The Kennedy Center in Washington DC will be closed for a two-year renovation beginning in July, President Donald Trump has announced.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump said the centre would close on 4 July this year “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country”.
The move follows several artists cancelling performances at the storied institution after it was recently renamed as the Trump Kennedy Center.
Shortly after taking office, the president fired several of the board members at the centre and replaced them with allies, who then voted to make Trump chairman of the board.
The new board renamed the institution the Donald J Trump and the John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in December. New signage appeared on the building’s exterior the following day.
Several musical acts, including Steven Schwartz, the composer of the musical Wicked, and a group called Doug Varone and the Dancers, cancelled performances at the centre in the following weeks because of the Trump name change.
On Thursday, the venue hosted a premiere screening of a documentary about first lady Melania Trump.
Trump has said there would be a “scheduled grand reopening” for the facility, and that the renovations had already been financed.
“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest performing arts facility of its kind, anywhere in the world,” he wrote on Truth Social.
“In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many events using the facility, will be much longer.”
Trump had lambasted the physical state of the centre and worked with Congress to allocate more than $250m (£182m) to rebuild it, one of many renovation projects he has taken on in his second term.
Some US lawmakers and legal scholars have argued that because the centre was named in a 1964 law, Congress must have a say on any name change.
Last December Democratic US Representative Joyce Beatty filed a lawsuit seeking to remove Trump’s name for that reason.
Some members of President John F Kennedy’s family too have denounced the move. The centre was named in Kennedy’s memory shortly after his assassination.
Joe Kennedy III, a former US House of Representatives member and grandnephew of the late president, said the venue was “a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law”.
By BBC News
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