Arts

Ari Post • June 29, 2016

There is a frequent dilemma in the perception of art that dates back at least to the 19th century. It …

Richard Selden • June 23, 2016

A household name nearly 70 years after his death, the Bambino is the first sports star in the “One Life” series.

Ari Post • June 8, 2016

Since the early 20th century, Saudi Arabia has experienced extraordinary political, economic and social transformation. However, the only perspective that …

Gary Tischler • June 2, 2016

At the Phillips Collection, a family-friendly early start to the DC Jazz Festival.

Richard Selden • May 19, 2016

The weather cleared up and the crowds turned out for the annual Spring Art Walk in Georgetown’s Book Hill section last Friday. One of the half-dozen exhibitions that welcomed visitors that night, in a pop-up space at 1666 33rd St. NW, is called “High Art | Low Art: Works by David Richardson and Ari Post.”

(There will be another open-house reception at the gallery with Richardson and Post on Friday May 20, from 5 – 9p.m.)

The two artists, who met in a Dupont Circle art gallery in 2009, are unlikely colleagues: a Marine Corps Lieutenant who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and a manager of curatorial programs for the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries (Post, art critic for The Georgetowner, is the latter).

The first two rooms contain eight large paintings and one small one from Richardson’s “Trojan War Series”: abstract oils that suggest Richard Diebenkorn in their varied combinations of lines and planes and Mark Rothko in their strong, layered colors. A distorted tic-tac-toe motif that at times seems to transform into landscape is rooted in the Japanese stone markers that inspired an earlier series by Richardson.

Other than the series title and the names of the paintings — for example, “Achilles Seeking Kleos” — the signs that these works are about the experience of combat are, literally, signs (they could be considered sculptures but are not identified as such). Three quotes are painted on groupings of boards on the walls. And powerful Diomedes/froze him with a Glance/”Not a word of retreat./You’ll Never Persuade me…” reads one, one phrase per board. In the center of the second room stands a stanchion — a charred board, with text painted on one side and the locations of battles on the other, set vertically in cement with a military knife for a pinnacle.

The remaining room on the first floor displays Post’s work in several media. Two painted portraits are simultaneously decorative and aggressive, with hints of both Henri Matisse and Alice Neel. In between them is the hard-to-look-away-from “Plisa,” a dense clustering of more than 200 small heads, somber white faces bordered by shadows in charcoal and India ink. It brings to mind the Holocaust and, in fact, is named for the Lithuanian village of Post’s ancestors.

On the opposite wall are pairs of animal illustrations. In each case, the ink drawing and the linoblock print are so dissimilar — not only in medium but in style — that one would never guess they were by the same artist (never mind by the creator of the portraits and “Plisa”). In several of the linoblocks, the strokes within the animal’s outline are not meant to represent its hide, instead resembling the patterns of paper-cut art.

The ink drawings — storybook animals — are preparation for what you’ll find upstairs. Post, who calls newspaper comics and political cartoons “his first true loves,” has drawn caricatures, mounted in gilt frames, of would-be presidential nominees Clinton, Cruz, Kasich, Sanders and Trump. Surrounding them is a series of 34 small drawings titled “The Four Humors, and Other Temperaments,” which could have come from the pen of Richard Thompson, creator of “Cul de Sac” in the Washington Post.

These illustrations, however, are from the Ari Post, a virtual newspaper intended, yes, to entertain us, but also to help us face our true and often neurotic natures. Post has taken the ancient theory of the four humors, believed for centuries to determine the moods and character types of individuals, to a new level of subtlety (with a good dash of irony).

Among the titles of his cartoon snapshots: “Confronting one’s inherent banality,” “Hungry, but not really hungry” and (under what is perhaps a portrait of the artist as a young man) “Misplaced guilt which, like a phantom limb, is but the tingling reminder of having renounced your Jewish faith.”

In the other room on the second floor are earlier works by Richardson that incorporate symbols such as skulls, Statues of Liberty and Uncle Sams. There are also three reproductions of a signboard for, presumably, a gym in Ramadi, showing an Iraqi barbell-lifter. To recreate its destruction by street gunfire, which he witnessed in 2006, Richardson took a shotgun to the three paintings, blowing away half of the third.

One of Post’s most impressive works is in that room, a tall, narrow painting with five heads stacked vertically. Perhaps referencing a strip of movie frames or photo-booth pictures, it is a portrait of painter Philip Guston, an Abstract Expressionist who later adopted a cartoonish representational style. Each head, bordered by the four letters of the subject’s name, “Phil,” is colored differently, two only in yellow on the white canvas.

Note: There will be another reception with Richardson and Post this Friday, May 20, from 5 to 9 p.m.
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Ari Post • May 4, 2016

One of Washington’s major gallery districts, the Georgetown galleries on Book Hill cluster along a few blocks of Wisconsin Avenue, enveloping the neighborhood with a vibrant spirit and cultural warmth.

The annual Spring Art Walk has become a seasonal fixture in Georgetown, right in step with the buzzing, foliate bloom of our gardens. As the galleries open their doors for a Friday night of open houses — filled with paintings and sculptures, music, wine and conversation — the event becomes a local inauguration of the cultural reawakening that warm weather brings.

There is a wonderful variety of works to explore this spring, from the luminous glasswork of David Patchen at Artists’ Proof Gallery and the primal naturalism of Katie Pumphrey’s paintings at Susan Calloway Fine Art to the intaglio prints at Washington Printmakers Gallery and the bold oil paintings of Rafael Torres Correa at Cross Mackenzie Gallery. (Full disclosure: This writer also has some work on view during the Art Walk, but we will get to that later.)

The 2016 Spring Art Walk is Friday, May 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. For details, visit georgetowngalleries.com.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Dan Treado: You Are Getting Sleepy

The playful merging of science and art, the genuine delight in tools and methods and the shared interest in performance art and experimental music are at the center of Dan Treado’s recent work. Often employing tools of his own design, such as squeegees and scrapers, the artist is able to fuse solvent and oil paint to create luminous, richly surfaced paintings on Baltic birch panels. Treado’s paintings are process works that often borrow from sources such as film and photography, physics and biology textbooks and electron microscope images. His multi-paneled canvases and Mylar works explore the relationship between science and art and the manner in which we view film and paintings.

The final works form clusters of brightly colored, ringed discs. In the artist’s words: “When clustered together, overlapping or occupying distinct envelopes of space, a collection of them becomes a dynamic force, willing themselves into motion.”

Susan Calloway Fine Arts
1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Katie Pumphrey: Heavyweight

In August of last year, Baltimore-based painter Katie Pumphrey swam the English Channel in 14 hours and 19 minutes. It was an emotional endurance test and a far cry from the art studio, it would seem. But for Pumphrey, athletic competition and painting are part and parcel of a single journey.

Pumphrey’s paintings investigate the primal urges of competition and movement in both humanity and wild animals, connecting us to the roots of our very instinct. Through her imagery, as well as through the raw energy and physicality of her brushwork, her paintings are meditations on the nature of what drives us to be physical beings, exploring themes of confrontation, reflex, territory and interaction.

The implications of her work are riveting. They offer insight into our cultural obsession with sports and athletic events, and our war-like and ceremonial glorification of star athletes. They also uncover a harmony in the hulking motion of wildlife and large animals, in rushing herds of buffalo and massive schools of fish, shedding light on our own traditions of highly social and herd-like competition, from marathon racing to football. This is not a show to miss.

Cross MacKenzie Gallery
1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Paintings by Rafael Torres Correa

In partnership with the Cultural Service of the Embassy of France, Cross MacKenzie Gallery will host an exhibition of paintings by the Cuban-born French national Rafael Torres Correa. Originally from Havana, this international artist has widely exhibited his work in Mexico, Spain and France and with Cross MacKenzie in 2014.

Correa creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases. His paintings evoke memories — symbolic and emotional—and conjure imagined experiences of water and floating islands with their shifting imagery and fluid execution, using washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors, a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

Maurine Littleton Gallery
1667 Wisconsin Ave. NW
John Littleton & Kate Vogel

On view at Maurine Littleton Gallery will be a group show of groundbreaking glasswork featuring the collaborative works of John Littleton and Kate Vogel. Littleton and Vogel met at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. Since 1979 they have lived in the mountains of North Carolina, where they began their collaboration on blown and cast glass in the studio of John’s father, Harvey Littleton.

Their recent work includes a marvelous, gem-like series of desert flowers and succulents made of cast and hot-worked glass, which in the deft hands of these masters defies the perceived limitations of the medium.

Washington Printmakers Gallery
1641 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Transitions: Prints by Gabriel Jules and Books from the Eastern Shore

Washington Printmakers Gallery is a cooperative print gallery and the area’s primary source for contemporary, artist-pulled fine art prints. On view through May 28, “Transitions” showcases the intaglio prints of Gabriel Jules alongside gorgeous artist books of the Salisbury Book Guild and the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland.

Jules is an artist entirely fascinated with the practice of creating original, hand-pulled prints, engaging with the intimacy and rhythm of the etching process. Her work, largely representational, explores our individual and cultural ties with the surrounding world and celebrates this connectivity as an essential facet of being human.

Meanwhile, the showcase of artists’ books is a uniquely wonderful experience, presenting viewers with many surprises as they finger through the pages; they are among the few works of art you are encouraged to touch (with gloves, of course).

Book Hill Pop-Up Gallery
1666 33rd St. NW
High Art | Low Art: Works by David Richardson and Ari Post

David Richardson and Ari Post met in a Dupont Circle art gallery in 2009, where they formed an unlikely friendship. Richardson is a man who has long led two rather contradictory careers, as both a Marine Lt. Col. through multiple tours of combat duty, and as a contemporary painter. Post, who studied painting and illustration, built his career in the Washington arts community, where he now works for the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, writes about art for The Georgetowner).

This group exhibition, “High Art | Low Art: Paintings, Prints, Pulp and Propaganda,” showcases recent paintings by both artists, along with other artistic ventures not usually exhibited in galleries. Post has created multiple series of political caricatures, cartoons and ink-work more typical of the Sunday funny pages than a gallery wall — a love letter to newspaper comics and political cartoons, his first true loves. Meanwhile, Richardson, who normally deals with the subject of war through his art using allusion and abstraction, has come out with a series of far more brazen, blunt and politically charged works, influenced by and akin to war propaganda, but infused with a fascinating, mysterious ambiguity and unmistakable painterly bravura.

Artist’s Proof Gallery
1533 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Color in the Curve: Glass Sculptures by David Patchen

David Patchen is an American glass artist and designer who uses the Italian techniques of cane and murrine in an American style. Known primarily for a combination of complexity and scale in densely patterned glasses, his organic forms reveal something unexpected and precious, rewarding those who make a close study.

Patchen is captivated by the breadth of possibilities offered by glass and the opportunity for rich creative expression in three dimensions. He describes the optical properties of glass as intriguing, as the glass offers a refractive palette with the ability to bend, layer and twist color and light, modulating both density and translucency unlike any other medium. He relishes the dual challenge of designing and executing complex glass pieces, achieving elements of great detail or soft abstraction.
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Percy Metcalfe • April 27, 2016

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

This is the question asked by “The Tension of a Suspended Moment,” an exhibition of works by Kevin MacDonald on view through May 29 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.

The majority of the numerous pieces on display show what can only be described as empty scenes. Humans are absent from almost all the beautifully rendered locations. A silent suburban street, an abandoned diner booth and a vacant laundromat are all eerily depicted, hanging on the walls of the gallery.

The understanding one obtains from staring at MacDonald’s work is that the absence of people only makes their existence more noticeable. Every picture appears suspended in the time between when someone has just left the scene and when someone might return.

A lifelong Washington resident, MacDonald died in 2006 at the age of 59. The exhibition, which assembles an enormous range of his work, is simultaneously a celebration of his talent and a lamentation of his early passing. As Lee Fleming writes in the text at the entrance to the exhibition, the amassing of such a great number of pieces forces us to take note of their creator’s departure, 10 years ago.

By presenting so many of his pictures in only three rooms, the curators are able to reveal the full diversity of talent possessed by MacDonald, who was known to change his style and subject matter for every show. On one wall, you see a precisely drawn image of a suburban cottage, but across the gallery you find a far more abstract pastel drawing, “Angel of the Annunciation.” In one room, you might find 20 years of work, demonstrating the varied influences drawn upon by MacDonald in his artistic life.

Yet, while MacDonald’s art, as presented at the Katzen, will amaze you with its variety, a clear and well constructed theme runs through the entire exhibition: that of momentary silence.

On Saturday, May 21, at 6 p.m., there will a gallery talk about the exhibition. For more information, visit american.edu/cas/katzen.
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Ari Post • April 20, 2016

There is a stirring tranquility in the architectural landscape photography of Alan Ward that causes me great human envy. As his work shepherds the viewer through the great parks, gardens, graveyards and winding mountain roadways of America, the photographs become living documents which evince that unalienable right so judiciously promised by Mr. Jefferson so long ago: the pursuit of happiness.

Ward’s photographs exhibit an encompassing soundness embedded in the foundation of our very earth. It is an emotional sensation disparate from the roiling charade of political demarcation and career spectacle that governs our daily lives, and it drives me nearly mad to know that someone out there has not only traversed this divine presence for a living but also captured it.

At the National Building Museum through Sept. 5, “Luminous Landscapes: Photographs by Alan Ward” is a sublime escape into the backyard of America, where you can unlace your shoes or roll down the window of your car, let the thick air wash over your face and know that the feeling is real.

“Successful works of landscape architecture have a certain resonance with us,” Ward said in a recent conversation with The Georgetowner. “After all, we are connected to land, humans always have been. And exceptional landscape designs express our relationship with the land. So when you see these images you see that it’s possible to design and build in harmony with the land.”

To that end (and among other things), “Luminous Landscapes” is a road trip. The exhibition journeys from the grassy tidewaters of the Deep South, over the rolling hills of the Piedmont and New England’s groves of academe, across Appalachia and into the sun-flecked nape of the Midwest, all the way up to the mossy shadows and old growth majesty of the Pacific Northwest.

Taken throughout Ward’s 40-year career, these photographs become a sort of domestic passport, documenting the expansion and evolution of our country. Through his lens, we get to see and understand the impact of the most significant designs in American landscape architecture; each site is either itself a landmark or emblematic of a pivotal transition point in landscape design.

At Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest surviving designed landscapes in America (dating to the 1740s), earthen terraces descend in long steps from the main house to the river. The plantation owner, Henry Middleton, relied on European precedents to achieve the vantage needed to oversee farming in the pre-Civil War era.

(All that aside, Ward’s photograph of a venerable, hulking oak tree at Middleton Place — framing the distant landscape with its branches as it cranes almost horizontally over a flooded rice field — is one of the most satisfying compositions one could ever hope to see.)

About 140 years later in Bratenahl, Ohio, the architect Charles Platt put a popularized Italianate influence to work on Gwinn, a distinctly American estate on the shores of Lake Erie that masterfully integrated ornate architecture in a billowing landscape. A spacious pergola is built into the hillside; the formal garden flanks the entry drive like an extension of the rooms in the house. Through Ward’s lens, the stonework seems to grow out of the surrounding environment, all the way down to the slick steps that break the seawall and invite us into the water.

By the 1970s, the Bloedel Reserve in the state of Washington pared away the ornamentation of previous generations of landscape architecture and explored architecture’s relationship to ecology through a design involving the forest, meadows and water. Here, the way that Ward portrays the walking paths, hedgerows and stonework that move in and out of natural streams, one can barely discern what is naturally occurring and what was manufactured.

What is so lovely and engaging about the way that Ward photographs these natural subjects is that he offers viewers the experience of standing on these very grounds, as if moving naturally through the landscape.

By way of comparison, Ansel Adams famously elevated his camera beyond the foreground, achieving a heroic, mythical quality in his sweeping landscape photography. Ward does almost the opposite, connecting the environment to the human scale and putting the viewer within the landscape.

“Ansel Adams was trying to transcend the human experience,” he said. “What I am trying to do is create an experience of a place, to draw you through it. These places were designed to walk through, for instance, so many of my photos are on paths.

“After Adams, and even at the same time, there started to be more of a critique of the landscape and the built landscape,” Ward continued. “So much landscape photography is highly critical, showing us how we’ve despoiled the earth and how development has overtaken natural landscapes. But I am trying to show that we can build wisely and in harmony with the natural landscape, and I want to find places where land and culture have come together to forge these beautiful, inspiring places.”

With these works, Ward has developed a resounding and poetic argument, and contributed significantly to the dialogue about modern society’s relationship with the natural world.

Who knew that it was possible to bottle transcendence?
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