Artist Cheryl D. Edwards had eagerly anticipated the March 2025 opening of “Before the Americas,” an exhibition she'd curated of nearly four dozen works by Afro-Latino, Caribbean and Black artists scheduled at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C.
Then, in February, the Washington, D.C.-based painter and printmaker was in Costa Rica preparing for a solo show when she got a call from museum staff: The show she’d spent three-plus years putting together was being cancelled.
She was crestfallen. "I asked why," she said. “They said the funding had been taken away. I said, can we not raise the money some other way? And they said no.”
The exhibit, she said, had become a casualty of the Trump administration’s crackdown on federal support for diversity initiatives.
Edwards’ dismay didn’t last long. Don Russell, the university curator at George Mason University who'd previously shown some of Edwards’ work, quickly reached out and offered to host the show at the school’s Gillespie Gallery despite the venue’s typical focus on contemporary art; “Before the Americas” opened there on Aug. 25.
