Comment Opportunists Are To Blame For The Kennedy Center's Downfall The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

When does working inside a damaged institution become complicity, and when is it simply opportunism? In a new essay dated June 1, 2026, Philippa Pham Hughes argues that the answer matters, especially in the case of Washington, DC's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts under Donald Trump's second term.

Hughes says she has been accused of collaboration for organizing conversations with Trump voters since 2016 as part of a socially engaged art project. She rejects the charge, arguing that the word is being used too loosely. In her view, a collaborator is a true believer - someone who knows exactly what they are serving and does so willingly. The people who accepted positions at the Kennedy Center after Trump's return to power, she suggests, were something else: opportunists who helped legitimize the administration's control.

The essay points to a rapid consolidation of power. Less than a month after Trump's inauguration, Deborah Rutter, who had led the Kennedy Center for more than a decade, was fired. The board was purged and replaced with loyalists. Drag performances were canceled, and the social impact programme was eliminated. Richard Grenell served as the center's acting director and president from February 2025 to March 2026.

For Hughes, the argument that principled insiders could act as guardrails may have held some weight during Trump's first term. By the second, she writes, the administration had already studied where those protections were and dismantled them first. That left little room for anyone to claim surprise.

Her broader concern is not only institutional but historical. Hughes argues that the people who built the Kennedy Center, sustained it, and left when leaving carried a cost are being erased from the story now being told about its capture. Those are the people, she writes, who deserve recognition for the institution's greatness. The essay ends on a note of moral clarity rather than nostalgia: the real injustice is not only what happened to the Kennedy Center, but who is being left out of the record of what happened.

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