Four young Dominican art students look out from a monumental painting made for the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo. Their bodies overlap and turn toward one another. A dense field of leaves and flowers moves behind them and across the foreground. The painting’s scale and setting ask its audience to see these students as part of the public face of a diplomatic building.
Kehinde Wiley made Young Artists After Siamesas 1960 for that place. The 2015 painting was commissioned through the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Wiley studied Dominican painting and worked with art students in Santo Domingo while developing it. See the painting and its embassy setting in The Art Newspaper.
The title carries an art-historical question of its own. Published accounts connect it to a painting called Siamesas that had been attributed to Dominican artist Gilberto Hernández Ortega. In September, Hernández Ortega’s son wrote to Diario Libre disputing that attribution and describing the referenced image as a stylistic forgery. We cannot resolve that dispute from the available record. It is a reminder that even the institutional account of a commission can contain a contested premise. Read the clarification in Diario Libre.
The Wiley painting is no longer on the embassy wall.
In August 2026, United States Ambassador Leah Campos publicized its removal in a social media video. She said the embassy was turning away from “woke” and globalist ideology in favor of American patriotism. Erin Scavino, then leading the State Department’s Art in Embassies program, had also criticized the work publicly and referred to Wiley’s connection to President Barack Obama. Read The Washington Post’s account of the removal and proposed sale.
A State Department response reported later that month gave a broader rationale. It cited sexual-misconduct allegations that Wiley has denied, along with a comment about a separate series based on the story of Judith and Holofernes. The official did not identify a specific objection to Young Artists After Siamesas 1960. Read The Art Newspaper’s report and the State Department response it reproduces.
Those explanations should not be collapsed into one another. One presented the decision as an ideological change in what the embassy should project. Another judged the artist through allegations and work elsewhere. Neither public explanation identified violent imagery in the painting that was removed. The work at issue depicts the four students.
The State Department also said it was consulting lawyers about whether the government-owned painting could be sold. On September 24, Wiley wrote to President Donald Trump asking for the opportunity to buy it if the administration no longer wished to display it. He described the painting as important to him because of the people and ideas it represents and said he was prepared to follow the required legal process. Read the report on Wiley’s request.
Diario Libre brought the request back to readers in the Dominican Republic on October 1. That local account matters. A story easily framed in the United States as a clash among a famous artist, a president, and officials is also about Dominican subjects and the purpose assigned to their presence inside the embassy. Read the Dominican report.
An embassy controls what hangs on its walls. This painting is also public property created through a cultural-diplomacy program for a particular building and audience. Its removal therefore changes more than décor. It changes the encounter the commission was meant to create.
The proposed sale presents a different question. If a government decides that a commissioned painting no longer expresses what it wants an embassy to say, does the work become surplus, remain part of the public record, or return to the artist who made it? Wiley has offered one answer. The State Department has not yet supplied its own.
For now, the outcome remains unresolved. The painting has been removed. Its possible sale is under legal review according to the available reporting. Wiley has asked to bring it back through purchase. The students in the painting, and the Dominican audience for whom their presence carried meaning, remain at the center of a public work that the public can no longer encounter in its intended place.
A question to carry into the work: When a public commission is rejected by the government that owns it, who should decide where its purpose can continue?
Reader note: This account is based on the government publication, official statements and social posts as reproduced by the linked reporting, the artist’s reported letter, and Dominican coverage. We have not obtained the commission agreement, the State Department’s legal review, or a response to the purchase request. The original editorial graphic is an AI-assisted interpretation, not a depiction of Wiley’s painting or the embassy. The artwork itself remains link-only.
Explore the work
- The Art Newspaper: the painting in its embassy setting
The report includes an installation image and documents the commission, removal, and State Department response. The linked image remains at its source.
- Diario Libre: Wiley’s request from Santo Domingo
Dominican reporting on the repurchase request and the work’s local context.
Links open material at its source. Access and viewing availability may change.
Article history
Dates below describe changes to our account, which may report earlier events.
Replaced an inaccessible storage-object link to the embassy publication with The Art Newspaper’s illustrated report and updated the surrounding wording. No factual conclusion changed.
First published an account of the commission’s removal, the competing official rationales, Wiley’s repurchase request, and the disputed attribution behind the title.
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