This Was a Good Sculpture
Washington, D.C., is full of cords of connection. By removing a Joel Shapiro work, the Kennedy Center severed one.
Last week, an electric-blue sculpture by Joel Shapiro named Blue stood near the Kennedy Center, a sculpture that represented a celebration of possibility. However, the institution that housed it, the Kennedy Center, decided to dismantle the sculpture last Wednesday. There was no specific reason given for the removal, but internal documents obtained by The New York Times indicated that the decision was made shortly after Donald Trump took control of the institution.
Joel Shapiro, one of the most important American sculptors of his generation, was known for coaxing human gesture and emotion from austere geometry and was deeply inspired by his work. He spent several years in India as part of the Peace Corps under President John F. Kennedy. Shapiro’s most notable works, like Blue and Loss and Regeneration, were created in the 1990s and carried an obdurate sense of self.
Blue was a centerpiece of the REACH expansion at the Kennedy Center, which was installed in 2019. The once-unique sculpture now finds a new home at the National Gallery of Art, leaving a blemish in the city's landscape of symbols. The removal of Blue highlights the cords of connection between the Kennedy Center, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and other landmarks along Washington D.C.'s National Mall, and raises questions about who gets memorialized, what myths and whose money might explain why, and who’s missing.
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