One of president Donald Trump’s first-day priorities in his second term was an executive order ending federal efforts in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, terming them “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.” Federal museums immediately shuttered their DEI offices, and even now, six months later, the art-world repercussions of the administration’s anti-diversity stance continue to unfold: artist Amy Sherald recently pulled out of a show at the National Portrait Gallery, citing concerns over censorship after learning the museum might exclude a painting depicting the Statue of Liberty as a Black trans woman out of fear it could provoke Trump.
So if you’re concerned that your favorite museum—or your local community more generally—might need some help making sure that diversity, equity, and inclusion are still valued, New York artist Dread Scott has just the T shirt for you.
Mimicking the FBI logo, Scott has printed up black shirts reading “DEI” in yellow, with the words “recruitment officer” under the logo on the breast. He announced the project on Instagram last week with a photo of himself along with artist Kenseth Armstead and curator/writer Yasmin Ramirez, posing in the shirts at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met serves basically as a stand-in for “cultural institution,” though they did also shoot in the newly renovated Rockefeller Wing, showcasing the museum’s African art collections, among others. Scott also shot photos at the Guggenheim Museum, just up Fifth Avenue, currently home to a Rashid Johnson retrospective, and at the Robert Pruitt exhibition currently on view at the gallery Salon 94.
The project’s purpose, said Scott in an email, “is to find a way for lots of people to resist and show their opposition to the fascism and racism that is being unleashed and promoted by the government now. It is a way for people to protest the shackling of cultural and academic institutions in a way that forces the institutions to sanitize history and culture and effectively promote a racist and sexist outlook.”
