Arts & Society

John Blee • November 3, 2011

At the Hirshhorn Museum, “Innovation and Inspiration” is a perfect title for the exhibition focusing on the work and teaching of Josef Albers. Albers is known for his work on color theory, and I for one have never felt color fits into any theory, as it is so subjective in effect. Nevertheless, Albers had and continues to have an enormous effect on the way color is perceived in everyday use. If you look at his color exercises you see the colors we see around us in everyday life, whether in the home, or office, or other public spaces. Albers is far more influential than Martha Stewart!

Albers’ dynamic early graphic work had nothing to do with squares within squares, and in the pieces on view he experimented with type usage. He also used work that implied dimension through linear perspective, something Albers would not wholly abandon. In addition a few landscape lithographs that are unremarkable represent his earliest work. There is also a self-portrait by Albers that is pure Kokoshka. It is surprising to see even a glimpse of expressionism in the exhibition!

Assemblages by Albers incorporating glass and metal/wire/paint/nails/mesh/imitation pearls from the ’20s look contemporary. “Window Picture” has beautiful, rich, expressive color. “Grid Mounted Squares” is glass/iron/wire and again uses deep color, quite unlike later Albers. Modestly sized, these works are like modern stained glass windows.

What follows of Albers work is mostly his endless “Homage to the Square.” I have been looking, and sometimes not been looking, at Albers for almost 50 years, and there is sometimes a surprise. Yet I often feel about the squares the way I feel about hearing someone playing scales on the piano. It’s useful, but rarely exciting.

There is no doubting Albers’ importance in his role as teacher. Albers was a Bauhaus member from 1920-1933. Fleeing Hitler and coming to the U.S. to the incredibly important art campus at Black Mountain College (North Carolina), Albers was a founding director. Some of the greatest figures in mid-century art in America found their way to Black Mountain, either teaching or in its student programs. By art, I mean those working in all disciplines: John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and many more. One of the most important schools of poetry is the U.S. is known as Black Mountain poetry. In 1950 Albers became chair of the Department of Design at Yale University.

Albers’ students, including Rauschenberg, Noland, Nevelson, Bolotowsky and Judd fill the last two galleries with paintings, constructions, and sculptures. I have never seen Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg hanging next to each other so amicably! Not to be missed are some wonderful works by Anni Albers, wife of Josef. (Through April 11.)
[gallery ids="99079,99080,99081,99082" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Sacheli •

In “Make Believe,” one of the classic songs from Show Boat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II celebrate the power of imagination, as the show’s heroine professes, “Our dreams are more romantic than the world we see.” The world that audiences will see in Signature Theatre’s new version of the legendary 1927 musical will most likely be a startling one. Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer has stripped Show Boat of generations of gingerbread and ballyhoo to find a more realistic world at its heart, and in doing so hopes to make its characters and its theatricality more vibrant than ever.

The most startling fact may be that Signature is tackling Show Boat at all. Yet Signature and Schaeffer welcomed the challenge for more reasons than one. “It’s our 100th production and so we wanted to do something that was iconic,” said the director during a break in a recent rehearsal.

“It was also a show that we really felt was ready to be rediscovered.”

In an era of featherweight plots, Show Boat was the first musical making racial inequality one of its themes, and the show’s unflinching look at relations between whites and African Americans still “has a lot of important things to say.” The last major revival was directed by Hal Prince in 1993, so “it just felt like it was time” to see Show Boat on stage again, asserts Schaeffer.

Not only is the show laden with history (“It was ground-breaking in its form. It actually invented
the musical theatre.”), but it calls for a large orchestra and cast and elaborate sets. As fashioned for the 276-seat MAX Theatre, this Show Boat sails with 15 musicians and a new overture and orchestrations by longtime Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick. Twenty-four actors inhabit James Kronzer’s evocative, multi-level unit set of blue-gray washed wood flanked by prop-laden wings. It’s a lovely visual metaphor for the interplay of theatrical “make believe” and often-grim reality that echoes through the lives of several generations of show folk.

Unlike most musicals, Show Boat has gone through a significant number of revisions since its premiere, and part of the problem is simply choosing which version to present. Working with the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization, Schaeffer solved that dilemma by creating a new adaptation, using the 1946 Broadway revival as the starting point and drawing material from both the 1927 original
and a version done by the Bern Opera in 2005.

“It’s like we’re doing a brand-new musical,” says Schaeffer. One major restoration is the song “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Round,” cut after the very first tryout performance. He also found a clue in the book that provided the basis for Kern and Hammerstein’s musical: “When you look at the Edna Ferber novel, it’s Magnolia’s story.” So the woman who grows from sheltered girl to wife of a gambler to Broadway star is the center of Signature’s production.

Schaeffer also addresses a lack of balance he finds in the existing versions of Show Boat in that its African American characters virtually disappear after the first act. He’s restored scenes for Joe and his wife, Queenie, the showboat’s cook. His direction, too, finds ways to keep a focus on the social journey of African Americans during the more than 40 years that the show spans.

The concept of change, as relentless as the Mississippi, is one of the Show Boat themes that Schaeffer emphasizes for both whites and African Americans. “I think how the show’s interpreted is really going to be new to people who have seen the old, grand productions that feel more like pageants. I think the show’s a lot more haunting than what people may think of Show Boat.”

Schaeffer knew from the start that his staging would not feature a grandly ornate Cotton
Blossom drifting in from the wings. (“It’s ‘No-Boat’,” he jokes.) “I just want people to be moved,” by this smaller-scaled, emotion-driven Show Boat, declares Schaeffer. In this production the interior of the floating theatre is suggested by a small footlit stage and a faded painted curtain. “I wanted it to be on a boat that’s breaking down,” he explains. “It’s much more interesting, because people are fighting for survival.”

Characters are also fighting prejudice. A racial epithet appears in the show’s dialogue, and the word still has the power to sting. In an early rehearsal, Schaeffer encouraged his cast to discuss
their feelings about the show’s language and racial attitudes, “and it was fantastic,” he says. “They were really passionate—and that’s exactly why I want to do this show,” since the conflicts in Show Boat are still with us.

“Yes, it’s going to offend some people,” he acknowledges. “Some people are going to get uncomfortable, but you’ve got to get people talking about it.”

“I just want people to be moved,” by this smaller-scaled, emotion-driven Show Boat, declares Schaeffer. Signature’s production has another goal: to reinvigorate one of the richest, if sometimes problematic, shows in American musical theatre. “The hope is that it will bring renewed life to the show. What’s so great about stripping it down is that you realize how important it is. You think, ‘I can’t believe this was written 82 years ago.’ It’s amazing!”

Show Boat plays at Arlington’s Signature Theatre through January 17, 2010. For ticket information
call 703-573-7328 or go to www.signature-theatre.org.

John Blee •

At the Sackler Gallery, a wonderful exhibition of Tibetan art, “Lama, Patron, Artist: The Great Situ Panchen,” as well as a spectacular recreation of a Tibetan altar, have just opened. Situ Panchen was an 18th-century Tibetan version of the Abbé Suger, engendering the Encampment style that incorporated aspects of Chinese landscape and color. There are incredible paintings (thangkas) and bronzes in the show that have an amazing spiritual intensity. Though Tibetan Buddhist art is very much related to Chinese and Indian Buddhist art, it is somehow able to magnify its implosiveness.

Situ Panchen was an artist himself, and for that reason he was probably very interested in shaping the art that was produced for monasteries that were part of the Karma Kagyü sect he belonged to. Because Situ Panchen was a Rimpoche (reincarnated Lama), his life is chronicled, unlike most Tibetan artists. We know that Situ Panchen began to paint even before he had been schooled in painting. At the age of 15 he undertook instruction in iconometric proportions. One of the Karmapa Lamas, the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist sect that Situ Panchen belonged to, was also a noted painter.

The Encampment style of painting had emerged in central Tibet in the late 16th century. It was called by that name because the Karmapas lived in portable encampments, or moveable monasteries. There had subsequently been political problems that had resulted in the suspension of the style. Situ Panchen re-empowered the style.

Looking at Tibetan painting as a whole, the Encampment style stands out as being freer and having an extra element of fantasy. It also uses a sweeter and softer green and has some amazing landscapes, thanks to its Chinese infusion. In the midst of skies there are conjoined figures. It is symbolic, but at some level it is also sexual. Perhaps it is truly visionary sexuality.

In the show there are also some staggering sculptures of Lamas, some of the greatest portrait sculpture ever.

The Tibetan Shrine, with the contents of the Alice S. Kandell collection, makes an enormous impact. Though viewing individual works of art is preferable in the museum manner of the Situ Panchen show, the power of the actually quite-small chapel is possibly greater. I took students of mine, not well versed in art and not at all in Tibetan art, to see the show and chapel. They had a hard time looking long at anything. They stood and gazed into the fantastic array of Bodhisattvas and Demons and Lamas for many minutes, getting it. One student remarked it was just like his (Ethiopian) church. The chapel was truly enlightening. (Through July 18.)

Corrie Dyke •

Spring is finally in the works, which is good news for art galleries. After a showstopper of a winter, Susan Calloway of Susan Calloway Fine Arts recalls aborting two openings due to the torrential snowstorms. Now, optimistic from a successful show long since due, her gallery on Wisconsin Avenue has picked back up. “I sense a change in the market for fine art,” she says. Calloway has even seen an increase in business for the gallery’s archival framing services.

“I’m looking forward to the coming months with great enthusiasm,” says Norman Parish of Parish Gallery. The Parish Gallery has long helped make Canal Square a Georgetown destination. “Spring is here and with its beauty a breath of new life is anticipated for our coming shows,” he said. Parish, known for his focus on artists of the African diaspora, eagerly awaits his first exhibition of the works of renowned artist Robert Freeman (opening May 21). Freeman, noted for his theatrically alert groupings of figures and a continuing dialog within his work, focuses on race interactions.

Rebecca Cross, of Cross Mackenzie Ceramic Arts, has likewise been reveling in the dawn of art’s upcoming season. “Spring is shedding the recession. It’s more than cherry blossoms that are blooming!” Cross Mackenzie Ceramic Arts shows painting and photography along with top-shelf ceramics. Cross is additionally looking forward to showing her ceramic work in New York later this spring.

It seems that the economic devastation of the last two years is beginning to thaw with the warmth of spring, and patrons can look forward to getting back into the familiar swing of the spring arts season.

What To Look Forward To:

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
Christopher Addison of Addison/Ripley Fine Art is presenting a broad spectrum of Washington talent for the spring and summer season. Ranging from the serial abstractions and luscious surfaces of Dan Treado to the finely crafted, closely observed landscapes of John Morrell, Addison/Ripley Fine Art is sure to offer some of this season’s exemplary contemporary art in Washington this season.

In Treado’s third show with Addison/Ripley, “Requesting Quiet” (opening May 1), he works layering form over form, drawing from graphic and imagined imagery and juxtaposing subtle color with bold hues. The following month, June 12, sees the opening of John Morrell’s landscape paintings. From his offices above Georgetown, John Morrell, head of the Georgetown University fine arts department, has a spectacular view across the Potomac. Some of the artist’s impeccable landscapes reflect that inspiration while others elicit the scenic vistas of Maine and upstate New York. Finally, exercising his curatorial vision, Frank Day has selected a range of Washington portraitists in all variety of media for his curatorial venture, “Facing Washington.”

Irvine Contemporary
Irvine Contemporary’s current offerings are two solo exhibitions by contemporary female artists. “Swallowtail,” showing through April 20, is a solo exhibition of original paintings by Susan Jameson. Working with egg tempera on panel, Susan Jamison reflects on many traditions of imagery to create dream-like portraits and figures that question gender conventions. Reflecting back on sources like fairy tales, Renaissance portraiture, botanical illustration, and Kama Sutra manuscript paintings, Jamison uses the animals, plants, and objects in her work for their symbolic meanings, giving the Snow White-like female figures a contemporary, feminist perspective.
The gallery’s other exhibition, “American Vernacular,” features Susan Raab, whose documentary and fine art photography is noted for its distinctive approach in capturing the often overlooked places, people, and events in daily American life. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, Raab recently had a series of 10 photographs acquired by the Smithsonian Museum of American History for their permanent collection.

Long View Gallery
Long View Gallery’s upcoming show, “Identify,” features the latest series of work from Mike Weber. In over 30 photo-based mixed media works, Weber explores concepts of commemoration and heritage, including his own lineage, as he symbolically reinvents the life stories of his unknown or forgotten subjects. Weber selectively edits and reframes vintage snapshots derived from both his family’s collection and estate sales into newly composed digital prints on canvas. He augments these details with layers of paint, unorthodox collage materials and high-gloss resin, intensifying the mood of the original photograph. His artistic praxis ascribes a new narrative to his source materials and re-presents them as glossy, modern images. The opening reception will take place on April 22 at 6:30 p.m., and the exhibition will run through May 20.

Kathleen Ewing Gallery
In 1971, Steve Szabo, an award winning photographer for The Washington Post, took a six month leave of absence and moved to a 19th-century farmhouse in a remote area of Somerset County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In contrast to his fast shooting photojournalistic style, Szabo began working with a large format view camera to record the haunting scenes of Americana he found there. The Kathleen Ewing Gallery will feature Szabo’s photographic studies of rural America in “The Eastern Shore and Other Images,” curated by Kathleen Ewing herself, on display from April 5 to May 29.

Marsha Mateyka Gallery
The Marsha Mateyka Gallery opens their new season with paintings from the estate of Gene Davis (1920-1985). “Gene Davis: Cool / Works from the Artist’s Cooler Palette,” spans the work of Davis from 1959 to 1983. Gene Davis became well known in the early 1960s for his dramatic stripe paintings. In this exhibition, a selection of paintings from the estate reveals a more limited palette. Subtle, gentle tones of blue, purple, and green collide with vibrant effects.

Susan Calloway Fine Arts
Opening April 2 at Susan Calloway Fine Arts, “Changing Planes” is an exhibit of cityscapes by Linda Press. Press, interested in the poetic quality of light and shadow, engrains her European and American cityscapes with a sense of history in the architectural details of her work. Opening on April 9, and running in conjunction with Press’ paintings, the fine art photography of Diane Epstein captures the monuments, statues and fountains of Rome and other Old World cities, with a textural, timeless quality. Her show, “Italy: A Journey Through the Layers of Time,” brings to life the panoramic vistas of the Renaissance with the architectural details of the modern world.

Parish Gallery
In addition to the previously mentioned Robert Freeman, the Parish Gallery will be showing the work of Angela Iovino from April 16 to May 18. Iovino, a watercolorist who for the last four years has been exploring mixed media and acrylic, has produced work that could be described as expressionist landscapes, full of vibrant colors, rich textures, and lively brushwork. The work has been largely inspired by her travels to East Asia and Western Europe. With work on display beginning June 18, Parish Gallery will also feature the work of Tayo Adenaike, an eminent Nigerian watercolorist.

Fraser Gallery
Since 1996, the Fraser Gallery has developed a well earned reputation for introducing artists from the United Kingdom to the Washington, D.C. region. Their upcoming exhibition, “In My Blood,” includes work by six artists working in a variety of media, connected by one common theme: their homeland, Wales.

Among the contributing artists, Carwyn Evans’s installation “Everything Seemed So Simple and Beautiful,” is a noteworthy collection of miniature dioramas of sites under threat. The representations include a rural school and a farmhouse in ruin. Evans’s work reflects his personal experiences while exploring broader social and political shifts in rural Wales. Much of his practice has focused on his migration from an upbringing in rural Ceredigion to the Welsh capital Cardiff.

The title of Helen Grove-White’s video “Rising Slowly” refers to the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and to the rising sea levels that are eroding the Welsh coastline. The work makes many allusions to the landscape of Wales, with its layers of misty mountains, lakes, coastal plains, and frequently changing atmospheric conditions.

The Ralls Collection
Through the end of May, the Ralls Collection will be featuring work of Nicole Charbonnet. Textural and built up over long periods of time, textures, images, words, washes of paint, and veils of translucent fabric and paper create a visual threshold in Charbonnet’s work, meant to allow the viewer not only to see the painting, but to see through it. These surfaces reveal a memory of preexisting stages or structures. Her most recent work, featured in this exhibition, shows Charbonnet exploring images from popular culture in her signature style, inviting dialogue about redefined gender roles and social sentimentality in today’s society.

Cross Mackenzie Ceramic Art
The Cross Mackenzie Gallery, always with an eclectic and impressive variety of work, is hosting a series of shows throughout the spring and summer months. John Brown’s “Vine Series,” featuring abstract photographs of Wisteria Vines, hangs through the end of April. The month of May sees California-based painter Andrea Luria with a series of “Big Birds” — lush, textured portraits of water birds and chickens. Finally, opening June 18, Elizabeth Kendall, a ceramic artist, has put together an installation of button-like hanging clay sculptures. The gallery will fill itself with these pieces to make the space feel like an inverted pincushion.

Lister Gallery
A bit further south in Fairfax, VA, the Lister Gallery is hosting a group exhibition, “Process of Perception,” starting April 9. The artists in the show deal with process-based approaches and concepts. The May 14 show, “Invisible Energy,” finds a different group of artists addressing ideas about tension, power and stimulation. “It’s been a true balancing act trying to run a gallery space and make art at the same time,” says Adam Lister. “I feel like I see a different side of the artists.”

Museums At a Glance

Smithsonian American Art Museum
With the recent loss of Jeanne-Claude, one of the premiere environmental artists in history, it is fitting that the Smithsonian is exhibiting “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence.” Documenting one of the couple’s most daunting projects, the exhibition exposes the history and work behind “Running Fence,” an 18-foot high, 24.5-mile long stretch of white nylon fabric, that ran at one end down to the Pacific Ocean.

According to the Smithsonian’s website, “The exhibition includes components from the actual project, nearly 50 original preparatory drawings and collages, a 58-foot long scale model, and more than 240 photographs by Wolfgang Volz documenting the process and the many personalities involved with the project. Also included in the exhibition is a film by the legendary American filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, with Charlotte Zwerin. The film chronicles the unpredictable and ever-changing path that led to the completion of ‘Running Fence.’” The exhibit runs through Sept. 26.

National Gallery of Art
Allen Ginsberg, the counterrevolutionary wordsmith and ringleader of the Beat Generation, penned the lines that defined the unrest of his time. “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” is an exploration of the poet’s photography. Including portraits of Jack Kerouac and other contemporaries, Ginsberg’s poetry reflects a similar sentiment to his poetry: keen and sensitive observation of the surrounding world, intuitive expression, and a steady consciousness of a present time and place. The retrospective opens May 2 and runs through the beginning of September.

The Hirshhorn
Yves Klein, an influential artist of unfortunate brevity, had a career that spanned less than a decade. The Hirshhorn presents “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers,” the first retrospective of the artist’s work in nearly 30 years, opening May 20 and showing through September. The Hirshhorn explains, “Yves Klein took the European art scene by storm in a prolific career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962, when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 34 … Klein was an innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture, and theoretical writing. Self-identified as ‘the painter of space,’ he sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color. The artist’s diverse body of work represents a pivotal transition from modern art’s concern with the material object to contemporary notions of the conceptual nature of art.”
[gallery ids="99094,99095,99096,99097,99098,99099,99100" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Marc Kudisch sounded psyched.

“We’re all eager to bring this play to Washington,” Kudisch, who’s appeared at Signature Theater here and who’s a veteran of big Broadway musicals, said in a phone interview from Philadelphia. “Washington is such a great theater town and they audiences here are so responsive, they’re so sharp so I for one can’t wait to see what happens.”

Kudisch is part of the cast of “The Golden Age” by Terrence McNally, which kicks off “Nights at the Opera,” a three-part, five-week presentation by the Kennedy Center in which three of McNally’s plays, all of them with opera themes or focuses, will be performed concurrently on three Kennedy Center Stages.

In addition to “Golden Age,” the festival also includes “The Lisbon Traviata” and “Master Class,” which will star Tyne Daly as the legendary diva Maria Callas. But “Golden Age,” which just completed a world premiere run at the Philadelphia Theater Company, is by far the most newsworthy of the three offerings, given that it’s a new play by the prolific McNally, and that it continues and perhaps completes his theatrical passion for opera.

Kudisch, who’s had some experience with opera and shares the fascination, actually has made his mark in today’s Broadway musical theater, although that’s not what he set out to do. Originally from Hassenback, NJ, “I came to New York as a dramatic actor, I’d never seen myself as a singer, had no intention of doing musicals, I did off-Broadway a lot,” he said.

Then came Birdie. “I got cast as Conrad Birdie, in the Tommy Tune revival of ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ and toured with it,” he said. “That sort of set me on my way.” And then some: “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Bells Are Ringing,” “The Wild Party,” “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” “9 to 5,” Sondheim’s dark “Assassins,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “A Little Night Music,” the Signature’s cutting edge musical “The Witches of Eastwick” and as Vincent Van Gogh in “The Highest Yellow.”

“You can really tell how the people that are creating, writing, and composing musicals today are going in new directions,” Kudisch said. “In some ways, that’s what “Golden Age” is all about, except that the characters are Rossini and Bellini and the creative artists who inhabit the world of opera in Paris in 1835. They’re thinking about the same things, new music, how it will be greeted by critics, other artists.”

“Golden Age” is about back-stage doings at the premiere of Bellini’s opera “I Puritani.” Rossini will be heard from and we also hear the Puritani quartet, the four singers who are the stars of the opera, one of them played by Kudisch. “It’s a very personal thing for McNally, and we and he learned a lot from the run in Philly.”

Kudisch thinks the festival is a great idea. “You get a chance to see what I think is some of McNally’s best work,” he said, “and it’s a focus that tells you a lot about his career.”
“Golden Age” will be at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater March 12-April 4. “The Lisbon Traviata” will be at the Terrace Theater March 20-April 11 and “Master Class” will be at the Eisenhower Theater March 25-April 18.

Upcoming performances:

– There’s new material from playwright Neil LaBute, who tackles contemporary American contentions with gusto, clear-headedness and the impact of a punch in the mouth. LaBute’s latest, “Reasons to be Pretty,” comes to the Studio Theater, which has become a go-to theater with LaBute’s work, and completes his trilogy exploring our obsession with looks and physical beauty, which began with “The Shape of Things” and “Fat Pig,” both hits at the Studio. “Reasons to be Pretty,” directed by David Muse, opens March 24 at the Mead Theater.

– Could there be a more provocative and tempting title than “Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews”? Especially if you’re Jewish, or follow all things Warhol. The D.C. Jewish Community Center has you covered on both issues, with the very same one-man show written and performed by Josh Kornbluth, the popular San Francisco-based monologist who had a hit with “Citizen Josh,” through March 21. The show is based in part on a ground-breaking exhibition of silk screen portraits of prominent Jewish figures by Warhol in 1980, an exhibition which can be seen in the DCJC’s Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery. “Good for the Jews” runs through May 2.

– “Porgy and Bess,” George Gershwin’s landmark, truly American opera, opens the Washington National Opera’s spring portion of its 2009-2010 season March 20-April 3, with such stirring American classic songs as “Summertime” and “Porgy.”

Read Vera Tilson’s interview with “Porgy and Bess” conductor John Mauceri here.

Ari Post •

Watercolors are an often overlooked medium, their subtleties and patiently layered depths seemingly run off by the raw energy of so much popular expressionism and abstraction. Angela Iovino’s series of landscapes at the Parish Gallery, open through May 18th, is a kernel of cool mint, cleansing the palette between the explosive, bright flavors being offered around the city.

Even with such tangible titles as “Eastport Maine Morning” and “Hot Spring I,” to call these studies ‘landscapes’ is more of a projection than a precise definition. Iovino’s paintings are the geography of dreams that pull the viewer in only to stand beyond a world that cannot completely be entered.

Iovino lets the water do a lot of the work in her paintings, allowing the colors to dissipate, diffuse and coagulate in their wet state. I am inclined to believe that puddles of water may well have been spread carefully around the paper. The atmospheric effect created by this technique is thick and simultaneously transparent, recalling the feeling of intense humidity.

Like looking into a marsh, or staring fixedly at something and then closing your eyes – what is seen in Iovino’s work is more of a feeling of brevity, a weightlessness that cannot last. But in the meantime, it is a beautiful sight.

Through May 18 at the Parish Gallery (1054 31st St.)

John Blee •

I have often noticed the incredible exterior of the 19th-century house at the corner of Q and New Hampshire. It is every bit as grand on the inside as the outside and it houses the Woman’s National Democratic Club (1526 New Hampshire Ave.). There is currently a show there (through July 22) entitled “Art in Congress,” with works by members of the U.S. Congress and their families. Everyone can cheer the inclusion of Representative Barney Frank’s partner, Jim Ready, who has a large photograph, “Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009.” It depicts the view of the crowd attending the Obama inauguration in epic manner.

The works in the show contain some surprises, including the thought that Senator Diane Feinstein of California could quit her day job and launch a respectable career as a floral artist. Though she is needed in the Senate, her lovely “Autumn Bouquet” would be welcome to anyone needing some quiet color affirmation. And Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona displays some very strong graphic gifts in his “Long Day of Legislating,” drawn with a Sharpie. One can feel the tension of April 28, 2007 in his jagged linear qualities.

A surprise is also the sumi-e brush painting on rice paper by Representative Jim McDermott, of Washington. He has been classically trained in the sumi-e technique, and his “Mountain Bamboo” brings its auspicious freshness to the show. On a totally different note, Representative Dina Titus of Nevada shows her book cover for “Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing.” It is appropriately grim.

Erin Kelly, daughter of Representative Betsy Markey of Colorado, is a gifted photographer. She has a diverse body of work that shows a wide range of styles. Representative Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii is represented by a technically accomplished clay sculpture entitled “Tokyo Dango” that includes cherry tree twigs. There is a bit of ikebana in the piece; it is bold, but in a graceful way.

There is a poem by Representative Diane E. Watson of California entitled “Aunt Gert.” Poems should be found more often on the wall. And California Congressman Mike Thompson has a very skillfully done “Drake Hunting Decoy” made of redwood, oil, and glass, used for duck hunting in the Pacific Flyway of California.

Suzanne Finney of the Woman’s National Democratic Club’s Arts Committee accompanied me through the show. I asked her in the spirit of bipartisanship if any Republicans were invited, and she smiled in response. [gallery ids="99134,102722,102714,102699,102707" nav="thumbs"]