President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he would close the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which has been facing an existential crisis for the past year, for up to two years as part of a renovation project.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the closure, which is still “totally subject to Board approval,” would happen on July 4, the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the US. He said that the planned closure was meant to turn “a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center,” into “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind,” which could only be accomplished by a total closure.
The Kennedy Center has been beleaguered since Trump was elected chair of its board last February. The following month, Vice President JD Vance was booed during a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra. In December, Trump took steps to add his name to the Kennedy Center’s façade and tried to officially rename it to include his name, though the legality of that has been questioned.
In January, the Washington National Opera said it would find a new home. Similarly, numerous artists have canceled performances at the Kennedy Center in the past year. The latest of these is composer Philip Glass, who had been commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony honoring Abraham Lincoln. The symphony was originally supposed to debut at the Kennedy Center in 2022, but Glass missed that deadline; it was most recently slated to premiere this June. It is unclear how the National Symphony Orchestra, which hosts around 150 performances each year, would be impacted by the closure.
The renovation is the latest in Trump’s goals to remake some of the most significant sites in Washington, D.C. At the White House, he removed the grass from the famed Rose Garden and replaced it with a patio. He is also in the process of constructing a 90,000-square-foot ballroom in the White House’s East Wing, construction for which began in October. The plans are currently the subject of a lawsuit.
The Kennedy Center most recently underwent a $250 million renovation in 2019, which was overseen by Deborah Rutter, the center’s president who departed her role shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Trump has said that that renovation included “rooms that nobody is going to use.”
In his post, Trump said that the financing to the new renovation had already been completed. Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s current president, said on X that Congress had appropriated $257 million for the renovations, though it is unclear what the final budget for the renovation project would be.
The Washington Post reported that Grenell had emailed Kennedy Center staff on Sunday confirming the closure, adding that “[w]e will have more information about staffing and operational changes in the coming days.”
