The artist Andrea Fraser, who campaigned to remove the US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin from the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, is planning a project to expose US institutions’ links to the country’s conservative elite.
Using publicly available information, Fraser will reveal the 2016 campaign donations made by major patrons of US museums. “There is a seeming inconsistency between supporting a presidential candidate who, in his attitude and, we’ll see, in his policies seems to have a negative attitude towards the arts and [supporting] the very organisations on whose boards these donors are sitting,” says the collector Ethan Wagner, who is funding the project with his wife Thea Westreich Wagner.
“The larger question, about the relationship between museums and these trustees and the political field, has to do with plutocracy,” Fraser said at a recent event at Artists Space. She hopes to publish the book before the end of the year.
