On September 2, workers began dismantling a twenty-four-foot cobalt aluminum figure that has stood outside the Kennedy Center's Reach annex since 2019. No public notice preceded the move. No reason was given.
The sculpture, titled Blue, is the work of Joel Shapiro, the American sculptor known for reducing the human body to a handful of tumbling geometric limbs, always caught mid gesture, never quite still. Blue was commissioned to greet visitors at the opening of the Reach, the Kennedy Center's newest wing, and for seven years it did exactly that: a cartwheeling giant painted the colour of a clear sky, impossible to walk past without noticing.
Shapiro died earlier this year. He will not see where his sculpture goes next. That decision now rests with the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation, which as of this writing has said nothing publicly about Blue's fate, according to the Washington Post.
The removal follows Donald Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center board in February 2025, when he installed himself as chairman and replaced much of its leadership. Since then, as Artforum first reported, the administration has pushed to attach the president's name to the building's facade and to shut the main hall for a two-year renovation, a plan widely read as damage control after ticket sales and donations collapsed in the wake of the takeover.
The Kennedy Center's own statement on Blue's departure was warm and strangely bloodless at once: gratitude for the years the sculpture spent 'animating our campus', pride at having been its 'stewards'. It said nothing about where the work is going, or why now.
Hands Off the Arts, an advocacy group that has campaigned against the reshaping of the Kennedy Center, put it more bluntly online: 'Say your final goodbyes to Blue.' They called September 2, 2026 the day a piece of public art was torn down 'at the behest of a petulant crybaby', and promised it would not be the last.
Whatever comes next for Shapiro's blue giant, its removal marks something quieter and more permanent: an artist who spent decades studying the body in motion is no longer here to say where his own work should stand. That choice now belongs to a foundation, a board he never chose, and whoever decides what a national cultural institution is for.
