Democracy’s Art Wars and Border Boycotts
Today's Stories
- Irreconcilable differences: Canadian cultural tourism to the US experiences a steep decline — The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
- Monumental 37ft-long Indian scroll goes on public view for the first time at Yale Center for British Art — The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
- At 250, America Must Reframe Its Founding Icons — Artnet News
- How the New Deal Treated Art as Essential to Democracy — ARTnews.com
Full Transcript
It is Monday, April sixth, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.
Political tension is now showing up in travel numbers. The Art Newspaper reports Canadian tourism to the US has dropped by more than 30%, amid anger over President Donald Trump’s calls to annex Canada as the 51st state, on-again off-again higher tariffs on Canadian lumber, steel, and automotive parts, and his claim that the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement is now “irrelevant.” New York City Tourism + Conventions counted about nine hundred eighty three thousand Canadian visitors in 2024, falling to eight hundred thousand in 2025. Washington State saw a 26% decline in southbound border crossings in October 2025 versus October 2024, and Seattle Art Museum director and chief executive Scott Stulen said Canadians visiting the city dropped 50%.
Staying in Connecticut, The Art Newspaper highlights a 37ft-long early 19th-century work newly on view at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven: the Lucknow scroll, shown publicly for the first time after two years of conservation. It appears in the exhibition *Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850* (until 21 June). Because the scroll is large and fragile, only half is exhibited at a time and it will be unrolled over the course of the show, also reducing light exposure. Made between 1821 and 1826, it’s 33 joined sheets of laid paper in watercolour, gouache, and gold, presenting Lucknow from across the Gomti River.
Now to an image nearly everyone thinks they already know. In an Artnet News opinion piece titled “At 250, America Must Reframe Its Founding Icons,” Charles Willson Peale’s *George Washington at the Battle of Princeton* is the focus. Commissioned by Princeton University’s trustees in 1783, it has been in the university’s collection longer than any other work and had been on continuous view for 236 years after it was completed. With the Princeton University Art Museum’s reopening after a five-year construction hiatus, the painting has returned to view as the US nears its 250th birthday. The piece describes how its ornate gilded frame once held a portrait of King George II, and how a gilt crown at the top was cut off—hacksaw marks still visible.
And finally, a look back at a decade when the US government treated art as a public resource. “How the New Deal Treated Art as Essential to Democracy” traces federal arts programs from 1933 to 1943, beginning with the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. It recounts how painter George Biddle—an old Harvard classmate—wrote Roosevelt about Mexico hiring artists like Diego Rivera at “plumbers’ wages” to make public murals, helping spur US patronage. The Public Works of Art Project launched in December 1933, and its director Edward Bruce emphasized that artists “eat, drink, has a family, and pays rent.” When PWAP funding expired, the Section of Painting and Sculpture ran from 1934 to 1943, hiring 850 artists to create one thousand four hundred works for federal buildings.
That’s it for today’s episode—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another download from the art world’s front lines, and until then: Chinga la migra