Ari Post • May 3, 2012

Throughout the post-holiday lull of January and February, as we try not to let our winter weight-gain springboard from the gastronomic massacres of seasonal indulgence, a strange and uncomfortable claustrophobia begins to sink in. The unrelenting cold keeps us holed up indoors, making it hard to get out even for the morning commute, let alone exercising and soaking up a stray beam of frosty sunshine. Of course, the weather is perfect for one winding winter activity. Ski season is just around the corner.

Whether it’s your first time out or you’re a veteran to the sport, there is really nothing like cutting into fresh powder on your first run of the season. And while the Northeast slopes don’t equal the Western mountain ranges of Utah and Colorado in terms of intensity, abundance and sheer scale, we are chalk full of beautiful, banking ski terrain perfect for families, leisure ski trips and enlivening wintry getaways, with just enough edge to satiate the more adventurous appetites.

If you’re in search of a quick, one-day getaway, a family outing, some serious mountaineering or a relaxing weekend of winter activities, there is a ski slope for everyone within reach of the Washington area. All of the resorts below also have up-to-date, to-the-minute snow and trail reports on their websites that let you know the slope conditions everyday. So, if the snow beckons and the conditions are right, it will soon be the perfect time to take advantage of these frosty offerings.

Liberty Mountain: A Stone’s Throw from the District

The Washington community is notorious for its work ethic. Six-day, 60-hour workweeks are just part of the scene here. Many of us barely have two days to rub together, and long weekends are often more like distant fantasies than potential realities. Still, even workaholics need a temporal and physical release. If you fit this description, Ski Liberty is the perfect day-trip whenever you find yourself with a stray Saturday and in need of an adrenaline boost.

The closest ski resort to the Washington area, its wintertime adventures are available within two hours of the District. They have a range of diverse activities, whether riding solo or visiting with family or friends.

If you are looking for good old-fashioned fun, you might want to try snow tubing on Liberty’s Boulder Ridge slope. It’s a throwback to the days where snow meant no school and sledding. And there is no experience necessary. Enjoy all the fun of zooming down a perfectly carved sled lane and relax on your up back up the hill, with their “moving carpet” that rides you and your tube quickly back to the top for another run.

After the slopes, the Boulder Ridge Lodge is the perfect place to warm-up, complete with party rooms, snack bar, arcade and wrap-around decks to watch the action on the hill. LibertyMountainResort.com

Massanutten: A Wintry Haven for the Whole Family

For more than 30 years, Massanutten has welcomed vacationers to experience the wonder of the Shenandoah Valley. From Massanutten Peak, you can gaze out over panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and surrounding valley. And from the peak, there’s nowhere to go but down. Make sure those skis are strapped on tight!

More than just skiing, Massanutten is a fully equipped family resort year round. But during the winter, the skis have the floor. This year is the 40th anniversary of its ski slopes, and deals, parties, and and fun are this year’s themes. For information on anniversary specials, visit MassResort.com/40th.

Massanutten’s slopes boast 1,110 feet of vertical incline — the most in Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania. If you ski, snowboard, snow tube or want to learn how, Massanutten is the place to be. MassResort.com

Bryce Resort: An Intimate, UnCrowded Winter Retreat

Voted the most family friendly resort in the Mid Atlantic/Southeast region in 2010 by online ski guide On The Snow, Bryce Resort is a small mountain nestled deep in the Shenandoah that will rekindle your love of the Blue Ridge and allow you the intimacy and privacy usually afforded by only more expensive, exclusive resorts.

With the only true beginner terrain in Virginia, Bryce is the perfect place for kids and adults to learn how to ski or snowboard. And for parents and grandparents who might prefer the role of spectator, Bryce has the perfect mountain layout: all slopes funnel down to one central area, so you can keep an eye on your children while sipping hot cocoa on the back deck. While their lower slopes are very accommodating for beginners, they have just enough in the way of advanced slopes and short, steep drops to keep seasoned intermediate and advanced skiers engaged.

And with many of their cabins and lodges opening right onto the slopes, Bryce is like a small taste of Aspen in the Shenandoah. BryceResort.com

Wintergreen Resort: The Beauty of the Blue Ridge

Treat yourself to magnificent mountain views, sumptuous luxury and thrilling recreation at Wintergreen Resort. Spanning 11,000 acres on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, their spacious condominiums and vacation homes are surrounded by winding trails, cascading streams and lush forests. Wintergreen Resort is peaceful and refreshing, with an endless variety of winter activities.

Twice named “Best Ski Resort” by WashingtonPost.com readers, Wintergreen boasts a thrilling winter playground, whose amenities include the most extensive beginner-to-expert terrain for skiers and riders alike, as well as Virginia’s largest tubing park. Nestled atop the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains, Wintergreen Resort is perfect for skiing, snowboarding and tubing, whether you’re a beginner or pro. Enjoy more time on the slopes while avoiding the lines thanks to five chairlifts, including their two lightning fast “six-pack” lifts for those with an insatiable ski craving. For more information, visit WinterGreenResort.com
Snowshoe Mountain: Adventure Around the Corner

Residing in the mountains of West Virginia, Snowshoe is not like your average ski resort — it’s an “upside down mountain.” Since the village and resort sit on top, you’ll start your ski day going downhill, not up. But chances are, you’ll want to do it again. They also offer new, lower mid-week rates. So, if you can get away for a day or two inside the week, you’ll save as much as you’ll surely enjoy the fresh powder.

In addition to great skiing and riding, Snowshoe offers a wide variety of winter adventures including snowmobiling, snowshoeing, cross country skiing and much more. The Village is the resort’s bustling hub of restaurants, shops and events, all within steps of accommodations. It’s the Village that makes it worth turning a weekend into a week at Snowshoe. You won’t simply have fun. You’ll feel at home. For more information, visit SnowshoeMtn.com
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Ari Post •

In the seasonal cycle of arts and entertainment, summer and autumn bring about the blockbusters. Hollywood pulls out the big action spectacles and Oscar bait, lists of the year’s best books and music pop up in all our syndicated leisure sections, museums open their big name exhibitions to attract the inflated summer crowds and holiday visitors, and the Kennedy Center usually brings in “Wicked” for a few weeks. Over the past six months on our museum and gallery scene, we’ve seen a major Edgar Degas retrospective, a multifaceted citywide adulation of Andy Warhol, the wire-sculpture portraiture of Alexander Calder, the stentorian “30 Americans” exhibit at the Corcoran, and pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik in the Tower of the National Gallery.

The winter months, on the other hand, often bring us rich and subtle experiences, opening the doors to work that might not have the opportunity to shine during the busy season. The work Sam Gilliam did with The Phillips Collection last winter, installing a site-specific work and curating a concurrent exhibition of his artistic influences, was an unprecedented homage to Washington art culture. Last February, The Hirshhorn’s retrospective of Blinky Palermo, a relatively obscure, German-born postwar painter, was the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in the United States. And while shows like this are the salty bone marrow for Washington’s art-going crowd, they would be overshadowed by the Warhols and Calders in the primetime months.

Now is the time for galleries and museums to release their B-sides and alternative works, and challenge tradition of the Western canon. It’s a two-month art junkie paradise. This is the stuff you don’t usually see in books. All you can do is bundle up to combat the whipping winter wind and go experience the work firsthand. Once your fingers thaw, you’ll be glad you did.

Annie Leibovitz at American Art Museum
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Since she made her indelible mark in the landscape of contemporary pop culture with her Rolling Stone photographs of a naked John Lennon cocooned around a black-clad Yoko, Annie Leibovitz has been generally acknowledged as the eye of Hollywood. Anyone who’s anyone since the 1970s has assuredly looked down the barrel of Leibovitz’s lens.

But don’t expect to see Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio hanging on the walls of the American Art Museum this year. The exhibition, “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage” (opening Jan. 20), is uncharacteristically void of any people at all.

Visiting the homes of iconic figures, including Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pete Seeger and Elvis Presley, as well as places such as Niagara Falls, Walden Pond, Old Faithful and the Yosemite Valley, Leibovitz let her instincts and intuitions guide her on a journey across America. Revealing her curiosity and infatuation with the country, the photographs span landscapes both dramatic and quiet, interiors of living rooms and bedrooms as well as objects, rendered in a way that feels almost unconscious. Some of the pictures focus on the remaining traces of photographers and artists Leibovitz admires such as Ansel Adams and Robert Smithson. The photographs in this exhibition, bridging a period between April 2009 and May 2011, were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject. And it cements her as much more than a photographer of American dreams, but a filter of the American experience. For more information, visit AmericanArt.si.edu.

Picasso’s Drawings at the National Gallery of Art
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As an artist, Pablo Picasso covered so much ground it becomes difficult to discuss any of his individual contributions without missing an alternative, equally integral aspect of his work. From cubism and collage, to the undulating restraint of his blue period and the effortless, classical ambiguity of his Rose period, it’s easy to get lost in his composition, his perspective, his color and texture, his visual sense for love, madness, grief, joy and everything in between. What’s often overlooked is how well the guy could draw.

Picasso was a master draftsman, and his command will be on full display at the National Gallery this month in “Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition,” opening Jan. 29. The exhibit spans the artist’s drawings over 30 years, from his early studies as a young student in the 1890s (10 to 15 years before he shook the art world with the introduction of his cubist works around 1907), to his virtuoso drawings and portrait sketches of the early 1920s. Delving into the importance of drawing to Picasso’s process of creation, experimentation and discovery, the audience will get to see how intricately his work is connected with the grand tradition of drawing by European masters of the near and distant past from Rembrandt to Vermeer. For more information, visit NGA.gov.

‘Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space’ at the Hirshhorn
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The Light and Space movement was introduced to American around the 1960s in southern California. Focused on perceptual phenomena such as light, volume and scale, the tenets of the movement sound like a neo-impressionism for the 20th century, with a focus on the ethereal perception of light, volume and scale in its most raw form. Whether directing thre flow of natural light, toying with light through transparent, translucent and reflective materials or embedding artificial light within objects and architecture, the works always used a range of materials and often incorporated modern innovations in science and even aerospace engineering.

The Hirshhorn will be presenting the first exhibition to reevaluate the evolution of the international Light and Space movement through the work of five pivotal Latin American artists, who almost a decade before the movement’s introduction to America were creating environments of light and color that challenged traditional standards of art. The five installations that make up “Suprasensorial” (opening Feb. 23) will create enveloping optical effects that overwhelm and transform sensory experience and demonstrate Latin America as a source of innovation for the global Light and Space tradition. For more information, visit Hirshhorn.si.edu.

Ari Post •

By the door of the entrance into “Pilgrimage,” a new exhibition of photographs by Annie Leibovitz at the American Art Museum, hangs a photograph of the messiest workshop you’ve ever seen. Blanketed in the green, swampy light of an old fluorescent bulb, wires, saws, copper pipes, oil canisters, paint cans, pruning shears, and drills are crammed within every dimension of a wooden worktable, built into the wall against a peeling, dust-caked window. Chairs are covered in such clutter that they are only recognizable by the legs that stretch toward a ground. This is Pete Seeger’s workshop, just off from the log cabin that he built for his family’s home in Cold Spring, New York, in 1949. He has lived there ever since.

But Pete Seeger is conspicuously absent from the photograph. And for Annie Leibovitz to take a picture of a renowned icon without the presence of the individual is, if nothing else, unprecedented.

Throughout “Pilgrimage,” the audience is in the presence of important figures and icons, tied loosely but surely to a collective American-European consciousness. But the figures all lie just beyond the lens. We see a doorway. It is the entrance into Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico studio. We see a wicker bed frame. This is the bed that Thoreau slept on at Walden Pond. We see a windowless room bathed in red light. This was Ansel Adams’ darkroom in Carmel, California, where he developed his photographs in the last twenty years of his life. We don’t get but a haunting of Leibovitz’s subjects—all of whom are dead, save Seeger—yet there their presence is engrained deeply within the images, connecting us to the past not through nostalgia, but within the context of our present.

Annie Leibovitz was 21 years old and still in school when her portrait of John Lennon ran on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in January of 1971. By 1973, she was the magazine’s chief photographer. Almost over night, she became a photojournalism sensation, and through the years her camera has captured some of the most recognizable and iconic portraits of our time, revealing her to be among the foremost documentarians of the American social landscape. Her most famous photograph is arguably that of a nude John Lennon cocooned around a black-clad Yoko in 1980—taken five hours before Lennon was shot and killed.

Rather than focusing on her subject’s face, or having them pose with the banal glam of your typical high-profile photo shoot, Leibovitz is known for photographing her subject’s full self, from head to toe, engaged in something beyond the camera, frequently posed amidst objects from their lives.

Herein is perhaps the lead-in to “Pilgrimage.” Leibovitz has divested herself of her subjects all together, to tell their stories with only their significant surroundings. The subjects of her photographs, as with the Pete Seger workshop, are only shown in absence. From a busted television to a hat (Elvis and Lincoln, respectively), from a concert gown to a bedroom wall (Marian Anderson, Virginia Woolf), we only see these people through the objects and places tied to their lives.

The focus of these photographs is still celebrity, in a way. Perhaps “persons of significance” is a better way to say it—you won’t see George Clooney’s liquor cabinet or Angelina’s dirty laundry in this show. You will see Sigmund Freud’s bookshelf, Elvis Presley’s busted television (he had a habit of breaking them, with apparent force), Emily Dickinson’s nightgown, her only surviving dress, and Yosemite Valley, from the same location that Ansel Adams took his archetypal photographs of the landscape throughout the early 20th century.

Leibovitz’s own pilgrimage, which led to this exhibit, began by accident. “I started the project at a difficult time in my life,” she said at a tour of the exhibit on Jan. 24. Two years ago, she explains, she was in the middle of some financial and personal hardships. “I took the kids to Niagra Falls as a day trip. As they were leaning on the rail, I walked up behind them and snapped a photo. It’s a photo that anyone could take—an American snapshot.”

This photo hangs in the exhibition, marking a jumping off point for the journey to come. “I hope that what anyone can get out of this is that we are in a great country, and there is so much to see if you just hit the road. That’s what happened to me.”

Through her exploration, Leibovitz revisited locations repeatedly, letting them lead her to new ones, like a subconscious scavenger hunt. Concord, Massachusetts, for example, was a particularly rich area of discovery. First going there to photograph Walden Pond, she was drawn into the world of Thoreau, which led to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson. All these figures are represented in some way in the exhibition. One of the Alcott sisters was a mentor to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Leibovitz followed the trail, winding up in French’s studio in western MA, which led her to the National archives, where she found a rare multiple-lens glass pate of a Lincoln portrait. The National Archives led to Gettysburg. This led to Matthew Brady’s studio. And so on.

“I was trying to find a reason to live, places to be inspired,” Leibovitz said. “This is the kind of project that doesn’t end. The show went up, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. I did this to feed my portrait work, to save it. And it did. But there’s no reason I can’t return to this later.”

She also discussed the significance of children to this work: “Hanging this show, I saw children running around the museum. I loved it. So I hung everything low, cluttered the rooms with pictures, for children. The book [accompanying the exhibition] is dedicated to my children. I can’t wait to see a classroom in here, to see what the children think.”

Equally significant to the show are two technical facts regarding Leibovitz’s process. Unlike the work that made her into the presence she is today, none of this work was commissioned. This is Leibovitz’s first personal assignment since she was a student. This is also her first foray into digital photography. She used an array of cameras, starting with a cheap digital number that fit in her pocket, and eventually upgrading to a wide-angle lens with tripod.

“Pilgrimage” is significantly smaller and more intimate than almost anything Leibovitz has ever done. And its audience of museum goers is comparatively more modest than the national and international syndication of the magazines she works with. But Leibovitz is thrilled with the outcome and location of her project. “The Smithsonian is popping right now,” she said. “Doing a lot of great things. I feel very cool being here, so steeped in history.”

“We think we know who people are,” Leibovitz said. “But when you try to really understand someone, you find out how much there is to know,” and perhaps how much we can never know. Through her explorations, however, Leibovitz doesn’t seem to be worried about how well she knows her subjects. Her understanding is on a different level—an interpersonal one, tied to her intellectual roots, her heritage, her family and her sense of self. To put a face to self-discovery is no small feat, especially for someone who has lived her life behind the public spotlight, not in front. This show offers a portrait of a portrait artist and, as it turns out, there is not a face to be seen—just the essence of various selves.

For more information visit [AmericanArt.si.edu](http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/leibovitz/)
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Ari Post •

The history of oatmeal is a modest and uneventful affair. It was never worth its weight in gold, like salt. It was never fabled to have mystic healing properties, like beetroot or ginger. The bible does not allude to it, as with bread and fish. In fact, in Greek and Roman times, oats were considered a diseased form of wheat. Until the late 19th century, they were nothing more than economic sustenance for northern European peasants and animal feed.

But like a man whose steady greatness slowly reveals itself in his maturity, oatmeal emerges as a sort of existential hero: hearty, decent and strong. Its status has grown over time, and today it frequents breakfast tables throughout the world, appreciated for its high fiber, iron and protein content, its ability to fight heart disease and its unrivaled wholesomeness

“It’s on the list of top five foods to fight heart disease,” says chef and restaurateur Ris Lacoste. “Oats are the definition of ‘whole food’ — there’s nothing in it but whole grain. And that’s what wholesome is: good for your heart, body and soul.”

One reason it’s so satisfying is that it keeps you full, she says. “In the crazy world that we live in, it’s important to have a meal in the morning that keeps you satisfied and steady and warms you so entirely.” For all people who lead fast-paced lives, it is very important to feed your system with something healthful and substantial each day.

“I was sent off to school every day in the winter with a bowl of warm oatmeal in me,” says Ris. “I continue that practice to this day, along with a cup or two of good coffee. It energizes me, fills me up and warms my soul.”

“As a chef, I also end up tasting and consuming more fat in a given day than most people,” she continues. “It just comes with the territory: I have to do a lot of tasting on the job. So the cholesterol-reducing properties in oatmeal is a huge bonus.”

Oats are a grass that gradually came under cultivation at the same time as wheat and barley. They require a good deal of moisture to grow and do best in wet climates. Once they take root, they grow like weeds. The whole grain that oatmeal comes from is called a groat, the inner portion of the oat kernel. Steel-cut oats, also known as coarse-cut oats, are made by cutting up groats into two or three pieces.

By contrast, your standard rolled oats are whole kernels of groats that are steamed to make them soft and malleable, then pressed between rollers to make them thin and quick to reabsorb water during cooking.

Ris prefers steal-cut oats for their nutty aromas, fabulous texture and earthy, well-rounded flavors. Not that there is anything wrong with rolled oats, Ris says. “But needless to say, the less you have to process a natural ingredient, the better it will taste and the more nutrition it will hold onto. That’s why steel-cut oats have more flavor, as well as more antioxidant properties — they’re just that much less processed, and that much closer to a raw, natural oat seed.”

The only deterrent of steel-cut oats might be their longer cooking time. “But it’s absolutely worth the wait,” says Ris. But if you don’t have the time, there’s an easy option. “Just make a big batch on Sunday night and reheat a little each morning, or eat them cold as a snack. Package them with blueberries and almonds to take with you. They will hold up in the refrigerator for several days. When heated up on the stovetop for a couple minutes, you’ll never know the difference.”

“But another reason to talk about oats — other than their economy and nutrition — is that they are delicious!” Ris says. “That smooth, thick consistency is so pleasantly rich and heartwarming. They are compatible with an array of flavors. You can add almost anything to them and they will taste great, leaving you with not a reason in the world to be bored with breakfast.”

In the summer months, Ris recommends adding ripe melons and berries. “The bright sweetness of melons and the juicy, sweet depth of berries both complement the nutty, earthy flavors of oatmeal wonderfully,” she says.

And in the winter, where we find ourselves now, oatmeal shines. It is perhaps the perfect dish to help face the cold world each morning. Just add cooked apples, raisins and nuts. “And don’t forget a pinch of maple syrup or dash of brown sugar,” Ris adds.

Some other unique pairings for oatmeal include:

Milk and brown sugar and buttered oatmeal toast for dipping.

Honey and figs.

Pomegranate molasses and toasted walnuts. If the pomegranate is too tart, a dash of cane sugar will balance it out.

Stirring in a bit of coconut milk and top with toasted coconut, fresh ripe mango and a sprinkle of sugar (if using unsweetened coconut milk).

If you’re like the author, you also want your first meal of the day to be a bit of a health bomb. My default oatmeal toppings are slivered raw almonds (get them in the baking section), flax seed for omega 3, a bit of honey and the smallest crack of black pepper, which gives it the faintest zing.

“It’s also worth noting,” says Ris, “that no matter how you make your oats, a healthy pinch of salt is a must. When you think about the salt in cereal, eggs, bread and other breakfast staples, it’s perfectly natural. Salt brings out the flavor of anything, and that goes for oatmeal, too.”

Of course, there is a lot more to do with oats than just whip up oatmeal. They are a surprisingly versatile ingredient. As an obvious example that everyone loves, there are oatmeal cookies. (By the way, if you haven’t had a Kayak Cookies Salty Oats cookie at Teaism, you don’t know what you’re missing.) Most granola bars also have an oatmeal base.

“And just as with cookie dough,” says Ris, “you can add rolled oats to waffle or pancake batter, muffins—basically any baked goods. Oats have a softening effect by nature because they absorb and hold the moisture so well. Added to bread dough, they bring a nice, soft crumble, an ethereal sweetness and a bit of chew.”

And they have the same tenderizing effects with meats and savory items when used as a filler or binder. They help retain the juices in the meat and thereby keep things moist. In Ireland and Scotland, oats were used as filler for many dishes—think haggis, for instance. And this was before its health benefits were known. It was just used to fill more mouths, multiply and extend the meal, like rice or bread. And the Scottish are certainly known for being hearty and strong — this may be a reason why.

Adding oats as a binder in meats may require different levels of cooking and doneness, which is usually only perfected through experimentation and preference. “I prefer the texture oatmeal gives to a recipe,” says Ris. “Use oatmeal to bind meatballs or veggie burgers. It’s a whole grain that works in place of processed flour, bread or crackers. They are a much smarter, healthier and tastier option. But do remember that they absorb moisture during cooking so you may need to adjust your recipes.”

Ris will state here that one of the secrets of her great Monday meatloaf special is using oatmeal as a binder. “It’s how my mother made it,” she smiles.

Oatmeal bread is also one of her favorite sandwich breads. Joan Nathan, a friend and fellow chef, makes an oatmeal loaf with fig, anise and walnuts, which is a wonderful compliment to Ris’s chicken salad. It accents the apricots and grapes in the salad perfectly. Make them both, and see how good “whole food” can be.

For more from Joan Nathan, including her cookbook “Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France,” from which this recipe is excerpted, visit JoanNathan.com.

Joan Nathan’s Oatmeal Bread with Fig, Anise and Walnuts
Yields 2 loaves of bread. For a single loaf, cut ingredient proportions by half.

2 tbsp. active dry yeast
½ cup honey
2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup steel-cut oats
1 cup toasted wheat germ
1 tbsp. kosher salt
2 tsp. anise seeds
1 cup roughly chopped walnuts
1 cup diced dried figs
2 cups whole-wheat flour
4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more as needed

Dissolve the yeast in 3 cups lukewarm water in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook. Once it is dissolved, turn the mixer on low and slowly add the honey, rolled oats, steel-cut oats, wheat germ, salt, anise seeds, walnuts and dried figs. Stir in the whole-wheat flour and 3½ cups of the all-purpose flour and knead.

Place in a large greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise for 1 hour, or until it is doubled in volume. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a baking sheet, or line it with parchment paper.

Punch down the dough and turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide it in half and form two round loaves. Place them on the baking sheet and make a few long, shallow gashes across each of the loaves. Let rise another half hour.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped. Allow to cool before slicing.

Ris’s Chicken Salad Sandwich

Mix together:
3 cups fresh roasted chicken meat
1 cup cooked white or brown rice, I prefer Calasparra rice
½ cup red grapes, cut in half
¼ cup diced celery
¼ cup diced red onion
¼ cup diced dried apricots
¼ – ½ cup chopped toasted walnuts
A few Tbsp. dressing made with mayonnaise, sherry vinegar, a dash of walnut oil, honey and chopped fresh sage. Enough to bind the salad together.

Mix together. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve on fresh or toasted oatmeal bread, dressed with some of the mayonnaise and a healthy leaf of lettuce.

Ari Post •

Post-Impressionism is a movement that often diverges the innovations of the collective whole among its individual artists. The painters are known and respected— Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat—but their styles varied wildly and their directions were individually effusive and disparate. They also thrived in the precarious decades between Impressionism and Cubism (roughly 1890 – 1910), two of the most profound, loud and influential art movements of the past 300 years. As such, they are frequently and easily unhinged from their art historical parameters in museum settings.

“Snapshots: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” the newest exhibit at The Phillips Collection, deals extensively with the Post-Impressionists, rethinking the movement and redefining everything in its wake. It not only solidifies the distinct and long-term influence of Post-Impressionism, but illuminates the profound artistic impact of a landmark technical innovation from 1888: the Kodak handheld camera.

The amateur camera made it possible for a broader public to capture daily life in snapshots, and in the hands of painters the door was opened to an entirely new understanding of composition, value and spatial relationships that reenergized the artists’ methods and creative vision. “Snapshots” presents works by seven of the first artists to experiment in photography: Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton, George Hendrik Breitner, Henri Evenepoel and Henri Reviére.

This exhibition is the first of its kind, presenting over 200 photographs along with about 70 paintings, prints and drawings by the artists who took them. We are brought into the world of photography at its inception, and through these artists we see how the Kodak altered the perspective of our cultural lens. Even without a single work by Picasso, Braque or Duchamp, the urgency of cubism to resuscitate the future of painting becomes pertinently clear. We feel just why fine art began moving so quickly, without ever stopping to look back.

Entering the exhibition, you come upon a handful of small paintings by Bonnard. One is a portrait of the artist’s sister and brother-in-law. They sit smoking in a sharp, stark light, and at the bottom of the canvas is a large hand holding a pipe. It comes from outside the canvas, presumably belonging to the artist.

Immediately, we get an understanding of a photo-influenced composition. The figures act as compositional devices rather than subjects. As in a Rothko painting, Bonnard’s family members become strategically placed shapes that support an abstract harmony.

The perspective of the artist’s own hand and pipe is not a view Bonnard would ever have had before his canvas, but only if he put his hand before the camera lens. There is also radical foreshortening of the figures in space, making the painting almost graphic, illustrative or claustrophobic—we are contained in the space with them. This is the cropping and lighting of a photograph.

Sure enough, Bonnard primarily photographed his family and immediate circle of friends at home or during summer days in the countryside, examples of which abound in the exhibit, many strikingly similar to the scene in the painting. The eye of the camera, as it seems, is a contagious and invasive visual filter. It didn’t take even a decade to alter artists’ sense of space.

Walking through the exhibit, these moments reoccur and overlap: we see photographs that look like studies for paintings, paintings that bring together surrounding photographs, sketches and prints filtered through a camera lens. To these artists, photography was still a mimetic medium, used to better understand their paintings—to clarify a perspective, to study the shape of a figure or the dimensional accuracy of a mirror’s reflection.

Photography was initially frowned upon by critics, which made the artist’s reserved about revealing their work with it, which is perhaps why most of these photographs have never before been on exhibit. It is interesting, though, that even within this exhibition we start to see a certain superfluity of the paintings, not the photographs. However beautiful the paintings are, the act of painting what is captured in the photograph becomes redundant.

Breitner’s photographs, among the others in the show, are in fact more compelling than his paintings. A pioneer of street photography, he focused on the city as a visual resource: his street scenes of carriages, canals, sand carters and mill workers, construction and urban bustle, are some of the most moving images on display.

In the work of Vuillard, the marriage of painting and early photography becomes almost seamless. His photographs of family and friends, posing in the mundane theater of quiet existence, sit alongside his paintings of domestic moments. They inform one another, communicating to its audience the artist’s world and vision. The works in this room serve also as nice companions to similar Vuillards currently on view in the National Gallery of Art’s “Small French Paintings” exhibit.

“Snapshots” comes at a unique time, as Kodak files for bankruptcy and digital photography poises to monopolize the industry, leaving traditional film with almost no place in contemporary culture. But just as oil paints took the place of tempera and egg-based paints in the 15th century, the takeover of digital photography does not negate the impact of the precedent set by film. The introduction of photography altered our perceptions of our surroundings, but it took a group of painters to reveal the potential of its beauty.

Exhibiting the works among this subset of Post-Impressionists showcases an important development within a movement that is often difficult to pin down, concentrating the significance of the exhibition as well as the unity of these artists. These works seem in many ways like the sparks that set off the explosion of 20th century art. And yet here they hang, delicate, pensive and ethereal, as if standing on the precipice of an endless free-fall without thinking to look down.

“Snapshots: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” is on view at The Phillips Collection through May 6, 2012. For more information visit PhillipsCollection.org

Ari Post •

Nestled like an egg in a courtyard of high-rises and apartment buildings just off Dupont Circle sits Gold Leaf Studios. A 10,000-square-foot carriage house built in 1903 by Evalyn Walsh McLean, the building stands as an urban anomaly — one of those small architectural wonders that momentarily suspends reality when first seen. Its stucco walls and adobe tile roof recall something of the Old West, as if at any moment a cowboy-capped young stablehand will swing open the heavy wooden door and wonder aloud what sort of business a confused looking man in strange, foreign clothes has with the boss.

But the traditions at Gold Leaf Studios date much further back than the old west. And the boss, William B. Adair, a master gilder, frame historian and catch-all depository for aesthetic and historical idiosyncrasies from here to Byzantium, knows a little more than your average rancher.

Adair is among a small handful of international authorities on frame fabrication, conservation and the nearly extinct art of gilding: applying fine gold leaf to the surfaces of paintings, wood, frames or anything else you could possibly conceive (Martha Stewart did it to pumpkins — Adair taught her how). He has employed his expertise extensively with every major museum in the city and consults with gallerists, architectural firms and private collectors throughout the world. His eyes look not into a work of art from the outside, but out from the artwork into the world it reflects.

Walking into the studio, you are greeted by a flurry of activity and projects, which it becomes clear is a reflection of Adair himself. His five studio assistants occupy every dimension of the crammed and cavernous workshop, wielding brushes, cotton swabs and an arsenal of unidentifiable tools that date back to the Renaissance. Indeed, the gilding techniques employed at the studio are of an age-old craft that has remained unchanged since the Late Middle Ages

“Man has worked with gold as long as it’s been around,” says Adair. “Gilding, in fact, is the third oldest occupation in history — behind prostitution and advertising.”

As with the other two oldest professions, there are varying techniques for gilding. But the oldest and most common form is a process called water gilding, which Adair employs exclusively at Gold Leaf Studios. After first applying layers of gesso to linen or wood — for a painting or a frame — the gilder then applies a layer of clay and glue, called bole, to help the small thin sheets of gold leaf adhere. The applied gold is then burnished and can be lightly manipulated. For a textured, dynamic surface, such as embossed vines wrapped about a picture frame, warm gesso can be carefully ladled upon the surface to create the patterns before laying the gold leaf, a process called pastiglia.

Examples of gold leaf abound in museums and buildings around the District, perhaps most prominent displayed in the National Gallery of Art’s permanent collection of 13th and 14th century Italian paintings, which is all but overrun by brilliant gold leaf altarpieces. “The National Gallery is resplendent with examples of Renaissance gilding,” says Adair. “There’s really nothing like it in the area.”

The collection’s few paintings by the Italian master Duccio (about 1260 – 1319) illuminate the ethereal splendor of gold leaf, as well as the sweep of humanist philosophy at the heart of Renaissance. (But that history is for another day.)

Adair began his long tenure with framing and gilding rather fortuitously. After studying fine art at the University of Maryland, he found work with the National Portrait Gallery. “I was hired to work in the exhibits department,” he says. “And they put me in charge of framing. Of course, one thing led to another, as it goes, and in 1982, I left to found Gold Leaf Studios.”

He tells the story like a shrug, undermining the inevitable mad passion that evidently took him over. This is not an occupation one just happens to fall into, like business administration. Adair’s multifaceted work requires him to be a historian, anthropologist, diligent researcher, tedious craftsman and sharp intellectual — usually all at once. He can distinguish periods and demographics in history from the geometric flourish on a strip of wood lining a painting that most of us would entirely disregard.

“But that is precisely the job of the frame,” he says. “If the frame jumps out at you or feels incongruous to the artwork, it isn’t doing its job. It’s a little bit like God — if it’s doing everything right, most people won’t even notice that it’s doing anything. In the Middle Ages, it was said that an empty niche in a cathedral is where God dwells. They were often left empty intentionally — like an empty frame can stand for an unspoken wonder otherwise within its borders.”

His history with gilding began in 1975, when the Smithsonian awarded him a grant to travel to Europe to learn about tools and techniques from the few remaining master gilders working in the Renaissance tradition. Working back and forth between these interwoven ancient crafts, Adair found his calling.

The year after he founded Gold Leaf Studios, Adair mounted the first ever exhibition of American frames, titled “The Frame In America, 1700 – 1900.” Along with the exhibition, which was sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, he produced a catalogue that is still regarded as an invaluable reference for American frame history. (The book, titled after the exhibit, is available at Blurb.com.) In 1995, he curated a follow-up exhibition, “The Frame In America, 1860 – 1960,” which traveled around the country through the Mid-Atlantic Arts Alliance for five years.

In 1991, the American Academy in Rome awarded Adair’s achievements with the Rome Prize in Design, wherein he spent six months further immersed in the elusive study of the origins of frame design. He is a founding member of the Society of Gilders and a member of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. The list of accolades, acclaim, professional anecdotes and associations stretches on like the scrolls of Ancient Alexandria, but talking to him, all that seems to matter is the craft and the history.

“Back in the 13th and 14th centuries,” he says, “as much time and money was spent on the frame as the artwork. They were custom designed to fit each individual painting.”

A well-designed frame is integral to illuminating a sound work of art. And Adair has made it his life’s work to preserve these traditions, while reintroducing them to the cultural market.

At his studio, Adair develops new frame designs and reproduces period frames. Each frame is handmade to enhance and relate to the work it holds. Through the years, he has amassed a repertoire of frame designs that pays homage to historical periods and styles around the world.

Meanwhile, in his conservation department, he preserves and repairs antique frames, gilded objects and furniture better than any in the trade. Since its founding, Adair has held his studio to museum standards of conservation, and it has long been a member of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic Artistic Works. “We’re committed here to combining contemporary techniques with age-old and proven methods,” he says. “Nothing is more important than preserving the historic and aesthetic value of each piece, whether we’re working with an old family portrait from the turn of the century or a Cézanne watercolor.”

Adair also hosts regular seminars throughout the country and internationally on gilding, finishing techniques and frame history. Instructing students, hobbyists and field professionals, he is a regular at the annual Frame Convention in Las Vegas, and is frequently booking classes at the Washington Design Center, just off L’Enfant Plaza.

For several years, Adair has been in partnership with Montgomery College in Silver Spring, holding seminars for educators on gilding practices. “My goal right now is to train the trainers,” he says. “I want teachers to be familiar with the art of gilding so that it can be reintroduced as a viable art.”

Through these seminars, he hopes to combat the decline of trade skills in education in the U.S. But despite what Adair calls, “a lack of artisanship in the world,” he has begun to notice an increasing interest in these forgotten arts.

“Along with the digital revolution,” he says, “there has been a parallel movement in homegrown craft revival. It has taken many forms. You see it in the local food markets and in the growing interest in vintage and custom goods. People want to know where their products come from, their histories, and they want to know that they are made well.”

Adair has found a unique companion for championing this cause in Prince Charles.

The Prince of Wales has long noticed this cultural and utilitarian deficit and called on Adair to consult in his international mission, The Prince of Wales Foundation’s Artisan Training Program. “From tiles, to woodwork, to gilding, The prince has a keen interest in reviving lost arts,” says Adair. “When he found out I was teaching those things here, he contacted me.”

Adair’s last seminar took place at the Intersections D.C. American Arts Festival, through Atlas Performing Arts Center, on U Street. On the weekend of Feb. 27, Adair’s staff hosted two free interactive seminars, demonstrating and teaching the application of gold leaf to mirror frames.

If you missed that one, there are always more to come. Adair’s latest exhibition is currently on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, the museum for the College of William in Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., which he will accompany with a lecture and gilding seminar on Friday, March 16. Invited by Scholar-in-Residence John T. Spike, a noted art historian, author and lecturer specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, Adair has put together a show of “The 20 greatest frames from my private collection, representing the history of frames from Byzantine to modern.”

Accompanying the exhibition are the paintings of artist Kay Jackson, Adair’s wife and collaborator. An acclaimed painter whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a commission by President Clinton for the official White House holiday card in 1997, Jackson’s work has a long history of addressing environmental concerns such as endangered species, pollution and loss of habitat. Jackson frequently employs gold leaf techniques in her work, which she learned through her husband, and for the coming exhibition she has created gilded icons of endangered species, drawing parallels to the endangered craft of gilding.

A technically brilliant artist, Jackson has made more than just paintings in these gold leaf works. She has constructed intricate, cryptic, glowing panels and boxes, encasing the endangered animals — from crayfish and salmon to the spotted owl — in armatures of gold and surrounded by symbols that span eras and iconologies.

Jackson custom designs the frames for each work, inspired by 14th century panel paintings. She herself observes that her boxes are like 16th century cabinets of curiosities, those assembled by wealthy European collectors to celebrate and catalogue their knowledge of the world. Yet despite these callings upon the past, the works look entirely contemporary. Her pieces depict both the fragility and resiliency of our ecosystems and species, and connect the vulnerability of our planet with the delicacy of our artistic culture.
“Creating art is an act of faith,” says Jackson. “With each passing year it takes an increasing commitment to continue what most people think is a spontaneous and blissful activity.”

The sentiment is echoed in the work of her husband. Adair works daily to pull a near-extinct art form back from the fate of obscurity, just as Jackson puts her artistry to work to combat environmental threats. It is a bond that, in many ways, must move beyond love and into a commitment that bridges more than just the distance between two persons. They are committed to eight centuries of artistic traditions, the preservation of cultural heritage, life and ideas. As a gilder lays each feather-like sheet of gold leaf delicately to the frame, they approach their work with a focus that must be narrow and unwavering, but with a vision that sees into and beyond the picture as a whole.

For information about William B. Adair and Gold Leaf Studios, visit www.GoldLeafStudios.com. To get information on Adair’s exhibit and lecture at the Muscarelle Museum of Art and to sign up for his gilding seminar, visit web.WM.edu/Muscarelle. For information about other workshops hosted by Adair on gilding, frame history, or inquiries regarding framing or consultation, call Gold Leaf Studios at 202-833-2440. [gallery ids="100519,119175" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

Just a few blocks from the Dupont Circle and McPherson Square Metro stations, the art galleries around 14th Street, between U Street and Logan Circle, hold some of the strongest collections of contemporary artwork in the city. Original, effusive, tasteful and energetic, the community of galleries in this area hosts work by new and emerging local artists as well as nationally and internationally renowned artisans. It binds communities and creates ambitious dialogues not only between the viewers and the works but among the artists. The common thread throughout the galleries, on top of its contemporary bent, is the impressive quality of the work. From the photographs of Annie Leibovitz to interactive sculptures with their own idiosyncratic attitudes, the works on view at these galleries should not be missed. And they’re all within a 15-minute walking radius. The weather is about to turn warmer, and there’s no better way to celebrate a nice Friday evening like a walk down the 14th Street galleries. Here’s what’s coming up.

Hamiltonian Gallery

Hamiltonian will feature the work of gallery artists Jenny Mullins and Sarah Knobel, March 17 – April 14, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 17, from 7 to 9 p.m. The drawings and paintings of Jenny Mullins, who recently completed a Fulbright Nehru grant in India researching spiritual tourism and traditional Buddhist Thangka painting techniques, explore the Western adherence to Eastern spirituality, while exploring notions of commercial mythology and consumer culture. They are “a world of low-budget mysticism . . . consumable, disposable and filled with the empty calories we crave.” The works are — perhaps ironically — gorgeous, engaging and meticulously rendered. The video art of Knobel explores individuality when forced through the sieve of cultural assumptions. The photos and videos in this exhibit are tied together by the use of origami, wherein Knobel focuses on its connections to ritual and spirituality.
www.HamiltonianGallery.com

Gallery Plan B

Five artists, all working with metal or metallic mediums in painting, etching, photography and sculpture, are featured in Gallery Plan B’s latest exhibition, “Precious Metals,” on view now through April 8. Andrew Wapinski layers gold and silver leaf with acrylic, graphite, pigments and resin resulting in substantial panels with visual and physical depth. Using photos of local scenes, Shelley Carr etches copper, then cuts and composes the copper pieces within a composition. Filmmaker Donna Cameron shifts focus of her film to the subject matter of photographs applied to aluminum surfaces. Mike McClung burns through layers of vellum into heavy paper underneath and treats the burned edges with metal leafs and layers them into whimsical patterns. Well known local artist Robert Cole will round out the group with a few of his whimsical, stylized steel sculptures. In addition, on the weekend of March 24-25, Tina Bark will be showcasing her jewelry designs from 1 to 4 p.m. each day.
www.GalleryPlanB.com

Project 4 Gallery

Rhode Island-based artist Paul Myoda’s latest works will be on view in the exhibition “Glittering Machines” at Project 4, from March 24 – April 28. A Yale MFA graduate, who has been awarded grants from the NEA, the Warhol Foundation and Howard Foundation, Myoda has been developing this series of interactive sculptures for several years now, out of his studio near Brown University, where he works as an assistant professor in sculpture and new media. “Glittering Machines,” writes Myoda, “are modular, kinetic, interactive, and illuminating sculptures. Each sculpture behaves in different ways depending upon the proximity and behavior of the viewer. Taking cues from various bioluminescent animals and insects, these behaviors range from attraction to repulsion, camouflage to revelation, predictability to spontaneity.”
www.Project4Gallery.com

Hemphill Fine Arts

“Gun Shy,” an exhibition by photographer Colby Caldwell, will open March 24 at Hemphill, with a public reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 24. Caldwell’s photographs of depleted shotgun shells, abandoned buck blinds, found birds, feathers and abstractions derived from a corrupted film frame highlight his preoccupation with the relationship between photography and memory. “A photography embeds time, freezes it and carries it forward,” says Caldwell. His works, inspired concomitantly by the changing landscape of his rural Maryland home and by a corrupted frame of Super 8mm film of landscapes shot while traveling, conjure feelings of nostalgia and loss, serving as “epitaphs for the now antiquated film age that Caldwell himself mourns.” These beautifully alluring depictions of things discarded and left behind are captivating.
www.HemphillFineArts.com

Adamson Gallery

Master printer David Adamson, who lives and works locally out of his Adamson Gallery, was the man who made the archival pigment prints for photographer Annie Leibovitz’s landmark exhibition, “Pilgrimage,” now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (for our coverage of that exhibition, visit www.Georgetowner.com and visit our Arts & Society page). If you would like to spend time with Leibovitz’s photographs outside of the crowded museum atmosphere and in a more intimate setting, Adamson is currently exhibiting a selection of her photographs in his gallery through March 24. This is a unique opportunity to get some “alone time” with one of the most lauded living artists working today.
www.AdamsonGallery.Jimdo.com [gallery ids="100521,119226,119185,119219,119212,119196,119205" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

Museum exhibitions are not always user-friendly. There is an occasional air of intimidation or coldness about them, as if you need a cultural license in order to appreciate the exhibited work.

Even as a lifelong student of the arts, I sometimes feel like an embarrassed school kid who didn’t do his homework upon entering particularly esoteric exhibits. It’s frustrating. Sometimes, it’s best just to let your mind go and consume art the way a dog eats a bone —ravenously, ecstatically, intuitively, palpably — without reading a dissertation on relational aesthetics or mid-century spatial polarity as interpreted by the German avant-garde. This is not to say we don’t appreciate the analytical endeavors of artistic traditions. Just as every meal should not be a course in molecular gastronomy, we sometimes simply want to eat some good lasagna, see some artwork that we feel with our hearts and walk away satisfied.

The current shows at the Hirshhorn work both ways. “Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space” shines light (literally) on a rich and rarely displayed modern Latin American art movement, and it’s also the most fun you’ll have in a museum this season. Another featured exhibit, “Dark Matters,” is equally satisfying, bringing together works from the museum’s collection that draw upon the associations and implications of darkness, physically, psychologically and otherwise.

“Suprasensorial” presents large-scale installations by five artists who abandoned traditional art in favor of ephemeral and subjective forms based on light, color, motion and space between the 1950s and early 1970s. Until recently, these artists have received little attention in the United States, where audiences are more familiar with light works by such American artists as Dan Flavin (also on display in the Hirshhorn) and Doug Wheeler. “Suprasensorial” shows us how these Latin American artists independently and contemporaneously devised comparable methods and effects.

What immediately jumps out is the difference of warmth between the Latin American and American intention of working with light. The “Suprasensorial” artists’ formal and social motives were nearly one in the same, working to involve the viewer in the experience of their work, whereas their American counterparts were chasing a more polarizing, post-modern agenda whose intentions seem far more erudite and conceptual. By choosing light, color and space as their materials and configuring them in ways that required participation from the viewer, these Latin American artists worked to engage the viewer completely, effecting a significant change in the customary dynamic of looking at art. And it’s awfully enjoyable.

The first major installation in the exhibit, Julio Le Parc’s “Light in Movement,” sets the tone. Walking into an enclosed passageway, a dim spotlight about the strength of an old light bulb shines light against a wall of polished metal squares suspended on threads, flickering light about the room. There is a mirror behind the squares, and you see yourself between and amidst the rippling squares of light as if underwater, momentarily free of burdens and floating within these fabricated fissures of space.

In the next installation, Carlos Cruz-Diez brings you into a world defined by color relationships. Like stepping into a Joseph Albers or Mark Rothko painting, Cruz-Diez explores the ways in which color activates space, expands perception and elicits emotions. Upon entering his room, viewers move through spaces of vibrant blue, magenta and green light, whose hues appear almost tangible against the walls and floors, while the boundaries of their interactions remain tantalizingly elusive like a horizon.

Farther along the lines, you get to lie down and listen to Jimi Hendrix, run through a field of nylon string and gaze up at a white neon pattern that looks like the tread marks of a renegade shooting star. Throughout the exhibit, what is striking is how aware you are of fellow viewers. The experience is effected entirely by those that surround you. Following me was a young mother with her sandy-haired son, no older than three. Watching his eyes light up as he ran between the luminescent room of Cruz-Diez, laughing and jumping as his skin changed between hues of purple and blue, was the highlight of my experience. I left feeling light and inspired, wondering when I could return and whom I wanted to bring with me.

Meanwhile, the “Dark Matters” exhibit, while it may seem like an ominous and joyless endeavor, was a congenial and thought-provoking experience. It never asks us to embrace any great darkness within ourselves — it just shows us its potential. The darkness of a chalkboard, of the human psyche, of racial and social barriers, the depths of the sea, apocrypha, even the style and warmth of darkness, are all enveloped within this exhibit, among with much more. From Frank Stella’s stark geometric canvases, to Thomas Eakins’s photographic anatomy studies, to the bracingly lifelike sculptures of Ron Mueck and the trend-setting “surrogates” of Allan McCollum, there is much to take in, all of it engaging.

The curators at the Hirshhorn has put together a series of exhibits that could draw interest from an infinitely varied audience, an increasingly difficult thing to do in the visual arts these days. For that, if nothing else, we should thank them. They have drawn light from the darkness and brought forth an energy that is often alluded to but rarely displayed. [gallery ids="100593,100594" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • April 5, 2012

Spring has hit us, hard and fast. In Washington, that comes with a lot of baggage: the National Cherry Blossom Festival swells the streets with tourists from across the world, the spring gala season fills our calendars to the brim, our retail districts overflow with throngs of shoppers eager to replenish their warm-weather wardrobe. Our city parks are also rediscovered. Having lain dormant through the whippings of winter, they spring up with joggers, ball players and picnickers about as fast as with dandelions.

For a good many of us, it’s time to pull the bicycles out of storage and widen the horizons of our recreational and commuting potentials. If you talk to a local cyclist, very little can refresh the senses like the rush of cruising through warm spring winds along the Potomac or through the Mall. Whether biking along the Tidal Basin or the Capital Crescent, the Washington & Old Dominion Trail (W&OD) or Rock Creek Park trails, the very nature of the ride is a signifier of spring.

Unfortunately, those of us who aren’t on bikes don’t always share the elation, and that disconnect can often result in some ugly run-ins—literally. Every spring, bicycle accidents increase significantly, a result of both heightened automotive, pedestrian and bicycle traffic. While it’s easy to blame it all on the cyclists—and in many cases, they are indeed the ones to blame—it is worth trying to understand their situation.

Cyclists are at the bottom of the traffic food chain. Too slow and fragile to share the road properly with vehicles and too fast and precarious to ride along pedestrians on the sidewalk, bikers hunt for safe riding areas in the city like a scavenger: winding around the neighborhood blocks to avoid the congested streets, shooting into pockets of open road when they present themselves, compensating for the cars that never see them and the pedestrians that don’t pay them attention. Even most bike lanes in the city are sandwiched between traffic lanes and parallel parking spots. Bikers are almost constantly at risk when riding through the city.

As a response to the increase of bikers and walkers and runners, the Metropolitan Police Department has kicked off its Street Smart Campaign, an annual mission enforcing pedestrians, cycling and driving laws.

Street Smart is an annual public education, awareness and behavioral change campaign in the Washington area, responding to the challenges of pedestrian and bicycle safety since 2002 through public awareness and law enforcement efforts. The Street Smart program emphasizes education of motorists and pedestrians through mass media as a companion to the efforts of state and local governments and agencies to build safer streets and sidewalks, enforce laws, and train better drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

The program is coordinated by the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (TPB), and is supported by federal funds made available through state governments and funding from some TPB-member jurisdictions. Throughout the past week, police have been enforcing traffic laws at major city areas and intersections—they were focused on 14th and U Streets last Tuesday and cleaned up good.

Arlington County has also gotten on board with its own campaign, PAL (Predictable, Alert, Lawful).

Whether in your car, atop your bike or on your feet, now is a good time to be aware of the road—not only to avoid citations but to prevent injuries or worse. And for the sake of greater good, let us all agree not to bring back roller-blades.

Ari Post • April 4, 2012

Canal Square and Beyond

Nestled in a brick courtyard at M and 31st Streets, walking into Canal Square on the evening of a “First Friday” feels like stumbling into the best social club you never knew existed. The four galleries clustered in the space are teeming with admirers, friends, patrons and chance roamers, peering about the galleries or lounging in the benches just outside, smiling and chatting. And what’s more—they’re chatting about art! The galleries are also local institutions—Parish Gallery, Moca DC and Alla Rogers Gallery have all recently celebrated their twenty-year anniversaries. Just north of Canal Square, The Old Print Gallery and the Ralls Collection have also made their mark on the city’s artistic community (the Ralls Collection even used to reside in Canal Square). Among the most longstanding and respected galleries in the city, this cluster of art venues embodies what’s best about Georgetown: history, community, style and beauty, with an eye for the contemporary.

Parish Gallery

Internationally recognized African painter, Bethel Aniaku, will be at Parish Gallery through April 17, in an exhibit titled “Instinct of Desire.” The cultural explored in these paintings include a blend of historical, literal, and artistic elements, which aim to reunite the viewer with their own culture and origins. Aniaku, by comparison, honors the trade of his own carpenter ancestors by using wood as the base for his paintings. His compositions play with color, light, space and mixed media, relying on instinct more than any direct intention, as if the painting was not being made but found as an artifact that has always existed.

Opening April 20, Parish Gallery will open its next exhibit, showcasing the artworks of husband and wife Christine and Richmond Jones, in a show titled “Two Views/One Vision.” Starting out as an illustrator and designer, Christine’s oil paint and pastel works represent the textures and colors, people and places in which she finds inspiration. Richmond, who also began his career as a graphic designer, found a new creative direction as a “transparent watercolor painter.” Since then, both artists have been exhibited in numerous juried exhibitions around the country and received many awards for their individual and collective work.

www.ParishGallery.com

The Ralls Collection

The Ralls Collection is in the midst of a powerful group exhibition of gallery artists, which runs through June 15. It is difficult to encapsulate the significance of The Ralls Collection to Washington’s artistic community, much in the same way it is hard to grasp the broad archive of substantial artwork that has passed through the gallery since its opening over 20 years ago. The work present in the gallery’s current exhibit showcases a remarkable collection of beautiful contemporary artwork with a clear vision and impeccable taste. Many of the artists Ralls chose for the exhibition have been with the gallery since it’s beginning, and some are welcome additions. David Richardson, a personal favorite of this author whose show at Ralls last year garnered tremendous national attention (including a feature in the New York Times), uses planes of bold colors and textures, recalling landscape both foreign and familiar, contained yet effusive.

www.RallsCollection.com

Moca DC

Moca DC stands up for the little guy, in more ways than one. A nonprofit, part of the gallery’s mission is to be “Open to all artists all the time,” offering opportunities to artists at every stage of their careers. Moca gives more exhibits to emerging, first-time and beginning artists than almost any in the city. The gallery is also devoted to the tradition of figurative art, including three annual exhibits dedicated to the nude human form (this July, keep an eye out for the exhibit, “A Celebration of the Figure”). This April, the gallery will mark its twenty-year anniversary by expanding its scope to include three juried exhibits of figurative works a year, the first of which will focus on the interpretation of the figure within contemporary art practice. Moca’s 20th Anniversary Show, which will hold an opening reception on April 6, is also on display.

www.MocaDC.org

The Old Print Gallery

“Blossom DC,” the latest exhibit at The Old Print Gallery, is inspired by the 100 year anniversary of the gift of the cherry blossoms from Japan to Washington. The exhibit celebrates the beauty and youthful energy of spring’s blossoms, featuring a large number of prints by local D.C. artists coupled with a selection of works by contemporary New York City artists and several early 20th century printmakers. Established in 1971, The Old Print Gallery has long been known for its wide selection of antique prints and maps, and has expanded recently into the world of contemporary printmaking. The gallery also hosts printmaking workshops and demonstrations, establishing itself as a source of inspiration and information for print artists, enthusiasts and new admirers alike.

www.OldPrintGallery.com

Alla Rogers Gallery

The Alla Rogers Gallery, founded in 1990, focuses on the accessible contemporary art from Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The Gallery has curated hundreds of exhibitions and led artist exchanges between American and Eastern European artists. Currently on display is the artwork of Alla Rogers herself, who recently exhibited 42 of her own paintings in Kiev at the National Fine Art Museum of Ukraine. Her works on canvas plays out like the geography of memories, folding and falling into one another. These are not works you want to miss. [gallery ids="100714,120510,120468,120502,120496,120477,120490,120484" nav="thumbs"]