The captive National Endowment for the Humanities recently announced a call for proposals for statues to be assembled in the Trump administration’s “National Garden of American Heroes,” a project that takes obvious inspiration from the Foro Italico, which includes a stadium ringed with classical statues constructed in Rome under the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Where to begin? I have nothing against the historical figures represented in the president’s edict. Donald Trump’s list of heroes includes some truly wonderful people, as well as some head-scratchers. Most of them do belong in a full accounting of American history. But so do many others not represented in this handpicked list. The logic of the monument is to lift up and validate only certain individual actors in history — and to forget others, as I have argued before. The strength of this country has always been in its diverse grassroots multitudes, however much certain ideologies might channel us toward individualism. Also, these monuments, like Mussolini’s, are tasked with celebrating a particular artistic tradition — classical and European — at the expense of all others.

One person who should be on the list but isn’t is Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who gave us some important words on monuments that still ring true today. In reference to the Chicago Picasso — a work of art designed by an avowed communist — Brooks wrote that “art hurts. Art urges voyages.” Brooks’ dedicatory poem for the 1967 unveiling of the now-beloved statue displayed a certain ambivalence toward it. She much preferred the fire and feeling of Bronzeville’s Wall of Respect, created by Black painters and photographers that same summer with an abundance of community support.

But Brooks’ point about art holds true. It should challenge established values, not fawn on authority.

Not all official art is bad art, but the best art — which doesn’t necessarily mean the highest price tag — shakes us out of preconceived notions about how the world has to be. The best art comes from a wellspring of feeling and practices of cooperation, critique and care — not from edicts.

On April 17, at Northwestern University, where I teach, students and faculty held a day of action in conjunction with the National Day of Action for Higher Education organized by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education. Among other things, students, faculty, staff and families came together to create a dream line, a series of multicolored flags that expressed their hopes and dreams for a better future. They spoke of a future for trans kids to flourish, a future where immigrants’ contributions to our country are valued in their fullness, where we take care of one another, where we recognize the importance of art and science and history and education. A future in which we care for the Earth, in which we all are free.

The result was both beautiful and powerful. Bringing together the dreams of a multitude of participants, resisting the crabbed, hateful vision of the regime currently in power, it emerged from and bolstered our refusal to let the hurt and fear we feel dominate us.

Such moments of restorative reflection and radical imagination might not count as art to be collected in a museum, but they can and should take their place within an art of creative resistance and protest.

Finally, from another perspective, Trump’s “Garden” isn’t a good use of funds. Diverting NEH funding toward the commissioning of top-down, politically prescribed “art” is an affront to the vital work the NEH has historically done. Slashing the NEH budget has also drastically cut the budgets of state humanities councils, which support cultural work all over each state. (Full disclosure: Illinois Humanities has supported my work teaching humanities to South Side young people and organizing cultural programs at the South Side Community Art Center; the NEH supported an institute on Chicago cultural history that I co-led at the Newberry Library.) For 60 years, the endowment has enhanced education at all levels — K-12, higher ed and community-based — by supporting a thoughtful and critical engagement with history, art and culture. It has enriched and diversified the lives of rural and urban communities and everyone in between, helping us make sense of our experiences and our cultural memory.

Draining resources in tandem with the destruction of all this, the Garden of Heroes promises, instead, to be a paragon of forgettability, a boondoggle for sycophancy. Past Republican administrations, though I might have disagreed with their priorities, had officials who cared about supporting arts and humanities programming. The current administration offers only aggressive incompetence and an arrogant, insatiable appetite for the destruction of all humane values. It doesn’t want independent thinkers and creative visions.

But artists and humanities scholars know how much is on the line. We can and will find ever more creative ways to resist.

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Rebecca Zorach is a professor of art history at Northwestern University and the author of the book “Temporary Monuments.”

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