Grammy-winning banjo player Béla Fleck has canceled his upcoming performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the latest in a wave of cancellations since President Donald Trump's name was added to the building last month.
Fleck had been scheduled to play three concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra there next month.
"I have withdrawn from my upcoming performance with the NSO at The Kennedy Center. Performing there has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music," Fleck said Tuesday in a statement on X.
"I look forward to playing with the NSO another time in the future when we can together share and celebrate art," he added.
Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell blasted Fleck in a response on X, saying, "You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties."
"The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome — Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics. We want performers who aren’t political — who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for," Grenell wrote.
Trump fired members of the art institution's board and installed himself as chair last February in a move he announced on Truth Social. “At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” the post said.
The center’s board voted to rename the venue "The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" on Dec. 19, and the president's name was added to the building's sign the next day.
The move was highly controversial and is being challenged in court because the federal law establishing the arts institution named it a “living memorial” to Kennedy, who'd championed the center and was assassinated two months before the law was signed.
Members of the Kennedy family have said the naming is illegitimate because it would take an act of Congress to change the name.
“The Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law. It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says,” former Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, a grandnephew of the late president, said in a statement last month.
A number of artists have canceled performances in the wake of the renaming.
Jazz musician Chuck Redd canceled a Christmas Eve concert he had hosted since 2006, and the jazz band The Cookers canceled its New Year’s Eve appearance. Folk singer Kristy Lee and the dance group Doug Varone and Dancers also canceled performances that had been scheduled for this year.
Last week, Stephen Schwartz, composer of the smash musical “Wicked,” backed out of hosting a May gala at the center, saying in a statement the venue was “founded to be an apolitical home for free artistic expression for artists of all nationalities and ideologies,” but “appearing there has now become an ideological statement.”
Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, said in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday that it had not been “impacted at all" by the cancellations.
She said the president has "raised over $131 million in private and corporate donations and had Congress give $257 million for critical infrastructure needs, all to SAVE this institution. There was over $250 million of deferred maintenance repairs immediately needed. Those individuals attacking now sat idly by while America’s cultural center slowly crumbled. Now the bipartisan Trump Kennedy Center is here for generations to come.”
