Richard Selden • April 20, 2016

Urban Pace, a D.C.-based firm that provides real estate developers with sales, marketing and advisory services on new residential projects, will become part of the Long & Foster group.

The partnership, representing an investment in Urban Pace by the Long & Foster Companies — the parent of Long & Foster Real Estate, the nation’s largest privately owned real estate firm — was announced today.

“In regions like Washington, D.C., urban developments — whether they’re high-rise or townhouse-style condos — are thriving, and our team at Long & Foster recognized the opportunities for our company’s and our agents’ growth by partnering with a firm like Urban Pace,” said Jeffrey S. Detwiler, president and COO of the Long & Foster Companies.

“In addition to our base office in Washington, D.C., we now operate in New York City and Philadelphia as well,” said newly appointed CEO of Urban Pace Lynn Hackney, previously the firm’s president. “We’ve noticed that several successful firms using our business model — working directly with real estate developers — have been strengthened substantially by their affiliations with large residential real estate brokerage firms.”

Urban Pace will continue to operate under its same brand and team at the current office location at 1919 14th St. NW.

Richard Selden • April 18, 2016

Billing itself as a “full-service, boutique fitness studio,” the first BLAST outside Georgia — just west of Georgetown, at 2311 M St. NW — held its grand opening March 19.

The brand’s backstory will sound familiar to many.

In the course of carrying her second child, founder Missi Wolf put on weight — a lot of weight. Five feet tall, after giving birth she weighed 206 pounds and had 34 percent body fat. Her doctor categorized her as morbidly obese and borderline diabetic.

That was motivating. Wolf immediately began researching, studying and experimenting in order to create her own personal fitness program, which enabled her to lose 100 pounds in two years and get her body fat out of the danger zone (in the ‘after’ photograph on the website, Wolf has also become a blonde).

That crash program evolved into BLAST, an acronym for Balanced Level of Aerobic and Strength Training. The three parts of the program are classes, metabolic testing and nutritional coaching. Wolf opened her first studio in Atlanta in 2008.

Among the five instructors at the D.C. location are Christa A., a cheerleader for the football team with the objectionable name, whose power song is “Anything” by Calvin Harris. To read more instructor profiles, schedule a class and connect with the BLAST community, visit theblastlife.com.

Richard Selden • April 8, 2016

A National Historic Landmark, the Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side made an about-face in 2007.
The one-time drill hall for New York’s aristocracy — with interiors by Tiffany, Stanford White and the Herter Brothers, among others — had become best known as a cavernous venue for high-end antiques shows.

That year, the massive brick castle became the home of Park Avenue Armory, a nonprofit that undertook the building’s restoration and began to program performances and contemporary art installations. The Royal Shakespeare Company came for six weeks one summer and the Merce Cunningham Company danced its last there. Visitors listened in the dark to “The Murder of Crows,” a sound piece by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; swung on giant swings amid dangling sheets at Ann Hamilton’s “The Event of a Thread”; and marveled at Paul McCarthy’s pornographic take on Snow White, “WS.”

Almost singlehandedly, the Armory has made the Upper East Side hip. (The next major installation, “Martin Creed: The Back Door,” opens June 8.) Its avant-garde events have been so successful that last year the New York Art, Antique & Jewelry Show, an annual rental of $300,000 or so, was evicted; the 2016 show will be at Pier 94 in November.

But two of the most prestigious shows of their kind in the world are still Armory tenants. The Winter Antiques Show will return in January 2017. This weekend, April 7 to 10, more than 200 of the top U.S. and international vendors of rare books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera will be at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.

A short walk up Park Avenue from the Armory is the Asia Society Museum, between 70th and 71st streets, where “Kamakura: Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan” is on view through May 8. The exhibition focuses on sculpture from the politically turbulent Kamakura period (1185 to 1333), when artists and their workshops were commissioned by the warrior class to create Buddhist icons of exceptional realism, power and technical excellence.

Meanwhile, the big news on the Upper East Side is the opening, last month, of the Met Breuer. With the Whitney Museum of Art in a new Renzo Piano building in the Meatpacking District (at the southern terminus of the High Line), the Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken over the old Whitney, at Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a Brutalist icon designed by Marcel Breuer.

The inaugural exhibition at what this writer calls the Metney (until I hear from both museums’ lawyers) is “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” running through Sept. 4. Under the direction of Sheena Wagstaff, named the Met’s chair of modern and contemporary art, a new department, in 2012, the show’s curators selected nearly 200 works — by contemporary artists and by big names from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg — that were never completed or “partake of a non finito … aesthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended.”

About eight blocks away, at what is now identified as the Met Fifth Avenue, the top-billed special exhibition is “Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France.” Closing May 15, the display of 80 paintings and pastels is said to be the painter’s first retrospective “in modern times.”

Finally, across Fifth Avenue from the “Big Met,” the exquisite Neue Galerie on the corner of 86th Street is the sole U.S. venue for “Munch and Expressionism,” through June 13. Organized with the Munch Museum in Oslo, the exhibition will explore the mutual influences among Edvard Munch and his German and Austrian contemporaries, including Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.
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Richard Selden • April 6, 2016

A National Historic Landmark, the Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side made an about-face in 2007.

The one-time drill hall for New York’s aristocracy — with interiors by Tiffany, Stanford White and the Herter Brothers, among others — had become best known as a cavernous venue for high-end antiques shows.

That year, the massive brick castle became the home of Park Avenue Armory, a nonprofit that undertook the building’s restoration and began to program performances and contemporary art installations. The Royal Shakespeare Company came for six weeks one summer and the Merce Cunningham Company danced its last there. Visitors listened in the dark to “The Murder of Crows,” a sound piece by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; swung on giant swings amid dangling sheets at Ann Hamilton’s “The Event of a Thread”; and marveled at Paul McCarthy’s pornographic take on Snow White, “WS.”

Almost singlehandedly, the Armory has made the Upper East Side hip. (The next major installation, “Martin Creed: The Back Door,” opens June 8.) Its avant-garde events have been so successful that last year the New York Art, Antique & Jewelry Show, an annual rental of $300,000 or so, was evicted; the 2016 show will be at Pier 94 in November.

But two of the most prestigious shows of their kind in the world are still Armory tenants. The Winter Antiques Show will return in January 2017. This weekend, April 7 to 10, more than 200 of the top U.S. and international vendors of rare books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera will be at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.

A short walk up Park Avenue from the Armory is the Asia Society Museum, between 70th and 71st Streets, where “Kamakura: Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan” is on view through May 8. The exhibition focuses on sculpture from the politically turbulent Kamakura period (1185 to 1333), when artists and their workshops were commissioned by the warrior class to create Buddhist icons of exceptional realism, power and technical excellence.

Meanwhile, the big news on the Upper East Side is the opening, last month, of the Met Breuer. With the Whitney Museum of Art in a new Renzo Piano building in the Meatpacking District (at the southern terminus of the High Line), the Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken over the old Whitney, at Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a Brutalist icon designed by Marcel Breuer.

The inaugural exhibition at what this writer calls the Metney (until I hear from both museums’ lawyers) is “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” running through Sept. 4. Under the direction of Sheena Wagstaff, named the Met’s chair of modern and contemporary art, a new department, in 2012, the show’s curators selected nearly 200 works — by contemporary artists and by big names from Rembrandt to Rauschenberg — that were never completed or “partake of a non finito … aesthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended.”

About eight blocks away, at what is now identified as the Met Fifth Avenue, the top-billed special exhibition is “Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France.” Closing May 15, the display of 80 paintings and pastels is said to be the painter’s first retrospective “in modern times.”

Finally, across Fifth Avenue from the “Big Met,” the exquisite Neue Galerie on the corner of 86th Street is the sole U.S. venue for “Munch and Expressionism,” through June 13. Organized with the Munch Museum in Oslo, the exhibition explores the mutual influences among Edvard Munch and his German and Austrian contemporaries, including Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.
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Richard Selden • March 30, 2016

Ears pricked up at the press preview for the Kennedy Center’s 2015-2016 season this morning when the stodgy-but-stirring performing arts palace announced its first artistic director of hip-hop culture. Q-Tip, 45, a former member of A Tribe Called Quest, was born Jonathan Davis in Harlem. He grew up in St. Albans, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens (the Q in Q-Tip stands for Queens) that was home to Basie, Miles and Coltrane and a couple guys who played baseball in one of the other boroughs, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson. When he converted to Islam, he changed his name to Kamaal Ibn John Fareed.

Tip (as his friends call him) has been nominated for a Grammy Award six times, winning Best Dance Recording in 2006 for “Galvanize,” with the Chemical Brothers. What’s the difference between hip-hop and rap? Rap is considered one element in hip-hop, a culture that embraces music, art, dance and fashion. But we’ll leave it to Tip to drop science on our ass starting this summer. Welcome to D.C.!

Richard Selden •

Several great Americans were born into slavery. One way the nation pays tribute to such personages is on our currency. We are likely to see Harriet Tubman on the $10 or $20 bill in a few years. And in 2017, the former home in Anacostia of Tubman’s fellow abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, will appear on quarters.

Douglass, who lived in the hilltop house he named Cedar Hill from 1877 until his death in 1895, was known as the “Sage of Anacostia” and — both for his oratory and for his white mane — “the Lion of Cedar Hill.” Preserved by Douglass’s second wife, the property became Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in 1988.

Whether during Black History Month or when the nine-acre site is in bloom, a visit to Cedar Hill is one of D.C.’s most rewarding heritage experiences. The National Park Service offers ranger-guided tours of the restored house, furnished largely with original pieces, five times daily (reservations, made for a $1.50 fee at recreation.gov, are recommended).

The huge trees, terraced front lawn and woodsy backyard — where Douglass’s rustic stone hideaway, the “Growlery,” has been reconstructed — make it easy to imagine the rural Anacostia of the mid-1800s. The house’s builder and original owner was John Van Hook, one of the developers of an early, semi-successful suburb called Uniontown, aimed at Navy Yard workers (and from which Irish and African Americans were excluded).

Douglass purchased the house in 1877 upon his appointment by Rutherford B. Hayes as U.S. Marshall for the District of Columbia. He served until 1881 and later became Minister to Haiti, appointed by Benjamin Harrison.

Speaking at the dedication of the Haitian Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Douglas said of the Haitian people: “It will ever be a matter of wonder and astonishment to thoughtful men, that a people in abject slavery, subject to the lash, and kept in ignorance of letters, as these slaves were, should have known enough, or had left in them enough manhood, to combine, to organize, and to select for themselves trusted leaders and with loyal hearts follow them into the jaws of death to obtain liberty.”

Writing and speaking about human rights — of blacks and, during the latter part of his life, of women — was Douglass’s calling. Born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught himself to read and write as an enslaved boy, a household servant in Baltimore.

At 20, while working as a ship caulker on the Baltimore docks, he escaped to New York City, married a free black woman, Anna Murray, and began to raise a family in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He soon became an agent of William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society and wrote the first of three autobiographies.

Still a fugitive from slavery, Douglass went on a speaking tour in Europe, returning to the U.S. after English friends purchased his freedom. In 1847, he launched an abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in Rochester, New York. Twenty-five years later, at 54, a prominent public figure who had advised Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, he and his family relocated to Washington, living at 316 A St. NE prior to buying the Anacostia estate.

A short film shown in the visitor center movingly tells his life-story, with graphic scenes of his treatment by a slave-breaker and winning cameos by actors playing Garrison, Tubman, Lincoln and John Brown. Several scenes were filmed in the house, including a confrontation between Douglass and his daughter over his decision to marry Helen Pitts, white and 20 years his junior.

There is an extensive selection of books by and about Douglass for all ages in the shop, notably the dual biography “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln” by Harvard professor John Stauffer.

After a climb of 85 outdoor steps from the visitor center (there is also a ramp), the tour enters the house from the front porch. Visitors get to look in on rooms downstairs and up, including the kitchen wing that Douglass added, converting the former kitchen into a large dining room in which to host his many visitors. Before or after the tour, the hilly grounds are open to explore.

When in Anacostia, another black history stop is the Anacostia Community Museum, founded by the Smithsonian in 1967 as a storefront museum in the Carver Theater, a 1940s movie house. Twenty years later, it moved to a new building near Fort Stanton Park. On Saturday, Feb. 27, at 2 p.m., the museum will host Aaron Reeder’s show, “Rhythm Café: The Life & Times of Sammy Davis Jr.”

For more information on the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, 1411 W St. SE, visit nps.gov/frdo or call 202-426-5961.

For more information on the Anacostia Community Museum, 1901 Fort Place SE, visit anacostia.si.edu or call 202-633-4820.
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Richard Selden •

Legendary below-ground jazz club Bohemian Caverns, a U Street mainstay, will close for good at the end of the month, when the current five-year lease expires.

Managing partner Omrao Brown, who owns the club, the restaurant Tap & Parlour above it and the nightclub Liv above that, made the decision to close the three venues with his partners — his brother Sashi and Jamal Starr — after two years of losses.

Brown’s group bought Bohemian Caverns from its former operator, Al Afshar, the building’s landlord. Their fractured relationship and the club’s complicated history, dating back to 1926, are described in an article by Michael J. West in this week’s City Paper.

The room’s unique cavernous décor is a relic of Club Crystal Caverns, which opened on New Year’s Eve 1932. During that era, it hosted such stars as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Later, in the classic years under the name Bohemian Caverns, from 1959 to 1968 (when it closed, a few months after the riots), John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Thelonious Monk, among others, performed.

Since reopening as Bohemian Caverns, the club has become a showcase for rising jazz artists and home to a 17-piece big band that plays every Monday. Recent setbacks have included the recession, a car crashing into the back of the building in 2013 and a negligence lawsuit filed last year in relation to an alleged sexual assault in 2012.

Richard Selden • March 18, 2016

It happened in Philadelphia: 56 men in breeches created a nation.

Then, 51 years later, it happened again. This time, it was 53 men in trousers. And what they created was … a flower show.

Actually, what they created in 1827 was the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The first public show, featuring the poinsettia’s American debut, came two years later. (In 1835, the society admitted women as voting members — long before the nation did.)

The descendent of that historic event, the Philadelphia Flower Show, the largest and longest-running indoor show in the world, now attracts more than 200,000 visitors over nine days. The 2016 show, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, ends this Sunday.

A Garden of Eden for plant-lovers — with award-winning specimens, lectures and vendors from around the world — the show is also a floral theme park that seems to grow Disney-er every year. Since this year’s theme is “Explore America: 100 Years of the National Park Service,” expect recreations of Yosemite, simulated Old Faithful eruptions and a Denali sled dog team. You can even “create your own Mount Rushmore floral headpiece.”

For details, and to reserve a garden tea or an early-morning private tour (weekdays only), visit theflowershow.com. Families with children should note that on closing day, Sunday, March 13, there will be a Flower Show Jamboree and a Teddy Bear Tea.

Prior to launching their kisses-and-hugs “With Love, Philadelphia” campaign, Visit Philadelphia’s slogan was “Philly’s More Fun When You Sleep Over.” With the Flower Show meriting a full day and three new museum exhibitions, it makes sense to get a room.

After a controversial legal and financial intervention, the Barnes Foundation galleries relocated from the suburban residence of Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951) to a new museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012. The move’s approval hinged in part on the exact reproduction of the unchanging salon-style display found in leafy Merion by the relatively few visitors who made it out there.

Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien created a large and spacious modern building for the Barnes in which the tiny recreated rooms are encased. In accordance with Barnes’s eccentric theories of art appreciation, African, Native American, Pennsylvania German and other sculpture and artifacts, including miscellaneous wrought-iron objects, share the walls with frame-to-frame masterpieces by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Modigliani (to name a few of Dr. Barnes’s favorites).

It is one of the most astounding museums in the world, now with the additional reason to visit of special exhibitions. Through May 9, the Barnes (which has 22 paintings by Pablo Picasso in its permanent collection) is hosting “Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change.” The show’s focus is the period surrounding and including World War I, during which Picasso — the “High Priest of Cubism” in the words of curator Simonetta Fraquelli — abruptly returned to a naturalistic style, continuing to alternate between Cubism and Neoclassicism.

A video illustrates how during the war Cubism was portrayed as anti-French (though the style’s co-creator, Georges Braque, was as French as could be and served at the front) and associated with the despised Germans.

Several blocks up the parkway from the Barnes, “International Pop” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 15. All the American stars are represented, of course: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, Ed Ruscha. But what makes the show an eye-opener are the works by what the text calls the “British forbears of Pop,” notably Edinburgh-born Eduardo Paolozzi and London-born Richard Hamilton, whose collages date to the 1950s (earlier, in Paolozzi’s case), and by artists from throughout Europe and from Argentina, Brazil and Japan.

Finally, across the Schuylkill River, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is the exclusive U.S. venue for “The Golden Age of King Midas,” on view through Nov. 27. Of the 100-plus objects on loan from Turkish museums, many were excavated by Penn archaeologists from an eighth-century B.C. royal tomb, believed to be the resting place of Midas’s father Gordios.

Whether you hear the clatter of gold or of your muffler when you think of Midas, this exhibition is another example of the remarkable things to be seen this spring in the City of Brotherly Love.
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Richard Selden • February 18, 2016

In 2000, when Peter Colasante decided to move in, the once-elegant storefront on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and P Street, formerly an Italian men’s shop, was boarded up. The art gallery he was relocating from Connecticut Avenue was named for architect and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant (Colasante didn’t consider the 1960s office complex—L’Enfant Plaza—a fitting tribute to the designer of the District of Columbia).

Colasante, 67, is still pleased with his choice of location, calling Georgetown — outside of New York, which he says is “a different universe” — “the best place in the best city in the country to be.” The gallery’s window displays, meant to be “visual out-of-the-box experiences,” draw in the avenue’s enviable foot traffic. “I find out who they are later,” he says.

By now, the gallery has an international network of clients, a “nuclear family.” Dealers look to L’Enfant Gallery for Chinese art and Asian ceramics, and the Civil War is a focus (Colasante lent items to a major Lincoln exhibition recently), but the overall mix is eclectic in genre, origin and price.

Stepping inside, visitors face a red wall of paintings hung salon-style, assorted chandeliers above. That sense of rich surprise extends throughout the gallery’s four levels.

In November, after a volunteer archivist went through what was in storage, Colasante opened the gallery’s basement to the public. It is now set up to resemble a Victorian viewing parlor, complete with a carved chief’s throne from Borneo.

Having decamped for Vienna, Virginia, Colasante no longer gets up at 3 in the morning to move paintings around. But he and his business partner (and former spouse) Maureen Taylor rearrange the display and host special exhibitions every few months. From total holdings of roughly 4,000 objects, he says they sell 200 to 300 per year.

Colasante’s eyes twinkle behind stylish frames when he recalls starting out with a much smaller inventory. In December of 1973, he opened Calvert Gallery in an English basement on Connecticut Avenue, putting four things purchased at apartment sales in the window. The gallery grew as it moved from one location to another in the vicinity of Connecticut and Calvert, becoming L’Enfant Gallery in 1990.

Raised in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, Colasante attended Catholic University, where he failed to shine, as he tells it, either as an actor or a philosopher. He learned about art working in Oxon Hill, Maryland, as an eccentric collector’s cataloguer, then curator. His boss’s advice: Never specialize.

Colasante can remember three recessions, but calls the last five years “the worst it’s ever been.” The threshold for bread-and-butter purchases, formerly $10,000, has dropped to $3,000, he says. The good news is that he owns his building, having finally been able to purchase it from a trust in 2012. He also does appraisal work and counsels owners of art and antiques (he advises those wishing to hang on to treasured possessions to avoid the three Ds: death, divorce and downsizing).

In the end, Colasante explains, the business is about matchmaking. You can have the finest example of something in the world, but “unless the right person comes to buy it, it doesn’t matter.”

Richard Selden • January 11, 2016

East of Tuscany, in the Apennine Mountains, Umbria is known as il cuore verde d’Italia: the green heart of Italy. Since the fall of 2014, when the Via Umbria store first appeared in Georgetown as a pop-up, that green heart has been beating at 1525 Wisconsin Avenue.

Owners Bill and Suzy Menard (who met while working on Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign) recently launched the store’s galleria, a renovated second-floor space equipped with a professional kitchen, where they hold events to complement the other facets of their Umbria-obsessive business.
On the first floor, the emporio offers a carefully curated selection of Italian wine, olive oil, pasta, specialty foods (including chocolate), kitchen items, linens, glassware, jewelry and — notably — the hand-painted ceramics known as maiolica from Deruta in Umbria, a ceramics center since Etruscan times.
Examples of food and kitchen items are: Verrigni spaghetti with squid ink ($8), Il Boschetto Grigliata sea salt ($12), Mancino flavored olive oil ($16), a pasta slicer ($22.50), bread cutting boards ($50 and $90) and copper two-handled pots ($110, $140 and $165).

For those what want to try living like an Umbrian in Umbria, the Menards rent La Fattoria del Gelso, their eight-bedroom, 18th-century farmhouse in Cannara, a village near Assisi famous for its onion festival. Saturday-to-Saturday rentals go for 3,000 euros in low season and 4,000 in high season.
The Menards, who maintain a kind of cultural dual-citizenship, first bonded with Italy after spending a summer in Fiesole when Bill was a student at Georgetown Law School. They started the shop Bella Italia in Bethesda in 2003, running it for 10 years and purchasing their Cannara farmhouse in 2008.

Among the upcoming events in the galleria are wine dinners on Dec. 7, 8 (Tabarrini vineyards) and 12 (medieval wine dinner with guest chef Robert Van Rens). On Dec. 9, there will be both a cooking class with Dorrie Gleason focusing on crostatas, tarts and fruit pies and a culinary mystery program, “Pasta, Passion, and Poison.” A book club next meets on Dec. 17 to discuss “Hunting Truffles” by Dick Rosano. Italian chef Simone Proietti-Pesci will be in D.C. from Jan. 8 to Jan. 24.

Details, online ordering of emporio items and the Dolce Vita blog are available at viaumbria.com. [gallery ids="102173,132315,132276,132284,132292,132304,132309,132299" nav="thumbs"]