WASHINGTON — Heather Dune Macadam still remembers one thought that bubbled inside her as she stepped onto the stage decades ago at the Kennedy Center for a dance competition: “Wow, I made it.”
Then, just last month, when she heard about President Donald Trump’s appointment as chairman of the Kennedy Center and the replacement of its board, she thought back to a parallel experience she had during the Reagan administration.
It was May 1981 when the then-21-year-old dancer had her first professional dance gig at the Kennedy Center. That same night, the Reagan administration cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, as she recalled. The day after their competition, without the pay they had expected to receive, the Wayne State dance team put their pennies together to buy enough gas to get back to Detroit.
Macadam said the funding cut wasn’t only a hit to their pocketbooks and felt like a betrayal of hope and the arts. In the years since, Macadam became a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and later a Holocaust biographer and documentary filmmaker of “999: The Forgotten Girls.”
Now Macadam, like many other performing artists and creative people, viewed President Donald Trump’s appointment as chairman of the Kennedy Center and the replacement of its board with trepidation about the consequences for artistic freedom.
“I think his move to the Kennedy Center is just a shot across our bows,” Macadam said. “It’s a threat, and it’s letting us know where he’s headed.”
Macadam said getting artistic funding is already extraordinarily difficult in the United States compared to other countries, and she worried the changes at the Kennedy Center were moves to limit the very people capable of thinking outside the box.
“I fear for my country,” Macadam said. “I fear for my country’s moral and ethical conscience, which I think the arts hold us accountable to. And without that moral compass, where will we go?”
The recent upheaval at the Kennedy Center started with a Feb. 7 Truth Social post from Trump, in which he announced the immediate termination of multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees who “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” To some artists, it marked a startlingly authoritarian approach to the arts that started when he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities hours after his second inauguration.
Several hours after his initial announcement, Trump posted what clearly was an AI-generated image of himself conducting a performance. He had his back to the musicians he was supposedly conducting. Concert lights illuminated his unusually stubby fingers while his hands were awkwardly poised. The caption? “Welcome to the new Kennedy Center!”
One entrance hall of the Kennedy Center displays flags from all 50 states and Washington D.C. (Valerie Chu/MNS)
The Kennedy Center was established under the Eisenhower administration by the National Cultural Center Act in 1958 and later renamed in another law to serve as a “living memorial” to President John F. Kennedy.
A Kennedy Center statement captured by archive on Feb. 8 but no longer available said the center was “aware of the post made recently by POTUS (Trump) on social media” but had received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to their board of trustees.
“There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board,” the statement said.
Neither the Kennedy Center nor White House responded to multiple requests for comment.
In less than a week, multiple Biden appointees were purged from the Kennedy Center. The new board then elected Trump as its chairman. No previous president had ever assumed that role. Ric Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany and Trump’s former acting national intelligence director, was made interim executive director of the Kennedy Center. Deborah F. Rutter, who served as president of the Kennedy Center since 2014, had planned to step down at the end of 2025, but departed abruptly in early February.
“Core to our American experience is also artistic expression,” Rutter wrote in a statement released upon her departure. “Artists showcase the range of life’s emotions – the loftiest heights of joy and the depths of grievous despair. They hold a mirror up to the world – reflecting who we are and echoing our stories. The work of artists doesn’t always make us feel comfortable, but it sheds light on the truth.”
Changes to the Kennedy Center’s programming have already started. On March 6, “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and lead producer Jeffrey Seller told the New York Times that the musical about the birth of American democracy would not be performed next year at the Kennedy Center. It was originally supposed to be part of the center’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In a statement posted on X, Seller said the Kennedy Center’s neutrality has been destroyed and been replaced by a new spirit of partisanship, forcing it to betray its mission to foster the free expression of art in the United States.
“The recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center flies in the face of everything this national cultural center represents,” Seller wrote in the statement. “Given these recent actions, our show simply cannot, in good conscience, participate and be a part of this new culture that is being imposed on the Kennedy Center.”
On Feb. 18, the Kennedy Center canceled a pride concert planned for May 21 that would have featured the Gay Men’s Choir. And on Feb. 14, actress, comedian and television producer Issa Rae canceled her sold-out show, “An Evening With Issa Rae.”
Marshall Coid, a musician who has performed at the Kennedy Center multiple times, said that the Kennedy Center should not be turned into a sanitized place that caters to “undeveloped and narrow-minded tastes.” He raised concerns that the new board would villainize art forms such as drag performance, whose elements and history extend far beyond what most people initially picture drag to be.
“The Kennedy Center, to me, represents the nation,” Coid said. “And that’s everyone’s art. There’s room for it all.”
Coid studied violin at Juilliard and has performed at the Kennedy Center as a countertenor and violinist, including as a soloist in Tom O’Horgan staging of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” for the Center’s 10th Anniversary Celebration. He has also performed as an onstage violin soloist with Jinkx Monsoon while she played Matron “Mama” Morton in CHICAGO on Broadway, and acted in several roles himself that included cross-dressing.
Coid said he was worried the Kennedy Center’s new leadership would interfere with programming, including by banning drag. In Trump’s Truth Social post, he said: “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.”
Coid described drag performance as a theatrical tradition with centuries of history. Drag was prevalent in early medieval church dramas, Shakespeare plays, contemporary opera and various forms of art at the highest level. To Coid, drag is just one type of performing art that is “something totally beyond the comprehension of most of these people that are condemning it.”
Coid described the Trump administration’s move to control the Kennedy Center as something that left him and other performers he knows “heartsick, appalled and horrified.”
“We may not have so consciously been carrying around a sense of what it meant to us, but when it’s taken away, we realize,” Coid said. “I think we took it for granted and never thought that it was vulnerable. And now it has been clearly demonstrated to be vulnerable, and as far as I’m concerned, under attack and being grotesquely diminished by this intrusion, by people that have no business having anything to do with it and should be nowhere near it.”
Singer, songwriter and performer Gwen Levey said stories would go untold. She predicted that social justice, which the Kennedy Center showcased previously, would no longer be promoted, and the variety of music would be reduced. She pointed to the diverse board of people appointed by previous presidents who resigned in the wake of Trump’s takeover, such as “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes, soprano Renée Fleming and singer-songwriter Ben Folds.
“The diversity is basically being sucked out of the Kennedy Center,” Levey said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if, like most things with this administration, it becomes very whitewashed.”
Levey predicted that in the future, government censorship of the arts would increase. After her song that protested abortion bans, “Barefoot & Pregnant,” went viral in 2023, Levey said Meta censored the song and her content by shadowbanning her, a word for describing when a social media company limits who can see a creator’s content, often without the creator’s knowledge, causing their engagement to abruptly drop. Now, Levey thinks that since many social media platforms are “in Trump’s pocket,” those platforms may follow the Kennedy Center in censoring the arts.
Trump’s decision to replace Biden-appointed board members and install himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center was not his first clash with the performing arts center. In August 2017, white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., where a bystander and two law enforcement officers were killed. In response, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” In protest, three of five recipients of the annual Kennedy Center Honors said they would refuse to attend its White House reception. Trump canceled the reception and did not attend the Kennedy Center Honors annual awards ceremony all four years of his first term.
Still, despite its uncertain future, in the weeks after Trump named himself chairman, music continued to fill the Kennedy Center’s halls like normal.
Attendees wait to be admitted to a concert at the Kennedy Center featuring Cody Fry, LANY and Sleeping At Last. (Valerie Chu/MNS)
At a concert featuring Cody Fry, LANY and Sleeping At Last, the artists made jokes, the audience whooped and clapped, and some even sang together during one song.
“Sometimes, I look out into the world and it feels like optimism is like this radical act of bravery,” singer-songwriter Cody Fry said when introducing his last song. “And I want to focus my mind on the things that are good because I truly believe that the good outnumbers the bad.”
Levey, who grew up in Alexandria, Va., performed at the Kennedy Center in a choir and as an actress in 2012 and 2013 as part of the National Capital Area Cappies program, which showcases high school artists in the Washington metro area. She said that some musicians like Trump and his recent actions. In Nashville, where she is currently based, Levey said many singers and fans of the mainstream country music genre are “very much MAGA” and more progressive artists need to speak out to enact change.
Still, Levey said art helps push culture forward, and that’s why she is hopeful more artists will use art to protest and to uplift marginalized communities.
“People are waking up,” Levey said. “The people I’ve been meeting through the Rise Above Justice Movement and through my music have been giving me so much hope. Because it’s people from all walks of life, all different backgrounds, that want to preserve democracy.”
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