The philanthropist Agnes Gund (left) and the writer, artist and film-maker Tanya Selvaratnam (right) are supporters of Kamala Harris's campaign Gund: Daniel Leal-Olivas / PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo. Selvaratnam: Unique Nicole / Getty Images
The US presidential election swept into high gear this summer, following president Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing vice president Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate to run against the Republican nominee, the former president Donald Trump. The move has reinvigorated the Democratic Party’s push to secure the presidency, with Harris securing $200m in donations in the first week of her campaign. Support has been particularly forthcoming from the arts and culture world, with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Shepard Fairey designing billboards and other works promoting Harris’s election, and collectors and philanthropists donating to her campaign.
Biden’s decision came after weeks of pressure from close advisers and Democratic donors, on the heels of a poor debate performance against Trump in June. The final straw, according to The New York Times and other outlets, was the threat from major Democratic donors to withhold $90m in funding until Biden stepped down. Among them, according to NBC News, was the California doctor and philanthropist Karla Jurvetson, who is a patron of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and the vice chair of Emily’s List, a political action committee (PAC) that backs pro-choice women Democratic candidates across the country. Over the past two years, Jurvetson had given more than $225,000 to Biden’s re-election, which now goes towards Harris’s campaign. She has pledged her full support to Harris, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, although any contributions Jurvetson might have made since Harris took over the candidacy in July were not available on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website. (Presidential campaign committees were due to file their July fundraising numbers as we went to press; updates to this article will be made online.)
Agnes Gund, the president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and a high-profile philanthropist who famously sold a Roy Lichtenstein work to fund criminal justice reform, says Harris “represents opportunity, and she represents optimism.” Gund thinks other culturally-minded donors will also back the vice president. “Artists and musicians have already rallied around to support her election, it seems to have more spark than anything we’ve heard of for a long time,” she says.
Gund expects Harris to continue Biden’s unwavering support of government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which saw its funding increase to $211m this year. As a senator in 2017, when then-President Trump attempted to defund the NEA, Harris tweeted that “the arts give people an outlet to view the world differently.” Gund says, “She’s going to safeguard all the artistic and cultural heritage of the United States and its peoples, domestically and internationally.” But perhaps more importantly, Harris takes a progressive stance on social issues such as abortion rights and bodily autonomy. “That’s very important to me, particularly,” Gund says.
Los Angeles-based collectors Lyndon and Janine Sherman Barrois in front of a painting by the Miami-based artist NFN Kalyan Photo by Terrell Tilford
The Los Angeles-based collectors Lyndon and Janine Sherman Barrois have followed Harris’s career since she was attorney general in California, and supported her senatorial campaign and her first run for the presidential nomination in 2019. “We were really taken by her vision of America and a better future for everyone,” says Janine Barrois, who is a television writer and producer on series like ER and Claws. She is part of Black Women in Entertainment for Kamala, a group of more than 475 Hollywood actors, directors, writers and producers supporting the vice president’s campaign. Lyndon Barrois is an artist and animator who has worked on films including the Matrix franchise and Happy Feet. Harris is “more than qualified to do the job—she is vice president”, he says, “so she definitely deserved and earned the nomination”.
The couple say they are hoping that Harris will personally take part in a fundraiser in Los Angeles—her husband, Doug Emhoff, already attended one in August, which raised more than $3m for the Harris Victory Fund—so they can donate further to her campaign.
“As people who work in the arts, I feel that a Harris-Walz administration will bring out the best in us,” Janine Barrois says, referring to Harris’s similarly progressive running mate, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota. “We are being tested at this moment in time to stand up for all of the fights that have happened before, and not to roll back anything, to actually roll forward and bring more hope and more joy and more belief in this country.”
Evidence of how widely Harris’s message has resonated can be seen at her rallies, Janine Barrois points out. “It’s people from all over… everyone looks different, but we all have this hope and dream of what this country is and can be,” she says, adding: “I’m—for the first time in a long time—very hopeful and getting behind all the artists and writers, all of the young people who are now mobilised, because this is lightning in a bottle.”
Evan Seymour, the publicist who started Black Women in Entertainment for Kamala after an open Zoom meeting in July that reached an estimated 90,000 viewers and raised $1.5m, called the groundswell of support for Harris “inspiring”.
Evan Seymour, the founder of Black Women in Entertainment for Kamala, with a giclée print by artist Leroy Campbell titled We Have Your Back Photo by Arnold Turner
Fred Eychaner, the chairman of Newsweb Corporation who co-founded the Tadao Ando-designed Wrightwood 659 art space in Chicago and received a National Medal of Arts from president Biden in 2021, told Crain’s Chicago Business newspaper that he is “absolutely” ready to support Harris. A staunch LGBTQ+ advocate, Eychaner is a leading donor to the Democratic party, and has already given $7m to the Forward Future PAC, which now backs Harris.
Susie Tompkins Buell, a co-founder of the clothing companies Esprit and The North Face, and a photography collector who has donated works to the Getty Center, is reportedly planning to host a fundraising event for the vice president, whom she has known since Harris was a district attorney in San Francisco. “Kamala’s youth and positive energy is like a fresh gust of a cool breeze on a sweltering, humid day. So refreshing and hopeful,” Tompkins Buell told The Los Angeles Times.
The Texas- and California-based philanthropist and preservationist Suzanne Deal Booth cites Harris’s personality as part of her appeal. ”She’s a straightforward thinker and speaker,” Deal Booth says, adding that Harris has shown her commitment to the arts in the past, notably when, as a board member of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she created a mentoring programme that matched teens with adult volunteers to encourage an interest in the arts.
“I’ve seen people in politics who pretend they care about the arts, and they really don’t, they don’t understand it—but I think she does,” Deal Booth says. “If and when” Harris is elected president, Deal Booth predicts, “we’re going to see a whole new, bright future for the arts in America and elsewhere”.
Deal Booth is, however, holding back on donating further to Harris’s campaign as she has been disappointed with the vice president’s statements about the ongoing war in Gaza, at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on 22 August and since then. “Given that no Palestinian American representation was allowed at the DNC, it was the enormous yet silenced issue no one would address,” Deal Booth says.
The US has sent billions in military support and arms to Israel to aid its fight against Hamas, which launched a deadly terrorist attack in the region on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 200 people hostage. In the ensuing bombardment, blockade and invasion of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians, have suffered through a devastating humanitarian crisis, and ceasefire talks have largely stalled.
“Let me be very clear: I am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not going to change,” Harris told CNN in her first major interview since becoming the Democrats' nominee at the end of August, echoing her comments at the DNC. “And how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.” She also reiterated the need to get the remaining Israeli hostages released and secure a ceasefire deal, adding: “I remain committed since I’ve been on October 8 to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution where Israel is secure and, in equal measure, the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.” When asked whether her policy on sending arms to Israel would differ from Biden’s, Harris said it would not.
“I had a really hard time with Biden, with his policy in the Middle East and his unconditional support of Israel in this horrible [war] in Gaza, it turns my stomach,” Deal Booth says, adding that the Harris-Walz campaign seemed to be towing the party line on this issue, to the detriment of the Palestinian people. “They don’t want to lose pro-Israel supporters to the Trump campaign by stating otherwise, even though they say that they are tirelessly working on a solution," Deal Booth says. “I genuinely hope this is true and will reveal itself in time.”
Similar criticism has been seen online. When the artist Carrie Mae Weems posted on Instagram about a new billboard she is creating in support of Harris, with the text “Leading with Compassion, Not Complaint”, a number of commenters voiced dissatisfaction with the vice president, seeing her as a continuation of the Biden administration. Harris has briefly responded to pro-Palestinian protesters who have interrupted her rallies in Michigan and Arizona, redirecting attention to the urgency of winning the election. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done,” Harris said at an Arizona rally. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month included an open forum for discussing the situation in Gaza.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and US Vice President Kamala Harris at a campaign event at Temple University in Philadelphia on 6 August © Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire. Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Live News
For the most part, however, artists appear to overwhelmingly support Harris’s campaign. Weems says the potential election of America’s first woman president is “historic” and adds that she has been working on related text and images from the moment Harris took up the candidacy. Weems created her billboard—which is due to be installed in October in key election battleground states—as part of the Artists for Democracy initiative. The project will also include a collage-like poster featuring the word “Freedom” Victoria Cassinova as well as works by Beverly McIver, Jeffrey Gibson, Titus Kaphar, Deborah Kass, Christine Sun Kim, Hank Willis Thomas and others. The street artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the Hope poster for the former president Barack Obama, has created one for Harris titled Forward that he is distributing freely, and has also made a portfolio of prints for Artists for Democracy.
Diana Weymar, the artist behind the Tiny Pricks project, which ironically memorialised some of former president Trump’s most outlandish statements through embroidery, has turned her needle in a more uplifting direction for this election. “For me, part of connecting to Harris is reconnecting to a positive feeling. And I think artists have been ready for that,” Weymar says. “Because in the past, it has felt like working toward positive change has been a process of focusing on the negative.” Compared to the world under Trump, which Weymar describes as “scary and mean and hard and feels like this system of power that is not empowering”, Harris offers a vision of society that “makes people feel less defensive and more secure”, which is a key to feeding creativity.
“People are fired up like I have not seen them fired up in my lifetime,” says the writer, artist and film-maker Tanya Selvaratnam, who was part of the Arts for Biden-Harris coalition in 2020. “It was the kick in the pants that America didn’t know it needed, because there’s been so much voter fatigue and depression and angst,” she says.
Selvaratnam also looks at Harris as a personal role model, “because I'm a South Asian Tamil, and she is half Tamil, so I feel a lot of Tamil pride”. Selvaratnam is now leading voter mobilisation efforts with fellow artists, including Laurie Anderson, and has drafted a creative brief for artists, with documentarian Hannah Rosenzweig. Selvaratnam is also involved in the artist-driven Joy to the Polls initiative, which aims to frame voting as a celebratory event.
Amid all the jubilation, Selvaratnam acknowledges there is still “a lot of work to do, because there have been so many attacks against vulnerable communities that have been made more vulnerable in the past few years. My work is about advocating for people to be treated more humanely, and that is my hope for this campaign, that it encourages people to treat each other more humanely, regardless of political persuasion.”
Reproductive rights and bodily autonomy are two issues that Selvaratnam says are “especially on the line” with this election, and she was encouraged to see Harris choose Walz as her running mate. “He’s one of the first governors to ensure access to gender-affirming healthcare, including mental health and social services,” she says.
The selection of Walz, a well-liked figure in the Midwest who worked as a high school teacher and American football coach before turning to politics, added to the fundraising momentum, with the Harris campaign saying it had received $36m in the 24 hours after he was added to the ticket in August. This has helped the Democratic Party make up for lost fundraising ground, after the Trump campaign received some hefty donations from wealthy conservatives this summer, including $75m from Tim Mellon, the billionaire son of the collector and National Gallery of Art benefactor Paul Mellon.
Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana, on 9 August Reuters / Jim Urquhart
Other Trump-supporting art collectors, who have donated six-figure sums to his campaign in 2024, include the hedge fund manager John Paulson, the former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross and his wife Hilary, the Blackstone private equity firm chairman and the chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, the Elliott Management founder Paul Singer, the former US ambassador to Austria and the former Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco trustee Trevor Traina, and the casino and hotel developer Stephen Wynn.
However, many Republican donors have so far avoided backing Trump. Ken Griffin, the billionaire chief executive of Citadel and a former trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, has donated more than $45m to various Republican campaigns and funds this year, but nothing directly to Trump, according to the most recent FEC filings. Griffin was reportedly withholding his support until Trump selected a running mate, and the choice of J.D. Vance, a junior US senator from Ohio who has been openly hostile to Wall Street influence, may have done little to garner the hedge funder’s support, especially considering Griffin supported a super PAC that backed Vance’s opponent in the 2022 Ohio Senate race.
Before Trump secured the Republican nomination this summer, some collectors supported alternative candidates. The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami patron Norman Braman donated to Florida senator Rick Scott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s runs for the presidency. And Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, seemed to be a favourite among collectors before she dropped out of the race in March, gaining support from the MoMA patrons Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis (Marie-Josée, MoMA’s board chair, also donated to President Biden’s re-election), Ronnie Heyman, Ronald Lauder, Barry Sternlicht, and Alice Walton, among others. Walton, the Walmart heiress and founder of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, also backed the Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson’s campaign, and gave $5m last year to the Americans for Prosperity Action fund, a libertarian super PAC started by David and Charles Koch that has spent $10m to oppose Trump in this election cycle.
Since taking over the Democratic candidacy, Harris has pulled ahead in the fundraising race, with her campaign reporting $310m in donations in July and $377m in cash on hand, while Trump’s team said it had raised $138m, and has $327m in cash on hand. This will probably come as welcome news to supporters like the Barroises, who consider themselves all in for Harris, and are already preparing to attend her inauguration. “We bought airline tickets and reserved a hotel,” Janine Barrois says. “They’ve got this.”
