Artists see a President Donald Trump’s plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes as “trolling” and not “very serious,” according to a Politico report.
“It seems completely unworkable,” Daniel Kunitz, editor of Sculpture magazine, told Politico.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is seeking to commission 250 statues of famous Americans from a predetermined list, to be displayed at a location yet to be determined. The statue garden coincides with an executive order from March 2025 in which the Trump administration denounced what it saw as historical revisionism and aimed to construct a story of the nation that portrayed it as inherently great.
The plan has drawn criticism from historians who view it as a top-down approach to U.S. history that celebrates a limited set of "movers and shakers" while ignoring the broader social, economic and cultural forces that have shaped the country.
And experts claim the administration might even struggle to find artists to work on it.
“Low opinions of Trump in the artistic community could dissuade some applicants,” Politico's Michael Schaffer wrote. “And while the commissions are $200,000 per statue, it seems less lavish when you consider the costs of casting and base material, which the administration says must be marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass.”
Another problem: many U.S.-based sculptors don’t make traditional figurative work and need more than just a year to develop detailed work.
“A year is highly unlikely,” Kunitz said.
Dylan Farnum, who ran one of the best-regarded fine-art foundries in America, added, “You’d be flooding the capacity of artists in this country who do that kind of stuff, and the capacity of foundries.”
“It’s easy to AI-render a Dick Van Dyke sculpture,” Farnum said. “So much easier than actually getting it done.”
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From questions like where the garden would be (a location has not been officially announced) to how much collaboration the artist would have to do with the Trump administration, there is a lot in the air, making it difficult for artists to say yes.
Schaffer also noted that “it's Hard to imagine Trump-appointed leadership waiving its right to review whatever some artist cooks up.”
The NEH also didn’t respond to Politico’s request for comment.
Politico noted, “political fury has distracted attention from the basic logistics of the plan — and from the question of whether the end product would, as a simple matter of aesthetics, be worthy of a great country.”
Posing the latter question to Kunitz, the answer seems to be Nope. “It doesn’t seem to be very serious,” Kunitz said. “It’s sort of trolling.”
“It’s a classic artistic divide for a populist age,” Schaffer wrote. “Should a project aim for mass appeal, a spot for Instagram selfies and zany poses? Or should it, as conservative cultural critics have long insisted, seek to be a lasting masterwork of civilization?”