Barbra Streisand, the EGOT-winning singer and actor, took aim at President Donald Trump’s remaking of the Washington, D.C., landmark in a statement posted to her website on Thursday, September 17, 2026. The fight over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she said, has been “galling and painful to witness.”

Streisand, 84, a Hollywood and Broadway star and a Kennedy Center honoree, began with praise for the institution’s standing. “The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has stood as one of America’s great cultural venues. Many of the world’s most accomplished actors, musicians, singers and dancers have graced its stages,” she wrote, adding, “Renaming the Cultural Center in JFK’s honor was a fitting choice, because he was a true champion of the arts.”

The complex serves as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963. Congress renamed the National Cultural Center for him in January 1964 and designated it a national memorial; the first audiences arrived in 1971. Streisand’s own tie to the place dates to 2008, when she was included in the 31st annual class of Kennedy Center honorees. That was, she wrote, “an honor [that] represented something larger than a career recognition. It represented a belief in the importance of art to the life of a democracy.”

“You can easily imagine my indignation at seeing this revered institution become the subject of such a bitter struggle over one man’s name and unchecked ego,” she wrote.

What the Courts Have Ordered

The arts complex has been a preoccupation of Trump’s second term. The president, 80, made himself its chairman on returning to office and set out to put his own name on the building. His board voted in December 2025 to rename the venue “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” and the name went up on the facade at that point. A federal judge blocked him in May from keeping it anywhere on the property, inside or outside. Crews put up scaffolding and pulled the “Donald J. Trump” lettering off the front of the building.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled on Tuesday, September 15, that the name could not be restored without approval from Congress. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’ blessing,” Cooper said in the ruling. The same decision also blocked a proposal to rename the campus “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” on top of barring recognition of Trump on the building and grounds absent congressional approval.

Once the lettering came down, a “humiliated Trump ordered a large tarp placed over the facade, where it remains today,” Streisand wrote. The president, she said, is still working to stamp the building through what she called his “Trump-aligned board.”

A Shutdown and an Ultimatum

Later the same day, Trump announced an almost unanimous board vote to close the building immediately on safety grounds and to launch what he described as a process of reconstruction. Not one piece of that work can start, he wrote, until the D.C. Circuit rules on the name the board approved. Should the appellate ruling go against him and survive review at the U.S. Supreme Court, he wrote, the renovation and reconstruction will not happen at all.

A two-year closure is what the Trump-appointed board set, calling it unavoidable because the center is sliding toward bankruptcy and cannot cover its payroll.

Kennedy Center Executive Director Matt Floca told the court that parts of the facility showed “severe structural deterioration.” Among the safety concerns the board cited were water intrusion and a partial ceiling collapse — the institution’s own explanation for shutting its doors.

Trump has said the performing arts center can reopen only once his name is approved. A planned $257 million renovation is what he has threatened to scrap if the lettering does not go back up, and leveling the building altogether is an option he has floated should his demands go unmet. His post also said $17 million he had raised was already deposited in the center’s account to keep it solvent.

The day after the board vote, on Wednesday, September 16, Trump told reporters his administration wanted credit for rescuing the place. “For the Trump administration, for me, to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close, it will end up being ripped down.”

Streisand pounced on the timing of the shutdown. “And now, a thoroughly defeated Trump has announced that the Kennedy Center is being closed for what the completely stacked board describes as a major renovation. Oddly, when Trump’s name was still on the building, there was no discussion of closing it!” she wrote.

Kennedy’s Family Has Pushed Back

Members of Kennedy’s extended family have made the same objection to the president attaching his name to the memorial, among them Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s only grandson. Maria Shriver, 70, another relative, wrote on X in December 2025: “Adding your name to a memorial already named in honor of a great man doesn’t make you a great man.”

In that same post, Shriver questioned what the effort was really about, asking why anyone would put his own name above another man’s on an existing memorial.

For Streisand, the dispute betrays what the building was for — honoring a president she said believed artistic achievement was proof of a free society, and keeping a stage where artists could challenge, inspire and provoke audiences. “He believed that when the creative impulse cannot flourish freely, a society loses its vitality,” she wrote of Kennedy. Her statement ended with a call for Americans to vote in the midterm elections in November.

Meanwhile the litigation grinds on. A federal judge on Thursday, September 17, ordered the board to provide 30 days’ notice before any major physical alteration of the institution, a requirement that reaches the president’s threats to tear the complex down. As of September 21, the Trump administration has challenged that restriction.

For now the building is closed, the president’s name is gone from its facade, and the courts will decide whether it returns.