Arts & Society

Mary Bird • February 26, 2015

The Women’s Board of the American Heart Association Greater Washington Region logged 1,000 hours in planning this year’s always anticipated event which drew 1,200 attendees to the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on Feb. 9 to raise awareness of cardiovascular health issues, the number-one killer among women. Autria Godfrey of ABC7/WJLA-TV emceed and Barbara McConaghy Johnson produced the stunning fashion show of spring 2015 styles from Bloomingdale’s, Chevy Chase. In a special video greeting, news anchor Bret Baier hailed Richard Jonas, M.D., who has overseen their young son’s struggle with congenital heart disease.
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Riena Santa • February 24, 2015

On Thursday July 19 at the Sewall-Belmont house & museum in DC, the highly anticipated Global Down Syndrome Foundation hosted the 2013 Be Beautiful Be Yourself Gala Kickoff Party. The exciting and fun evening included a fashion preview featuring the stylish urban bohemian look from the Wink collection. It was worn by the models with Down syndrome which were escorted by members of Congress and TV celebrities. Guests included Bob Guiney (from the Bachlor), Scott Grimes (from TV show ER), and several U.S Congressman including Scott Tipton , Cory Gardner, Congressman Mike Coffman, Ed Perlmutter , and Congressman Greg Walden.

With approximately 250 attendees from DC, family members with Down syndrome and interested parties, this grand Fashion show raises awareness to the chromosomal disorder that affects more than one in 700 babies. In effort to inform the audience, Director of Alzheimer disease research and the department of neurology the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome, Dr Huntington Potter presented a moving speech that raised the need to help. Abnormalities are caused by errors in the number or structure of chromosomes, and many children with a chromosomal abnormality have mental or physical birth defects. Some chromosomal abnormalities result in miscarriage or stillbirth and understanding what chromosomes make it easier to recognize the wide range of problems chromosomal abnormalities can cause.

Guest attendee Sara Brown said “I’m here in support of my family member Laila Brown and because I believe that there is a cure that someday will be found. Brown said that Laila is very active, she has been doing 2 years of special Olympics and various other events like this fashion show. Brown also said “She has such a strong spirit and I know that events like this will help further the research process to finding a cure for this syndrome” .

For further information or a chance to donate and help the Global Down Syndrome Foundation, contact PR Abby Perlmutter 303.468.6665 or visit their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/GDSFoundation and their twitter page @GDSFoundation.
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Gary Tischler • February 23, 2015

I first saw “Godspell,” the John-Michael Tebelak-conceived and Stephen Schwartz-composed hip and hippie musical, based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew, in San Francisco in 1972, when it toured after its Broadway debut in 1971. Jesus had a huge red afro, as I recall, wore a Superman t-shirt. The stories and parables of Jesus were sweet and funny comic turns, one of them by lads dressed up like the Marx Brothers.

It was the post-hippie 1970s, and the music was joyful, gospel-pop-rock, and the show was a touching, inviting call to community. Mary Magdalene in that version had the hot hit song “Day By Day,” and all was swell with the world. I remember taking my son to a mass in Berkeley at which the presiding priest wore a Superman vest.

That was a long time ago, as fads and hit shows go, and there have been many incarnations and revivals of “Godspell” since then, including a Broadway revival as late as 2011.

So, where is “Godspell” now, and how is it doing?

It’s at the Olney Theatre Center, not a likely hot spot. Since we asked, it’s doing just fine, looking not so much quaint as fresh. The hippies have become something akin to a gaggle of questioning drifters and hipsters, a nice mix of gender and ethnic types in a show in which gender and ethnicity appear to have been complete blurred in the sense that they don’t matter and aren’t referenced. It’s egalitarian as all get-out, although Jesus, in this instance is not black, Hispanic or female.

Audiences matter, especially in a show like “Godspell,” which still appeals to young people, although they might snub its overt sweetness and gentleness, but then that’s a question of how you feel about Jesus, the gospels and perhaps the one percent.

“Godspell” remains firmly grounded in its gospel material and in a Jesus who’s here to laud the virtues of being kind to your neighbor, turning the other cheek, rewarding those who acknowledge sin or help others. It’s about love, love, above all, love God to be sure, but also your neighbor as you would yourself. The suggestion is also there that you should love yourself, or at least give yourself a break, because Jesus will.

It remains a sweet show, with unflagging energy, and the audience of mostly past-40 types greeted it with enthusiasm. It’s as a commune of sorts being applauded in suburban Maryland, an event that’s kind of gratifying.

Director Jason King Jones has assembled as high-volume, high-appeal and frisky cast—everyone gets a turn to shine out his or her light, although as individuals they’re deliberately not differentiated as specific characters.

The exceptions are Jordan Coughtry as Jesus and Rachel Zampelli with the double duty task of John the Baptist and Judas. The rest are a ragtag group of apostles who appear first as contemporary discontents wandering into any-old-town USA one at a time, with back packs, bags, and worn clothes along.

Soon enough, with the arrival of John the Baptist and Jesus, unannounced but clearly special—Jesus spreads water on the sometimes reluctant new followers, the group begins to coalesce into a story that is often joyful, sometimes questioning, sometimes funny, very often surprisingly appealing. From the first real blast of arrival—the stirring “Prepare Ye,” sung in fine form by Zampelli, to a familiar “Day by Day,” led by Allie Parris, the audience is led to a musical journey through the gospel.

Coughtry as Jesus is immensely appealing—he has the gospel spirit but also the hippie spirit of the 1960s, a handsome, compelling presence, who is most affecting in the end at the Last Supper, in the course of suffering, questioning God the father.

There’s something carny-like, child-like, circus-like about it all: It’s story-telling hour, the rich man and the poor man, the good son and the prodigal son, the seeds that fall on stone and earth, accompanied by Schwartz tunes which are still terrific—“Save the People,” “O, Bless the Lord My Soul,” “Learn Your Lessons Well,” “All for the Best” (a ringing indictment of the one percenters), the touching “”By My Side” and the bawdy “Turn Back, O Man.”

The simplicity of the staging—make-do set, pop-rock band on another level, the intimacy between cast members and cast members and audience—seems almost brand new.

— “Godspell” (through March 1) opens Olney’s 2015 season, an eclectic bundle of musicals, new plays and classics. The season includes “Grounded,” “Carousel,” Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” “The Producers,” Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever,” “Bad Dog” and “Guys and Dolls.”

Gary Tischler •

Robert Earl Keen, the premier Americana music singer-songwriter and “Americana” star from Texas has a natural way of talking—and, we guess, writing. It’s like the beginning of natural-born memories, conversational, and without too much heavy lifting.  Sort of like the way he sings,  his voice is direct in delivery, you remember the way it sounds, not necessarily how long a note is held or the timbre.  As he’s said before about his voice, “You get used to it.”

The 59-year-old Keen has been around a while to amass a reputation, lots of tunes and albums (18 to date), beginning with “No Kinda Dancer,” and now his latest—just out this month —“Happy Prisoner,” a bluegrass-themed trip back to his listening and playing roots, which includes a cover of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s “Footprints in the Snow.”

He’s come to bluegrass territory, playing music from the album, at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., Tuesday night, a place which bills itself as “America’s Legendary  Music Hall,” in an area and state which happens to be a hotbed of “Americana” music and bluegrass.

“It’s a great place,” Keen says of the Birchmere. “Been there before. I loved it.  The album, the music, bluegrass, that’s like going back.”  He’s also said before, “I can’t think of a better thing on a Saturday morning than to tune into a bluegrass station, and get it going with that music and you listen, and you say ‘well, okay, let’s get started.’ ”

Keen is more or less a musician’s musician, singing, playing, writing in the “Americana” field in the sense that he works hard, travels all the time, tours and loves being in front of a live audience,  in clubs, parks, stadiums and venues all over the country. “There’s nothing better than singing in front of people,” he says.

“This is our roots,” Keens says of Bluegrass music. “It’s where all the other stuff comes from—folk, country,  cowboy music, all the sounds and rhythm are in there.  And Monroe, he’s the greatest, if you had to do that and Flat and Scruggs and others.”

Keen is from Texas, through and through and through, growing up in and around Houston, picking up English rock and Willie Nelson, and after getting a degree in English in 1980, starting writing songs and playing,  initially, you guessed it, “bluegrass.”  “It’s my roots, too, it’s what I started out doing.”

In the mid-1980s, he also started out doing albums—his first was in 1984 “No Kinda Dancer.” His album titles, like his song titles, are resonant of what you might call people’s music,  country and folk flavors, with a little bit of Texas spice. “No Kinda Dancer” was followed by “West Textures,” “A Bigger Piece of the Sky,” “Gringo Honeymoon,” “Picnic,” “Farm Fresh Onions,” “Ready for Confetti” and others.

“I think there were a lot of people doing so-called “Americana” music before it even became a genre or category,” Keen said.  “My buddy Lyle Lovett was doing it, and all of a sudden, it’s a Grammy category. But I think it’s several strands of music or offshoots of the strands, like country, from all over the country, from Nashville to Willie (Nelson), to folk, traditional music, regional,  bluegrass and so on.  I guess I fit in the category—so does Roseanne Cash, Lyle, Emmy Lou Harris.  It’s a pretty rich, diverse and broad category.  A lot of  it is acoustic.  It’s based in exceptional instrumental playing as well as in the emotional power of lyrics and stories.”

“I believe it’s an art form, sure,”  he said.  For Keen, the words mean a lot—he was an English major, after all.  “Yeah, they do,”  he said. “I like to write, I like to write songs that could stand alone and be read for themselves.” We talk a little bit about John Stewart, the former Kingston Trio member who was probably an “Americana” pioneer, and top-notch songwriter (“Daydream Believer”).  “He was a terrific guy,” he said. I knew him. Really good writer. Really good songs.”

Keen is proud of being a Texan—he’s lived there in different parts all of his life. “It’s got this mystique—the music, too, but there’s a lot of jokes about it, too.”

“We’re doing this by way of all acoustic,” he said.  “It’s embracing the music.   I didn’t write any of the songs. Me and the band put it together.  Lyle sings on it.”

The song list will give you the flavor: “Hot Corn, Cold Corn,” “99 Years for One Dark Day,” “East Virginia Blues,” “T for Texas,” “Old Home Place,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Steam Powered Aeroplane and others, including: “Footprints in the Snow,” the Bill Monroe classic, which is a story, a song, which starts out with “Now, some folks like the summertime, when they can walk about . . . ” and builds to an end. 

For Keen himself, yes, the road does go on forever, as he likes to say. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Robert Earl Keen, “Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Tour” with Bonnie Bishop, 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 17, the Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria, Va.

Gary Tischler •

It wouldn’t hurt to put a carny barker out in front of Harman Hall where the Shakespeare Theatre Company is staging a production of “The Metromaniacs,” originally by a French playwright by the name of Alexis Piron, who hung out with the renowned philosopher Voltaire.

You could have the barker marketing the old-fashioned way to passers by, as in “Pssst . . . looking for a good time?  Step right in.  They’ll have you rolling in the aisles.”

And they will.  “The Metromaniacs” is such good fun and so funny that they might even hear the rolls of laughter in the streets,  and it won’t be because it’s karaoke standup night at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

What it is is an outrageous evening of rhyming, a lost art as in “Brian Cryin’,” bad puns and contemporary references, a spirited, rhyme-on-a-dime (it’s catchy, like measles, but much more fun) crew of actors, and another really smart and fun collaboration between STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn and adapter and playwright David Ives. 

Kahn and Ives have beaten the bushes in 18th-century French farce before to great success and rewards for the audience in the much acclaimed “The Liar” and “The Heir Apparent,” both of which were beautifully staged with cares and a spirit of invention that out-invents itself.

The title, “The Metromaniacs,” refers to a group of Paris intellectuals,  competitive poets and people of the theater who have nothing better to do than compete with each other in couplets and stanzas, as opposed to foils and dueling pistols.  Metromaniacs, as one character suggested, are not people obsessed with the Metrorail System, as many of us are these days.  They just rhyme everything in the play.

This is a barrage of rhyming—you have to be a  little amazed and awed. It is so smartly done that it resembles a doubles game of ping pong with six balls in play at once, or a night out with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, pranksters of old, juggling chain saws and balloons. The verbal dexterity is so sharp that if you happen to be for some reason even for a split second thinking about texting somebody, you will be lost like a drunk on a tightrope.

There is also a plot, so dense and confusing that it defies description, but we must or bust, so:  a gentleman named Francalou, wealthy, wise and a secret poet (his nom de plume is a female) is holding a soiree for the rich and wealthy and his competitors in the poetry game, a party that will have his ditsy, but ritzie daughter on hand, along with a potential swain or three, a smarter-than-everybody maid (always important in these things),  a playwright-once-lawyer, and his smarter servant, an uncle of the playwright  and several characters who appear to be incognito, which seems kind of neato and here is also rhymed with libido.

Somewhere along the way, things appear to get lost—people disappear that weren’t even there, others mistake their lovers for other lovers,  and sometimes long-lost relatives are re-united.

Ours is not to reason why, wi-fi not, but just to sit back and let the laughs come—and they are hits that keep on coming.  Kahn and Ives have honed it to a true art form now, and they work well together. Kahn keeps things going at a not-quite-but-very-close to breakneck speed. It’s as if all the verbal tools at hand were being used,  although not always correctly. Kahn has always been an actor’s director, whose motto is respect the text, and Ives has always had a way with old and forgotten plays, sucking all the dust of the them to make everything feel as fresh as a ring-a-ding tweet.

The cast is outrageously splendid—you can tell because it looks easy and is as difficult as a man trying to get into tights.  You cannot do pas de deux rhyme games by yourself. This takes verbal dexterity, thinking (and remembering) on your feet, if they are unstable, moving around on a stage beautifully cluttered with a fake forest and stone, pretending to be slapped from across the stage and creating a character that people can relate to.

Standouts here are: everybody.   I give you Amelia Pedlow, who has the idling “whatever” in her classic French repertoire and a sudden attack of sexual fever that threatens to burn her petticoats as the smitten Lucille; Dina Thomas as her much smarter and well-rounded maid Lisette; Adam LeFevre, a jaunty poet and host who doesn’t mind putting on a play and dishing out 50-page rewrites;  Peter Kybart as a cantankerous uncle to the multi-faceted Damis, played with smart speed and fury by Christian Conn (he is also Cosmo de Cosmos and Bouillabase).

They dash about the stage and pounce on rhymed words like soccer goalies, throwing in pratfalls,  bits of physical comedy that everybody gets. They’re maniacs all right, as crazy as a fox who can box.

*“The Metromaniacs” will be performed at Harman Hall through March 8.* [gallery ids="118214,118227,118222" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • February 19, 2015

It is America’s first great ghost story by a beloved legendary author and involves a headless horseman—yes, there is—the fiery Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, the school teacher Ichabod Crane, the British spy Major Andre, witches burned at the stake. All of this adds up to the perfect, adventuresome and spectacular ingredients for the Septime Webre-conceived and -choreographed Washington Ballet production of “Sleepy Hollow”  which makes its world premiere at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater for seven performances Wednesday, Feb. 18, through Sunday, Feb. 22.

“Sleepy Hollow,” which also features guest artist Xiomara Reyes, a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre as Katrina Van Tassel, is the third installation in Washington Ballet’s “The American Experience” series, which develops original full-length ballets based on iconic American literary masterworks. “The Great Gatsby” and “The Sun Also Rises” were the first two produced to kick off the series.

Webre said he was attracted  to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which a headless horseman is prominently featured, along with a school teacher and his love, because it represented an opportunity to create something spectacular and  theatrically thrilling.  Webre has woven the familiar tale into the Salem witch trials, the American Revolutionary War and a love triangle with the help of a spectacular cast and design team.

The  musical score by composer Matthew Pierce features ancient Gaelic lyrics and hymns performed by a 14-piece orchestra and 18 choristers from the Choristers of Washington National Cathedral Choir.  Included in the design team are costume designer Liz Vandal, scenic and properties designer Hugh Landwehr, lighting designer Clifton Taylor, projection designer Clint Allen, librettists Karen Zacarias and Bill Lilley and puppet designer Eric J. Van Wyk.

All the familiar characters are here: the vengeful headless horseman, three witches, the geeky Ichabod Crane, the lovely Katrina Van Tassel and the town rowdy, Brom “Bones” Van Brunt.

Webre said he chose “Sleepy Hollow”  for the American Initiative series “not only for the grabbing imagery, but because Washington Irving is America’s first true celebrity author. This was a man that made his pen a pistol and made fiction an American  profession.”

The score by Pierce, who created the music for Washington Ballet’s “Alice (In Wonderland),” the company says, “creates  an atmosphere that  lends a cinematic quality to the production. He imparts a fresh and bold energy to the early 19th-century, story-based folk music and country fiddling that inspired his score.”

The large cast also includes Luis R. Torres as Cotton Mather,  Jared Nelson or Corey Landolt as Ichabod Crane, Brooklyn Mack or Gian Carlo Perez as the Headless Horseman,  Reyes or Maki Onuki as Katrina Van Tasssel, Jonathan Jordan or Miguel Anaya as Brom “Bones” Van Brunt.

Performances are 7:30 p.m., Wednesday (preview); 7:30 p.m, Thursday; 7:30 p.m., Friday; 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Saturday; 1:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Sunday.

Gary Tischler • February 18, 2015

When soprano Renée Fleming appears in recital with Russian pianist Olga Kern at the Kennedy Center on Feb. 23, as part of Washington Performing Arts’ Star Series, she’ll be on familiar footing. So will her audience, because in the world of classical music, Fleming, with 50 operas to her credit, is just about the most familiar face that lives, breathes and sings in these times.

You can expect Fleming to be in fine form, performing songs by Schumann, Rachmaninoff and Strauss, not because the music comes easy to her, but because she gives it impassioned attention. That’s where the love especially exists.

“The Rachmaninoff songs are new to me, but I’ve done the Schumann and Strauss pieces before,” she says, every inch, one way or another, the diva – a description she doesn’t particularly mind. “You can embrace that without thinking of it in terms of high-strung temperament. It’s about the utmost quality in the performance, and doing all the things that are required with being a singer, a performer, at a high level.”

Certainly, she’s the best-known diva. She’s been called “the people’s diva,” because she crosses the boundaries of classical music and leaves the world of her opera roles often, almost with a certain amount of glee.

She can be heard in the “Lord of the Rings” movies singing in Elvish. For the 2010 album “Dark Hope,” Fleming abandoned her familiar soprano tones to take on pop-rock compositions, including Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Willy Mason’s “Oxygen,” which Fleming tosses out like a gift of bouncy music.

Blessed with good looks, she remains striking and glamorous. She followed the traditional pathways to musical stardom, more or less: studies in school, graduate studies, a Fulbright scholarship, appearances in small operas companies and, a big leap forward, winning the Metropolitan Opera Auditions at 29 (when she also sang the part of the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro” at Houston Grand Opera in 1998).

The rest is a prodigious and world-whirlwind success story – singing in pretty much all the major houses, singing many of the major roles to critical and popular acclaim. She became a star, a diva, call it what you will.

But that world – sometimes confined both musically and in terms of lifestyle – changed. If you became the kind of megawatt star that Fleming has become at 55, the expectations shift. She believes that, for one thing, opera is a world that’s expanding, with brilliant new works from contemporary and modern composers. This belief led her to performing as Blanche DuBois in Andre Previn’s opera, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“I don’t think classical music stands still, nor should we rely only on an existing great-works repertoire. We need new music and forms and should embrace them.”

She’s gotten past a divorce after 11 years of marriage, has two daughters, Amelia and Sage, from that marriage and in 2011 remarried after being set up on a blind date by her friend, novelist Ann Patchett (“Bel Canto”).

“We’re very good friends,” she said of Patchett. “The book is beautiful, it lends itself to opera.”

She is curating an opera based on the novel for the Chicago Lyric Opera, which commissioned the project. She is a creative consultant for the Chicago Lyric Opera.

There’s more. She hooked up with the Kennedy Center in 2013, heading its American Voices project. She sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, wrote a book (“The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer”), and she is well known for being part of numerous charitable and educational projects. Which is why she’s recommending a book called “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.” “This is important, it really is, because there’s so much going on in everyone’s lives,“ she said.

Change begets change. Fleming and her husband, who live in New York, recently bought a home in the Palisades neighborhood near Georgetown.

And oh yes, she’s taking to the stage in the comedy “Living on Love”, based on an unfinished Garson Kanin play, scheduled to open on Broadway in April. She plays a famous—wait for it-diva. These days, anything can happen. With Fleming, that’s no longer a surprise.

Ari Post • February 16, 2015

Drinking coffee on a gray morning this past winter, I watched through the window of the cafe as a construction crew tossed a stack of red bricks, one-by-one, from the ground up to a scaffold two stories above. The man at the bottom would toss the brick just so, and his partner, leaning over the railing of the scaffold, would pluck it from the air as it floated momentarily at the peak of its arc and place it gently down beside him. A third man stood guard, keeping pedestrians clear of the narrow strip of sidewalk.

I watched this small production carry out in an irrelevant daze, sipping my coffee and avoiding the moment when I would get up, walk a block to my office and sit at my desk for the next nine hours. It went on like this for ten or fifteen minutes: me bluffing time’s inexorable momentum, and the men in hardhats and reflective neon safety vests making bricks leap from the ground and hover gently before plucking them like grapes from the dark sky.

Suddenly they stopped and turned their heads and I followed their gaze to a woman on the edge of the safety perimeter, standing with a small bristly dog at the end of a short leash, rustling her phone out of her pocket and squaring off to steady herself. She held the phone in front of her face, signaled to the crew with a thumbs up and what I can only call a ridiculous grin, and began clicking photographs with excitement as they resumed their small labor. After a moment, she said something, put her phone back into her pocket, readjusted her grip on the leash and tugged her dog away.

There are many ways to observe the world, but the view through a lens is an ever more common filter through which we look at even the smallest and most fleeting of details around us. That woman who photographed the construction team with her phone was so focused on getting the image that she will hardly remember what went on any better than someone who heard the story secondhand.

There are many people today who would consider this trend detrimental to something like social consciousness. But looking at the photographs of Garry Winogrand, it can be considered nothing less than genius.

At the National Gallery through June 8, the self-titled exhibit, “Garry Winogrand,” the first retrospective of the renowned New York photographer in 25 years, features hundreds of photographs and proof sheets that reveal the compulsive, ceaseless physicality of sheer picture-taking profuseness that defined Winogrand as a person, a photographer and an artist.

Even by today’s standards, Winogrand took more pictures than one would almost think was possible in a lifetime. When he died in 1984 at age 56 from bladder cancer, he left behind 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls that had been developed but not contact-printed, and 300 untouched, unedited contact sheets. That is more than a quarter of a million pictures he took that he never even saw.

He was described as a man with ravenous energy and interest in the world, known to literally hurtle through crowds as he photographed. This might explain why so many of his images are fixed in a now trademark tilt—things are usually crooked in a Winogrand photograph, frozen in a restless, startled motion.

He made no distinction between subjects, either. The way he photographed a crippled war veteran or a union rally on the streets of New York is the same way he photographed President Kennedy or Mickey Rooney. Nothing was sacred to him because everything was sacred, and nothing was vulgar because he could find beauty in it all. A ferocious wit, he once quipped, “I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.”

He was always taking photographs. His first wife said, “Being married to Garry was like being married to a lens.” As a result his work comes at you like pages of an American encyclopedia caught in a tornado: a pageant winner, the mayor, a sailor, the struggling middle-class family, angry protestors, a tramp, the endless skies of the Southwest, the New England snow blustering over crowded city sidewalks, the ferryboat, the Greyhound bus, the cattle auction, the drunken socialites, the women, a diner, an airport, the smokers, the gamblers, the nuns and priests, the confused children, and a stray pony for good measure.

He took so many photographs, all of them very good, some of them great, and some of them heart-stopping. But I am not sure Winogrand himself would have been interested in the distinction. To pick one photograph as a focus, or even a dozen, would be to single out an image that inadequately represents the power of the artist’s cumulative lifework on display.

This exhibit makes you wish that Winogrand just existed with his camera in every lost moment that ever was because, somehow, he would have made it beautiful. So, the point of the construction worker story is that it is precisely as irrelevant and forgettable as anything, and Winogrand would have done exactly what I saw the woman do: he would have taken the picture, shelved it, and dealt with it some other time, knowing somewhere in his mind that he had recorded that moment. Was it an important photograph? Probably not. But could the photograph be important? Through the lens of Winogrand, it would be a certain possibility.

The content is simply the fabric of our society, which encapsulates everything, from the construction workers, to the overexcited woman with a dog and a phone camera, to the bored man drinking coffee across the street, to every passerby that broke up the scene in between.

And as the view through our own lenses becomes more and more common, it is increasingly clear that Garry Winogrand possessed a rare talent to pluck these moments from the ether, the same way the construction crew snatched the bricks out of the air before they would fall back down to earth and shatter into dust. Although Winogrand would surely scoff at the metaphor.

“Garry Winogrand” is at the National Gallery of Art through June 8. For more information, visit www.nga.gov

Ari Post •

I need to get something off my chest. Surrealism annoys me a little.

It always feels like a cultish charade of midcentury intellectuals: the aggressive anti-rationalism, the unnecessary visual lexicons of the pseudo-Freudian subconscious, the exploration of the mind’s mysterious fissures, the creation of new realities that defy constraints of earthly existence…it’s all just a little much for me. I find its sensibilities much better fitted to a Loony Tunes parody than a deadly serious museum wall (for a good time, Google “Porky in Wackyland,” 1938).

This is not to say Surrealism never had its time or place. An evolutionary offshoot of the Dada movement, it was born in France as a retaliation against the societal trauma caused by World War I. All across Europe cities were leveled, communities were displaced and national currencies were tanked by hyperinflation. A flu epidemic had wiped out nearly six percent of the world, and a generation of European men were lost to the trenches.

The world was no longer rational, so writers and artists determined to dig beyond their rational intellect to decipher it – perhaps in search of deeper meaning, but likely as much an act of defiance and self-preservation. Surrealism was founded in 1924 by the French writer André Breton. He defined it as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought.”

Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Surrealism rapidly caught on across Europe, and the outset of World War II found many of its leaders taking refuge in New York City. The wide exposure of their work to American artists was one of the major catalysts in New York’s later development as the epicenter of postwar art and culture.

Though Surrealism broadened the boundaries of art profoundly, its arcane ideologies and strange elitism rendered the movement insular and prohibitive – a perception that fine art has never really overcome, and now seems largely to have embraced. (Such vainglorious and esoteric practices arguably foreshadowed the profligate economic culture of today’s contemporary art market.) Furthermore, its initial nobility of concept gave way to a hackneyed commercialism by second-rate imitators.

All of this, oddly enough, is to say that I had a damn good time at the Phillips Collection’s latest exhibition, “Man Ray – Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare,” on view through May 10.

I experienced frustration, complexity, humor, disappointment, apathy, interest, excitement and occasional moments of great beauty; perhaps not dissimilar from a given day inside my head. From the standpoint of Surrealism, this is a smashing success. My fundamental conflicts with the subject matter never waned, but I walked away with renewed – if weary – reverence for the accomplishments of Surrealism, and particularly those of Man Ray, the only true American Surrealist.

Working in Hollywood in the late 1940s, Man Ray (1890-1976) created a series of paintings called the “Shakespearean Equations,” which he considered his defining creative vision. They were inspired by a series of photographs he had taken a decade earlier of 19th-century mathematical models and sculptures. The Phillips exhibition displays the paintings, photographs and models together for the first time in history, along with other paintings, photographs and assemblages by the artist.

The show illustrates Ray’s conceptual fixation with human/object interrelation: making people that look like things and things that look like people. In many ways it shows how Surrealism has affected our visual notions of the subconscious as much as the subconscious has affected notions of Surrealism.

For all his clear ambition, Man Ray was not a great painter. Unlike Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico or Max Ernst, whose eyes for phantasmagoria were on par with their painterly finesse, Ray’s canvases are tedious and inexpertly rendered. However, his photographs are stark, lucid and remarkable. They hold their own against the best Surrealist work, as well as any photography from this era.

In Ray’s photographs, the complex intermingling of object and anatomy, light and shadow, atmosphere and geometry get distorted both physically and emotionally. For instance, in two corresponding plates we see the formal juxtaposition of a peach and a deceivingly racy perspective of a woman’s bum, hands and toes. The illusion is so effective that it takes a moment to understand what we are even staring at.

In his famous “Le Violon d’Ingres,” a model’s body transforms into a violin, inspired by Ingres’s Neoclassical paintings “Valpinçon Bather” and “Le Bain turc.” It’s impossible not to appreciate the whimsy.

To a lesser extent, Ray’s models are clever, but they feel like carnival games: charming, enjoyable, but of little consequence. Ironically, what are always more impressive are his photographs of these models.

A great demonstration of this point is the series of “Non-Euclidean Objects” in the corner of the fourth gallery. There is the model itself, a geometric soccer ball of sorts. Then there is a photograph of the object, and a drawing of the object. Even with the object directly before us, its photograph, hanging on the wall behind it, is far more powerful. The way Ray manipulates the gradual value of shadows against the shifting planes of the object’s surface is stunning. He makes the photograph express what reality does not. And I don’t even remember what the drawing looks like.

Black-and-white photography was Ray’s greatest achievement; he saw something truly original through the lens of his camera. Using shadows and light, he made images of mundane objects that maintain their essence but exist simultaneously as beautiful earthly abstraction. His silver prints of an egg beater and photographic equipment are notably exceptional.

But this is never clearer than in the final gallery, with the “Shakespearean Equations.” (As a point of interest and debate, the arrogance of which I earlier accused the surrealist movement is on full display in the very title of this series, as the exhibit text admits Ray chose it for no particular reason. He just seems to have liked it—and it also happens to be preposterously smug.)

Each of the paintings try to wring out its nebulous intrigue like water from a vaguely damp cloth. Meanwhile, the objects on display are interesting to admire in the same way as a Tim Burton movie miniature might be; their intricacies and sheer existence are strange and lovely, if not achieving quite the force of a true sculpture.

Then there are the photos of the models, which transcend the objects themselves. All sense of scale, proportion and space are elevated; Ray’s use of composition culls an emotive visual vocabulary of the grandest Roman architecture. They are disconcertingly anthropomorphic, too, drawing us in and pulling us out through their undulating rhythms of shadows and light.

The photographs discover an internal logic all their own that never betrays a haunting essence of the unknowable. Looking at them, we don’t even have to try – they take us ever so naturally along for the ride.

At its best, this is what the art of Surrealism can do: capture our minds and usher us into its alternate reality. Here, we exist momentarily in a world we can never truly enter, for it survives like a flickering candle in the dark recesses of our minds.

“Many Ray—Human Equations” is on view through May 10. For more information visit www.PhillipsCollection.org

Robert Devaney • February 13, 2015

Georgetown Arts 2015, the sixth annual visual arts show, run by the Citizens Association of Georgetown, for those who live and work in the oldest neighborhood in Washington, D.C., kicked off with an evening reception Feb. 12 at the House of Sweden. A lively and large crowd filled the room, checking out the art and saying hello to neighbors, some of whom are quite the artist.

Representing 37 artists, the show is the largest ever and runs daily through Sunday, Feb. 15, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., in the Nobel Room.

“Every year is surprisingly different, and that is what is most interesting and exciting about this exhibit,” said Laura-Anne Tiscornia, chair of Georgetown Arts 2015. “The show attracts new artists as well as reoccurring artists and to see all the different pieces come together and play off one another is remarkable.”

The show’s curator is the Citizens Association’s communications manager Jennie Buehler, who has gallery experience. Some artists are young professionals while others are lifelong learners or teachers. A few of the artists exhibit nationally in other galleries. Attendees are in for a treat to see the vast artistic talent that Georgetown offers.

During Saturday and Sunday, there will be several Artist Talks. At 2 p.m. on Saturday, Peggy Sparks, owner of Artist’s Proof, a gallery on Wiscosin Avenue, will discuss the art scene in Washington, D.C., and highlight the art work displayed.

Artist Guy Fairlamb, Dariush Vaziri and Sherry Kaskey will be talking Sunday at noon. In the afternoon, you will also be able to listen to Andrey Bogoslowsky, Jane Lepscky and Ross Ruot during the Artist Talks.
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