Until last week, a big electric-blue sculpture by Joel Shapiro sat next to the Kennedy Center. Boxy and rigid but seemingly weightless, Blue looked like a clumsy person who’d been swept by a breeze into an accidental pirouette. Shapiro called the metalwork a “celebration of possibility.” Some people thought it looked like Gumby. I loved it. The leaders of the Kennedy Center—and there is really just one leader of the Kennedy Center—did not.Workers dismantled Blue last Wednesday. No specific reason was given, save that the change had occurred at the center’s request. Internal documents obtained by The New York Times say that the sculpture was targeted for removal soon after Donald Trump took control of the institution.Shapiro—one of the most important American sculptors of his generation—died last summer. He spent decades coaxing human gesture and emotion from the austere geometry of minimalism. His abstract shapes and forms have strong personalities. They lie in wait for their audience, then suddenly come alive.I knew Shapiro a little, through his wife, the artist Ellen Phelan. He was owlish, warm, blunt, and inspiring to be around, always searching for what he called a “little moment of rapture.” Blue was one of those. It wasn’t gilded.Shapiro spent two years in India in the Peace Corps, which President John F. Kennedy established. The antecedent for the Kennedy Center was right there in New Delhi: the architect Edward Durell Stone’s striking new American embassy, which he would channel in his later design for a national arts center—which would be named for Kennedy after his assassination. Decades later, Shapiro made monumental works for American diplomatic missions overseas. Blue, fittingly, stood near the Kennedy Center’s Peace Corps Gallery.Washington, D.C.’s landscape is full of these cords of connection—some accidental, some carefully arranged. This one was simply cut, leaving a blemish in a city full of symbols.Those symbols are everywhere. You can walk from the Kennedy Center to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in a brisk half hour. I’ve taken this route frequently, usually while running. The parks, the monuments, the cherry trees, and the limestone edifices of federal power all prompt questions: about who gets memorialized, what myths and whose money might explain why, and who’s missing.One reason I repeat this route so often is to keep an inventory. What moved? What vanished? What’s next? Some landmarks—the State Department, in Foggy Bottom, for instance—haven’t changed but were hollowed by the Trump administration’s personnel cuts. The Lincoln Memorial is no longer visible in the botched Reflection Pool, an eyesore that’s been drained again to fix a shoddy renovation.[Read: The Kennedy Center has a problem that courts can’t fix]Keep going, past the memorials to World War II and the Korean War, and, nearby, Maya Lin’s black-granite scar, elegizing U.S. troops in Vietnam. I love odd and nerdy things along this route: statues of 19th-century Latin American liberators, Cold War allegorical bronzes, and, tucked away, Robert Berks’s playful Einstein. (People like to sit on his lap and rub his nose.) Einstein said, “Force always attracts men of low morality.” Another cord of connection: Berks made the giant bronze bust of Kennedy that resides inside the Kennedy Center.Push farther, past the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin, until Independence Avenue and the Holocaust Museum—which had its own upheaval last year, when Trump purged its board of trustees—come into view.Here, less than two miles from the Kennedy Center, stands another big Joel Shapiro—his portentously titled Loss and Regeneration. It’s one of his most painful, deeply moving works. Two black-bronze forms: a windowless house crashed upside down on its roof and, 100 feet away, an unstable but determined tree-like shape. Life after genocide.The house is inscribed with lines translated from a poem by an unnamed child in the Terezín ghetto:Until, after a long, long time,I’d be well again.Then I’d like to liveAnd go back home again.I’ve memorized those words.Shapiro made this work in 1993. Blue arrived at the Kennedy Center in 2019, a gift from the artist and a centerpiece of the REACH, the campus’s elegant expansion that brought more art and more audiences.Blue and Loss became the cardinal points of my run: possibility and devastation. I doubt anyone else did this, but I got in the habit of tap-touching them: Blue at the start. Loss before I headed home.President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the creation of a national cultural center in Washington, D.C. But Kennedy worked hard to bring it into existence. Almost two years into his presidency, he gave a nationally televised speech to launch a public campaign for it—with appearances by Marian Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Frost, Harry Belafonte, and a 7-year-old Yo-Yo Ma.Kennedy spoke that night about art being political “in the most profound sense, not as a weapon in the struggle but as an instrument of understanding” among humanity.That was a perfect fit for Shapiro. I love how he could weld whimsy and catastrophe: a big blue dancer a short walk from an overturned house and a dark tree. But he also said that his sculptures have an “obdurate” sense of self.Blue will carry that obdurate spirit with it—down the National Mall to the National Gallery of Art. David Rubenstein, the chairman of the museum’s board and the former chairman of the Kennedy Center (he was ousted by Trump), just bought it from Shapiro’s foundation. That walk from whimsy to catastrophe just got shorter.Blue has a new home. I need a new path.