re in.”

Nakama’s choice to show the flag upright and reveal the decision-making process was, on both practical and conceptual levels, an excellent one. “The disagreement reveals more than it does conceal,” Nakama said, pleased with the nuanced conversations the exhibition has ignited. Unearthing fraught details from American history, Dear Uncle Tani, complicated our ideas of patriotism. True love of self, family, or country doesn’t require denial or compartmentalization, and criticism can be a form of devotion. For Spiak, Marinos, and Nakama, belonging to a community means fielding criticism and bearing out disagreements, and responsibility requires discomfort. “Some people see conflict as an abuse,” Nakama said, “but I am not one to shy away. I think this is how you express love.”

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Aleina Grace Edwards is an arts writer and essayist focused on preserving and promoting locally-rooted arts and culture.

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