WASHINGTON, DC — The National Park Service (NPS) deinstalled an iconic 24-foot-tall sculpture by late artist Joel Shapiro from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts today, September 2.
Before dawn, crews began wrapping, disassembling, and moving “Blue” (2019), one of 10 inaugural works of visual art on display when the Kennedy Center’s 4.6-acre REACH campus opened in September 2019.
The Kennedy Center did not provide a reason or advance notice of the work’s deinstallation, but the NPS issued a street-closure notice earlier this week indicating that the removal would be complete by Wednesday afternoon. The teardown project has caused major delays on Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, a major thoroughfare into the city. According to the Washington Post, the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation will decide where it is next installed.
The painted aluminum sculpture features rectangular appendages resembling arms and legs in the recognizable stick-figure style of the artist, who passed away last year at the age of 83. In a 2019 announcement on its website, the Kennedy Center described “Blue” as “poised in mid-kick, turning the surrounding landscape into a giant stage as it prepares to pirouette across the grass.”
Shapiro’s angular sculptures are held in several DC museum collections and are displayed on their grounds, including the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Loss and Regeneration” (1993) sits just outside the latter’s front doors.
