Ambassador Who Removed Kehinde Wiley Work Described It as a Lesbian Picnic
Trump officials recently removed a painting from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic without explaining why. An interview by Ambassador Leah Campos shed some light.
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Trump officials recently removed a painting from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic without explaining why. An interview by Ambassador Leah Campos shed some light.
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· 4:44 min
Sept. 4, 2026
A proposal last week from the State Department to sell what officials described as an “aesthetically terrifying” painting by the artist Kehinde Wiley that had been on display in a U.S. embassy came without a clear explanation as to what the Trump administration found objectionable.
When officials took down the 2015 work that had been on display in the embassy, in the Dominican Republic, they justified it by pointing to accusations of sexual misconduct against the artist, which he has denied, and comments he made about the racial undertones of another painting.
But a radio interview in April with Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, has shed light on another possible motive behind the removal. In the interview, which went largely unnoticed until now, she criticized the artwork as showing a lesbian picnic.
Wiley has not responded to requests for comment on the ambassador’s statement. Art experts said Wiley drafted the work, “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” based on images by two Dominican artists, using four local art students as reference models in the composition.
“I saw a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians,” Campos said in the interview in Spanish with a radio program in the Dominican Republic.
“It was total evidence of the indoctrination the Biden administration wanted to do by bringing that ideology here to the Dominican people,” Campos added. (The work was commissioned under the Obama administration, not Biden’s.)
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