On the Fourth of July 2026, the United States will celebrate 250 years of independence. Fireworks will fill the sky, speeches will praise liberty, and the nation will tell itself the story of its freedom. Yet on that same day, a sanctuary for the arts will shut its doors.

The Kennedy Center will be closed for renovations, and a symbol of American cultural excellence will fade into the history books. If the renovations resemble those of the East Wing of the White House, it will be unrecognizable when it reopens.

A nation marking its birth in freedom while one of its cultural voices falls silent is more than irony. It is revelation.

The closing did not emerge in a vacuum. During his first term, Donald Trump largely ignored the nonpartisan arts complex and declined to attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors. But his second term signaled a different posture.

On Feb. 7, 2025, in a Truth Social post, Trump announced the immediate termination of multiple members of the Center’s board, stating they did not share his vision for a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He promised a new board “with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” and criticized past programming, declaring, “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel… THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

Whether framed as reform, restoration or renovation, the trajectory revealed something deeper than administrative change in an already polarized political moment. It revealed an attempt to claim the arts, to shape imagination, narrow expression, and, moreover, to control the cultural narrative.

History shows this is the instinct of authoritarian power. Yet art has never belonged to rulers, and culture cannot be governed into submission. Buildings can be renamed. Institutions can be shuttered. But imagination refuses to be imprisoned.

Art is Resistance

Not all resistance is loud. Not all resistance is confrontational. Sometimes resistance takes the form of memory preserved, beauty created, or truth whispered when silence is demanded by the powerful.

Scripture itself bears witness to this. The Psalms were songs of lament before they became liturgy. Mary’s Magnificat was poetry spoken against empire. The oppressed have always sung, painted, danced and spoken truth long before they were free.

In light of the drastic changes in program and leadership at the Kennedy Center, some artists have canceled appearances or declined invitations. Some have interpreted their absence as retreat. But their refusal is not surrender; it is moral clarity.

Art is Prophetic

Like prophets stepping away from the power and prestige of royal courts, artists sometimes withdraw when participation would compromise truth. And when art steps away from power, it rarely disappears. 

It migrates into communities, streets, and the most unexpected spaces. It roots itself in the people.

Which is why this week, my social media feed gave me hope. It was full of people proudly declaring themselves “grass” in the Super Bowl halftime show. Ordinary people posting: “I was grass number 47.” “Finally excited to say that I was grass number 89.”

They described the weight of the costumes, the long rehearsals, the exhaustion and exhilaration of becoming part of something larger than themselves.

No spotlight. No celebrity. Just grass. Hundreds of individuals transforming into landscape, movement, and collective expression.

Art is Collective

There is something profound about individuals becoming a grassy landscape: anonymous but interconnected, and each essential. Each blade creating the ground on which everything else unfolded. 

These performers were not “just background.” They were the living, moving foundation of the story being told. But the image also carries a deeper resonance. 

The green of these fields cannot be separated from history. In Puerto Rico, green fields—especially the sugarcane—were sites of immense suffering, where enslaved and exploited people labored to generate wealth for others. Prosperity built on human cost.

Art has a way of reminding us of truths that history often tries to soften or erase. Memory preserves the story of the people in all of its pain and beauty.

During the performance, Bad Bunny shouted out nations across the Americas, from Chile to Canada, concluding with his birthplace, Puerto Rico. He wove geography into identity and diversity into unity. He created a dynamic and artistic liturgy, singing the song of the people. 

Then came the image of the football bearing the words: “Together, We Are America.” 

In a time marked by division, fear, and narrowing definitions of belonging, the message was unmistakable. America is not singular, but plural.

The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth that the body is made of many parts, each indispensable. The foot cannot dismiss the hand; the ear is no less a part of the body than the eye. Strength emerges not from sameness, but from interdependence.

Watching hundreds of smiling “grass people” move as one, I was reminded that no role is insignificant. The unseen, the overlooked, the unnamed are the body. And they are often the ground beneath the story and the song.

Defiant Joy

Perhaps this is where resistance now resides.

Resistance is not in the grand institutions or on celebrated stages, but in grassroots creativity—in communities that refuse silence, in people who create together even when power attempts to control the narrative.

Governments may close buildings, but they cannot close imagination. Authority may attempt to claim art, but art slips through its fingers and reappears wherever people gather to sing, dance, and make meaning.

Last Sunday, resistance did not look like protest signs or political speeches. It looked like song and dance and smiling grass. It looked like ordinary people choosing participation over despair, creativity over fear, community over isolation.

It also looked like joy. And joy, in dark times, is itself an act of defiance.

Buildings may close. Names may change. Power may attempt control. But somewhere, grass will keep growing. 

Somewhere, people will keep creating. Somewhere, the quiet, persistent work of love will continue — not in marble halls, but in living fields of ordinary, extraordinary people.

And that is where hope lives. Keep making art.