Fired KenCen VP Describes Toxicity Under Trump

Until March 25, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a curator and performance artist, was vice president and artistic director of social impact at The Kennedy Center, a position he had held for seven years. Then, in a matter of less than a day, he and five colleagues in the ten-person department were laid off.

The abrupt end to his tenure was predictable. His program provided two-year residencies with organizations that worked with queer and trans youth, formerly incarcerated individuals, the disabled community, and a national partnership that worked with the National Arab Orchestra, the First Nations community, and WorldPride, among others. In short, people who Trump and his sycophants clearly despise.

“The primary strategy,” Joseph explains, “was to invest in artists and arts organizations who themselves were working with primarily vulnerable populations or historically marginalized populations.”

Joseph, who had left the West Coast to take the Kennedy Center position, found himself back in the East Bay late last week for a production with the Oakland Symphony. His interview with the San Francisco Chronicle provides glimpses of life in the Kennedy Center since the Trump coup.

The general atmosphere he describes is “one of vulnerability and impending violence within a landscape that is supposed to be a sanctuary for free thought and expression…. A sense of moral injury within the building.”

His own dismissal was head-spinningly abrupt. Following Monday morning instructions to begin dismantling social impact programs, Joseph and his staff began planning how to shut down an operation that involved scores of arts organizations. “We thought we would have maybe a week to at the very least present a transition plan,” he recalls. “Then… the leadership decided that it was gonna happen that day. So they just started calling us in on Tuesday, and we were laid off.”

The only remnant of his operation—the Millenium Stage—was a free, four-times-a-week program that, in Joseph’s words, was “the least sociologically embedded program in terms of its curatorial parameters…. I think that these folks… didn't see the Millennium Stage as antithetical in any way to what their vision of the Kennedy Center is.”

Joseph believes that the four staff members remaining in his former program are still trying “to bring art to the people as best as we can…. But that is happening within a broader kind of institutional culture that has demonstrated a lack of experience with the condition that artists need to be their full selves. There’s a tension there between arts professionals and most of the people that are now at the Kennedy Center, almost none of whom have worked in the arts prior.”

Going forward, Joseph argues, “It will be… harder and harder for organizations to sustain themselves in this environment if the economic impacts of a kind of monocultural perspective continue to announce themselves in this way.” As Trump narrows Americans’ cultural vision, it will be ever harder to fund and produce work that attracts audiences to institutions like the Kennedy Center. “What’s hard in this moment,” he concludes, “is a feeling that our cultural radius is getting more narrow.”

MSN.com

Pictured: Marc Bamuthi Joseph in happier times