The removal of the painting Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, by the artist Kehinde Wiley, from the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo has drawn international attention, according to a column by Aníbal de Castro published in the Opinion section of Diario Libre. De Castro, who spent two decades as a Dominican ambassador, including a posting to Washington, argues the decision was made without understanding what the artwork actually depicted.
De Castro writes that hasty decisions often see only the surface, and that a single ideological label can be enough to bring down a painting just as a trendy word can be used to condemn a book. He argues that power, when it feels the need to prove it is in charge, rarely pauses to understand what it is judging, while art resists simple classification.
What the painting showed
According to the column, Wiley's work measures more than twelve feet wide and about nine feet tall and depicts four young Dominicans. Two stand at the center while two others sit at the lower edges, in a composition that recalls the theatrical solemnity of historical portraits once used to depict nobles and military leaders. De Castro says Wiley borrowed that visual language but replaced the traditional subjects, powdered wigs and uniforms, with contemporary young Black Dominicans.
The background is a turquoise field covered in red, white, green and violet flowers, an exuberance that De Castro says deliberately breaks with the sobriety expected of a diplomatic setting, turning ornament into an instrument of representation.
How the work was made
De Castro explains that Wiley received the commission in 2013 through the State Department's Art in Embassies program for the new US diplomatic compound in Santo Domingo. Over roughly two years, Wiley researched local references and worked with students from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and the Altos de Chavón School of Design, who became the models for the four young Dominicans in the piece. The painting was completed and installed in 2015, commissioned specifically for that embassy rather than selected from a catalog.
De Castro argues this history matters because cultural diplomacy relies on symbols reaching where official statements cannot. A state that places the faces of young people from the host country inside its embassy is signaling recognition, he writes, and removing those faces years later sends a message too, even if unintended.
A dialogue with Dominican art
The painting's title, Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, points to Gilberto Hernández Ortega's Siamesas, a Dominican work whose figuration, close to expressionism and surrealism, produces distorted bodies and unsettling psychological relationships. De Castro writes that Wiley kept the intertwining of the central figures, hands and arms locked together as a single composition, but transformed the mood entirely, replacing darkness and unease with light, elegance and public affirmation.
De Castro traces the lineage further back to Celeste Woss y Gil, Hernández Ortega's teacher and a central figure in Dominican artistic modernity, described in the column as a portraitist, educator, feminist and pioneer of academic nude painting who gave the female body volume, weight and autonomy. He suggests the frontal, imposing figure on the left of Wiley's painting echoes that tradition, while stressing he has no documentary proof that Wiley intended a direct reference to Woss y Gil, only that an artistic genealogy runs from her to Hernández Ortega to Wiley.
Reducing the work to labels
De Castro writes that this layered history makes it especially poor that the painting was reduced to labels such as "globalist" or "woke." He argues that political buzzwords let people stop thinking, since once the label is applied the matter is considered closed, regardless of the fact that the painting engaged with Dominican art history, depicted Dominican students and grew out of research conducted specifically for the embassy that received it.
Where the error lay
De Castro acknowledges that an embassy has the right to decide what it displays and that this administrative authority is not in question. But he argues that the right to remove a work does not remove the obligation to understand its meaning, nor does it shield the decision from its consequences.
Diplomacy, he writes, consists largely of anticipating how a gesture will be read by the other side. De Castro says he is convinced there was no intention to belittle Dominican culture, but that in public life, as in private life, effects do not vanish simply because intentions were good.
He writes that covering the painting and publicly celebrating its removal turned a bureaucratic decision into an act loaded with meaning, arguing that the cloth used to hide the work ended up revealing more than the painting itself, and that the move vetoed what had been a conversation between two cultures.
What De Castro says the episode confirms
De Castro writes that Wiley's painting had asked, through its imagery, who is allowed to occupy the space of prestige and what face the United States wanted to show a Caribbean society, and that the original answer was generous: four young Dominicans, Black and linked to artistic training, raised to a scale historically reserved for elites.
The later answer, he writes, was to cover them and set them aside, and in trying to defuse the painting's supposed political content, the embassy ended up confirming the very political question it raised.
De Castro concludes that art can irritate and unsettle without needing everyone to approve of it, but that a diplomatic institution should be especially equipped to live with complex meanings, since its task is to build bridges between different societies rather than reduce every difference to a domestic dispute. Taking down the painting, he writes, did not erase Hernández Ortega, Celeste Woss y Gil or the Dominican artistic tradition the work engaged with, nor did it diminish the dignity of its models. It simply left a wall empty, and walls, he writes, remember what they are missing.
