Former Chairman of Kennedy Center Buys Disassembled Joel Shapiro Sculpture

A monumental Joel Shapiro sculpture that was disassembled last week at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. has found a new owner: none other than the embattled center’s former chairman, David Rubenstein.

Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist, was reported as the buyer of Blue on Monday by the New York Times, which cited unnamed sources who said that 24-foot-tall sculpture would eventually go on view in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art. According to those sources, the work cost more than $2 million.

The work, a blue stick figure–like form, had been on view at the Kennedy Center since 2019, when the artist had given it to the center as a gift. Rubenstein was chairman at the time; President Donald Trump fired him 2025 as part of a larger effort to seize control of the Kennedy Center. Shapiro, who has been hailed as a pioneering artist of the era that followed Minimalism, died in 2025.

Josef Palermo, a Kennedy Center curator in charge of visual art programming who was laid off earlier this year, wrote in an Atlantic essay that he had been instructed to begin taking away artworks on view.

The reasons for the removal remain unclear, since the Kennedy Center has not provided one. Shapiro’s daughter told the Times that the artist would’ve been “alarmed” by the removal; one other artist with work on view in the REACH, the expansive outdoor addition where Blue was previously displayed, raised similar concern in an interview with ARTnews.