Institutional Erasure

Author's note: This essay reflects my personal views, informed by three decades of work in the nonprofit arts sector. It is written in my individual capacity, not on behalf of any institution or public body.

I need to say something before I implode.

I woke up with a feeling I recognize but rarely name: watching something be taken apart while everyone agrees to look elsewhere. Silence is easier, and “waiting for more information” is always defensible. But by the time the information is complete, the thing being destroyed will already be gone.

Anger is not comfortable. It is not professional. But anger is also information. It tells us something is wrong. The question is whether to let it drive us toward speech or silence.

I am choosing speech.

I’m currently writing a book about my father’s repatriation to Korea from Manchuria after World War II. Hundreds of thousands of stories were never recorded. His was one of them. Working on that has made me understand something: erasure does not always arrive as violence. It arrives as omission and replacement, until the absence becomes normal.

And last night, while the Grammys celebrated artists, a different announcement landed. President Trump said the Kennedy Center will cease entertainment operations for about two years starting July 4, framing this as a “complete rebuilding.”

It is not renovation. It is the final stage of erasure.

Culture is where memory lives, which is why cultural erasure is how capture becomes permanent.

It would be easy to turn our heads from this news. It arrived while the country was watching something else, something joyful. But that timing is not incidental. While America honored its artists, one man needed to make himself the arts story. Not through patronage, not through listening, but through possession.

Erasure is not destruction. Destruction leaves rubble, evidence, something to mourn and rebuild. Erasure is quieter. It removes an institution’s identity so completely that what replaces it can claim the same space, the same name, even some of the same language, while being something else entirely.

The building will reopen. But the Kennedy Center, the one that served as a living memorial and a nonpartisan cultural commons for more than fifty years, is being erased. When the doors open again, something else will stand in its place.

The pattern is visible

The Kennedy Center is not an isolated case. The East Wing of the White House was torn down to make way for a new ballroom.

This is replacement, sold as improvement. Civic symbols remade into monuments of dominion.

First, the board

Every institution has an immune system. For a nonprofit, that immune system is the board. The board holds the mission in trust. When the board is replaced with loyalists, the institution loses its ability to resist what comes next.

At the Kennedy Center, the board was swept and restocked with allies. David Rubenstein, who had given more than $111 million and led fundraising for its first major expansion, was removed as chair. The new board then voted to install their patron as chair. Everything that followed became possible because this happened first.

If you lead an arts organization, or serve on a board, understand: this is the entry point. Board capture is how erasure begins.

Then, the leadership

The president of the Kennedy Center, Deborah Rutter, was ousted. In her place, the board installed Richard Grenell, a political operative with no background in the arts. His appointment was announced with the words: “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA. ONLY THE BEST. RIC, WELCOME TO SHOW BUSINESS!”

This is an appointment designed for execution, not stewardship. Grenell’s job is not to run a cultural institution as a cultural institution. His job is to clear the ground for what comes next.

Then, the name

An institution’s name is not a label. It is an identity.

The Kennedy Center was established by Congress as a living memorial to a slain president. But the name also carried a national story: Kennedy as the grandson of Irish immigrants, a family that arrived with little and rose to the presidency, a vision of America where newcomers and their children could shape the nation’s identity.

When that name is subordinated and branded with a new identity, it is not just one president being diminished. It is a claim about America itself. The immigrant story is being written over.

Then, the programming

At the Kennedy Center, WorldPride programming was canceled, relocated, or forced elsewhere. Programming that reflected the full diversity of American experience, that centered communities of color, that insisted culture belongs to everyone, has been narrowed.

The building still stands in a majority-Black city. But it no longer speaks to or for that city. The message is simple: this space is no longer for you.

Then, the people

The exodus has been remarkable: Hamilton, Renée Fleming, Philip Glass, Rhiannon Giddens, and others. The Washington National Opera has also ended its long-standing association with the Center and announced it will relocate.

These departures are not logistical. They are moral.

When the people leave, the institution loses the relationships that made it what it was. New people may come. But they will be building something else.

Then, the closure

The closure is being framed as renovation. But the timing tells a different story. The closure follows board capture, leadership purge, branding conflict, programming shifts, and a wave of cancellations and withdrawals. Reporting has also described significant unsold inventory, including analysis showing that a large share of tickets remained unsold during a key period.

Cultural erasure is often the final step that makes capture permanent. After governance is seized and relationships are broken, you close the doors long enough for memory to fade. Then replacement can present itself as continuity.

Two years of silence. When the doors reopen, the new institution will claim continuity with the old, but the thread will have been cut. The closure stops the bleeding by stopping the heartbeat.

The collateral damage

This is not abstract. A two-year shutdown is a shockwave through an entire ecosystem.

Education programs go dark. Commissions are delayed or canceled. Touring calendars implode. Union and backstage labor is displaced. Early-career artists lose the prestige platform that changes trajectories. Local vendors, nearby restaurants, and small contractors lose predictable seasonal income.

For two years, the national stage becomes a construction site. The work of culture is replaced with dust and silence.

Erasure does not only alter what is presented. It alters what is possible.

The ancient pattern

None of this is new. Erasure is the tool of empire. Colonizers renamed continents. Autocrats airbrushed enemies from photographs. Dictators reset calendars to Year Zero. Religious zealots built their temples on the ruins of what came before.

Erasure aims to replace and normalize, until the new reality hardens into permanence.

The threshold to autocracy

This is not a cultural matter. It is a political one.

Before you can rule without constraint, you must eliminate the memory that things were ever otherwise. You must ensure that resistance becomes unimaginable, because no one remembers that alternatives ever existed.

When a government can capture a congressionally created institution, purge its leadership, brand it, narrow its welcome, drive out artists, and shutter its doors, all without consequence, it demonstrates that the guardrails do not hold. It demonstrates that erasure works.

And if it works here, it will be attempted elsewhere.

The gilded cage

Destruction can be rebuilt. What is torn down can be raised again. But this is not destruction. This is replacement.

The renovation will be lavish. The reopening will be grand. The building will gleam. And it will stand for decades, telling a story about what America is and who it belongs to.

Whose erasure is intolerable

Congress created the Kennedy Center. Congress named it. Congress funded it. If the name is to be formally changed, Congress will have to own that decision, or fight the public legal consequences of letting it happen anyway.

And yet Congress has watched. The board was captured. The president was purged. The name was changed in practice. The programming was gutted. The artists fled. And now the building will close for two years, long enough for memory to fade, long enough for the erasure to become permanent.

This raises a question that is painful to ask.

The erasure of immigrant stories has not moved Congress to act. The erasure of communities of color from the nation’s cultural center has not moved Congress to act. The erasure of Pride programming, the erasure of a decade of leadership, the erasure of fifty years of artistic relationships, none of it has been enough.

Perhaps the erasure of a white president’s legacy will be.

John F. Kennedy’s memorial is being erased. The living memorial that Congress created to honor him is being killed.

If that is intolerable, then act. If it is not, then we will know exactly what kind of erasure this country is willing to accept.

The enabling condition

Members of Congress may tell themselves they are staying out of it. They may insist they are neutral, or prudent, or waiting for more information.

But silence is not empty. Silence is a condition. It is what allows replacement to harden into permanence.

History will record who acted and who watched. The names of those who enabled this will be remembered alongside the names of those who executed it.

We must hold them accountable. Not eventually. Now. While there is still something left to protect.

What cannot be erased

Erasure is never total.

The artists who walked away carry something with them. The audiences who refuse to return remember what the institution was. The communities who were welcomed before remember that they were once seen.

And the act of erasure itself becomes part of the record. Future generations will know that this happened. They will know who did it and who allowed it. They will know who enabled it and who resisted.

Memory is not nothing. Resistance is not nothing. They are not enough, but they are not nothing.

A living memorial

The Kennedy Center was designated a living memorial because Congress understood that some legacies are best honored through ongoing practice, not static preservation.

To kill a living memorial, you do not tear it down. You stop it from living. You silence it, empty it, and refill it with something else.

That is what is happening now.

This is institutional erasure. It is happening in plain sight. And it is a warning to every cultural organization watching, and to everyone who believes that the stories we tell about ourselves are worth protecting.

Protect your boards. Protect your names. Protect your missions.

Because once erasure begins, it moves faster than you think. And what replaces what we lose may stand for a very long time.