A series of 18 gold-leaf artworks are currently on display on the Kennedy Center’s campus, including multiple portraits of Donald Trump. The exhibit includes no wall text or attribution—but according to a source, the artist is Patricia Duggan, a major Trump donor and prominent Scientologist who is also a Trump-appointed member of the Kennedy Center’s board.
Duggan, who lives in Florida, gave $7 million to pro-Trump groups in 2024 and $9 million in 2020, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In 2019, the same paper reported that Duggan and her ex-husband, billionaire biotech entrepreneur Bob Duggan, had given over $360 million to the Church of Scientology, making them the church’s biggest donors.
Duggan’s gold-leaf artworks are currently on display at the Reach, an annex building on the Kennedy Center’s campus. One of these works depicts the President, fist raised in the moments after a 2024 assassination attempt, above the text “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Another is a portrait of Trump alongside a quote from his 2016 election victory speech. Other works on display include gold-leaf renderings of Elon Musk, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Duggan has donated to the Kennedy-aligned MAHA Alliance PAC.) There’s also a portrait of the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, with whom the President strongly identifies, plus depictions of George Washington, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, a $50 gold coin, and a bald eagle.
According to her website, Duggan is primarily a glass artist. Among her artworks are renderings of female cyborgs, glow-in-the-dark busts of aliens, and depictions of the Statue of Liberty. She’s also a prolific collector of glass art, and her collection is housed at the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which she founded.
Trump appointed Duggan to the Kennedy Center’s board in early 2025 after purging the board of its 18 Biden appointees. She was among a slate of new members—all of them Trump loyalists—who immediately elected Trump chairman of the board. Later that year, the board authorized renaming the Kennedy Center after Trump. (A federal judge ruled that the renaming was illegal. The Trump administration has appealed.) The Trump-controlled board also authorized an unprecedented two year closure of the Kennedy Center for renovations, a decision that a court found so imprudent as to be unlawful. Currently, the Kennedy Center is nominally open, but only offering minor and sporadic programming, such as an upcoming screening of The Princess Diaries on the lawn of the Reach.
Washingtonian has contacted Duggan and the Kennedy Center for more information on the artworks, including about when they were installed and who authorized or commissioned them. In a 2025 Instagram post that refers to a Kennedy Center board meeting, Duggan quotes the late W. Cleon Skousen—a far-right author who was associated with the John Birch Society, whom Duggan says was a friend—as saying that Americans should “create an expansive new cultural climate that gives eagle’s wings to the human spirit.”
