Visual Arts Highlights

**National Museum of African American History and Culture
Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration**
*Sept. 23 through Sept. 25*

Four or 10 or 13 or 15 or 25 or 101 years in the making — depending what starting point you pick in a convoluted history — the National Museum of African American History and Culture is about to open on the National Mall, on Constitution Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets NW. The newest Smithsonian museum’s debut is turning into the biggest fall cultural event in recent history. Though the official opening day is Saturday, Sept. 24, the required timed, but free, tickets for that day, the rest of September and all of October are already gone (November is wide open).

All are welcome, however, to the big party on Dedication Weekend on the grounds of the Washington Monument, with performances, arts activities and food concessions. The hours for “Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration” are noon to 5 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 23; 1 to 5 p.m., plus a 6 p.m. concert featuring Living Color, Public Enemy and the Roots, on Saturday, Sept. 24; and noon to 5 p.m., plus a 6 p.m. concert featuring Experience Unlimited, Meshell Ndegeocello and a special guest, on Sunday, Sept. 25. President Obama is expected at the dedication ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, at which there will be large-screen viewing areas.

Ground was broken for the striking building — designed by David Adjaye, son of a Ghanaian diplomat, and Philip Freelon — in February of 2012. The façade’s bronze-colored lattice references the ironwork made by enslaved African Americans in states such as Louisiana and South Carolina. Inside, the exhibitions explore American history through an African American lens. A section of the website called Collection Stories provides a preview, with curators giving context to objects such as enslaved musical prodigy Blind Tom’s flute; the first-day-of-school dress of Carlotta Walls, one of the nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957; and Olympic medals won by track and field star Carl Lewis in 1992 and 1996.
See our web exclusive, “Musings on the African American History Museum.”

**National Gallery of Art Reopening of East Building**
*Friday, Sept. 30*

The East Building galleries of the National Gallery of Art, which house the modern collection and several temporary exhibition spaces, will reopen Sept. 30 after three years of renovation work. More than 12,000 square feet of new galleries have been added, and there will be a completely new configuration of the permanent collection of modern art. The new spaces will include an outdoor sculpture terrace on the roof, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, and two flanking, sky-lit, interior tower galleries. The northwest tower gallery will showcase an installation of works by Alexander Calder and the northeast tower gallery will present Abstract Expressionist works, including a changing selection of paintings by Mark Rothko. Trees, plantings and built-in seating will make the roof terrace an inviting place to relax, look out over the city and see the architecture of the East Building from an entirely new perspective.

**9/11 at the National Building Museum**
*Through Nov. 27*

“Commemorating 9/11,” a series of photographs, is presented in honor of those who lost their lives, those who responded and volunteered in the aftermath and those who have labored to never forget — and to rebuild — after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Taken by Camilo José Vergara over a span of more than 45 years and focused on the site of the World Trade Center, these sequences chronicle the development of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. They are also a testament to the power of place, buildings and our collective memory.

**Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series at the Phillips**
*Oct. 8 through Jan. 8*

Since nearly as far back as the great narrative paintings of the Italian Renaissance, almost no series of paintings have rivaled the cultural significance, beauty, legacy and narrative structure of Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration Series.” On Oct. 8, in “People on the Move: Beauty and Struggle in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series,” the Phillips Collection will reunite all 60 panels of this series, Lawrence’s seminal masterwork, depicting the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between the World Wars.

Shaped by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this exhibition explores the historical, literary, sociocultural, aesthetic and contemporary manifestations of migration that underlie Lawrence’s powerful visual narrative. The presentation will be complemented by a new interactive website featuring the artist’s first-hand accounts as well as contemporary responses to migration. A variety of community events will further engage visitors in the multifaceted story of the Great Migration from through music, theater, dance and poetry.

**Ragnar Kjartansson at the Hirshhorn**
*Oct. 14 through Jan. 8*

“Ragnar Kjartansson” is the first major survey of the work of this internationally acclaimed Icelandic artist and the first comprehensive overview of his prodigious output since his 2000 debut in Reykjavík. It features Kjartansson’s most celebrated works, including many never before seen in the U.S., and encompasses the entirety of his practice: live endurance performance, large-scale video installations, drawings, photography and painting. Born into a theatrical family in Reykjavík in 1976, Kjartansson dons various guises — from a foot soldier to a Hollywood crooner to an incarnation of death — to both celebrate and ridicule the romantic figure of the artist as a cultural hero. Drawing from theater, film, Icelandic storytelling, rock bands, opera music and pop culture, he stages repetition and endurance performances that explore family, society and contemporary culture with infectious humor, irony and poignancy.

In a Hirshhorn first, visitors will be able to experience a live performance of Kjartansson’s monumental 2016 work “Woman in E” every day of the 12-week run of the exhibition. The work features a single, sequin-clad woman strumming an E-minor chord endlessly, rotating on a pedestal in a gold-tinseled room, a performance that walks a characteristic line between kitsch and earnest commentary on feminine objectification. A rotating (pun intended) cast of Washington-area musicians will play the “Woman.”

**Jazz Icons at the National Portrait Gallery**
*Through Feb. 20*

Enthralled by the music and those who made it, the late Herman Leonard began haunting New York City’s jazz clubs after opening his first photography studio in Greenwich Village in 1948. Armed with his Speed Graphic camera, Leonard made images that captured the very essence of a live jazz performance. Soon his photographs were gracing album covers and appearing in the pages of Downbeat and Metronome. Leonard’s extraordinary photographs are widely regarded as the definitive portraits of many of the 20th-century’s greatest jazz artists. This exhibition, “In the Groove: Jazz Portraits by Herman Leonard,” assembled from works in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, features Leonard’s iconic images of jazz legends such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk and Sarah Vaughan.

**Art of the Qur’an at the Sackler**
*Oct. 15 through Feb. 20*

In recognition of one of the world’s extraordinary collections of Qur’ans, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (the attached Freer Gallery of Art remains closed for renovations) is hosting a landmark exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States. Some fifty of the most sumptuous manuscripts from Herat to Istanbul will be featured in “The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts.” Celebrated for their superb calligraphy and lavish illumination, these manuscripts — which range in date from the early eighth to the 17th century — are critical to the history of the arts of the book. They were once the prized possessions of Ottoman sultans and the ruling elite, who donated their Qur’ans to various institutions to express their personal piety and secure political power. Each manuscript tells a unique story, which will be explored in this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition.

**Sam Gilliam and Simmie Knox at the Kreeger**
*Through Dec. 30*

To celebrate the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Kreeger Museum presents selected works from the permanent collection by Sam Gilliam and Simmie Knox. The Museum’s relationship with both artists dates back to the early 1970s, when David and Carmen Kreeger purchased their works. Sam Gilliam was the focus of the first exhibition at the Kreeger in 1998. John Beardsley, guest curator of that exhibition, wrote that “[Gilliam] is among the nation’s most accomplished abstract painters. Over the decades, he has not wavered in his commitment to a rigorous but exuberant modernist style.” Meanwhile, in 1971, David and Carmen Kreeger purchased a work by Simmie Knox that had been shown in the Thirty-Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at Corcoran Gallery of Art. This early abstract diptych by Knox illustrates his love for the movement of color.