By Yvonne Hayes

On December 29, 2025, the Cookers jazz supergroup canceled their New Year’s Eve show at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Musician Chuck Redd had already announced cancellation of his annual Christmas Eve concert. Alabama folk singer Kristy Lee announced she was backing out of a performance scheduled for January. And the New York company Doug Varone and Dancers cancelled two performances scheduled for April.

These cancellations came on the heels of the installation of U.S. president Donald Trump’s name over that of former president John F. Kennedy on the façade of the building. Originally dubbed the National Cultural Center, in 1964 the venue was renamed by an act of Congress following Kennedy’s assassination.

This latest rebranding by the Trump-installed board — which changed the name to the Trump Kennedy Center — came on the order of the president. Trump appointed himself chairman of the center’s board of directors in February 2025, shortly after his inauguration, and promptly removed 18 members of the board, replacing them with his supporters.

The artists who are refusing to go along with the rightist takeover of this cultural institution are setting an example of much needed resistance to the Trump administration’s course.

“Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice,” the cancellation notice on The Cookers’ website reads. “Some of us have been making this music for many decades, and that history still shapes us.”

Cooker saxophonist Billy Harper was more explicit. “I would never even consider performing in a venue bearing a name … that represents overt racism,” he said. “After all the years I spent working with some of the greatest heroes of the anti-racism fight like Max Roach and Randy Weston and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Stanley Cowell, I know they would be turning in their graves to see me stand on a stage under such circumstances and betray all we fought for, and sacrificed for.”

Doug Varone said his dance troupe faces a $40,000 loss as a result of their decision. He told the New York Times, “It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating.” 

Kristy Lee posted on social media, “When American history starts getting treated like something you can ban, erase, rename, or rebrand for somebody else’s ego, I can’t stand on that stage and sleep right at night.”

 March toward one-man rule, reshaping culture

Referring to Trump’s self-anointment as the new chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last February, an article in World-Outlook noted: “It would be a mistake to dismiss, or minimize, this takeover of a cultural institution. The purpose was to dramatically announce the establishment of one-man rule in all areas of the nation’s life.”

The installation of the new signage is not just an example of the use of government power to feed the ego of the sitting president; it is yet another step in that march toward autocracy. The multiple changes at the Kennedy Center over the last year are a step toward reshaping cultural norms in the United States, which have undergone significant changes in the last half century — what Trump calls “woke culture.” Trump posted on social media that his takeover would bring a “GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture” and ensure there would be no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.”

At a protest outside the cultural center in February 2025, dancer and educator Kelly King told National Public Radio (NPR) that the Kennedy Center’s dance offerings have been historically focused largely on “classical ballet and very white programming or European-based programming.” But in the past decade or so, she said there was a shift to include “many more contemporary works and some under the radar dance offerings that give both artists and audience an opportunity to expand their horizons. And that has been really exciting and encouraging.”

From its inception, the newly minted board of the Kennedy Center indicated that it would “review” programming that it deemed did not reflect the cultural norms espoused by the Trump administration. Events were cancelled, pressure was brought upon artists to alter their work, and employees were fired.

Philippa Pham Hughes, a Kennedy Center artist-in-residence who was producing Saigon by Night, a cabaret-style show, told NPR that a staffer instructed her to remove or modify a sequence that included elements of drag performance. Hughes refused, prompting the Kennedy Center to list Saigon by Night as “canceled by artist.”

“I wanted to showcase Vietnamese American artists on the Kennedy Center stage,” Hughes declared. “So, it feels hurtful that they would say I would want to cancel it. They canceled it.”

‘Imagine inspiration itself as a constitutional right’

In March 2025, the Kennedy Center began dismantling its Social Impact initiative, laying off seven of its 10-person team without warning and scrubbing references to the team’s work from the center’s website. The Social Impact initiative had been focused on providing outreach programs to local communities lacking access to cultural resources and attracting young, new, and diverse audiences.

“How do you access the American promise if you don’t have access to the impulse of creativity?” asked Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the artistic director of Social Impact. “As the nation’s cultural center, the Kennedy Center has an obligation to ask itself that question every day… Our work in Social Impact was to widen our cultural radius and to imagine that inspiration itself was a constitutional right afforded to ALL of this nation’s people.” Joseph himself was laid off in the wake of the decision to end the program.

However, even as the Trump administration and the Kennedy Center’s board have pushed in one direction, they have met with resistance in the other. Artists such as singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens have cancelled scheduled shows. Key staff have resigned, including soprano Renee Fleming who was an artistic advisor to the Center, and Shonda Rhimes who served as its treasurer. Lin-Manuel Miranda, director of Hamilton, called off a revival of the production set for 2026. “This latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” Miranda said. “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit and … we’re just not going to be part of it.”

There has been backlash from the public, as well. A Washington Post ticket sales analysis found that nine months after the Trump takeover of the institution, only 57% of seats were being filled for performances as compared to 93% in the fall of 2024 and 80% the year before. The annual production of “The Nutcracker” sold barely 10,000 seats across seven performances, about a 33% drop off from the approximately 15,000 ticket sales annually for the 2001 through 2024 productions.

Protests at the Kennedy Center by artists, employees, and supporters of artistic freedom have been ongoing since Trump’s takeover was first announced. Sometimes these protests are themselves performance art, picketers dancing — or dancers picketing — across the building’s front portico.

“This building belongs to the American people, and these folks know it,” said Mallory Miller, referring to the 100 protesters gathered outside the Kennedy Center on December 22. She is with Hands Off the Arts, which organized the action.

Kennedy Center staff launch union drive

Miller used to work at the cultural institution, she told NBC News. “I was fired for organizing my union in August, and since then I’ve been organizing the community to take back the Kennedy Center from the Trump administration,” she said.

The campaign for union recognition was inspired in reaction to threats by their new boss. “Overnight, the Kennedy Center staff went from being employed by a normal person to being employed by the President of the United States,” Miller explained.

On May 15, 2025, administrative staff announced publicly their effort to unionize as they filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board. They are trying to organize between 130 and 170 staffers in programming, education, marketing, and development at the Kennedy Center, as well as administrative workers at the Washington National Opera and National Symphony Orchestra. About 60 percent of these workers had signed union authorization cards by the date of the filing, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The website of the Kennedy Center United Arts Workers (KCUAW) proclaims, “On February 12, 2025, the Kennedy Center’s board was stripped of its bipartisan structure. Our reputation as arts professionals was questioned and we were threatened with censorship. Instantly, … trust was broken. We no longer believe our institution trusts us and we no longer trust our institution.”

“We demand transparent and consistent terms for hiring and firing, a return to ethical norms, freedom from partisan interference in programming, free speech protections, and the right to negotiate the terms of our employment,” a spokesperson for KCUAW said in a statement. The group is working with the United Auto Workers national union.

The pairing of the fight to defend free speech and artistic expression with the rights of workers at the Kennedy Center can be a powerful combination. The artists, staff, and members of the community coming together and attempting to find common ground with others in united-front action are setting another example of resistance to the Trump administration’s march toward one-man rule. An example worth emulating.

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