DC Design Week to Kick Off Underground
This year’s DC Design Week, themed “Stories Within,” will kick off on Sept. 27 with a party at Dupont Underground. Events (in daily chronological order starting Sept. 28): a “Portfoli-Yolo Creative Review” at George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design; a financial workshop for creatives; “Designing the Climate Story” at NASA’s Earth Information Center; a hackathon at Artechouse; an author event with Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller (“Here: Where the Black Designers Are”) at Duke Ellington School of the Arts; a Capital Pride panel and happy hour at Crush; and a closing party on Oct. 4 at Hill Prince.
‘Artful Attire’ Is Theme of 2024 Craft2Wear
Craft2Wear, the annual weekend show of contemporary wearable art organized by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee to support the Smithsonian museums, libraries, centers and zoo, will hold “First Night–First Dibs” on Sept. 27 at the National Building Museum. Light refreshments and informal modeling will add to the evening. The 2024 theme is “Artful Attire,” with jewelry, accessories and clothing by 93 artists offered for sale. Also on view: ceramics, metal, folk painting, fiber and court dress by 10 South Korean artisans. Regular show hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.
Yeuell Retires; Bennett Now Leads the Atlas
Douglas Yeuell, who led the Atlas Performing Arts Center for the past 10 years, has retired. Yeuell’s Joy of Motion Dance Center was one of the restored theater’s first tenants in 2005. The Atlas’s new executive director, as of Sept. 3: Jarrod Bennett, who started as director of operations in 2022. A Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC member since 2009, and the chorus’s technical director since 2017, he held positions with the YMCA of Metropolitan Washington and the national headquarters of the American Red Cross. Bennett grew up in Japan and Hawaii, the son of an ESL teacher/Japanese translator and a U.S. Marine.
Pianist Jenny Lin Named Director of Phillips Music
The Phillips Collection has named pianist Jenny Lin the new director of Phillips Music, the venerable chamber concert series in the museum’s music room. Born in Taiwan and raised in Austria, Lin, a Steinway artist who performs and records widely, studied at Vienna’s Hochschule für Musik, Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory and the Fondazione Internazionale per il pianoforte in Como. She also earned a bachelor’s in German literature from Johns Hopkins. Phillips Music’s 84th season, running from Oct. 13 to May 4, was curated by Jeremy Ney, now head of music and performance at New York’s Frick Collection.
New Portrait Gallery Choreographer-in-Residence
Choreographer Diana Movius, artistic director of 14-year-old Moveius Contemporary Ballet, began an 18-month residency at the National Portrait Gallery in July. The Charlotte, North Carolina, native, who holds a B.A. and an M.A. in environmental anthropology from Stanford, did fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, then worked in D.C. on climate change policy. Movius also founded and runs Petworth’s Dance Loft on 14. On Oct. 19, Moveius dancers will preview “Atlantic Paradox,” inspired by the “Brilliant Exiles” exhibition. The NPG’s first choreographer-in-residence, from 2016 to 2023, was Dana Tai Soon Burgess.
WaPo Hires Theater Critic, Axes Gallery Column
Naveen Kumar, associate director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute, is the Washington Post’s new theater critic. A graduate of Vassar and Columbia, Kumar is based in New York, as was his predecessor, Peter Marks. On Kumar’s first day, Aug. 19, “In the galleries” columnist Mark Jenkins announced via email that the Aug. 25 column (online the Friday prior) would end his 13-year run. A freelancer who also writes about architecture, film and pop music, Jenkins’s byline may appear occasionally in the Post. Still on staff: art critic Sebastian Smee and art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott.
Gallery to Debut in Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center
On Oct. 23, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center — the Baltimore-based university’s D.C. hub in the former Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue NW — will launch its Irene and Richard Frary Gallery with “Art and Graphic Design of the European Avant-Gardes.” The gallery’s inaugural director: Caitlin Berry, who led the Miami-based Rubell Museum’s Southwest Washington outpost from its 2022 opening through last January. (A replacement at D.C.’s Rubell has not been named.) Earlier, Berry, a Wake Forest graduate, was associate director and director at Hemphill Fine Arts, then ran Marymount University’s Cody Gallery.