Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Leaving Town: NPG Director, Sherald Show
National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet, who resigned two weeks after being “fired” by President Trump in a May 30 Truth Social post, will start as director of the Milwaukee Art Museum on Sept. 22. Set to open on Sept. 19 at the Portrait Gallery, its third venue, the exhibition “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” — withdrawn by Sherald following a dispute with the Smithsonian over her painting “Trans Forming Liberty” — will instead be presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art from Nov. 2 to April 5. Best known for her portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, Sherald, who earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, won the NPG’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016.
NPG’s 7th Outwin Exhibition Opens Oct. 18
“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today,” an exhibition of the winning works from the seventh triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, will open at the National Portrait Gallery on Oct. 18, remaining on view through next summer. Organized by Taína Caragol and Charlotte Ickes, curators at the Portrait Gallery — where the acting director is Smithsonian Under Secretary for Museums and Culture Kevin Gover — the show will display 35 portraits by 36 artists, chosen from more than 3,300 entries. Established in 2006, the competition awards $25,000 and a commission to portray a living American as first prize. The second- and third-place winners receive $10,000 and $7,500, respectively.
Kennedy Center Dance Head Fired, Replaced
Director of Dance Programming Jane Raleigh was fired by Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s Trump-appointed president, on Aug. 21, along with assistant dance programming managers Mallory Miller and Malik Burnet. Possible factors: their unionization activity and the current leadership’s aim to present events of broader appeal. The new director is Stephen Nakagawa, a Washington Ballet dancer since 2020, whose piece “Rising Sun” was premiered by the company the following year. The New York Times reported that Nakagawa wrote to Grenell decrying the “radical leftist ideologies in ballet.” Jeffrey Finn, vice president and executive producer of theater, left the center earlier in August.
Washington Performing Arts Season Omits Ken Cen
The 2025-26 season announcement of Washington Performing Arts notably listed zero events in any of the halls and spaces — Opera House, Concert Hall, Eisenhower Theater, Terrace Theater, Family Theater, Theater Lab, Millennium Stage and the numerous locations in the Reach — at a venue that was a favored partner in prior seasons: the Kennedy Center. A spokesperson for the prolific music presenter told Washingtonian: “We assessed the variety of artists and performances we have in this upcoming season and decided it was best to explore new spaces that offer fresh possibilities.” The venues: Strathmore, Lisner Auditorium; Hopkins Bloomberg Center (the ex-Newseum); and Sixth & I.
Rescission Package Hits All-Classical WETA 90.9 FM
Based in Arlington, Virginia, WETA, parent of one of the nation’s leading classical music radio stations, 75,000-watt Classical 90.9 FM, has lost roughly $9 million in funding this year and next. The amount is about seven percent of WETA’s budget, according to President and CEO Sharon Percy Rockefeller. The rescission package approved by Congress in mid-July eliminated $1.1 billion in funding from PBS, NPR and their affiliates. Programs of WETA Classical, which switched over from a news-talk format in 2007, include Front Row Washington, NSO Showcase, Choral Showcase and, on Saturday afternoons, Opera Matinee, which presents the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts from December to April. In addition, HD2 Viva La Voce features classical singing. The station will try to make up for the cuts through fundraising.
Source Theatre Sale Leaves Constellation Homeless
A Source Theatre tenant since its 2007 founding, Constellation Theatre Company failed to purchase the 120-seat black-box venue at 1835 14th St. NW. On Aug. 13, Theatre Washington posted on Facebook: “We are dismayed by the news that Source Theatre has been sold [for $4.5 million, $400,000 above Constellation’s offer] by CulturalDC to an affiliated corporation of restaurateurs Geoff Dawson and Curt Large.” CulturalDC and Constellation were unable to resolve issues of financial documentation and restrictions on the building’s possible future sale, with each side blaming the other. Constellation’s last show at Source, “Head Over Heels,” closed on June 1; a new season has not yet been announced.
Bethesda’s Imagination Stage Gets 3-Year National Grant
Children’s theater company Imagination Stage, based in Bethesda, Maryland, was awarded a three-year grant from the Kaiser Permanente Fund at the East Bay Community Foundation in Oakland, California (where the managed care consortium is headquartered). Starting this fall, the new funding will enable Imagination Stage, founded in 1979 as Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts, to bring educational theater programming on the subject of mental health to over 65,000 additional elementary through high school students and educators in markets served by Kaiser Permanente — specifically, along with the Mid-Atlantic region, the states of Georgia, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.