It has been widely reported that the Kennedy Center is at the center of a power struggle between the Trump administration and preservationists, as the president wants to rename it in his own honor and insists that the decaying building must close for renovations. He has threatened that it will be razed if he does not get his way.
Now, CNN reports that donors who have given artwork to the institution are trying to reclaim their gifts, fearing for their safety amid a renovation and in the wake of layoffs. They are not convinced that the leadership, largely appointed by Trump, values the artworks as part of the institution’s holdings.
According to an internal document reviewed by CNN, officials have been working since at least late last year on a plan that proposed the “disposal” of artworks, whether by “return to country of origin, transfer or exchange with another institution, public sale, or destruction.”
“I want to get that sculpture out of there,” one person who donated a piece told CNN.
Donors, as well as artists and their families, have been trying for months to get answers, the report says, to questions about how the artworks will be safeguarded, where they are, and whether they will be returned. Their fears were not assuaged when Trump ordered the disassembly and removal of a monumental Joel Shapiro sculpture from the institution’s grounds. The work had been gifted to the center but was sold to its former chairman, David Rubenstein. The reason for its removal has not been explained.
“We remain in regular contact with the foundations and entities who have donated art to the center,” a Kennedy Center spokesperson told CNN. But an unidentified person described as close to the Kennedy Center said the institution’s response has been “a little bit disjointed” and that donors are “not given detail in any way.”
The Kennedy Center has long been home to hundreds of unique works of art and antiquities, including sculptures and tapestries, donated or loaned by individual benefactors and other countries, CNN notes. Officials say the proposal contemplating the “destruction” of art “was never envisioned as a sweeping purge.” They told CNN that the “cornerstone of the collection—historic international gifts given to the center for its opening—remains intact.”
The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request from ARTnews to clarify how much of the center’s collection falls under that “cornerstone” designation, or what circumstances would lead to the destruction of artworks.
Officials told CNN that all artwork will be “fully safeguarded” during the renovation, with some pieces relocated if necessary to ensure their safety. But sources also told CNN that objects belonging to the archives have been “inadvertently” taken home by staffers.
Following Kennedy’s assassination, world leaders rushed to donate artworks: France gave tapestries by Henri Matisse, and Tunisia gave a reproduction of a third-century mosaic for the rooftop terrace, CNN notes.
Josef Palermo, formerly the curator in charge of visual art programming, was laid off earlier this year. He wrote in an Atlantic essay that he had been instructed to begin removing artworks on view.
CNN also notes that the Kennedy Center recently convened, with no announcement, its first visual arts committee, “to curate and expand public installations of performing and visual arts.”