Visual Arts

Benjamin Abramowitz at Whittemore House Museum

Gary Tischler •

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Before the color school, before there was such a thing as a Washington art scene to speak of, there was Benjamin Abramowitz.

The prolific Abramowitz began his life as an artist with a commission of work from the Works Progress Administration during the Depression when he was only 19 and never stopped until he passed away at the age of 94 in 2011.

For a few days more (until November 28), you can sample a small part of the amazingly large output and legacy of this unique artistic figure in Washington and the nation at the Woman’s National Democratic Club’s Whittemore House Museum at Dupont Circle called “Out of the Vault: Early Prints and Drawings, Benjamin Abramowitz, 1917-2011”.

The exhibition, co-curated by Nuzhat Sultan and Susan Abramowitz Rosenbaum—the only living daughter of the artist—contains 15 original lithographs and drawings. Among them are three works that are part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a series of intimate, familial portraits, some of them of Rosenbaum in her adolescence, childhood and youth.

“These works by Benjamin Abramowitz, a W.P.A. artists who established himself in Washington for six decades, exhibit his social and political observations,” Nuzhat Sultan, the co-curator said. The works are reminiscent of Honore Daumier.” Daumier was great and caustic recorder of early 19th-century French society)

Even among the way-too-few works present, you can sense Abramowitz’s restless interests and generous compassion, his feel for the energy in the furious winds of the times he lived in—there are thickly and energetically drawn portraits of electioneering, union rallies, children gathered together, workers in the field and the like, accurate captures of the rural and urban scenes.

His name resounds in Washington, where he rose to prominence with solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, Howard University and other institutions and galleries over the years. Through the course of his life he had over 100 exhibitions, on the East Cost, through ART in Embassies.

Powerfully accessible and modern in a characteristically American way by style and content, Abramowitz raised his family in what was then rural Greenbelt in Maryland, where he lived and worked for almost half a century. His genius was his singular work but also a gift for multi-tasking and constant curiosity. He would draw, paint, created sculptures, but also found time to study history and philosophy and learn seven languages, Greek and Latin among them.

His output was prodigious as his daughter Susan Rosenbaum, who cared for her father until his death at 94. Working on a registry of her father’s work. By this year, she had accounted for nearly 8,000 works, including 433 paintings, and 162 sculptures.

Rosenbaum is an arts consultant, worked as an external affairs officer at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and is currently Chair of the Board of Trustees of Arts for the Aging.
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Georgetown Art Walk

Ari Post • September 21, 2012

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Unique things are happening in Georgetown’s gallery community. From microscopic sculptures, to affordable contemporary art sales, to themed shows devoted to relationships and natural wonders, it’s a great time to get involved with the local gallery scene before the fall art season kicks into high gear. Don’t miss these late summer exhibitions.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
On view through Aug. 31, Addison/Ripley Fine Art is presenting a group exhibition guest curated by gallery artist Dan Treado. In his work, Treado uses squeegees, scrapers, and invented brushes to build up many thin layers of paint that produce taut, skin-like surfaces that have almost no evidence of a mark of the hand. Often individual images are combined to form a single larger painting. Treado also takes on interactive projects with friends and fellow artists and has worked on a few series with the theme: “All My Friends Are…” The latest project, titled “All My Friends Are Painters,” a continuation of this theme, is currently on view at Addison/Ripley. Artists include W.C. Richardson, Jeffrey Smith, Tom Bunnell, Steve Cushner, Colin Treado, Katherine Mann, Chris Gregson and Maggie Mitchell.

1670 Wisconsin Ave., NW – www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

Heiner Contemporary
“Winging It,” a group exhibition devoted to all things ornithological, has been extended through Aug. 24 at Heiner Contemporary. The exhibition takes as its starting point three works by American naturalist painter and ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson. Peterson’s 1934 field guide, “A Field Guide to the Birds,” was the first available to amateurs, which revolutionized and popularized bird watching through a new identification system. “Winging It” brings together Peterson’s bird studies with work by a new generation of artists who share his fascination and appreciation of the natural world and its feathered inhabitants.

1675 Wisconsin Ave., NW — www.HeinerContemporary.com

Parish Gallery
Parish Gallery is exhibiting the pea-sized work of Willard Wigan in “The Half Century Collection,” on view through Jan. 31, 2013. To the naked eye, Wigan’s work is virtually invisible. Yet when viewed through magnification, the effect is truly mesmerizing. Wigan’s micro-sculptures are so minute that they are only visible through a microscope—each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle or atop a pinhead. To create his art, Wigan enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat slows, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by outside traffic can affect Wigan’s work. So, he often works through the night when there is minimal disruption. Wigan has been honored throughout the world for his work and his exhibitions frequently sell out. Washington is lucky to have such an intimate venue available to view the work of this micro-visionary.

Canal Square, 1054 31st St., NW — www.ParishGallery.com

The Old Print Gallery
The Old Print Gallery, like Heiner Contemporary, is featuring a themed show devoted to nature’s beauty. “Water,” a group exhibit featuring prints by local, national and international contemporary artists, yields both personal and universal interpretations among artists, which turns into a very natural and effecting conversation with viewers. No matter how it is represented—abstracted or literal, meticulously detailed or vaguely suggested in loose and emotionally charged compositions—its capacity to mesmerize and captivate artists’ attention is undeniable. It’s a swell viewers are sure to get caught up in as well. “Water” is on view through September 14.

1220 31st St., NW — www.OldPrintGallery.com

Susan Calloway Fine Art
Susan Calloway Fine Arts is presenting a new exhibition tailored to new collectors and first-time art buyers. “You Too Can Buy Art: Affordable Art for Young Collectors” will open on Friday, Aug. 17, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibit features a selection of affordable contemporary and vintage artworks, hung in an assemblage style—in other words, there’s a lot to see. Since she opened her doors almost 20 years ago, Susan Calloway’s unswerving commitment to quality, along with a sharp eye for curating an array of periods and styles, has earned her a following. This exhibit will showcase the gallery’s taste in unique fashion—and allow anyone to join in the experience. The show runs through Sept. 8. To RSVP to the opening, call 202-965-4601.

1643 Wisconsin Ave., NW — www.CallowayArt.com
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City Center Gallery Walk

Ari Post •

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The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead was a keen observer of the riches of modern city life. She spoke of a city as a center “Where any day in any year there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist. This is essential to the life of a country.”

“To play this role,” she noted, “a city must have a soul — a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as … libraries and museums and galleries …”

Scrolling through Mead’s list of highest urban attributes, Washington hits all the marks. We have the schools, the religious and scientific institutions. We are awash in great museums and historic libraries.

By its very nature, the District is a kaleidoscope of history and progression, holding onto our tenets while moving ever into the 21st Century.

And we have galleries. Boy, do we ever. In the heart of this city, encircling Gallery Place and Metro Center amid the glistening glass and steel of arenas, storefronts, apartments and office buildings, art galleries flare against the cultural skyline. Like the Viennese salons of the late 19th Century, there is always someone admiring the artwork worth their weight in conversational gold.

“A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know,” said Mead.

In the galleries listed below, the lifeblood of Mead’s persevering philosophy runs strong, proffering the visual arts as a channel to understanding our history, our surroundings and our collective selves.
Plus, they’re just great venues to see some damn cool stuff. ?

Adamson Gallery

1515 14th Street NW, Suite 202,

www.AdamsonGallery.com

“Wild Things,” the summerlong exhibition at Adamson Gallery, is certainly wild, but don’t go in with the expectation of seeing much in the way of the living. This collection of animal photographs showcase the inhabitants of our oceans and wilderness in a not-so-lifelike light (save the charming Weimaraner portraits of William Wegman). Granted, this is not just an arbitrary portrayal of animals post-mortem. For instance, Martin d’Orgeval’s photograph of an owl is an eerie beakless specimen, perched on a dirty pedestal. This image comes from his project to document the aftermath of a 2008 fire in a 170-year-old taxidermy shop in Paris. The artist photographed everything from singed butterflies to charred bears, offering an interesting observation into the nature of what was — or wasn’t — really destroyed in the fire, while showcasing life’s breathtaking diversity. Other notable artists included in the exhibit include Annie Leibovitz, Jim Dine, Roberto Longo and Roni Horn.

Touchstone Gallery

901 New York Avenue NW,

www.TouchstoneGallery.com

Two simultaneous exhibits at Touchstone Gallery show that traditional practices can still thrive in contemporary art. In his exhibit “Being Affected” (through July 29), Charles St. Charles gives us rows of faces with varied reactions to shared circumstances. The show is influenced by work Charles has done in theater and improvisation, where a satisfying portrayal of reality depends on the actor being affected by the other characters and the environment. Charles skillfully uses color, facial expressions and distortions to reflect the status interplays that result in increasingly crammed physical or psychological spaces.
“A 3D Collage the Adventure” is the work of David Alfuth, a longtime art educator who began this series as a class project for his students. The lesson, which used old prints and engraving, “allowed the students to create a surrealistic situation to present to the viewer,” he writes. “The addition of the 3-dimensional qualities allowed for a world of variety and interest.” The works represent a collective narrative journey, dealing with space, architecture and its effects on human experience: relief sculptures with bizarre and funny titles such as, “They landed on the Moon, planted the flag, and then they left. That is when the party got started;” cubist-like constructions of architectural spaces; and simple, powerful line drawings of architectural elements.

Civilian Art Projects

1019 7th Street NW,

www.CivilianArtProjects.com

Civilian Art Projects has enough to keep patrons busy for a while to come, presenting installations by three acclaimed artists working in a variety of media through July 28. Richard Chartier is a sound artist, considered one of the key figures in the current movement of reductionist electronic sound art, termed “microsound,” or Neo-Modernism. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. In his exhibit “Interior Field,” he transforms the center gallery at Civilian Art into a darkened space where a visitor may relax and focus to this sound composition. A significant portion of this piece utilizes several audio recordings made at the 1905 McMillan Sand Filtration Site in Washington, D.C. during a sudden heavy rainstorm.

Bridget Sue Lambert is exhibiting a photographic series of large-scale prints in which she explores and emphasizes the complicated nature of relationships through the humorously messy rooms of a dollhouse, which she has been working with for the last three years. In them, she has constructed and captured scenes that simulate the emotional and physical clutter that surrounds romantic relationships, as well as a woman’s relationship with herself.

Finally, Shamus Ian Fatzinger presents his show ‘Personal Frontier,’ a series of photographs created from negatives found in a cardboard box belonging to his mother that tell the story of the artist’s childhood, and his family’s move West. What emerges is at once a collection of seminal mid-century American snapshots and a lens into our own grainy, beautiful pasts — weird and sexy, vague and pointed, and somehow very familiar.

Flashpoint Gallery

916 G Street NW,

www.CulturalDC.org

From July 20 to August 18, Flashpoint Gallery will exhibit the work of Interdisciplinary artists Hana Kim and Shana Kim, who join forces to work between the disciplines of architecture and interactive media to create an immersive environmental installation. The show, “Atmospheric Front,” combines pulleys, motors, hand-knit textiles and wires that expand and contract in time with sound and light projections. The texture and movement of the multidimensional piece reference biological and natural systems, which evoke breathing cycles, pulse and emotion. For more information on the process behind their work, visit their blog: AtmosphericFront.wordpress.com.

There will be an opening reception Friday, July 20 from 6 to 8 p.m [gallery ids="100899,128306,128299,128279,128292,128286" nav="thumbs"]

Richard Diebenkorn: Everything All At Once

Ari Post •

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The moment I saw the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn for the first time was one that shifted the course of my life as an artist. I was an 18-year-old student wrestling with things like color, form and, more onerously, ways to convey my ideas and break free from the self-aggrandizing egotism that artistic practice so easily brings about. Something in the style of my complaints must have triggered my teacher to offer me a book of Diebenkorn’s work. I had never been so affected by paintings.

Even in the cramped dimensions of a catalogue, his works felt huge—they carried the visual grandness of a mural in a few square inches. His endless washes of color, falling through and beneath one another in farm-like grids, conveyed a vibrant and somehow weathered atmosphere, like sunlight piercing through morning fog. It was dilapidated doors, smoke, hot asphalt, sweat, fields, style, color, shape, geography, line, form, joy, peace, war. It was paint. And it had never looked better to me.

I remember wanting to run my hands all over these paintings, these fields and strips of color that looked like Mondrian charged with a scuffed, pulsing static. I wanted to lift up the veils of yellow paint to explore the oceans of red ochre and blue-grey beneath the surface. Diebenkorn lets viewers into his process in this way, allowing us to know his paintings inside and out—and he offers this portal to us without reservation or anxiety. In his time, Diebenkorn was a famously generous and patient teacher, and this comes out in his work—even his paintings are good teachers.

Unlike so many artists of the past century who went to great lengths to hide their techniques, Diebenkorn unveils his methods to us garnished on a plate. This was a man who wanted painting to survive when others denounced it as dead, to move the arts into the future in a way that connected and involved audiences.

For the second half of the 20th century, Diebenkorn was the painter’s painter. You would be hard pressed to find a working artist today that does not adore this man’s work. It is painting as the idea in itself, which seems to speak about everything—about an artist in his environment, but also about things transcending any singular time, place or individual. “The idea is to get everything right,” Diebenkorn once said, rather prophetically. “It’s not just color or form or space or line—it’s everything all at once.”

Take a moment to spend time in front of his paintings and you will know what he’s talking about.

Through the end of September, the Corcoran Gallery of Art is hosting “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” a retrospective of the artist’s landmark series made between 1967 and 1988, which marks the first major museum exhibition focused on these luminous, grid-like paintings. Small works on paper, prints, drawings and collages—even some “cigar box” studies—share space with his signature massive canvases, many of which are over eight feet tall.

“These works are powerful investigations of space, light, composition, and the fundamental principles of modern abstraction,” said Philip Brookman, chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran. “Diebenkorn investigated the tension between the real world and his own interior landscape… These are not landscapes or architectural interiors but topographically rooted abstractions in which a sense of the skewed light and place of that time emerges through the painting process.”

A lifelong inhabitant of the west coast, Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993) served in the U.S. Marine Corps after attending Stanford University and afterwards took advantage of the G.I. bill to study art at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Among his teachers was Mark Rothko, the acclaimed abstract expressionist who doubtlessly effected his perception of modern art. A look at Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series leaves no doubt that Rothko influenced his sense of composition and color palette. (And as The Georgetowner’s Gary Tischler often points out, “Washington is the Rothko City.” All the more reason to welcome this show to our town.)

As a young painter in the 1950s, it was no small feat to reckon with the wild assault of abstract expressionism on the contemporary art scene. To come into your own at the tail end of one of art history’s most explosive, brazen and contentious periods was a considerable strain on many emerging artists. But with that pressure came a certain liberation for Diebenkorn. Willem De Kooning later would say that the abstract expressionists (and Jackson Pollock, specifically) “broke the ice”; afterwards, art could go anywhere and be almost anything.

During this time, however, Diebenkorn did a rather unusual thing: he pioneered a representational movement, at once a gesture to the tradition of art history and an outright rejection of modern art critics like Clement Greenberg, who argued for “advanced art” that renounced subject matter and representation for the “purity” of abstraction.

Along with fellow artists such as Wayne Thiebaud—most recognized for his over-saturated paintings of cakes and patisserie treats— they together founded The Bay Area Figurative Movement, which pioneered an expressive, representational style that brought together the thick, lustrous brushwork and wanton impasto of abstract expressionism with the earthy romance of the Impressionists.

Though a far cry from his later work with the Ocean Park series, Diebenkorn began in his early paintings a pattern of weaving the threads of familiar people, family members and California landscapes with a grand intimacy that connected his quiet, precise observations to the collective subconscious of postwar America. It was a mutual search for peace, balance and beauty. He learned what it meant to be a modern painter as the world around him learned to see as a modern audience. His work was met with acclaim from critics, viewers and patrons alike.

In the mid 1960s, Diebenkorn took a teaching position at UCLA, moving from San Francisco to Santa Monica. It was during this time that he moved away from his figurative style, for which he had by now become quite popular, and began work on his Ocean Park paintings, a pursuit that would last him the rest of his life and become one of the most influential bodies of work in the second half of the 20th century.

Named for the beachside community where he set up his studio, the Ocean Park series cemented Diebenkorn at the forefront of his generation as an artist dedicated not just to his own work, but to the history and future of his medium.

The shift happened gradually but surprisingly, according to the artist, and in a way he always had trouble explaining. “Maybe someone from the outside observing what I was doing would have known what was about to happen,” he said in an interview in the late ’60s. “But I didn’t. I didn’t see the signs. Then, one day, I was thinking about abstract painting again… I did about four large canvases—still representation, but, again, much flatter. Then, suddenly, I abandoned the figure altogether.”

But looking at these paintings, what we see in fact is an unprecedented balance of abstraction and representation. These paintings are not just shapes that resemble things, like looking up at the sky and seeing a cloud shaped like a poodle. They are distillations of whole environments from which they are born.

Within the canvases are the layouts of suburban neighborhoods, the aluminum siding and split-level houses of mid-20th century America, power lines and clotheslines, interstates and parklands, oceans and shorelines, even the great frontiers of the Wild West. But while these visual tropes are tangible and intriguing, no one theme sits within any particular canvas. You will not find a painting in this exhibit titled “House by the Sea.” Diebenkorn named each piece in this series with a number in the order by which he made them.

The numbers become markers of the passage of time that denote the changing and shifting of the artist’s environment as he lived it. Just as Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral in different lights of day and Matisse evoked the emotional sentiments of his era with the wild, dissonant color palette of Fauvism, so did Diebenkorn acknowledge his time and place by sweeping his brush across his own physical and cultural landscape. He captured the grand, clean-shaven, perhaps diluted idealism of his time in wash- worn, infinitely expansive color fields, cut up with arbitrary vanishing points and the stark measurements of clean, straight lines.

Still, the paintings impose almost nothing upon us as viewers. We are free to explore the pictures in our own way and at our own pace. Diebenkorn’s postwar American abstraction offers glimpses of harmony and calm, a generalization of that “American Dream,” the sincerity and earnestness of which has not really been seen since.

I still wrestle with the same issues as I did when I was first introduced to Diebenkorn’s work, but he helped me to learn that these artistic dilemmas are not just equations that you solve and move past. These issues are themselves the pursuit of art. Diebenkorn’s work inspired me beyond myself. When that happens, you cannot help but to believe in art. ? [gallery ids="100901,128322,128315,128302,128310" nav="thumbs"]

Dupont Circle Art Walk

Georgetowner • August 10, 2012

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In Washington, there might not be a more accommodating neighborhood for contemporary visual art than Dupont Circle. It started as early as 1921, when Duncan Phillips began exhibiting his collection of modern art in special galleries at his home on the corner of 21st and Q Streets. Phillips played an important role in introducing the United States to contemporary art, exhibiting Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse when most of the country was still incensed by modernism. The Phillips Collection still stands at the site of Duncan’s old home—the original house now the southern section of the museum—and the gallery is still on the forefront of contemporary visual art (its current exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Antony Gormley are stunning proofs of that).

The foundation Phillips laid in his lifetime has only grown stronger; Dupont Circle is now a cultural mecca, housing some of the District’s most enviable performance spaces, restaurants and art galleries, nestled among honored historic landmarks, foreign embassies and international institutions. Its spirit is the living embodiment of Phillips’s lifelong focus of the continuous progress and tradition of art and culture. The galleries below have visual offerings this season worthy of multiple explorations. The owners know their stuff and enjoy sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with interested patrons. There’s no better way to celebrate summer than with an evening walk through Dupont’s gallery crowd. For more on Dupont Circle’s gallery scene, check out the Dupont Circle Arts blog: www.DupontCircleArts.BlogSpot.com.

Studio Gallery

Studio Gallery showcases contemporary art from a variety of artists both American and international living in the DC area, and they always have a lot going on. One of their upcoming shows features the work of Jan Willem van der Vossen, whose series of abstract and wild landscapes are a swathe of color and line, taking the viewer from the red-hot landscapes of Andalusia to a minimalist forest of trees. Another show belongs to the work of Shahrzad Jalinous, whose debut exhibition with Studio will feature her large figurative oil paintings. Jalinous’s paintings are a blurred whirlwind of earthy texture and color, muted, saturated and entirely satisfying. The exhibits run June 20 – July 14.

2108 R St. NW. www.StudioGalleryDC.com. Hours: Wed. – Fri. 1 – 7, Sat. 1 – 6, or by appointment.

Hillyer Artspace

For the past six years, Hillyer Art Space has been dedicated to exhibiting underexposed D.C. area artists alongside those of established international reputation. To celebrate the occasion of six successful years, it has invited all of its previous artists to return to the gallery once more. This retrospective is a celebration not only of the gallery but of its family of artists that have come through the doors and realized great accomplishments. Each artist in this exhibition has shown in the gallery or is an Artist Advisory Committee Member. The exhibit runs through June 26.

9 Hillyer Ct. NW. www.ArtsAndArtists.org. Hours: Tue. – Fri. 12 – 6, Mon. & Sat. 12 – 5, or by appointment.

Burton Marinkovich Fine Art

Burton Marinkovich is a small gallery with a huge but well curated inventory of artwork, specializing in works on paper by modern and contemporary masters. Its collection ranges from some of the foremost artists of the past half-century—Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and D.C.’s own Kenneth Noland—to mid-career and established artists still working today. “We opened in 1993,” says Royce Burton, who runs the gallery with Andrea Marinkovich. “And, actually, we chose this location for its proximity to The Phillips Collection.”

Marinkovich told the Washington Post that the gallery is, “kind of messy, with the atmosphere of maybe a professor’s office or research library,” reminiscent of old-world European salons with intimate spaces full of treasures.

1506 21st St. NW. www.BurtonMarinkovich.com. Hours: Tue. – Sat. 11 to 6, or by appointment. Ring the buzzer to get in.

Cross-Mackenzie

Cross MacKenzie Gallery, a haven for those of us enamored by sculptural and ceramic arts, is exhibiting ceramic works by Anthony Stellaccio and paintings by Mary Armstrong. A curatorial research specialist for the National Museum of African Art by day, Stellaccio creates ceramics that are both scholarly and playful, referencing game pieces, pets and native toys and synthesizing his cultural studies with his artistic endeavors. This body of work is full of dynamic contrasts: rough, un-polished porcelain with cracked glazes atop smooth, reflective black and white Formica pedestal-like bases. The color in Armstrong’s paintings resonates with Stellaccio’s fresh green glazes and compliments the three-dimensional, hard-edged sculpture in the gallery. Armstrong’s soft paintings hover between landscapes and atmosphere, shifting back and forth from a view of a distant horizon to the drifting particles of dust and clouds. The exhibit runs through June 30.

2026 R St. NW. www.CrossMackenzie.com. Hours: Wed. – Sat. 12 – 6, or
by appointment.

Jane Haslem Gallery

Established in 1960 at the onset of the contemporary printmaking revival, Jane Haslem Gallery is well known for its thorough collection of prints by those artists responsible for reviving the medium in the U.S. after World War II. Currently on view are the works of Gabor Peterdi and Richard Ziemann. Peterdi, who died in 2001 at the age of 86, was a Hungarian-American printmaker and teacher who had a profound impact his students in the mid-20th century. Ziemann, a sort of spiritual documentarian of the natural world, has spent his life studying both the grandness and finiteness of the American landscape, focused particularly on the Northeastern woodlands. Ziemann was a student of Peterdi—in fact, the gallery was introduced to Ziemann’s work by Peterdi himself—and says of his teacher’s influence: “We all studied with Gabor Peterd… He taught us everything.”

2025 Hillyer Pl. NW. www.JaneHaslemGallery.com. Hours: Fri. 3 – 7 and by appointment. [gallery ids="100855,126818,126813,126801,126808" nav="thumbs"]

The Soul of DC’s Jazz Festival

Gary Tischler •

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Washington has its own culture —and it’s not just the whole center-of-the world, seat-of-government thing. It’s about music and neighborhoods, actors and museums—all the things that are the mosaic and the background of our daily lives Washington’s culture gets richer every year because of the work of its native citizens—people who have ideas, see needs and get other people to see what they see. The result is an environment of cultural arts institutions, festivals, concerts and music series and a rich theater and art world that have endured and enriched Washington culture, its contents and its reputation.

A good chunk of the heavy lifting in this arena—not excluding the existing culture totem poles and brand names like the Kennedy Center—has been done by individuals who can best be described as originals, one-of-a-kinds.

We’ve always had them in one form or another. The late Raissa Tselentis, who created the Bach Competition, the late and larger-than-life Maria Fisher, founder of the Beethoven Society and the Thelonius Monk Institute, Jerome Barry practicing cultural and musical diplomacy with Embassy Series, Norman Scribner, the founder of the Washington Choral Arts Society, Chuck Brown, who gave the city its own go-go sound, and many others.

To that list should be added the name of Charlie Fishman, the founder and executive producer of what is now called the D.C. Jazz Festival, now in its eighth year, and celebrating all over town June 1 through 10. Jazz festivals have been tried before, but it was Fishman who has grown and expanded the festival, guided it through rough patches and made it what appears to be a permanent institution of Washington’s culture.

You can get all the evidence you want by looking at the full schedule and various features of the festival, spread to all corners of the city with its innovative “Jazz in the Hood” component. It has big name artists—Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, Anat Cohen, Paquito D’Rivera, Dianne Reeves. They will playing at the Hamilton restaurant in downtown Washington, the spectacularly renovated, refurbished Howard Theatre, neighborhood clubs and restaurants as well as featured jazz performances at the I Street Synagogue and the Kennedy Center. The festival, as it exists today, is marked by innovation, an eye to the future, tremendous variety and energy, and Fishman’s rock-solid belief in the future of jazz as an American art form.

Everything has changed since 2005, when the first festival was held. Yet when you visit Fishman at his Adams Morgan home in the basement-office, nothing much appears to have changed since we first met there three years ago before the fifth festival, when it was still called the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival. There is, if that’s possible, more clutter on his desk, and some additions to the array of stuff you find there—a huge library of jazz CDs, books, magazines and newspapers.

Fishman himself is parked behind his desk, wearing as always one of a collection of yarmulkes, handmade, a thin gray-white beard on his face. He’s plugged into a phone and his computer, doing what he was doing the last time I saw him here, which is checking schedules, checking incoming musicians’ hotel reservations, making sure his seven-year-old son Moses was being picked up from school

“Yeah, I think this city is rich in originators, in people who have influenced the culture, who’ve created something,” Fishman said. “I knew Maria Fisher, by way of the Monk thing for one. Now, there was an original. I can think of others—Ari Roth, over at Theater J, Bill Warrell, who was District Curator and tried to keep a jazz festival going. He was a forerunner.”

“Jazz is our—America’s—idiom, its most original cultural contribution,” Fishman said. “And that’s especially true here—the Duke Ellington history is here. There are so many terrific local jazz musicians here, and there’s an audience. But for a long time, given all that, we were still the only city in the country that didn’t have a proper jazz festival.”

That changed eight years ago, when Fishman, with the help of many others, turned vision into reality and maintained it. “It was shaky sometimes,” he said. “But I think we’ve turned the corner here.”
“I think the festival is in a very good place,” Fishman said. “But when you talk about making something permanent, you can’t think just in terms of a festival, however good it might be. We’re already doing some things—educational outreach, special programs throughout the year in the schools, at embassies, we had a thing with the Cherry Blossom Festival. To me, the jazz festival is a year-round thing, and it’s a part of the heart and soul of this city.”

Fishman, as any founder worth his soul, wants national recognition and respect for the festival. He tends to think big, including global—which is natural enough given his 20-plus years with the legendary Dizzie Gillespie. But he also sees the music and the festival as a living thing, part of the neighborhoods of Washington—hence, the “Jazz in the Hood” special, which can be found in parts of D.C. as different as Anacostia and Georgetown.

“To me and people I know, Washington is about neighborhoods,” Fishman said. “I like living where I do, in Adams Morgan. It’s a lively neighborhood, the kind of place where the music is appreciated, and you can talk about it with your neighbors and friends.

He’s living a life that seems to get richer—in terms of meaning, if not necessarily, money—with the passage of time, a development that seems to surprise him still. Fishman talks about his family—wife Stephanie Peters, an executive with Microsoft, and their son, Moses. “It’s our 10th anniversary this year,” he said. “She was a surprise to me. I was divorced, I’d been single for 19 years and I have three grown children. I just thought that was it, and I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. Then, I met Stephanie, and that was it. I’ll tell you, if anybody keeps the festival together, it’s Stephanie. ”

He and his wife have a shared passion for jazz, and a devotion to their son. “He’s amazing. He’s a gift. He really is.”

He’s a little something more—he’s steeped in jazz, which couldn’t be helped given his parents. He played drums, and now he’s playing piano. “Let me show you something,” Fishman said. He does some clicking and brings up a video of Moses confidently playing Thelonius Monk at age seven.
For Fishman, jazz is the music he’s always heard running through his life. “I see the festival growing, taking on its own life,” he said. When it comes to his own life, he added: “the rest is not yet history.”

DC Jazz Fest Sidebar
Jazz in the Hoods, Jazz Meets the Classic, Jazz and Family Fun Days, Jazz at theHamilton, Jazz at the Howard. It’s all that Jazz at the annual DC Jazz Festival June 1-10, with top drawer attractions, jazz legends and new blazing stars and musicians.

As always the festival honors the living legends of jazz, with the presentation of its Lifetime Achievement Award to Kenny Barron, called the “most lyrical piano player of our time” by Jazz Weekly, and Ron Carter, a legendary jazz multitasker as bassist, cellist and author, an artist with more than 2,500 albums to his credit and numerous awards including two Grammies.

The two men will be honored at the festival’s signature concert Jazz Meets the Classics in collaboration with the Kennedy Center on June 4 with a performances by the Classical Jazz Quartet (Barron, Carter, Stefon Harris and Lewis Nash), preceded by an opening concert with the festival’s co-artistic director Paquito D’Rivera and his Sextet.

Other highlights of the Festival include the mushrooming in size and events Jazz in the “Hoods”, which splashes jazz, its music and performers city-wide with 80 performances at over 40 museums, clubs, restaurants, hotels and galleries. It’s presented by Events DC, and attracts a large and diverse audience and showcases D.C.-based jazz groups.

Kicking things off in the ‘Hoods is Ron Carter headlining at the Bohemian Caverns, the popular jazz club on U Street, one of the key elements in the festival. Also part of Jazz in the ‘Hoods is the DC Jazz Loft Series, a three-day series of events that includes a mini-festival on June 9.

The Hamilton (on 14th Street), one of downtown’s newest clubs and hot restaurants, will be the Festivals main venue with ten nights of performances with such headliners as Monty Alexander, Jimmy Heath, Roy Hargrove, David Sanchez, Les Nubians, Marshall Keyes, Antonio Hart and others, along with Jazz Gospel Brunches, featuring with the WPAS Gospel Choir and Lori Williams.

Jazz at the Howard highlights and celebrates the return of the restored Howard Theater, which only recently opened and will including such performers as Grammy Award-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves and Italian guitarist Pino Daniele.

A highlight of this year’s festival is a performance by Israeli clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, as well as six concerts co-presented by the Kennedy Center at its Milenniuim Stage, with performers like the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra, Origem and Malika Zara.
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Beyond the Blooming Sculpture Gardens

Ari Post •

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Between the sculpture gardens at the National Gallery, the Kreeger Museum and Hirshhorn, there’s a lot to see around the streets of Washington. Throw in the fraternity of bronze-cast historic figures scattered throughout the city and there’s an all-star cast of artistic and historic characters around every corner. You’ll see Henri Moore and Henry Longfellow, Giacometti and Ghandi, Alexander Calder and Alexander Hamilton.

Indeed, there are so many longstanding outdoor fixtures that we miss on our daily commute alone (who among us has ever actually seen a Boundary Stone?), that it’s all too easy to overlook a new public installation. Doug Aitken’s “Song 1” at the Hirshhorn was a deserved success before it came down early last month, with projectors flashing a fully encompassing video around the building’s elliptical façade to a remixed exploration of the 1930s pop song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It left audiences wanting more of that interactive, environmentally specific experience. Thankfully, the Hirshhorn isn’t lacking for new outdoor installations, and neither is the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And now is just the right time of year to be outside and experience them.

Chakaia Booker Scultures Roll Into New York Avenue

There is a peculiar group of sculptures on a well-kept, grassy median on New York Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets NW, amid the oil drum echoes of construction by Mount Vernon Square and the arterial bustle of downtown. Black and unusually textured, they appear almost aloof to their surroundings — curious as to what exactly is going on around them.

This is the work of sculptor Chakaia Booker, the second artist selected for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ (NMWA) New York Avenue Sculpture Project, the only public art space featuring changing installations of contemporary works by women artists. Booker, by integrating discarded construction materials into large outdoor sculptures, works here with recycled tires which she slices, twists, weaves and rivets into radically new forms. Tires resonate with the artist for their versatility and rich historical and cultural legacy: The harvest and production of rubber is entwined with a history of brutal colonization, cultural injustices and slave labor in Africa and the world beyond.

Given the space they occupy, these sculptures are oddly modest in size, as if refusing to compete with surrounding noise and structures. They stick out from their environment by utter disassociation of urban aesthetics. They do not try to be big—and in this way they grow. These dancing forms, with interlacing planes that revolve through and around each other, are Brancusian in their suggestive shapes and movement, while their texture and tactility remain rooted somewhere firmly in the earth of this world.

They have the texture of nature, vines, bushes and nettles, like fictitious plants you might see in a Maurice Sendack illustration. Also like Sendack’s work, there is an undertow of darkness about them—a keyhole’s peek into a world of magnificent intrigue and epochal wrath. Perhaps it’s the wondrous patterns and textures against the sheer literality of the tires—once you get close to them, the sculptures are upfront about their material: masses of diced, slit rubber and hundreds of heavy screws securing them to their skeleton.

While there is a good chance you already passed them by without even noticing their presence, Chakaia’s sculptures are worth serious consideration. The good news is they will be on view through 2014, so there’s time to see them.

For more information visit www.NMWA.org.

Ai Weiwei Turns Heads at the Hirshhorn

“Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” is the first major US public art project by internationally renowned Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. The installation comprises a dozen bronze sculptures, each roughly ten feet tall, that represent the signs of the Chinese zodiac (snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog, pig, rat, ox tiger, rabbit and dragon).

The sculptures are re-envisioned and enlarged versions of original eighteenth-century heads that were designed during the Qing dynasty for the fountain clock of the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), an imperial, European-style retreat outside Beijing, which was pillaged in 1860. The Hirshhorn placed them encircling the fountain in the center of the Hirshhorn’s rounded courtyard.

Weiwei went to great pains to depict the animals with detail, down to the veins in the rabbit’s forehead and the chicken’s grainy crown, every surface suggestive of hair, feathers or skin. The heads cut off abruptly at the neck, the stanchions they are affixed to connecting rather artlessly underneath, as if they were each severed from the body and mounted on coarsely carved wooden spikes—like the pig’s head in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

There is always a lot of historical and political baggage when dealing with Ai Weiwei—and I mean that in the best possible way. A noted dissident, Weiwei has spent his career speaking up against social and political oppression in his homeland. He is a master of the conversation between abrasive confrontation (including a photographic series of his own middle finger interrupting otherwise innocuous snapshots of historic Chinese landmarks, such as Tiananmen Square) and subtle symbolism (covering the floor at London’s Tate Modern with hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds—a comment on mass consumption, among countless other things).

Knowing this, why would Weiwei go to the effort of such odd and meticulous realism if he didn’t mean them to be perceived that way? Without forcing anything on the audience, the work raises questions about repatriation and intention as well as our own blindness to suffering, religious misinterpretation and historical injustice.

For more information visit www.Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="100821,125482" nav="thumbs"]

ART METAMORPHOSIS Gala at Georgetown Waterfront

Georgetowner •

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Art Metamorphosis Gala was a great success with over 3500 attendees in attendance including DC Mayor Vincent C. Gray.

For one night only, the harbour area in the heart of the nation’s capital has been transformed into an artist’s canvas.

Twenty-seven (27) innovative artists of DC created 300 feet long works of art in front of attendees. Artistic video and light installations by SND+VSN on flood walls, music by MANIFESTO accompanied by his live violin act and live opera performance by Pablo Henrich, hair and fantasy show by Stella Bonds & Roche Salon will enhance the transformation.

Nick’s Riverside Grille and Tony & Joe’s offered summer inspired cocktails and full bar menu.

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