A former curator at the Kennedy Center is pulling back the curtain on the chaos that President Donald Trump’s takeover has caused inside the historic institution.
Josef Palermo, the center’s first curator of visual arts, sat down with MS NOW’s Jackie Alemany to discuss why he believes what happened behind closed doors was “far worse than the public knows.”
Palermo, who was abruptly fired in late March, described what Alemany referred to as “a pattern of pay-for-play,” where “everything that the center did was centered around having a close association” and “access” to Trump.
The former curator recounted one example when VIP tickets to a showing of “Les Misérables” at which the president would be in attendance were listed at “astronomical prices,” some as high as $2 million. “I remember thinking that was strange,” he told Alemany.
According to Palermo, Trump’s obsession with the Kennedy Center took a toll on the institution. After the president’s name was added to the outside of the center’s building, many artists were “no longer interested in collaborating” on exhibitions, fearing the institution had been politicized by the administration.
Palermo told Alemany that while the president’s influence loomed over every decision, he places blame for the mismanagement “squarely at the feet of Ric Grenell,” the former president of the center who was appointed by Trump.
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Palermo was “mortified” at a commemorative exhibition, he said, when Grenell used a “very solemn, tragic event” — the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel — as a fundraising opportunity. The Trump ally “wagged a finger” at guests during a reception at the center’s Israeli Lounge, telling attendees that if they did not want the room to be sold away to a sponsor, they would need to donate funds and “pony up the money” to renovate it themselves, Palermo recalled.
Earlier this year, Trump announced that the center would shutter its building for two years, starting on July 4, for renovations.
After that announcement, Palermo said he and his colleagues were “summoned” to Grenell’s office. “He told me that he was putting me in charge of getting rid of the art, getting it off campus,” he recalled. “[Grenell] wanted to get it out of the building for the renovations, with the intention of replacing it with new art.”
“That was such a shock to me, because I had been hired to bring art into the building, not pull it out,” Palermo said. “And I was just terrified of the implications of that directive.”
You can watch Alemany’s interview with Palermo in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”