Visual Arts

Nancy Nesvet • July 2, 2014

Happy 100th birthday, Ralph Fasanella. A self-taught artist who painted for 30 years before his greatness was recognized, Fasanella (1914-1997) is being celebrated this year with exhibitions that illustrate his dedication to working people and the America he loved.

Here in Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition “Lest We Forget” features paintings of strikes, laborers, political events including the Rosenberg trial and the Kennedy assassination and members of Fasanella’s Italian American family, such as his father, who delivered ice in the Bronx (“Iceman Crucified #4).

The show opens with a nine-foot-long triptych of New York City that began as a single canvas, with Broadway at its center, and grew to include the Queensboro bridge and the uptown neighborhoods bordering it in Manhattan. The canvas extends to the waterways bordering the city, the sightlines forming an outline of the borough of Manhattan from its tip at Battery Park up through Harlem to its northern edge. Its complexity begs us to inspect each neighborhood and each group of New Yorkers as we follow them across the horizontal canvas.

A homegrown social realist, Fasanella worked as a union organizer and was involved with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade protesting fascism in Spain. He painted the possibilities of Americans, telling them where they had gone wrong and showing them the way to achieve an America that provided justice for all.

Politics is at the forefront in works such as “McCarthy Era Garden Party,” depicting what Fasanella believed was the wrongful execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In “Garden Party,” he shows the enveloping ring of protesters and the Disneyesque and perhaps Colonial-referencing palm trees, in pots clearly held by a photographer and other observers. The Rosenbergs face the crowd of protesters, not the House Un-American Activities Committee – on a raised stage in the painting – who indicted them.

“McCarthy Press” and “American Tragedy” use color and content to let the public know Fasanella’s view of McCarthyism and the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a tragic period in American history, dominated by the iconic “A” form, representing the shadow of the atomic bomb.

Farther into the exhibition, “The Great Strike” depicts what became known as the Bread and Roses Strike, which took place in 1912 in Lawrence, Mass. Here, we see people of varied ethnicities protesting together to bring about just wages, much as the protesters seen in “Garden Party” protest. This recurring theme of people demonstrating their beliefs is also seen in “Modern Times,” in which 1960s-era youth protest American involvement in the Vietnam War, showing the strength of common people, real Americans, to effect change.

These paintings showing the involvement of many people protesting unjust policies and leaders express Fasanella’s faith that justice can prevail if the people do not give up. Indeed, for thirty years, until he achieved the recognition of the art and wider world, he kept painting, revealing historical events that needed to be witnessed and talked and learned about, “lest we forget.”

“Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget” is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 3. A complementary exhibition, “Ralph Fasanella: The Art of Social Engagement,” is on view in the lobby of the AFL-CIO Headquarters through Aug. 1. [gallery ids="101794,140749" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • June 30, 2014

Since the end of the Revolutionary War, England and the United States have shared a peculiar affinity. During the 19th century, England was (perhaps bitterly) aware of America’s nascent industrial, commercial and trading potential, and the United States continued longing for England’s cultural inheritance with childlike dependency.

This eager and mutual fondness might help explain why so many of America’s aristocratic and liberal elite made second homes of London over the past two hundred years. From the impenetrability of its social order and its literary heritage, to its European bustle and gleam, the aura of “Englishness” pervades American sensibilities to this day.

This is particularly important when considering the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), perhaps America’s most renowned painter of the 19th century, who not surprisingly spent his most productive years in London, living on the River Thames and capturing its hazy, mechanical majesty.

Whistler’s fascinating evolution is on full display in “An American In London: Whistler and the Thames,” at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, exhibiting the thoughtfulness of the artist’s professional growth within and surrounding the unfolding international scene. Not only did Whistler bridge a gap between the Old World and the New, but he also occupied a pivotal position between artistic traditions of East and West when he spearheaded the Western artistic revolution of Japanese aesthetic influence following the opening of treaty ports with Japan in the 1850s.

Born in Massachusetts, Whistler was the son of a prominent engineer, who moved his family between the U.S., England and Russia throughout the young artist’s childhood. After studying in Paris, he settled in London in his mid-twenties, where he aimed to attract patrons among the growing number of wealthy merchants and shipping magnates in the city. He focused his attentions on the docks of the Thames, the industrial and commercial center of his new city that provided him a myriad of swarthy and energetic subjects in its decaying old wharves, splintering wooden bridges, and the clippers and characters that inhabited them.

In “Limehouse,” an etching from 1859, he seems to seat the viewer on the deck of a ship, looking over the bow onto a crooked forest of masts and rotting wooden beams with towering rows of storefronts crowding the edge of the dock. Here is a knowledge and spirit of place that demands acknowledgement, as if Whistler were trying to prove beyond doubt the degree to which he had adapted to his surroundings.

Sailors go on about their day in the distance, surveying the water and readying their vessels, as oblivious to the artist as birds might be to an ornithologist. Characters often litter these scenes, as with the men conversing in “Rotherhithe” (1860) and the lone fisherman in “Black Lion Wharf” (1859), the latter of which even details the signboards of several surrounding wharves.

Among his earlier works, Whistler’s etchings are perhaps more indicative of a fledgling tendency toward atmospheric richness than his thickly lain oil paintings. Canvases like “Wapping” and “The Last of Old Westminster,” while impressive, are weighed down with minutiae, which serve to illuminate the profound influence of Japonisme that so enlightened his later work.

In the fourth room of the gallery, viewers are met with woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, the renowned masters of the Japanese ukiyo-e style that transfixed Western culture when it came about in the 1850s and 60s. These two artists, with their unique variations on river and bridge scenes, had a profound impact on Whistler. The exotic language of Japanese art, with its limited color palates, flattened forms, and vast geometric compositions, provided him with a novel lens through which to interpret a changing world.

The evidence is palpable in Whistler’s work. “Chelsea On Ice” (1864) depicts a cold February dusk from the window of the artist’s home, looking across the Thames to the Battersea factories in the distance. In contrast to the clutter of his previous river scenes, there is now but a single boat in the water, defined by a precise handful of monotone brushstrokes. Some faint architectural gestures on the far bank faintly reveal the factories through the clouds, and a few brittle trees in the foreground hover above two sparse clusters of silhouettes walking along the street.

But the real subject here is the field of ice on the water and the blanket of fog engulfing every corner of the canvas. This is the atmospheric transcendence that became Whistler’s signature style: the washed out, muted tonality with which he wove together Japanese aesthetics and the singular character of the murky English skies.

Then there are the Nocturns. Such odes to solitude, fog and shadows captured by Whistler in paint that exist otherwise only in dreams. To stand before “Nocturn: Silver and Opal—Chelsea” (1880s) is as pulsing and silent as staring off into a hazy shipping port in the dead of night. Unclaimed lights flicker and fade in the distance. The beams of a suspension bridge grow and recede before your eyes.

Ultimately, Whistler sought to document the industrial center of England’s great port in all its dirty, tumultuous fervor. He sought to convey the essence of an ebbing and flowing lifeline of people, ideas and struggles. The turn of the 20th century was marked by advanced industrialization and globalization, two factors that forever altered the course of human history. In this light, Whistler’s lifelong portrait of a river offers a window into our modern evolution. It is a foggy, endless and often beautiful view.

*“An American In London: Whistler and the Thames” will be on view at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery through Aug. 17. For more information visit [www.Asia.si.edu](http://asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/american-in-london/)*

Ari Post • June 27, 2014

“Speculative Forms” at the Hirshhorn

Speculative realism is a philosophical notion that emphasizes equal relationships among subject, object and space. In the realm of visual art, it highlights the importance of installation and the viewer’s eye in relation to the object.

For instance, the iron sculpture “Okame” (1956), by Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), is a vaguely organic form, rust-colored with a single, slanted eye and what may be four ears and a mouth. The title means “bystander” in Japanese, and as one moves around the small work there is a prevailing sense that the audience is not the only participating viewer; it is a work that looks back. Noguchi is manipulating the notion of the work itself observing, even as it is observed by the viewer.

Drawn from the Hirshhorn’s private collection, “Speculative Forms” reconsiders the historical development of sculpture since the early twentieth century and the ongoing critique of the autonomy of the object. Ranging from the well known to the rarely exhibited, the selected works challenge the modernist notion that sculptures exist in isolation from their surroundings.

Including more than fifty works, this two-floor exhibition – while proceeding through Surrealism, Constructivism, Assemblage, Op and Kinetic Art, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism – collapses conventional art historical divisions such as figurative versus abstract, still versus kinetic, representational versus simplified geometric, interior versus exterior. The works oscillate between these dichotomies, turning one’s preconceived notions of sculpture inside out and raising intriguing questions about the potential and limits of the perception of objects and the larger world.

“Modern American Realism” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Sara Roby (1907-1986) was a beloved art collector who established a foundation in the 1950s to encourage figurative artists when Abstract Expressionism was at peak popularity. Through her foundation, she collected over 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures by the country’s leading figurative artists, including Edward Hopper, Will Barnet, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Arthur Dove, Nancy Grossman, Wolf Kahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn and Honoré Sharrer.

Acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984 from the American Federation of Arts (formerly administered by the Whitney Museum), the collection has been one of Washington’s hidden gems of the visual arts for thirty years.

“Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection,” currently on view at the museum, presents some of the most treasured artworks from this now permanent collection, featuring seventy paintings and sculptures from the 1910s to the 1980s. Selected by chief curator Virginia Mecklenburg, the works encompass a range of what can broadly be called modern realism, from sociopolitical to psychological, from satirical to surrealist. The resulting exhibition captures both the optimism and the apprehension of the years following the Second World War, from the poignantly human to the whimsical to the complex and enigmatic.

Roby gave essential support to realism at a time when critics celebrated abstraction that bore little resemblance to the natural world. She recognized that modern life allowed for many kinds of realism. This collection ensures that her legacy, as well as the legacies of the many great artists she championed, will not be forgotten.

“Speculative Forms” opened June 16 at the Hirshhorn Museum (the closing date will be announced). “Modern American Realism” will be on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 17. [gallery ids="101776,141120" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • May 27, 2014

American art before 1950 is all but omitted from the Western canon. Frequently perceived as an obscure assortment of simple colonial landscape painters, would-be impressionist yokels and winsome expatriates of voracious appetite and meager consequence, there was little recognition for American artists until after the migration of European progressives fleeing the Second World War. It reads in the history books as if one day a roiling storm of artistic breakthroughs blew across the Atlantic Ocean and began raining artistic innovation along the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Undergirding the breakout of Abstract Expressionism and America’s ensuing artistic prominence is a clear debt to centuries of European progress. However, frequently misunderstood and typically neglected are the regional artists and styles that helped mould and prepare the American artistic landscape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of the major champions of America’s early artistic identity was Duncan Phillips (1886 – 1966), founder of the eponymous Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle. When he opened his museum in 1921 in the old family mansion, it was the country’s first institution dedicated to modern art, and from the outset Phillips intended it as a bastion for the country’s artists. Over the course of 50 years he made it his legacy to find, foster, and preserve works by living American artists, ultimately amassing some 1,400 paintings and sculptures that have helped define the cultural landscape of 20th century America.

After touring the world for the past four years, the full breadth of Phillips’ American collection is back on display with Made in the USA, the most comprehensive installation of these works in the museum’s history. Consuming the main building’s three floors, the history of American art billows to life. It begins with the unsung masters of the late 19th century whose work set the course for modernism in the United States, and it evolves into the new visual language of Abstract Expressionism, which catapulted American art onto the center of the international stage. The collection uncovers a breadth and diversity of American artistic heritage unbeknownst to most audiences and welcomes home some of our city’s most beloved masterworks.

“Phillips was determined to lift American art out of obscurity,” says Sue Frank, associate curator of The Phillips Collection and editor of the exhibit catalog.

“And how did he get to this diverse view of American art? As he also collected European art, he believed artists in this country were connected to continuing identities and traditions that reach back into the 19th century. He was interested in how the present is connected to the past. He was interested in finding man’s place in nature and the cosmos, color and light, that you can trace from the end of the 19th century through to the 20th.”

From the offset, Phillips’ evolution as a collector is determinedly progressive. (Be advised: Now would be a good time to have Google at hand). The first floor exhibits his early acquisitions from around 1920, American Impressionist and regionalist painters such as Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast and John Henry Twachtman, as well as the revered early American masters William Merrit Chase, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler.

These works, while quite fine, reflect more typically fashionable American tastes of the time: atmospheric landscapes and impressive portraiture, provincial city scenes and windswept Americana.

However even among these early acquisitions, Phillips foreshadowed his keenly developing interest in experimental and conceptually challenging artworks. In Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Moonlit Cove (ca. 1880) and Rockwell Kent’s Burial of a Young Man (ca. 1910), a taste for transcendent mysticism pervades his sensibilities.

The most astonishing works in this part of the exhibit are perhaps two landscape paintings: Marsden Hartley’s “Mountain Lake—Autumn” (ca. 1910), and John Marin’s “Weehawken Sequence, No. 30” (ca. 1916). These wild terrains of explosive shape and color border on pure abstraction, each exuding a euphoric wildness of environment that give themselves almost entirely to the arena of paint.

On the second floor, all proverbial hell breaks loose in the form of a seismic shift into early American abstraction. Consuming a number of walls are the expansive, crackling landscapes of Augustus Vincent Tack, who Phillips saw as the first American to incorporate Far Eastern artistic influence. Sunset and floral paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe accompany explosive watercolors by Marin and the proto-Surrealist forest scenes of Charles Burchfield, which all reveal a sheer creative force beyond any straight-lined observational painting. There are even a handful of obscured, sun-flecked photographs by Alfred Stieglitz.

The artist who dominates this floor, however, is Arthur Dove. Increasingly revered today as an Artist’s artist, it is clear that Phillips anticipated something in Dove ahead of his time.

“For the first few years from World War I through the early 20s, Phillips was still struggling to educate himself about contemporary painting,” says Frank. “He’d initially set out to be an art critic, and he always said it was the work of Arthur Dove that really flung open the doors for him. He could understand, looking at Dove’s work, how paintings didn’t need narrative or metaphor to be successful.”

Dove’s weightless, unhinged landscapes and glowing skies defy previous notions of representation. The paintings “Golden Storm” (1925) and “Me and the Moon” (1937) are as haunting and ethereal of any 20th century masterpieces one could hope to see in a single exhibit.

On the third floor, this parade of artistic development fulminates. From Pollock and Mark Rothko to Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning, from a rare Philip Guston to a pair of remarkable Richard Diebenkorns, the congregation of jaw-dropping masterworks is dizzying. Here one can glimpse how Phillips’ vision of a great American artistic legacy was vaulted into the cultural stratosphere.

Yet balanced among the works of these international heavy-hitters, the visitor still finds in the surrounding galleries the triumphs of those who are usually overlooked: paintings by minority and immigrant artists such as Bernard Karfiol, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Jacob Lawrence – accomplished painters who underscore our country’s vexing cultural heritage of racial, ancestral and social tension.

What emerges from all of this is a renewed sense of the value of a truly American regionalism, boasting a long and storied lineage.

Even up until his death, Phillips pursued this mission. “In 1954,” says Frank, “Phillips wrote that he was still excited about what was happening in contemporary art, that he still had enthusiasm for going to New York galleries. He was in his mid-seventies, and that’s when he decides to build the first addition to this museum to house his ever-growing collection. He remained engaged until the very end.”

This is simply one of the great collections of American art, and Made in America is simply an exhibition that revels in its grandeur. Washington has its prized collection back within its borders. What more could we ask for? Go see the work and reclaim it as our own.

*“Made in the USA” is on view at the Phillips Collection through Aug. 31. For more information, visit [www.PhillipsCollection.org](http://www.phillipscollection.org/).*

Ari Post • May 22, 2014

The thought of a mid-to-late 20th-century artist painting washed out landscapes of rural America and being hailed as a cultural icon and national treasure is almost unimaginable. In the most aggressively transformative century in recorded history, the geography of art alone shifted so drastically and disparately that it is virtually impossible to sum up its evolution. Compared with Cubism, performance art, film and digital media, a pastoral scene of meadow grass and an old barn does not seem like much at all.

Yet Andrew Wyeth, a rural painter of American regionalist life and landscapes from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, managed to capture the imagination of this full-throttle era, and his work continues to challenge and inspire new generations to this day.

At the National Gallery of Art through Nov. 30, “Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In,” is a new exhibit centered around the recent acquisition of one of the artist’s seminal paintings, “Wind from the Sea” (1947). This is the first fully realized exploration of Wyeth’s frequent use of windows as subjects in his work, showcasing some 60 watercolors, drawings and tempera paintings. It reveals how the artist returned to windows repeatedly, probing the formal and conceptual richness of this most common subject in his and all our lives.

The works in this exhibit are haunted by ghostly shadows and memories that lie just beyond the picture plane. Wyeth devoted himself to visual art when he was still a child, trained by his father, the renowned but troubled illustrator N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings for such literary classics as ‘Treasure Island’ remain among the most acclaimed illustrations of all time. From his father, Wyeth inherited a love of nature and poetry, particularly an affinity for Robert Frost, but it seems like he absorbed a great deal of subtle, narrative illusory qualities as well. However, unburdened by the shackles of commercial illustration, Wyeth was able to realize a far greater level of dissonance and durability than his father’s work could ever achieve.

Windows allow for reflection, as seen in the watercolor “Rod and Reel” (1975), where a darkly reflective window set into a whitewashed wall slowly reveals tiers of subtly fragmented landscapes from the adjacent farmland through the glass. Onlookers are suddenly brought into an unexpectedly dimensional world on the surface of the paper.

The idea of reflections is fitting, as this collective work becomes a journey into the artist’s mind – which in Wyeth’s case dwarfs almost any effort by Surrealism to explore the depths of the unconscious. Wyeth lived most of his life in his Brandywine Valley hometown and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine, where the familiarity with his environment grew so intimate that he was able to truly divest himself of self-awareness and external forces of judgment. He spent so much time painting these scenes that they became a part of him, and so the work is at once an exact portrait of the artist’s mind as well as the reality of the subject. And Wyeth’s painterly expression of this duality gets contentedly lost within its own schism.

The paintings have a temporal haze to them, as if they could just vanish at any moment; the atmosphere he manages to produce is a depiction of something that can really be seen only in a state of unfocused rumination. (This idea might be an indication as to why Wyeth always insisted he was an “abstract” painter.)

There are occasional moments in his works where things just vanish, as in his tempera painting “Seed Corn” (1948). A high window looks out onto a sprawling gray landscape, with strung-up corn on either side drying out for the next season’s seeds. Peculiarly, the center rail of the window just disappears halfway out, fading into the muddy gray sky. At first it seems like a shallow surrealist gesture, but really it is much purer than that. It’s as if Wyeth had lost sight of the fact that the rest of the window even existed, as his eyes and brush strayed out toward the rolling hills beyond. And the strange thing is it looks perfectly natural.

Some of Wyeth’s appeal is absolutely his technical facility with his medium. His work offers such spoils of formal virtuosity, floating between hyperrealism and textured painterly richness, that scholars and museum-goers alike should swoon with awe.

From a historical perspective, there is also a great deal to play with. In many of these paintings, it is difficult to ignore the undertones of Wyeth’s contemporary influence, from the geometric purity of Piet Mondrian or Franz Kline, to the softer geometric haze of Hans Hofmann or Mark Rothko, and even the textural harmony and distributed brushwork of Mark Tobey’s all-over early abstract style of painting.

From the early regional side of things, there are parallels between Wyeth’s work and the atmospheric landscapes of forgotten early American painters like Dwight Tryon, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Henry Twachtman and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Of course, a great deal is further owed to his predecessors Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler as well, but quite frankly this game could go on forever.

One mark of a great artist is surely their ability to influence an audience to think and consider their surroundings. In the case of Wyeth, his subject is perhaps thought and environment itself. It is the moment when we look out a window into the gray sky, catching a glimpse of mortality as we ponder our myriad little human dilemmas, mired by history and personal experience but singularly products of our own creation, moving unavoidably into the future.

*“Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In” is on view at the National Gallery of Art through Nov. 30. For more information, visit [www.nga.gov](http://www.nga.gov).*

Ari Post • May 9, 2014

It is mesmerizing to walk into a room occupied by raw, pure and simple color. In the same way that the smell of the ocean pulls us in and triggers a deep connection to our natural surroundings, there is a sensation in seeing plain color, unrefined and unadulterated by subject matter or concepts, that brings us closer to the very state of our senses. It is almost involuntary the way it attracts us—color is fundamental to the way we experience the world and so we cannot help but react to it. Over centuries, artists have fought with it, innovating new modes of thinking and creation in pursuit of its depiction. Particularly over the past century, from the groundbreaking early 20th century works of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, to the color fields of Mark Rothko and the austere minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly, painters have developed brilliant and intoxicating approaches to communicating in the language color.

With Gravity’s Edge, on view through June 15, The Hirshhorn shines light on a time between 1959 and 1978 that signaled a shift in the way leading contemporary artists began approaching and perceiving color and abstraction. While throughout the 1950s the Abstract Expressionists focused on projecting personal ideologies and exploring their inner psychology through color and shape (greatly inspired by the writings of psychologist Carl Jung), this new generation of abstract painters moved away from these notions, giving prominence to and inspiring renewed emphasis on materials and technical processes. Led by artists Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, these artists began exploring the space of a painting in new ways, using both the force of gravity and the edge of the canvas as means of challenging the spatial and perceptual limits of their work.

They experimented with the way the paint bled down their untreated linen canvases, tilting it at different angles and letting the paint run out to the edge. They focused more intently on the edge in general, often painting around the canvas in the corners and along the perimeters, leaving the center empty and unpainted, which created illusions of both strict containment and endless expansion.

These effects, however, are very subtle, and the paintings generally feel quite simple. This is not to generalize or shrug off the more difficult, esoteric responsibilities of criticism, or to lazily thumb a nose at the frequent weariness and skepticism with which many viewers meet certain paintings such as these. This is just to say that despite and also in consideration of these perhaps lofty ideas, I believe that these paintings are meant to be approached simply and from the heart.

Along the walls of this exhibit, color and form are given the chance to radiate. The curved, diagonal lines in the paintings of Morris Louis, brightly hued and loose-edged, are soothing and playful. Helen Frankenthaler’s coarse layering of colors in messy blocks are wonderfully childlike in the way they search and explore such simple shapes and colors with thorough but spontaneous vitality. The graceful, organic outbursts of Paul Jenkins’ color washes are like flowers blooming with the explosive energy and immediacy of a firework.

A relative eschewing from so many exhibits on display in Washington right now, which are suffused with ambitious subjects and historical content (which is far from a denouncement but nevertheless quite prevalent), this is a show of art for the sake of art. It is for those of us who want to sit in front of a painting and let it wash over us. Frankly, it is a wonderful departure from the oversaturation of media and information that pervades our computers and trickles inevitably into our thoughts. Gravity’s Edge is a chance to lift that burden for a brief while, ignore the typical gnawing of time constraints and justification, and revel in something indefinably satisfying.

These paintings are beautiful and inspiring. Just enjoy them—there is much to love.

Alison Schafer • March 20, 2014

It’s the story of two powerful forces. One is human; the other is integral to future of the human race. Robert Nixon’s documentary film, “Mission Blue,” is the story of renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her relationship with the sea.

“I hope ‘Mission Blue’ shows people what we are doing to the oceans,” Nixon says. When he began working with Earle on the film, he says, “She said, ‘Please, make a hopeful film.’ And this is classic Sylvia, because she knew how hard that would be. But we believe we’ve done that. The film is very much about Sylvia’s life as a witness to nature and as a witness to what we’ve done to our planet.”

“Mission Blue” is coming to Washington as part of the 2014 Environmental Film Festival. It will make its D.C. premiere March 22 at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Earle is an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic Society, and where, as Nixon says, “she has ten of thousands of specimens.”

Washington is also home for Nixon and his family, and he says he’s been delighted to watch the Environmental Film Festival grow into a major event and a first-rate place to show films. And he would know. He’s made a dozen acclaimed films, including “Amazon Diary,” “Real Jaws” and “Gorillas in the Mist.” He also inspired and documented a massive clean up of the Anacostia, led by teenagers who live close to the river.

“Mission Blue” opened this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival. Directed by Nixon and Fisher Stevens, the movie, Variety said, captures the “majesty and imperiled status of the world’s aquatic life,” and the “spectacular underwater photography offers eye candy aplenty.” It also tells the story of the ocean story in human terms, through the eyes, drive, and lungs of Sylvia Earle.

“She is the hardest working, most tireless person I’ve ever met,” Nixon says. “We dove all over the world with Sylvia. And as exciting as it is to go diving with her, you don’t want to be her dive buddy, because she just does not use any air. We’re in the Galapagos, a hundred feet down, I’m hanging onto things and moving all over the place. I’ve got a camera. Sylvia’s next to me with a camera, just as calm as could be. After a while, I look at my air. I think, “Oh, I’ve got to be thinking about going up,” and I’d look at her air and it’d hardly moved at all. You know, you don’t want to be the reason why Sylvia has to go up.”

Ari Post • March 13, 2014

National Portrait Gallery

Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction

April 18, 2014 – January 11, 2015

Portraiture in the 20th century was a difficult terrain for artists to traverse. It was a time when many members of the artistic community agreed that abstraction was the new artistic language and figurative work had little more to offer the world in terms of progress and innovation. “Face Value” is a group exhibit of artists who helped reinvent portraiture for their era and demonstrated the enduring value of exploring the face and figure. Pulling a collection of work from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, the exhibit features artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenburg, Chuck Close, Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol and more, highlighting those who pushed the boundaries of portrait traditions, invigorated and challenged by new modes of abstraction and the roiling currents of their time.

American Art Museum

Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget

May 2 – August 3, 2014

Ralph Fasanella’s parents were among three million Italians who immigrated to America in the early 20th century, searching for a better life for their families. Growing up in the working class neighborhoods of New York City, Fasanella (1914 – 1997) worked as a truck driver, union organizer, gas station owner and ice delivery man before turning to painting in the 1940s. Though untrained as an artist, he developed a style that reflected his working class and immigrant roots, celebrating the common man and tackling complex issues of postwar America in colorful and infectiously exuberant paintings of urban life. “Lest We Forget” celebrates the 100th birthday of this quintessential American artist, bringing together paintings spanning his 52-year career. Don’t miss this one!

The Kreeger Museum

K@20: Kreeger Museum 20th Anniversary Exhibition

February 20 – July 31, 2014

As a longtime champion of local and regional artists, it is fitting that the Kreeger’s 20th anniversary exhibition should highlight Washington area artists. “K@20” features 14 artists from all walks of life who have played a large part in shaping this city’s unique and remarkable arts scene. Showcasing a broad spectrum of mediums, subject matter, and styles by renowned artists such as Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis, Jeff Spaulding, Yuriko Yamaguchi, Tom Green, Ledelle Moe and Michael Platt, the selection of artworks offers a fresh perspective on the collective strength of Washington’s art community.

Freer and Sackler Galleries

Bountiful Waters: Aquatic Life in Japanese Art

March 8 – September 14, 2014

If there is one thing that Japan is known for in America, it is its sushi and seafood culture that is second to none in the world. Indeed, since prehistoric times, the waters that surround the islands of the small and powerful nation have informed its culture and sustained its inhabitants. Flowing from mountain ranges to form rivers and lakes and feeding into the ocean, the plants and animals that live in and around the waters continue to be a major source of a revenue and a primary dietary source for its population. “Bountiful Waters” features a selection of prints, paintings, illustrated books and ceramics that depict Japanese appreciation for the beauty and variety of fish and other species. The highlight will be the public debut of the “large fish” series of twenty woodblock prints by renowned Japanese artist Hiroshige (1797 – 1858).

The Phillips Collection

Made in the USA: American Masters from the Phillips Collection

March 1 – August 31, 2014

The Phillips Collection’s private collection of American masterworks is finally coming home, after a years-long worldwide tour. The exhibit tells the story of American art from the late 19th century, when it was entirely dismissed by the prominent European art communities, through post-war American art in the 1950s and 60s, when it came into its own as a significant international force of artistic progress and innovation. The exhibit will be a landmark artistic experience, featuring over 200 works by over 100 artists, and taking up most of the museum’s gallery space. Artists range from early American progressives such as Arthur Dove and John Marin, to Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis and Richard Deibenkorn. Don’t miss it.

Art Museum of the Americas

Territories and Subjectivities: Contemporary Art from Argentina

March 27 – Summer 2014

Identities of boundaries and belonging are formed through cultural affiliation and familiarity, and so in many ways the idea of territory is quite subjective. For instance, most of us born in the United States will proudly bond with any fellow citizen over this mutual belonging, while a native Texan and Oregonian might have bitterly conflicting ideas of politics and cultural history. “Territories and Subjectivities” will examine the very notion of territory as something that we define for ourselves, not as an inherent condition of the world. Featuring contemporary artists from each of Argentina’s 23 provinces, this exhibit will present a panorama of modern-day Argentinian identity, revealing interweaving and conflicting notions of cultural ownership and identity within a single country that reflects the juxtaposition between any nation’s singularity and clashes of regional identity.

National Sporting Library and Museum

Foxcroft School: The Art of Women and the Sporting Life

March 15 – August 24, 2014

In conjunction with Foxcroft School’s Centennial Celebration, “Foxcroft School” is an exhibition focusing on women as sporting enthusiasts, sporting artists and sporting art collectors. The exhibition is comprised of loans from alumnae of the prestigious Middleburg college-preparatory school for girls and their relatives. Approximately thirty paintings and sculptures will provide a picture of the collecting interests of these remarkable women and their role in 20th century sporting life and art.

Corcoran Gallery of Art

Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson: Loop

March 15 – April 20, 2014

Drawing on the architecture of the Corcoran’s rotunda, “Loop” is a site-specific visual and music installation created by media artist Jennifer Steinkamp and electronic composer Jimmy Johnson. Originally commissioned in 2000 for the Corcoran’s 46th Biennial Exhibition, the artists use a high functioning graphics computer to create electronic visual patterns that enhance the space with rows of undulating multicolored digital rope and projections. Music plays along with the moving images. It will be an immersive and completely unique exhibit.

National Gallery of Art

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In

May 4 – November 30, 2014

While no artist could be farther from the abstract, post-modern and pop art movements that define American art in the 20th century, Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009) is one of our era’s great painters, who created a quiet shift in the tectonic plates of the American landscape. A painter of formal virtuosity and stamina like almost no other of his lifetime, he used both Renaissance traditions (like egg tempera) and new world techniques to create some of the most indelible images of our time, largely centered around farms and quiet landscapes of his hometown in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. “Looking Out, Looking In” will present an exhibit of over 50 of Wyeth’s paintings, drawings and tempera paintings focused around the artist’s frequent use of windows as symbol, subject matter, framing device and inspiration.
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Ari Post • February 27, 2014

Thanksgiving came and went, and the Christmas lights went up faster than you can say “Black Friday.” The season is upon us—the season of parades, of family, of thanks, beauty and giving. It is a season marked by visual splendor, from Christmas lights and snowy mountaintops, to gingerbread houses, parade floats and the glitzy intrigue of wrapping paper.

There is a traceable line between the spirit of the holiday season and the ethos of visual art, both of which build upon and reflect a collective understanding of our shared experiences, almost regardless of religion in this day and age. They carry with them an innate lineage unseen in almost all other objects or experiences that pull at our nostalgic heartstrings while moving steadily into the future.

Washington is abuzz with activities and events through the end of the year. If you are among the many households with family coming to town for the holidays, there are going to be plenty of options to keep your restless out-of-towners distracted. For those so visually predisposed, there are two unique and interesting museum exhibits which are both complimentary and starkly contrasting, and which hover beyond the radar of most visitors to the city so accustomed to the prevalence of the Smithsonian and National Gallery. The offerings at The Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts will please any audience, while taking them around the city for a true taste of the holidays in Washington.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is exhibiting “Wanderer,” an exhibit of travel prints, drawings and original printing plates by Ellen Day Hale (1855–1940), on view through January 5, which demonstrate the artist’s passion for travel and her mastery of printmaking. Hale achieved acclaim as a renowned portrait painter and printmaker, training in the ateliers of Boston artists and then traveling to Paris in the early 1880s to study painting. While abroad, Hale published accounts of her studies and the Parisian art world, encouraging female artists in Boston and inspiring them to travel.

Throughout her career, Hale took multiple trips throughout the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, recording crumbling ruins, scenic land and cityscapes, and local people at work, embracing the spontaneity and intimate scale of printmaking to capture her impressions of the many local cultures she experienced. This collection is an inspiring travelogue to any journeyer who might be resting their boots in the District over the holidays. www.NMWA.org.

In sharp contrast to Hale, contemporary artist Mia Feuer’s current installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, “An Unkindness,” is a haunting vision of our world consumed, transformed and twisted by human need. Inspired by the artist’s experiences in the oil-producing landscapes of the Canadian tar sands, the Arctic Circle, and the Suez Canal, the project explores the relationships between human infrastructure and the natural world. Feuer merges imagery from the oil sands with research into ecological systems worldwide, creating a series of immersive and interactive installations that are at once topical and deeply personal. The exhibit highlight includes a synthetic black skating rink open to the public in the museum’s Rotunda, which contrasts our own gleeful pleasure against the ominous natural symbolism, which is especially thought-provoking around the holidays. For skating rink hours and more information, visit www.Corcoran.org/Exhibitions.
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Ari Post • January 27, 2014

On May 12, 2008, an earthquake devastated the Sichuan province of central China, and more than 5,000 children lost their lives when the region’s shoddily constructed schoolhouses collapsed. After the catastrophe the state-controlled media tried to scuttle the incidents, detaining and threatening parents and volunteers who questioned the authorities and unfit building codes. Officials ordered the Chinese news media to stop reporting on school collapses, and parents were urged to accept money in exchange for their silence. Many of the schools were quickly reconstructed.

When Chinese artist Ai Weiwei visited the stricken region shortly after the earthquake, he saw the devastated schoolhouses, mounds of backpacks and twisted brambles of steel rebar scattered about the wreckage. The first thing he did was write about it in his blog (which had an extensive readership until Chinese authorities shut it down in 2009).

The next thing he did was to recruit volunteers through the Internet for his Citizens’ Investigation project, which compiled a list of the children who died in the earthquake. He gathered their names, birth years, genders and class, and displayed them along the walls of his Shanghai studio (now demolished) like a war memorial. At the Hirshhorn Museum, a replication of this wall faces the entrance to “Ai Weiwei: According To What?” a retrospective of the artist’s work, through February 24.

This wall is at once a statement of remembrance and protest, asking us with each name to confront the significance of an individual life and to weigh its loss, while defying his government’s mishandling and disregard of the situation. In all his work, Weiwei goes to great lengths to organize and document, to find a harmony in structure that reveals a feeling of truth in personal identity.

Weiwei’s work also has a way of confronting us with environments, filtering them through prismatic lenses and binding us all—his self, included—to the state of our modern times. Another piece in the exhibit brought about by the Sichuan earthquake events is a meticulously neat display of thousands of corroded steel rebar lengths laid out across the entire floor of a large gallery; the rebar was recovered in twisted heaps from the rubble of the schoolhouses, and the artist hired craftsmen to straighten them back out.

Consumed with the appropriating and rearranging of historical backgrounds and life experiences, Weiwei strives through his work to maintain a sincere, deeply rooted relationship with his surroundings, which is difficult when born into an upended society. Raised amidst the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, Weiwei’s family was among the many antisocialists exiled to northwest China. Eventually returning to Beijing, Weiwei entered film school before moving to the US in 1981, where he studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York and documented his daily experiences with photographs, hundreds of which are woven through “According To What?”

This personal visual record traces his early search for identity, which would soon consume him in an altogether different way. After his return to China in 1993, all remnants of his past had been wiped out by development, and a sense of excavating has emerged in his work as he uncovers and readapts lost artifacts of his cultural heritage.

“Kippe” is a perfect brick of tightly stacked scrap wood, nearly six feet tall, made out of dismantled pieces of Qing Dynasty temples and framed within a set of gymnast’s parallel bars, a ubiquitous schoolyard amusement from Weiwei’s childhood. “Colored Vases” is a collection of 16 Han Dynasty vessels, ranging in age between 206 BCE – 220 CE, which Weiwei dipped in neon hues of industrial paint; the only remnants of their original ornate patterns gasp through streaks of Kermit-the-frog green and frosted periwinkle.

All of Weiwei’s physical artworks—which exclude his trail of viral and online photojournalism, conceptual projects, architecture, writings and his prolific Twitter account—have the gravity and permanence of monuments. They defy China’s cultural patterns of paving over pasts and intentional forgetting, as with the Sichuan earthquake. Weiwei decries his country’s push toward cultural uniformity with the grit and snarl of egoistic proclamations, dealing directly and often abrasively with the values of free speech and expression (as evidenced by photographs documenting his unique employment of a certain four-letter word at the site of various Chinese and US landmarks).

Weiwei was initially acclaimed by his government and awarded the opportunity to work on significant projects in his country (including designing the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium from the 2008 Chinese Olympics). But since 2009, as a result of his heated political activism, the Chinese authorities have shut down his blog, detained him, kept him under house arrest, beaten him, confiscated his passport and demolished his studio.

There really is no clean end to this story. Weiwei is currently embroiled in murky charges of tax evasion by the Chinese authorities, and he is forbidden to leave the country for alleged suspicion of this and other crimes, from pornography to money laundering. He is currently working to prove his innocence.

But even ignoring all of this, Ai Weiwei is still a landmark contemporary artist. He distills monumental issues of our era by engaging the perspective of the individual, without losing focus on larger, more challenging implications. He stays aware of an ever-broadening network of global affairs, and uses an extensive web of media to empower his audience to understand and question their surroundings. And in an age where a government can all but cover up the deaths of 5,000 children, that means something.