Arts & Society

Georgetowner • September 21, 2012

NBA all-star MVP Kevin Durant returned home to Washington D.C. after a heartbreaking loss in the NBA finals. The D.C.-native sipped Moët Rose Imperial with his entourage a celebrity hot-spot Eden last night. The 23 year old enjoyed a cigar with his friends until he left the club just after 2 a.m. Talk about a fun way of coping!

Mary Bird •

On June 28, VIPs from the technology
and philanthropic worlds converged on Rick
Rickertsen’s Georgetown home (the former carriage
home for Mary Todd Lincoln) to celebrate
Microstrategy’s chairman and CEO Michael
Saylor upon publication of his book, “The Mobile
Wave.” Guests sipped cocktails in the gardens
and then gathered indoors from the sweltering
heat to hear Saylor wax poetic on the future of
technology and education. Guests included Jack
Davies, Jim and Michael Kimsey, Carol Joynt
and Bill Dean. [gallery ids="102464,120860,120870,120852,120865" nav="thumbs"]

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.

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

Gary Tischler •

It’s July, it’s summer, it’s Washington, D.C., and we’re right where we belong again.

On the Fringe.

It’s time once again to rock and roll, to visit what is a giant performance arts buffet, orgy, festival, conglomeration, explosion — the Capital Fringe Festival — set to take off Thursday, July 12 and run through July 29 with some 140 productions, more than 300 performances of plays, operas, one-person shows, dance productions and stuff that, as always, defies category, convention and expectations — all performed at venues fairly close together, with some exceptions.

Headquarters is Fort Fringe at 607 New York Ave., NW, out of which the Fringe Festival operates year-round, but which becomes a regular beehive of activity during the festival, starting with the recently held mind-boggling preview event held in the Baldaccino Gypsy Tent.

It’s also where you have a good opportunity to catch Julianne Brienza, the festival’s executive director and founding member, who sometimes still feels a little amazed that the festival is now in its seventh year. She can get the credit for the festival’s status as a kind of free-flowing, ongoing Washington cultural instutition, a sometimes incongruous state of affairs, given the nature of the festival.

“By its nature, this kind of festival, which is a process and a journey going from year to year, with no real permanent place that says this is what it is, isn’t exactly an institution, but we’ve become one,” Brienza said. “The festival has always been about exploration and adventure, here and from its beginnings elsewhere and in all of its forms across the country. A lot of people in this community sometimes think of it in theater terms, but it’s much more than that. It’s performance art. So, you can find dancers, burlesque, opera, cabaret, as well as plays. It’s comedy. It’s supposed to be and is on the fringe.“

Historically, the festival tends to split between local performers and groups and those from outside D.C., including Maryland and Virginia, but also folks from New York, San Francisco and all across the country as well as farther afield.

“I can’t point out highlights for you or what to expect, or give you a tip on what to see,” Brienza said. “I try to see as many performances as I can because you get a real good sense of the kind of people who come to the shows.”

Washington itself, as well as the festival, has changed over the last seven years, she noted. “There’s a very grounded and large theater audience,” Brienza said. “There’s also a lot of people — artists, and people who are in the cultural community here — who might come to the festival but can’t either afford to come to the regular theater and musical offerings, or want something different.”

“I think the festival fills a need — even a kind of gap in the community,” she said. “And Fringe isn’t just the festival itself. Like a lot of things that begin here, there’s a need to make this a full-time institution where you work year-round through educational projects and training, and you become a presence.”

But Fringe has always had a kind of wild and woolly complexity to it — the actual quality varies from year to year, from production to production. You can sort of get a flavor and pick some likely suspects just breezing through the titles and group and artists names.

We are basing this on titles alone: Dog & Pony D.C. is presenting “Beertown” which was a nominee for best play in 2011, for instance. Here are some other likely suspects and possibilities:

The Third Annual “Fool For All: Tales of Marriage and Mozzarella” from the Helen Hayes award-winning Faction of Fools Theatre Company, which specializes in Commedia del Arte, which has become very popular of late.

There’s “He Loved the Soft Porn of the City,” a musical trio piece with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Allan Von Schenkel, blending 80s New Wave, Fusion Jazz and World Beat.

As always, there’s the Dizzy Miss Lizzy’s Finn McCool, there’s Scena Theatre’s production of “Mein Kampf,” which tries to imagine Hitler’s life as a shiftless artist in Vienna. There’s a musical show about Tupac, there’s a solo piece, called “Do Not Kill Me, Killer Robots,” there’s a play about the 1968 D.C. Riots in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and there’s a play about the occupiers, D.C. and elsewhere.

“We have political shows, we have avant-garde shows — we have everything,” Brienza said. “There’s always surprises. It’s always an adventure. I think that’s the idea. “

And it’s proven to be successful: people flock to these events. In six years, 80,000 have shown up, generating $1.2 million in revenue for participating artists. The D.C. version has become the second-largest unjuried Fringe Festival in the United States.

Seventy percent of Fringe attendees are female, 70 percent are in the 25 to 55 years-of-age group. “I don’t know why the gender thing is like that,” Brienza said. “It’s interesting.”

Venues for this years festival include Fort Fringe and the Baldaccino Gypsy Tent, the Bedroom at Fort Fringe, Redrum at Fort Fringe, as well as the H Street Playhouse, the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, the D.C. Arts Center in Adams Morgan, the Warehouse, the Gala Hispanic Theatre, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Gear Box and Mountain, at 8103 at Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church, the First Congressional United Church of Christ, Caos on F, Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint, Goethe Institut, the Studio Theatre and the Source Theatre.

For complete information on tickets (they’re $17 individually), box office, schedules, times, dates and venues and individual plays, artists and groups, visit the Fringe Festival website — CapFringe.org. ?

Gary Tischler •

In Washington, D.C., people talk about HIV-AIDS frequently, given the city’s notoriously high rate of infections — one higher than many African nations.

For the rest of this month, they’ll be talking about it a lot more. There’s a keen focus in Washington this month on HIV/AIDS, the devastating disease which has claimed millions worldwide since surfacing in the early 1980s. It struck America’s gay comminity first, lethally and dramatically — although it quickly became known as a disease exclusive to no group, gender, race or age.

Most prominently, the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) will be held at the Washington Convention Center, July 22 to 27, under the theme of “Turning the Tide Together,” featuring keynote speaker and former President Bill Clinton, pop star and humanitarian Elton John and philanthropist Bill Gates among expected 25,000 attendees. It is the first time in 22 years the conference will be held in the U.S.

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the AIDS Quilt has made a vivid re-appearance in Washington, including on the National Mall where it was a part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in “Creativity in Crisis: Unfolding the AIDS Memorial Quilt,” under the auspices of the Names Project Foundation. Under scorching sunlight, accompanied by quilting bees, discussions and exhibitions, a large portion of the AIDS Quilt once again decorated the lawns of the National Mall with a colorful field of remembrance while visitors recited the names of those lost to the disease, as in days gone by.

Portions of the AIDS Quilt are also on display at the Kennedy Center where seven arts-related panels from the quilt will be on view in the center’s south gallery — including panels paying tribute to Alvin Ailey, Rudolf Nureyev, Howard Ashman, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and others, symbolic of the many AIDS-related losses suffered by the nation’s and the world’s arts communities.

At the Torpedo Factory Art Center, the 25th anniversary of the AIDS Quilt (and the 30th anniversary of AIDS itself) is also being marked with a display of the quilt with panels on exhibit in the main hall of the Art Center and outside on the Alexandria dock, July 21 to 25. The Alexandria Commission on HIV/AIDS will host a closing reception July 25 with Mayor William Euille serving as the honorary chair.

But to find and experience the emotional, the burning and hugely affecting human core of the universal history of the AIDS epidemic, you have to go to Arena Stage at the Mead Center in Southwest Washington, where Larry Kramer, the unrelenting AIDS prophet, town crier and activist, is seeing the first Washington production of his 1985 play “The Normal Heart” after a successful and Tony Award-winning revival on Broadway last year.

Around the production buzzes a beehive of AIDS activities at Arena through the course of the play’s run at the Kreeger Theater through July 29. Not only are more panels from the AIDS quilt hanging on the walls outside the Kreeger, adding poignancy to the drama on stage, but there are images from the HIV and AIDS related collections of the Archives Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. D.C. clinics and HIV testing providers have HIV-testing vans parked outside on select weekends, and there are panel discussions after selected matinee performances. On July 23, there’s a performance to benefit the Washington AIDS Partnership.

Before and after performances, there will be further opportunities to hear the alarm-sounding, passionate voice of Kramer, in the form of a one-sheet letter which begins by saying that “Please know that everything in ‘The Normal Heart’ is real. These were and are real people who lived and spoke and died and are presented here as best as I could.”

When people come to see the play something rare in theater performance happens, and in various ways, it’s been documented by many people who have seen the production. A kind of risible, visible emotional power builds during the course of the play, and the affects become obvious in the audience with periods of sustained silence where people seem to have stopped breathing, with the sound of long, audible sighs, and sometimes sharp intakes of breath and, in the end, often sobs. This is not because the proceedings, although dramatic, are melodramatic, it is not because what is going on is maudlin or even sentimental. The reactions appear to stem from honest emotions, a response to shocking moments, a normal heart open to undeniable feelings.

It’s that way for members of the outstanding cast, too — for the audience it’s like a tuning fork in the dark.

“Oh yeah, you can tell how people are reacting,” said Nick Mennell, who plays the buttoned-down, but affably charismatic gay investment banker Bruce Niles, a key character. “It gets really quiet, it gets completely silent during that scene where Bruce is talking about taking the body of his lover home to Arizona.”

“It’s always a little different,” said John Procaccino, who plays Ben Weeks, the straight attorney brother of the manic, and sometimes maniacal, gay leader and activist Ned Weeks, who’s basically a stand-in for Kramer himself.

“It depends on the audience,” he added. “At matinees people, they’re older and a little uncomfortable at first, they’re slower to respond, they don’t know what to do. But soon enough — especially in the second act — they start to respond — you can hear them.”

People come out of the play as if they’ve just finished an impossibly long, and dangerous, theme park ride. They look and feel exhausted, there’s a mixture of both buzz and stunned silence.

“The Normal Heart” first appeared in 1985 when the AIDS crisis was taking shape vividly in American cities, in New York, in San Francisco and in Washington. Most see it as history: It’s been embodied by the death of movie star Rock Hudson, others in the cultural community, President Ronald Reagan’s stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge AIDS at its outset, the renaissance of plays about the disease (“Angels in America,” the Falsetto plays, “The Baltimore Waltz”, works by Harry Kondeleon and Robert Chesley and the pioneering book “And the Band Played On”) and the first appearance of the AIDS Quilt in Washington.

“The Normal Heart” takes you back to the beginning of the AIDS crisis when it didn’t have a name, and deaths were few. But Ned Weeks has noticed some of his friends get sick and die in rapid order, and we see him with a friend at the offices of Doctor Emma Brookner, one of the play’s heroes, whose attempts to mobilize and get the aid of medical institutions and government officials proves agonizingly futile.

Ned, one of those people who have no verbal filters, starts a group to sound the alarm, to help victims, identify the disease, and spread the word in the gay community, which was experiencing what some are calling a golden age of sexual freedom and license and which Ned warns can be suicidal and dangerous. Difficult to deal with as a friend, or in conversation, Ned is a prickly, almost emotionally self-destructive radical when it comes to the subject of the disease, of love and relationships and of being gay. He enlists his skeptical, reluctant brother, he battles over leadership with the less flamboyant Bruce, a banker and former Green Beret who wears his three-piece suit like armor against coming out.

No one listens. The government (the Koch Administration in New York City, the Reagan Administration here) turned a deaf ear early on. Gay men began to die in ever larger numbers. A strange, almost awesome thing begins to happen. “The Normal Heart” can easily, and it has often been, be called a “gay” play, in terms of its concerns, in terms of the struggle, the characters and AIDS as a subject. But so vividly are the characters drawn, so close to them is the audience, that the frustrations, the guilt, the fear, the immense sense of loss, becomes ours. The play is one of those game changers — chances are that coming out you won’t be exactly the same as going in because what you’ve seen, felt and heard will stay with you.

It’s that way for the actors, too, only more so.

“It’s been an education and, I feel, an honor for me. I think it’s affected all of us,” Procaccino said. He and Mennell are sitting for our interview at the Mead Center, dressed casually, loose shirts, jeans, backpack and so on. Procaccino, 58, has performed all over the country, most recently for the Seattle Repertory Company, as well as a member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and in films and television. Mennell, 35, has divided his time between stage, including most recently on Broadway in “A Free Man of Color,” for director George C. Wolfe, who also directed this production of “The Normal Heart” and films, including a “Friday the 13th” remake.

Upclose around a table, the two are a study in contrasts — Mennell is 20 years-plus younger than Procaccino, of Italian-Hispanic heritage, dark-haired and casually handsome but almost intensely articulate, with a young daughter. Procaccino sports the speckled, spotty salt and pepper beard he grew for the part —“I kinda like it, I think I’m going to keep it,” he said. On stage, the two look oddly pillar-of-the-community alike in clothes and attitude. Procaccino, as Ned’s attorney brother, often sports New York attorney suits and Mennell, his hair Wall Street-slick, and his suit often fitted perfectly and escape-proof, looks defiantly not gay as suits worn by his character Bruce, who doesn’t want to come out to the world at large.

Ironies abound in this kind of setting. “You know what’s strange?” Procaccino says. “Back in the 1980s, and this made me think of it, I was offered a part in ‘The Normal Heart’, a gay character, and I turned it down because I had just played a gay man in another play. I was afraid of being typecast or seen that way. So, yeah, I can admit that as a young man that I was homophobic then. And being in this play, let me tell you, it makes you look at yourself.”

“I was just a kid in the ’80s,” Mennell says. “So, I didn’t really know anything, you know. But I remember I was playing one-on-one basketball outside once with some guy, and he told me he was HIV-positive, as a kind of warning, like some basketball players did back then, and I didn’t know what that was, or what it meant exactly.”

Both men, though, are theater people, they’re playing parts — and they know that. Procaccino’s girlfriend is the director Pam MacKinnon. At some point in this play — they both note how draining and exhausting it is — something sticks, the people become larger than the issue. “It becomes very real, and the audiences play a big part in that,” Procaccino says. “I like to think that what we’re doing here, and how we do it is important to something larger,” he says. “The suffering in this play, the loss is a human loss, not just gay suffering and loss.”

With Mennell’s ethnic background, there’s not universal approval for being in this play from some of his relatives. “Some of them think what I’m doing is a sin,” he said. “I don’t understand that attitude,” he said. “But you know, because you don’t live in a void, I have to think about being an actor, what value it is for society in terms of society.”

“In so many ways, what we’re doing, I like to think, elevates humanity, makes us see outside ourselves,” Mennell said. “With this play, I see it every night or matinee. It makes you question the existing paradigm. Every night I listen to the play and hear things as if for the first time, and they resonate so deeply for me on a human level.”

AIDS is now — and has been for some time — a global epidemic affecting not just gays, but everyone, including women and children. The numbers of cases and deaths continue to climb, in Africa, and in our cities. But the talk in the nation is not so much about AIDS, but about the political battleground issue of gay marriage, which is referenced prophetically, if briefly, in “The Normal Heart.”

You come out of the play, and there’s Kramer’s letter.

It is, like the man and his play, passionate: “Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague”.

It’s full of some hard facts, too.

“Please know that, as I write this, the world has suffered at the very least some 75 million infections and 35 million deaths. When the action of this play that you have attended begins, there were 41.”?
[gallery ids="100900,128294" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Devaney •

“My dad was a artist, who became a lawyer, and he told me: ‘Get a job where you don’t have to be in an office,’ ” says Washington photographer Patrick Ryan.

Well, that son listened to his father. Known around town for his Capitol Hill work as well as his commercial, movie premiere and fashion shoots, Ryan has merged his two great interests of politics and style into his own photo exhibit, “Red Carpet D.C.: The Capital and Cult of Celebrity,” at the Embassy of the Czech Republic July 19. It will feature paparazzi snapping pictures of the guests as they walk on the carpet to view photographs of such stars as Michael Douglas, Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel, Al Pacino and Sharon Stone.

The unique show with its oversized images meets at the confluence of what is called “Hollywood on the Potomac” and where members of Congress listen to actors and others testify about a cleaner environment, stopping a famine and other causes. They may even get to meet the president.

“Sooner or later, they all come to town,” Ryan says. “There is a sense of humor to it. The celebrities feel important, and the senators are like schools kids. I observed Sen. Tom Harkin repeatingly telling Robert DeNiro, ‘You’re my favorite actor.’ Both sides benefit. Sasha and Malia met the Jonas Brothers, and they got to hang out at the White House.”

Indeed, Ryan was interviewed by ABC News on photographing the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and knows how things can get out of hand to the point where, “It doesn’t matter what you’re famous for, just as long as you are famous,” he says, recalling his photo of Kris Jenner and Lindsay Lohan at a Georgetown party before the dinner. “When you think about it, it’s pretty silly.”

His photographic journey began decades ago, when Ryan’s mother Edith gave him a 1950s Kodak camera. By the age of 10, he was developing film. The local boy grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., on Western Avenue. His father went to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and his mother to Visitation Prep next door, meeting years later at the Brickskeller. He and his brothers attended Gonzaga College High School on North Capitol Street. “It was during the 1980s, we liked the underdog aspect of it,” Ryan says of his prep school. The neighborhood is in better shape now.

Today, the 46-year-old Ryan’s parents are gone, but he and some of his siblings still live along Western Avenue (three houses) and worship at Blessed Sacrament Church. His family is and has been made up of lawyers, artists and actors. His father Robert worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency. One sister is a lawyer and worked at the State Department; a brother works for Reuters. One uncle was an artist and another a television actor.

Always entrepreneurial, Ryan did legal research for out-of-town law firms, getting documents for them from various federal office (this was before the Internet). A few years later, his mother died after suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. It was during this time that Ryan again picked up a camera after going to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a retreat. “I shot tons of film,” he recalled and re-ignited his true love of photography.

After freelance photo assignments and meeting editors at the Georgetowner Newspaper, Ryan began full-time work at the Hill Newspaper during the election of 2000. He is still amused by the question he would get on Capitol Hill: “Where are you from? Here? No, really where are you from?”

Later, as photo editor of the Hill, Ryan led the switch from film to a fully digital newsroom and originated the still-popular feature, “The 50 Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill.” He left the Hill with mentor Martin Tolchin to become founding photo editor of a newspaper that later became Politico.

Another mentor, the Hill’s Al Eisele, has this to say of Ryan: “He’s that rare Washington creature. He combines an insider’s access with an artist’s objectivity, which allows him to portray the reality of the social and political scene like no other photographer I know. I’ve been privileged to watch him work — and play — at close hand from K Street to Kazakhstan, and I never fail to be impressed with his artistic ability.”

Today, Ryan’s freelance assignments read like a who’s who of the Washington scene: official photographer for Vice President Joe Biden’s media and beach party, for the Miss D.C. America pageant and for the premiere of “J. Edgar” with Clint Eastwood for Warner Bros. Add to that the “Harry Potter” premiere at the British Embassy as well as a screening with First Lady Michelle Obama for Warner Bros. There’s photographing the groundbreaking of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American Culture with President Obama or the Susan Komen Race For The Cure. Of course, there are inaugurations, the national political conventions and countless social events. You get the picture.

Two unusual assignments came back-to-back two years ago: covering UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon’s state visit to the Republic of Kazakhstan and then, in New York, Bridal Week (shooting an average of seven fashion shows per day).

Fashion shoots are always in the mix for Ryan. One of his favorite subjects remains Kate Michael, Miss D.C. 2006, now a new media maven with K Street Kate, who credits him for helping her start her D.C. career. “I’ll never forget working with him on my very first fashion photo shoot at ‘the Exorcist’ steps that eventually landed me the number-one spot on the Hill Newspaper’s 50 Most Beautiful,” Michael says. “He encouraged me to get agency representation. Years later, I’m still turning to Pat for his great eye and inspiration.”

As for photojournalism in D.C., “the best in the business” right now, according to Ryan, are Stephen Crowley and Doug Mills, both of the New York Times. “I still shoot politics. A campaign is like a horse race, and I regularly shoot the Preakness.”

Photography is recording history as it happens, Ryan says. “When I was reading Bob Woodward’s ‘State of Denial,’ I thought to myself: ‘I was in that room’ during the episode he describes.”

“I find it interesting that subjects often speak freely around photographers,” he says. “Most people like photographers unless they have done something wrong.”

“The difference between reporting and photography is that reporter can call someone or look over documents later,” Ryan says. “The photographer has to be there. A photographer can wait hours to get the shot. Photojournalism is sort of like tennis: You have to figure out where the ball is going to hit it — to get that shot. Photojournalists and sports photographers try to anticipate subjects as well as the lighting. A studio photographer controls the light. We are running after butterflies with a net.”

Ryan’s photo blog, SnarkInfested.com, began in 2009 as a mix of “political types, models and party types,” he says. To his own chagrin, the blog gets lots of hits not when the president is shown or a protest covered but when “photos show people with less clothing on” — in such events as No Pants Metro or the Cupid Undie Run on Capitol Hill.

“I’m trying to depict a different side of D.C. and showing that it is more well-rounded than most people think,” he says of his blog. “D.C. has an international flavor. There’s Capitol Hill, the White House and the embassies. New York is international, too, but more insular. They are thinking about themselves and their neighborhoods, but D.C. is actually thinking about the nations represented here.” (He still contributes to this and other publications as well as websites like Urbandaddy.com.)

While he has traveled to such places as the Galapagos Islands and Spain’s pilgrimage destination, Santiago de Compostela, not to mention Central Asia, the question arose: Ever have a desire to photograph a war zone, whether Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere?

“No, I would not make a good war photographer,” Ryan shot back. “My photos celebrate life. I would hate to take a picture of a dead person. There’s a sense of humor, a joy of life to my work.”

And if you know him and a few other members of the Ryan family, you know that’s true.

Red Carpet D.C.: The Capital and Cult of Celebrity, Thursday, July 19, 7 p.m., at the Embassy of the Czech Republic, 3900 Spring of Freedom Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20008 [gallery ids="100904,128339,128331,128327" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Jamaican Women of Washington, Inc. (JWoW) recently celebrated its 10th Annual Tea-Off to Good Health charity fundraiser and silent auction at the Mayflower Renaissance Hotel. Founder and President Dr. Jacqueline A. Watson noted that this is also Jamaica’s 50th year of independence. The organization has donated more than $275,000 to charities in Washington, DC, and Jamaica and has brought attention to important public-health and social issues. Washington Channel 7’s news anchor Leon Harris served as the master of ceremonies. Entertainment included a dance by Miss Caribbean Metro USA, Stefanie Belnavis, and fashion show highlighting apparel with a Caribbean flair. The group awarded Jamaica’s renowned reggae star Orville “Shaggy” Burrell for his outstanding contribution to the Bustamante Hospital for Children in Kingston through the Shaggy Make a Difference Foundation. [gallery ids="100896,128267,128256,128263" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Kitty Skallerup drew an enthusiastic crowd as guests responded to her invitation to celebrate “Diplomatic Gardens of Washington,” the stunning new book by photographer Ann Stevens and her husband Giles Kelly, a former U.S. diplomat and author. The crowd fit comfortably into the City Tavern Club June 19 and eagerly waited for signed copies as they enjoyed good company. Several diplomatic spouses, including the wives of the ambassadors of Germany and Italy, who enjoy the lovely gardens featured in the book, were present to share their good fortune. [gallery ids="100883,127541,127533,127525,127557,127517,127562,127567,127508,127573,127549" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

There are actually several audiences for “First You Dream: the Music of Kander and Ebb,” a musical revue of the song and show book of John Kander and Fred Ebb, now at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through July 1, and all of them are going to be peachy-pleased with the results.

There’s the group which saw the original production, created and mounted at Signature and co-conceived there by David Loud and Signature artistic director Eric Schaeffer: it will be delighted to find four of the original cast members performing with newscomers and a 29-member orchestra in a much less intimate, but much boldly brassier, setting.

There is a potentially large number of persons who know about Kander and Ebb. The lyricist of the pair, Ebb, passed away in 2004. Their unique, rich and prolific partnership spawned such huge hits as “Cabaret” (stage and screen) , “Chicago” (stage and screen), “The Rink,” “Liza with a Z,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Woman of the Year,” “The Act,” “Zorba” and “The Happy Time.”

And there is still a larger group which has at least lip-synched to the title song of “Cabaret.” Some of them have sung aloud, either in the shower or at a karaoke bar, the line, “What good is sitting alone in your room?” That would be most of the rest of us, old chum.

And no question—beyond an interest in Kander and Ebb, if not a passion—there is a group which appreciates terrific songs, beautiful songs, dazzling songs that are sung with great style and emotion by a group of six terrifically talented actor-singers or singers, born to sign on Broadway or formed there in performance. That part of the audience will be richly rewarded, whether they are singing “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”

Taken together, those audiences ought to do well by this thoughtful, passionately performed and staged whammy of a musical revue. But it is so much more.

Several degrees of separation are in order here. I can make no comparison with the Signature original, one way or the other, but I’ve seen numerous versions of “Cabaret” on Washington area stages, including one at Signature. I’ve always been puzzled by the lack of breakout success of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” an astonishingly original musical. I’ve talked with George Hearns, who did “The Visit” with Chita Rivera at Signature, although the show never quite made the Broadway leap. I also talked with the late Harry Guardino about his experience with “Woman of the Year,” who told vivid stories about working with Lauren Bacall. I’ve seen Liza Minelli on stage at the Kennedy Center, and it should be noted that she was a Kander and Ebb favorite, who could “ring them bells” for sure as well as just kill you with “Maybe This Time.”

Mostly, what you marvel at in “First You Dream”—the song (from 1997’s “Steel Pier”) snakes its way through the show like a seductive, but not pushy, hurdy gurdy man—is the sheer variety and diversity that’s in the body of work in terms of theme, substance and style. The creators have thankfully chosen many songs that are less familiar to a general audience, which gives the show the quality of one of those happy, bottomless swag bags from which emerge a constant parade of happy gifts for the audience. I’m thinking here of songs like the ridiculously giddy “Boom Ditty Boom,” the combination of “Walking Among My Yesterdays” and “Go Back Home” (a touching, beautiful turn by the three male singers, who also do the jaunty “Military Man”), the beautiful and tough love-for-life song, “My Own Space” and “Love and Love Alone,” paired with “Life Is.”

While the gifted collaborators roam all over the thematic, stylistic landscape, there is still a constant. At the core, there is: show biz, shows, showmen, stage rats and royalty, the urgent need to bare your heart in songs and music, the gotta-sing-gotta-dance, the glitz and rags of it all that informs Broadway, musicals, broken hearts that break under a spotlight. You can see why they liked writing for Minelli. You can see why Bob Fosse was drawn to “Cabaret” and submerged himself in “Chicago.” Here are music and songs which often manage to be both lurid and lovely. Hear how they string together “Only in the Movies,” “Happy Endings” and “At the Rialto.” Behold the sleazy soft-shoe sale of “Razzle Dazzle”and the wonderful finale of “Show People.” Feel the pairing (beautifully segued by Matthew Scott) of “Cabaret” and “I Miss the Music.” It is why we go to shows, remember the songs and rub old wounds in the dark like that.

Finally, a few words about the performers. They deliver. They have killer voices. They reach out and touch someone. To be fair, I remember the remarkable Heidi Blickenstaff (Is that a great stage name or what?), who starred in a musical version of the vastly underrated “Meet John Doe” at Ford’s Theatre several years ago. I was happy to see her again, blasting out “Sing Happy” in a sequin dress and lead the way in the deliriously funny, iconic “Ring Them Bells” to cap the first act. Then, there was that moving pairing of James Clow and Patina Miller in “Blue Crystal” and “Marry Me.” Alan Greene dominates “Life Is” and surprises you with his authority and presence and emotional power. Leslie Kritzer knocks “I Don’t Care Much” out of the park.

As a group, after a lengthy first act, they accomplished a remarkable thing. They elevated their game in the second act. I already miss the music.

“First You Dream: the Music of Kander and Ebb” at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through July 1; 800-444-1324 or 202-467-4600; Kennedy-Center.org. [gallery ids="100859,126832" nav="thumbs"]