Dear President Ric Grenell and Kennedy Center Board Members,

WE ARE THE AUDIENCE, PATRONS, DONORS, and SUPPORTERS OF THE KENNEDY CENTER!

We join together to raise our collective voices in denouncing the direction of programming and the long-term sustainability of declining ticket revenues and donor contributions under your leadership.  

Your leadership has resulted in significant losses in ticket revenue from performances that previously drew 80-90% capacity. Now those numbers are closer to 40-50% capacity.  This results in millions of dollars in losses from ticket sales. All on your watch.  Since 2018, ticket sales revenue has been at record highs.  It speaks volumes that since your ascendancy to the presidency of the board, the Center has seen its worst ticket sales revenue since the pandemic. What are you doing over there?

Considering ticket sales are traditionally about 1/3 of the Kennedy Center’s operating budget, we are deeply concerned about the storm you have unleashed on the Center’s fiscal future.

You inherited a ship that was sailing smoothly, only to hit an iceberg once you took over.  The ship has been sinking since you and the new board took control. Any business or government leader in your position would be removed and held accountable for their abject failure.  

As board members, you have a fiscal responsibility to ensure the Center’s long-term fiscal viability. The numbers under Grenell’s leadership should prompt you to dig deeper to understand the reasons for failure, as well as short- and long-term solutions to reverse the trend.  
Over its 54-year history, the Kennedy Center has fostered artistic excellence, built artistic communities, expanded audiences to reach diverse populations, and conducted community outreach in local schools. The Kennedy Center strived to expand its walls to ensure that all Americans could see themselves on its stages.

All of this is at risk under the Kennedy Center’s partisan takeover. Throughout its 54-year history, the Kennedy Center's leadership, operations, and artistic programming have been non-partisan, focusing on the arts for all Americans. The Kennedy Center was established to foster and stage America’s arts with diverse voices, critiques of modern society, and arts that push us to question our human existence and the role the arts play in our democracy.  

You have failed to meet the moment and ensure that the Kennedy Center is a success now and into the future.
As longtime audience members, donors, and community members, we demand accountability.   If the board is not going to do its job in terms of fiscal responsibility, we will. We demand answers about what you are doing to reverse the plummeting ticket sales and the destruction of the Kennedy Center brand.

The Washington National Opera is currently producing The Marriage of Figaro at the Kennedy Center. In Mozart’s time, the arts relied heavily on the patronage of the emperor and the aristocracy to fund artistic endeavors. Today, arts in America and at the Kennedy Center rely on community engagement, ticket revenue, and robust fundraising efforts.  That is your job! Based on the numbers, you are failing in all these respects.  

Part of your failure is the accurate perception that your appointment and the complete gutting of the prior non-partisan board have signaled that the Kennedy Center has abdicated its role as a non-partisan public-private partnership. This brand-killing move has led many individuals to boycott performances and withhold donations at the Kennedy Center because it is now seen as a political vassal of the president in the White House. In the past, the Center has enjoyed massive support from all Americans, regardless of their partisan affiliation.  Your brand-killing moves are detrimental to the future sustainability and fiscal viability of the Center.  You must reverse course.

In addition to killing the Kennedy Center brand, you have fired many individuals who provided artistic expertise in dance programming, marketing, audience development, fundraising, and social impact.   You may like to engage in bombastic rhetoric that calls out diversity, equity, and inclusion as 'woke' or the social impact team as not central to revenue building, but these programs and staffing are what bring excellence in the arts to Kennedy Center stages. Artistic excellence and community engagement bring in audiences. Audiences bring in ticket revenue. You may look in bewilderment at why ticket sales fell off after your takeover. The answer to your perplexed stare is that you gutted the Center of everything and everyone who ensured its success over the years.

You cannot run an arts center when you fire the artists and arts administrators who know how to develop and plan performances that audiences want to see.  You cannot lead an organization whose mission is to open the center’s walls and to expand access to its stages when you gut social impact and DEI efforts. All these actions you have taken have caused the perilous drop in ticket and donor revenues and have sullied the Kennedy Center brand.

Finally, your recent efforts to fire administrative staff who worked to organize the Kennedy Center's administrative staff into a union are shameful. The Kennedy Center has hosted more than five unions on its campus for years. These unions represent the people- musicians, stagehands, and technicians- who make the Kennedy Center what it is.  Without them, the Center would cease to operate. Without the Kennedy Center’s unions, it would merely be a mid-century modern box on the Potomac.

Unlike Mozart and the emperor’s patronage, the Kennedy Center’s stages are not yours, Trump’s, or any partisans’ stages to wield as a tool in your culture wars.  The halls and stages at the Kennedy Center belong to all Americans.  WE ARE THE AUDIENCE, PATRONS, DONORS, and SUPPORTERS OF THE KENNEDY CENTER!

Our Demands:

• Within three months, articulate a detailed plan for how you will reverse revenue shortfalls while maintaining the integrity of The National -
• Symphony, Washington National Opera, Dance, Theater, and Jazz programming.
• Within three months, develop a plan to change public perception that the Kennedy Center is a partisan vassal.
• Develop a plan with the President to appoint new board of directors members who more accurately represent the bipartisan nature of our nation.  Return governance at the Kennedy Center to the prior non-partisan public-private partnership.
• Provide transparency in ticket sales revenue and comparisons to prior years.
• Reinstate employees of the Dance programming staff, social impact team, and marketing teams who were fired in retaliation for their lawful union organizing.
• Recognize the newly organized Kennedy Center’s Arts Workers Union.
• Commit to healing the divide you have ripped open at the Kennedy Center and cease engaging in rhetoric that destroys the Kennedy Center brand and repels people from our community and artists from feeling welcome at the Kennedy Center.