The Kennedy Center Honors will be held this year at Capital One Arena in Washington, the performing arts institution said on Friday, as its future remained tied up in a court battle over President Trump’s $250 million renovation project.
The annual ceremony has been the marquee event for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since 1978, when it first honored a select group of artistic luminaries. It has since become a fixture of the Washington arts calendar, drawing celebrities, congressional members from both parties and the president for tributes by performers like Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé and James Taylor.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, the Kennedy Center has become a focus of his campaign to transform Washington’s cultural landscape, seeking to rid leading institutions of perceived liberal agendas and shape them to his aesthetic tastes.
As Mr. Trump pushes to close the center for two years of renovations, he is trading the ruby-red Opera House for the 20,000-seat home of the N.B.A.’s Washington Wizards and the N.H.L.’s Washington Capitals.
Like almost everything at the Kennedy Center, the honors ceremony has been upended by Mr. Trump’s takeover of the institution. Last year, he personally approved the honorees and stepped in as the ceremony’s M.C., using part of the night to hail his signature policy bill.
This year’s ceremony is scheduled for Dec. 7. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will return as host, but a “save the date” notice included a picture of him walking onstage last year to a standing ovation. The ceremony is typically broadcast on television at a later date.
The Kennedy Center is trying to persuade a federal judge to allow it to close.
In response to a lawsuit from Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat from Ohio, the judge temporarily blocked the closure, ruling that the Trump-allied board of trustees had not properly scrutinized the president’s plan. But last month, officials shuttered the main building to the public, citing safety concerns related to deteriorating infrastructure.
Ms. Beatty, an ex officio board member, is arguing in court that the building’s maintenance needs are a pretext for a closure necessitated by the center’s financial and artistic decline under Mr. Trump.
The president has expressed fury over the court’s limitations on his agenda for the center, which includes an insistence that his name be affixed to the building’s exterior.
Soon after last year’s Kennedy Center Honors, the board voted to rename the institution the Trump Kennedy Center. But the judge, Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington, ruled in May that only Congress had the authority to do that, and ordered Mr. Trump’s name removed.
The center is appealing the ruling. Last month, Mr. Trump said on social media that if a higher court did not side with him, he would cancel the renovations.
That same week, he was photographed reviewing a poster board on Air Force One titled “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.”
While the center’s renovation plan has redirected the institution’s performances out of its main building, a smaller annex called the Reach remains open for limited programming.
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