On Tuesday morning (1 July) the Republicans in the US Senate approved a modified version of President Donald Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” that is expected to cut social safety net programmes that millions of Americans rely on, add trillions of dollars to the national debt and fund the commissioning of statues depicting “American heroes”.
The bill is now headed back to the House of Representatives for final confirmation. If House Republicans can muster the votes to pass the bill, it will then go to Trump’s desk to be signed into law. He had given Republican lawmakers a deadline of 4 July—the US’s national holiday—to approve the bill.
Buried on page 820 of the 940-page document is a one-sentence item earmarking $40m from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) funding for fiscal year 2025 “to remain available through fiscal year 2028” for one of Trump’s pet projects, the National Garden of American Heroes. Artnews first reported on the provision in Trump’s spending bill. (The NEH’s funding, which is governed by federal appropriations determined by Congress, was $207m for fiscal year 2024.)
A spokesperson for the NEH had not responded to The Art Newspaper’s inquiries as of press time.
The National Garden of American Heroes, a project Trump first floated in the final year of his first term, has been a priority since the start of his second term. He hopes to have the garden built by this time next year—in time for the semiquincentennial of the founding of the US—at a yet-to-be-determined location and filled with 250 statues.
Even as he has sought to eliminate the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Trump has also sought to redirect those agencies’ resources toward the creation of his patriotic sculpture park. Reports in early April suggested that the NEA and the NEH would each be required to contribute $17m to the project from their most recent federal appropriations. Later that month the NEH issued an open call for artists’ proposals for the project (the deadline for applications is today, 1 July), with a budget of up to $200,000 for each statue.
Trump’s original 2021 executive order calling for the park’s creation included a list of 244 honourees to be commemorated. Among them are predictable historic figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr alongside a scattershot selection of dead celebrities including the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, chef Julia Child, singer Whitney Houston and television host Alex Trebek. It also included politically divisive figures like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Antonin Scalia and Barry Goldwater, alongside those of Hannah Arendt, Woody Guthrie and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The list also included six visual artists: Ansel Adams, John James Audubon, Charles Willson Peale, Norman Rockwell, Gilbert Stuart and John Singer Sargent.
The location of the sculpture park and the landscape architects who will design it remain unknown. In March Larry Rhoden, the governor of South Dakota, sent Trump a letter suggesting his state’s Black Hills would be an ideal location for the sculpture park, in view of Mount Rushmore. (Separately, supporters of the president have suggested that his likeness should be added to the quarto of giant carved heads at Mount Rushmore, though the National Park Service recently told The New York Times that “there are no viable locations left for additional carvings”.)
