Visual Arts

Georgetowner • February 1, 2013

Each month, interior designer Cynthia Reed and style-savvy publisher Sonya Bernhardt will collaborate on a window of inspiration, while celebrating a story inspired by the best of culture, cuisine and homegoods.

CELEBRATE VALENTINE’S DAY
Whether you’re in a romantic relationship or not, this year celebrate the loves in your life. Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love, is for all that you love. Our inspiration is a treat of churros y chocolate, a long-standing tradition from Spain. Churros, a crunchy donut-like pastry, gets dunked in a thick and velvety dark chocolate sauce. We set our table with elegant porcelain, light linen, napkins and luscious throw and, most importantly, our friends. We’ve paired our beautiful chocolate with orange and red, colors of love and warmth. Here are recipes and places where you can indulge.

To purchase Items in the photo:

The Tables and bench are available in any size. wood, and finish. Please contact Bernhardt & Reed for more information.

Linen, throws and napkins are available at Timothy Paul Bedding

CHURROS Y CHOCOLATE

Ingredients

For the churros

•3 oz (ounce) caster sugar

?•1 tablespoon(s) Ground cinnamon

•4 oz (ounce) Plain flour?

•4 oz (ounce) Self raising flour

?•1 pinch of sea salt?

•2 tablespoon(s) olive oil

?•1.76 pint(s) sunflower oil (for frying)

For the chocolate sauce

•7 oz (ounce) dark chocolate (roughly chopped)

•2 oz (ounce) Milk chocolate (roughly chopped)

•2 tablespoon(s) Golden syrup

?•10.53 fl oz (fluid ounces) double cream

Method

1. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together and set aside.

2. Make the chocolate sauce. Put all the chocolate in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the golden syrup and cream and heat over a low heat, stirring continuously, to melt the chocolate, being careful not to let it burn. Alternatively, heat with short bursts in the microwave, stirring between each burst.

3. Sift the flours with a good pinch of salt into a metal or heat-proof bowl and make a well in the center.

4. In a separate bowl, mix the olive oil and 450ml boiling water together, and pour into the well, beating it well with a fork to get rid of any lumps. The dough should be slightly soft and sticky to touch. Let it rest for 10 minutes.

5. Fill a large, heavy bottomed saucepan with the sunflower oil – it should be about one-third full. Heat the oil to 325 F or until a small piece of bread browns in less than 30 seconds.

6. Add the dough to a piping bag with a star- shaped nozzle and squeeze out churros directly into the hot oil, cutting them with a pair of scissors into the length you want. Be careful?not to cook more than three at any one time, or they will all stick together. Fry for about 3 to 4 minutes until crispy and golden. Remove from the oil with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper. Sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar. Reheat the chocolate sauce and pour into little cups for dipping with the churros.

This recipe comes from Mexican Food Made Simple by Thomasina Miers

Where to find churros y?chocolate in Washington, D.C.

?If you don’t feel like making your own churros, you can find them at many restaurants in the area.

BODEGA

3116 M St. NW

BOQUERIA

1837 M St NW

DOLCEZZA ARTISANAL GELATO (2 LOCATIONS)

1560 Wisconsin Ave. NW

1704 Connecticut Ave. NW

FARMERS FISHERS BAKERS

Washington Harbour, 3000 K St. NW

CHURRERIA MADRID

2505 Champlain St. NW
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Ari Post • January 17, 2013

Over thousands of years, portraiture has taken on a history and life of its own. In Egypt and other ancient societies, portraits of gods and rulers were ubiquitous. Though no examples remain today, ancient Greek painting is known to have developed a highly accurate portrait style, the evidence remaining in sculpted Hellenistic portrait busts of emperors and historical personalities from Alexander the Great to Socrates. By the zenith of the Roman Empire, portraiture had absorbed and propelled Greek and Etruscan traditions with artistic advancements and imbued them with senatorial political currents and religious and ancestral usage.

Skip ahead a few 1,000 years, past the Renaissance and the Dutch masters, the dreamy exuberance of the Baroque, the self-aggrandizing methodology of the Enlightenment and the emotional revolt of the Romantics, through roiling, ungodly tides of Impressionism—throw the invention of the personal camera and the cinematograph in there somewhere—and over the Vienna Secession, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Post-Modernism, Warhol, Conceptualism, and into the thick of the Information Age, where the plugged-in masses can cast their picture-phone portraits into a depthless technological sea as quickly and frequently as they can take them.

So, considering as many things up to this point, I often wonder what a drawn or painted portrait has to do with anything anymore. It can feel like a stuffy tradition, as dated as muskets and cravats, most often employed as an exercise by art students or as social posturing by royal families and self-important dignitaries. Frankly, compared with a good photographic portrait, a fine art portrait today looks a little awkward, out of place and self-conscious (Did anyone catch the recent Kate Middleton portrait fiasco?).

“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,” at the National Portrait Gallery, takes on the challenge of portraiture’s fate, pulling together a collection of contemporary artists who are moving the subject forward with fresh relevance. The artists featured in this exhibit use both timeless and modern techniques to deal with portraiture’s historical baggage as well as its inherently personal nature, presenting a cross-cultural smattering of identities and legacies for our time. The artists explore who we are and who surround us, where we come from and where we might go, and grapple with rendering the likeness of a broader, more disparate society that can no longer be cleanly identified.

Mequitta Ahuja is an African American and South Asian artist born in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her self-portraits are large, colorful fusions of her religious and cultural backgrounds, which she patches together to create her own personal history. It is a series of expansive, quilt-like canvases, which look as if they grew organically as more space was needed, cluttered with stamps, marks and washes of color. She places herself in the center of the compositions, surrounded by vaguely mythological plants, cryptic hieroglyphics, and a variety of symbolic markers from Eastern and Western traditions. Collectively, the works are enchantingly amorphous, offering a singular portrait of one woman’s bold emergence from her wild and untamed heritage.

The small, uniform, nearly translucent graphite portraits by Rob Matthews are on the opposite end of the spectrum from Ahuja’s self-portraits. With a softness and precision of light that recalls Vermeer and an unsettling emotional hollowness, Matthews renders meticulously detailed graphite drawings of his friends and family that consecrate the mundane affectations of our lives. His subjects each hold an object, a reference to medieval saints, but in place of bibles, swords or quills, they hold basketballs, crocheted skulls, house cats and turntables. The blank, distant stares of his portraits are like an acceptance of mortality, and the portraits turn into odd memorials of the “pre-deceased.”

Like Matthews, Ben Durham makes portraits of the people from his hometown, though he is further distanced from his subjects. Born in Lexington, Ky., he derives his source material from the local police blotter. These are people he knew in his childhood, some now arrested for traffic violations, others for assault or murder. Durham writes out his memories of them on thick handmade paper, using the mug shots as guidelines for his words. As he reconstructs his memories, a portrait composed of entirely handwritten text emerges. The clarity of the portraits are stunning, but the effect of a written story rendered unreadable from physically running over itself is an altogether beautiful sensation. Without being overwrought, these works pose the eternal question of what it is that defines each one of us, and illuminate the inescapable ripple effects of our past.

Adam Chapman’s digital works do not privilege the finished artwork over the pieces of it. His digital animations aggregate 150 of his own portrait sketches, and proceed to pull and push about their disassembled elements of line and shape on an LED screen. The moving pieces float in and out of the screen, occasionally and briefly reformulating into one of the portraits. Chapman custom-built the software, and according to the artist’s statement, every second of the installation is original, and every time a portrait is formed it is altered, shifted in some way from its initial incarnation. The portraits are continually forming, dissolving and reforming, sometimes without coming together at all. Like moments of clarity amidst the overwhelming malaise of a waking life, only briefly do the mechanics of the world flash brilliantly into focus.

So, what does portraiture have to do with anything anymore? Perhaps nothing. But if we take the time and exert the effort, it can offer us perspectives on our own lives that ultimately define the way we experience things—from our relationships with friends and family, to the effects our past, to the small rituals we unknowingly create to help us through our lives. Surely it is worth a look.

“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,” is at the National Portrait Gallery through Aug. 18. For more information, visit www.npg.si.edu

Gary Tischler • December 11, 2012

If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, you might wander over to the Ralls Collection before it’s too late.

You have until Dec. 15 to catch the exhibition, “The Photographs of Frank Hurley.” You want white—you’ve got white—the white of Antarctic ice, icebergs, ice floes and snow and blizzards, as endured by the men of 360-foot wooden ship Endurance, all part of a mission by English explorer Ernest Shackleton, who set sail for the Antarctic in August of 1914 with his crew and official photographer, an Australian by the name of Frank Hurley. They were leaving behind England and Europe, where World War I was just beginning.

Shackleton was attempting to become the first man to lead an expedition that would walk across the Antarctic from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. His expedition—named the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition—never accomplished that. Instead, the Endurance—it was named after a Shackleton family motto–was trapped in the ice along with the crew, which remained on the ship for a year until it sank. The men were then forced to live in what they managed to construct out of what was left of the lifeboats, subsisting on penguin and sea lion meat, until they were eating boiled bones. They moved to a barren island from which Shackleton set sail with five men on one of the lifeboats to try and reach a whaling station in the South Atlantic. After a harrowing 800-mile journey, he returned with help to rescue the rest of his crew, including Hurley. All of the members of the expedition survived.

Shackleton’s journey was a failure but in an age of brave exploration his survival and the rescue of his crew became a legendary story—a legend built on solid, black-and-white evidence that came with almost artful emotional content.

Marsha Ralls bought 35 of Hurley’s photos from the National Geographic Society 35 years ago and ended up keeping them. Hanging on the walls of her gallery in Georgetown, the images make an odd assemblage—they’re full of the kind of grandeur and stories that keep trying to escape the boundaries of their frames and edges. Each pictures seems to contain a frozen story.

Hurley was no stranger to the Antarctic, having accompanied Australian explorer Douglas Mawson on a trip to the Antarctic on the Nimrod. His photographic results led to his appointment on the Endurance.

The photographs in the Ralls exhibition appear to encompass the first year of the crew’s stay on the Endurance before it sank. The look is almost fantastic, like a visual tall tale, except, of course, that they’re real images, especially the photographs of the ship frozen in tundras of ice. The ship seems at once a powerful contraption and one totally in the grip of helplessness. Against the vast expanse of ice, the ship at times seems like a toy, the men working on the ice stick figures. Especially haunting is an image of the Endurance at night.

Hurley’s pictures—including one showing him draped across a mast, or underneath the ship, at work—are famous. There have been books about the expedition, stories and tales and pictures, all of which has elevated the failed expedition to the realm of legend. But it’s the pictures that tell the story, keep it alive in the mind as fact, a living fact of what men can endure, of how precious and powerful the earth is, we and the creatures in it (In one image, a group of king penguins seem to be in conference.).

According to stories about Hurley, he was a taciturn sort of Australian who was a doer, a great maker of pictures and also maker of makeshift environments —a dark room on the ship. He was without question brave—he dove into icy waters to save negatives, then returned from his ordeal with the expeditions to jump into the midst of World War I, chronicling the fortunes and misfortunes of the Australian troops in France and at the battle of Ypres.

“The Photographs of Frank Hurley” through Dec. 15 — The Ralls Collection, 1516 31st St., NW; 202-342-1298.
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Gary Tischler •

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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Ari Post • September 21, 2012

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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Ari Post •

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.

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