The Woodmere, a museum on the grounds of a nineteenth century mansion in Philadelphia, is suing the administration of US President Donald Trump after he signed an government order revoking a $750,000 federal grant the establishment had been awarded. On 27 August, the Woodmere filed a lawsuit looking for the rest of an Institute of Museum and Library Providers (IMLS) grant that Congress had agreed to fulfil previous to the manager order. The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported information of the lawsuit.
The museum had already acquired roughly $195,000 of the allotted funds. However when Trump signed an government order titled “Persevering with the Discount of the Federal Forms” on 14 March, certainly one of its results was to revoke funding for “parts of the federal forms that the president has decided are pointless”. This included IMLS and its grant programme Save America’s Treasures, which helps historic preservation tasks and the safeguarding of collections deemed to be of nationwide significance.
Woodmere doesn’t solely present American artists, however its assortment and historic house, together with a brand new training facility opening in November, match the {qualifications} for the Save America’s Treasures grant funding. Charles Knox Smith, the collector who gifted the majority of the Woodmere’s everlasting assortment, was born in 1845 and was deeply affected by the American Civil Warfare. A lot of his assortment, together with Sarah Fisher Ames’s bust of Abraham Lincoln, serves attests to his wartime experiences. The artist Edith Emerson was the museum’s director from 1940 to 1978 and centered on exhibiting girls artists; Emerson’s accomplice was Violet Oakley, the primary American girl to obtain a public mural fee.
In its lawsuit, the Woodmere argues that the establishment is reliant on the IMLS grant cash to fund tasks they’re already underway and had been deliberate with the understanding that the federal government would honour the complete $750,000 grant. The Save America’s Treasures funds have been to go in the direction of conservation efforts, catalogue updates and digitisation of assortment gadgets. These efforts would in flip assist the museum put together for its 2026 exhibition of artists from Philadelphia, Arc of Promise, timed to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence.
The lawsuit additionally notes that the IMLS grant stipulated that the Woodmere must elevate an identical sum from donors, which it did, however that requirement is now irrelevant in mild of the revoked funding.The Woodmere has already signed contracts with exterior events to have the mandatory conservation or digitisation work executed, counting on cash it is going to not obtain to fulfil these contracts. Although its choice to go to court docket is exclusive, the Woodmere is certainly one of a number of Philadelphia establishments whose funding has been lower, together with the Penn Museum, the South Asian American Digital Archive and the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
Some establishments that misplaced funding have seen it restored within the months since Trump’s government order. The Woodmere was at first optimistic that it could be certainly one of them. “When the Save America’s Treasures grant awarded to Woodmere in 2024 was terminated in 2025, we made a number of requests for evaluation by the IMLS and sought help from our elected officers,” William R. Valerio, the director and chief government of Woodmere, tells The Artwork Newspaper in an announcement, however these requests have been unsuccessful.
“After we exhausted all non-litigious avenues for reinstatement, we filed our grievance,” Valerio says. “We stay dedicated to this motion till the grant is absolutely restored, in order that we will proceed our crucial work preserving, archiving, and conserving our museum assortment.”
