By Mike Catalini
This year’s Kennedy Center Honors will be held at Washington’s Capital One Arena, not the riverfront building that’s been at the center of a legal fight over adding President Donald Trump’s name to the building.
The 49th annual awards are set to take place at Washington’s downtown arena, a Kennedy Center spokesperson said Friday. Few other details were immediately available, and an explanation for the change wasn’t given.
The center’s board voted last month to close the iconic performing arts venue along the Potomac River waterfront after a federal judge blocked the institution from returning Trump’s name to the building.
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Trump has said in social media posts that the center needed to close for safety repairs. But he said the repairs would only happen if the board was allowed to move forward with plans to add his name to the building.
A federal judge has twice said that can’t happen without the approval of Congress, which has allocated $257 million for repairs.
The president hosted the 2025 awards, whose honorees included Sylvester Stallone and George Strait. He said at the time that he would rename the facility the “Trump Kennedy Center,” and not long after workers began adding his name to the building.
The board of trustees, named by Trump, voted unanimously for the change, which has been challenged in court since.
Congress named the performing arts center as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy in 1964, the year after he was assassinated.
The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.
The Kennedy Center Honors, which recognize people for lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts, was established in 1978. The 2026 honorees are set to be named at a later day, the center’s spokesperson said. The event will take place on December 7.
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