Artist Andrea Fraser Will Map Trump Inauguration Donors & Art World Ties

Illustration by Benjamin Sutton for Hyperallergic.com

Andrea Fraser is a performance artist, known primarily for her focus on institutional critiques. Based in New York and Los Angeles, Fraser is currently a new genres professor in the Art Department faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.  A native of Billings, Montana, Fraser grew up in Berkeley, Calif. She is a graduate of New York University, the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program and the School of Visual Arts. Initially, Fraser wrote art criticism before incorporating it as analysis and commentary in her artistic practice. 

In one of her more infamous examples of performance art in 2003, Fraser recorded a hotel-room sexual encounter at New York's Royalton Hotel, with a private collector, who paid an estimated $20,000 to participate. Fraser denies the amount, also explaining that the collector paid to participate, not for sex, but to make an artwork. The contractual agreement, arranged by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, outlining the performance posed as a medium questioning male power in the art world connecting it to female prostitution and art making.

We all know that Donald Trump has little interest in any art not inspired by his own image. His donors, however, are major players in the art world. In her new project, Fraser is mapping the connections between major US museums and the political elite, and their institutional ties to the White House. The Art Newspaper writes that Fraser is documenting all political donations made in 2016 by museum patrons and trustees, many of whom contributed to the Trump campaign and inauguration. 

Donald Trump's inauguration was a small and comparatively understated affair, but one that rose a staggering amount of money -- $106.7 million, twice the amount raised by Obama for his historic, much larger affair, writes Hyperallergic. According to a 510-page report of donations to Trump’s inaugural committee released in April by the Federal Elections Committee, billionaire art collector and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) board member Steven A. Cohen as well as Henry Kravis — whose wife, Marie-Josée Kravis, is the president of MoMA — both gave $1 million. Unlike campaign contributions, which are capped, there is no limit to how much can be given to a candidate’s inaugural committee.

Fraser was part of a group of artists who petitioned the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to remove then treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin from its board. The artists emailed the institution, protesting Mnuchin’s ties to predatory foreclosures and the Trump campaign, and threatened to go to the press if Mnuchin did not resign. Mnuchin did step down In December, after his appointment had been confirmed, citing “a new workload as the reason”, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It's unclear if Fraser is also documenting Hillary Clinton's art-world contributors, but it's  unlikely, given the particular ire directed against Trump by artists. Hillary Clinton would not have tried to dismantle any federal support of the arts and public experiences of the arts and access to public broadcasting.

Artist Andrea Fraser will explore connections between major US museums and America's political elite.

“For me, the larger question about the relationship between museums, trustees and the political field has to do with plutocracy—the fact that the United States is now a plutocracy and that museums, in their origins, are a product of plutocracy,” Fraser said in a talk at the Artists Space gallery in New York last month. The artist will present the results of her research in a publication that is planned to resemble a phone book. 

“There’s a seeming inconsistency between supporting a presidential candidate who in his attitude and policies seems to have a very negative attitude towards the arts” and sitting on the boards of major museums, said the collector Ethan Wagner, who will fund the project with his wife, the art adviser Thea Westreich Wagner. “We are like a lot of other people in the country today, looking for a way to express our outrage about the nature and the policies of our current president,” Westreich Wagner said.

Ethan Wagner & Thea Westreich Wagner