“Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa” opens April 22 at the National Museum of African Art. Photograph by George Osodi.
Museum Exhibitions
At the National Geographic Museum, “Beyond the Story: National Geographic Unpublished 2012” showcases some of the most compelling images that never made it into the magazine from last year’s stories—42 photographs by 29 photographers, including images of emperor penguins, koalas, orphan elephants, and more. Through July 7.
“Next Stop Italy: A Journey Into Italian Contemporary Photography” runs at the Phillips Collection through April 28, and features 12 works by photographers such as Andrea Galvani and Franco Vaccari.
“Hand-Held: Gerhard Pulverer’s Japanese Illustrated Books” opens April 6 at the Sackler Gallery, featuring illustrated books from Japan’s Edo period. Through August 11.
“NEXT,” an exhibition of work by the Corcoran’s graduating class, opens April 6.
April 12 through July 28, the Renwick Gallery presents “Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color,” a show exploring the life and career of Day, an African-American living and working in the pre-Civil War 19th century. Thirty-six pieces of furniture illustrate the talent that helped him become one of the most successful furniture makers in North Carolina.
At the Textile Museum, “Out of Southeast Asia: Art That Sustains” features textiles ranging from Indonesian batiks to Laotian ikats, and looks at how they’ve evolved and inspired contemporary designers. April 12 through October 13.
A still from Jennifer Levonian’s “Buffalo Milk Yogurt.” Photograph via Smithsonian/Jennifer Levonian.
It speaks volumes about the state of portraiture right now that the most mesmerizing rendering of a subject currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery is the languorous way Bo Gehring captures corduroy. In “Jessica Wickham,” a five-minute, large-scale video installation, Gehring draws a camera over his subject from head to toe with breathtaking stillness, starting at her orange Crocs and lingering for what feels like eons on her nubby brown pants. Every fiber of the material is distinct, every fragment of lint supersized. It isn’t until the camera gets waist-high that we realize Jessica is breathing—a living, moving portrait in infinitesimal HD.
Gehring’s portrait is the winner and the centerpiece of this year’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, dominating the room with its scale, its musical soundtrack (the piece is timed perfectly to match Arvo Pärt’s celestial “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten”), and its vitality. The exhibition, on display at the National Portrait Gallery through February 2014, reveals 48 works chosen from more than 3,300 submissions, and offers a cross-section of contemporary portraiture that’s quite thrilling to behold. The diversity of media and approaches to subjects on display is broad (often, the process is as important a part of the finished piece as the subject is), but the show also has a sense of affirming optimism that comes as quite a surprise.
Take the second-place winner, for example: Jennifer Levonian’s “Buffalo Milk Yogurt,” a watercolor animation about a friend of Levonian’s having a minor breakdown in an eco-friendly grocery store. The subject, Corey Fogal, contributed to the accompanying score, and though his animated existential crisis is real, Levonian’s sketches add a sense of levity to the six-minute work. Perplexed by modernity, Fogal singes James Joyce novels in his George Foreman grill, dunks his head under water sprayers in the produce aisle, and stares, bewildered, at a naked woman meditating outside the store who seems to be as out of place as he is. The work itself is less a portrait of Fogal than it is a snapshot of a character recurring throughout the centuries—an artist outside of his era.
Photographs of Dürer’s “Adam and Eve” and “A Blue Roller” courtesy of the National Gallery of art.
When it comes to Albrecht Dürer, some things are apparently worth waiting for. Seven years after the National Gallery of Art first hoped to present “Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina,” the exhibit finally opens March 24 in the East Building. Curator Andrew Robison calls the show “the greatest exhibition of Dürer ever held in this country.”
Dürer, who lived in Germany from 1471 to 1528, spanned the medieval and Renaissance eras in his work, which included paintings, prints, autobiographical texts, mathematical treatises, and more. Robison compares the artist to Leonardo da Vinci in the scope of his accomplishments: “He was a very curious man, and like Leonardo he was very aware of the changing notion of what an artist could be—this transition from being a craftsperson to being a kind of genius with a special sort of inspiration.”
The Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, has the world’s most extensive Dürer collection, and more than a decade ago Robison started discussing a collaboration. But the Albertina didn’t want to expose the fragile works to light too soon after its own Dürer retrospective in 2003, so the National Gallery agreed to wait. The exhibit, which explores Dürer as a draftsman, covers the whole of his career, from 91 drawings and watercolors—including masterpieces such as “The Praying Hands”—to 27 engravings and woodcuts.
“Dürer was above all a realist,” says Robison. “He’s interested in real objects, real aspects of nature, real human beings, and that’s what makes him a great portraitist. It’s a very colorful exhibition and a knockout visually. We’ll be able to survey the whole of this very intelligent, very complex, and supremely gifted human being.”
“Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina” at the National Gallery of Art through June 9. More information is at nga.gov.
This article appears in the March 2013 issue of The Washingtonian.
Art + cocktails = a fun time. Photograph by Kevin Allen.
If there are two things we’re passionate about over here at After Hours HQ, those two things are fine art and cocktails. Luckily both come together in fine form at Artini, the Corcoran’s annual event dedicated to a fusion of mixology and art.
Hosted by the 1869 Society, Artini brings together eight mixologists from local hotspots such as the Passenger, Daikaya, Jack Rose, and the Gibson. We have two tickets to give away to this year’s event, happening this Friday, March 22. To win, simply tweet @AfterHoursBlog the name of your favorite Washington bar with the hashtag #Artini, or e-mail us the name at events@washingtonian.com before noon on Thursday. We’ll pick a winner at random and notify them Thursday afternoon.
For more information about Artini, visit the Corcoran’s website, or visit our Washingtonian Artini page with links to recipes and videos.
Albert Bierstadt, Mount Corcoran, c. 1876-1877. Oil on canvas, 60 11/16 x 95 7/8 inches. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Museum purchase, Gallery Fund, 78.1. Photos: Daniel Swartz.
The final feature night for the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Artini event happens Tuesday, March 19, at Barracks Row Balkan spot Ambar. Mixologist Milton Hernandez will stir up Le Corcoran, a cocktail inspired by Albert Bierstadt’s painting “Mount Corcoran.” Says Hernandez, “I chose three different liquors to represent the major natural forms in [the painting]. The mezcal infusion represents the clouds, the absinthe conjures up the clarity and emerald green color of the river, and the apple whiskey brings out the redness from the trees in the background.” Head to Ambar to have him make you one, or attempt it yourself with the help of the video.
Ingredients:
2 ounces Dark Corner Distillery apple-flavored corn whiskey
1 ounces Mezcal Benevá-Añejo infused black tea
1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
½ ounce La Muse Verte Absinthe Traditionnelle
1 teaspoon gelatin
Directions:
Blend the milk, cream, and mezcal together to infuse, and allow it to sit in a refrigerator
for a day before use.
At a low heat, warm up the absinthe and, using a whisk and a teaspoon, add one teaspoon of gelatin to the warm, but not boiling, absinthe, then let it cool in a refrigerator for five hours.
To put the drink together, pour the apple whiskey over ice and stir twice, add one tablespoon of the absinthe emulsion so it floats over the whiskey, then add the remaining mezcal infusion over the absinthe emulsion to create three layers.
Iva Gueorguieva's "Fracking Ceremony." Image courtesy of Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe.
Museum Exhibitions
Now open at the Phillips Collection is the Laib Wax Room by German conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib. The permanent installation is the museum’s first since the Rothko Room was installed 53 years ago; constructed from beeswax, it aims to transport visitors to a more introspective, spiritual state of mind. We reported last week on how the museum was experimenting with crowdfunding to help raise donations for it.
While the Corcoran is exploring the 1980s this month in “Pump Me Up,” the National Archives turns its attention to the previous decade in “Searching for the Seventies: The DOCUMERICA Photography Project.” The show reveals images from the 1970s Federal Photography project titled “DOCUMERICA,” looking at life in inner cities, farms, and coal mining communities. March 8 through September 9.
The Sackler Gallery unveils the Cyrus Cylinder, a 2,500-year-old Persian clay cylinder discovered in 1879 in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia. “The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: A New Beginning,” opening March 9, looks at the history of the object and its legacy as a symbol of religious tolerance. Through April 28.
The National Portrait Gallery presents 48 works selected by a jury from more than 3,000 entries in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The winner, to be announced March 22, receives $25,000 and a commission to create a work for the museum. March 23 through February, 2014.
Seven years after the National Gallery first hoped to present “Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina,” the exhibit opens March 24 in the West Building, and is billed as the finest exhibition by the German artist ever to go on display in the US. Through June 9.
Opening at the National Museum of the American Indian March 29 is “Cerámica de los Ancestros: Central America’s Past Revealed,” an exhibition examining thousands of years of Central American art and artifacts and the insight they offer into diverse and complex civilizations. Through 2014.
Wolfgang Laib installing Wax Room (Where have you gone—where are you going?) at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Photograph by Rhiannon Newman.
In a city where $500-a-plate dinners are as ubiquitous as broken Metro escalators, the idea of a museum fundraiser is hard to separate from tuxedos, dancing, and mediocre Chardonnay. But for its upcoming permanent installation, a room sculpted from beeswax by German artist Wolfgang Laib, the Phillips Collection has turned to a new platform to entice donations: crowdfunding.
Using the website Indiegogo, the Phillips is attempting to reach a goal of $15,000 in donations for the Laib Wax Room (UPDATE: The target has been reached, although the page will continue to accept donations for the next two days). The campaign has been assisted by a gift from artists Brian and Paula Ballo Dailey that matches donations dollar for dollar up to the $15,000 total. As is common with crowdfunding, there are incentives for donors depending on the sums given. For $25, donors are recognized as Hive Helpers and get a custom-made scratch-and-sniff postcard featuring an image of the finished room. A donation of $250 in the Worker category gets the giver a book about the Wax Room signed by Laib as well as an annual Contemporary membership to the Phillips (a $110 value).
Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski says the campaign is in keeping with the museum’s mission to engage people within its community. “We’re thinking a lot about how to be really innovative and creative, how to reach out to the public,” she said in a phone interview. “When this idea was floated, it seemed to fit with the underlying experiential theme of Wolfgang’s work, which brings people into an environment and allows them to participate in it.” In addition to revamping its website in 2012, the Phillips has long been active on social media and has its own free smartphone app for visitors exploring the collection. Last May it launched a competition encouraging people to submit Instagram images modeled after photos in the exhibition “Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard.”
Anna Ancher, a Danish artist working in the late 19th and early 20th century, is rightly revered in her native country as an extraordinary painter, but far less well-known on these shores. It’s a rare privilege to get to see so much of her work in a wide-ranging and thoughtful exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. “A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony,” on display through May 12, features more than 40 paintings by Ancher and other members of the Skagen Painters, a group working in a remote fishing village in northern Denmark. It’s a thorough introduction to the movement, showcasing exceptional works by Peder Severin Krøyer, Viggo Johansen, Ancher’s husband Michael, and many more, but the focus of the show is mostly on Anna herself and how she thrived as an artist despite being relatively confined in terms of training and subject matter.
Ancher studied drawing at the Vilhelm Kyhn College of Painting in Copenhagen—women at the time weren’t allowed to attend the Royal Danish Academy of Art where her husband and most of the other Skagen Painters were formally trained. While their paintings depict large-scale, dramatic scenes of fishermen and rowdy lunch parties, Ancher’s eye is more humble, focusing on family members sewing and knitting, women in church, and quiet, serene interior scenes.
Nevertheless, Ancher’s paintings reveal a profound eye for detail and an infatuation with light that makes her work seem luminous up close. One of her most famous works, “Sunlight in the blue room,” glows with a photo-realistic haze despite brush strokes that look rough, almost haphazard, if you focus on them. It’s a painting that reveals the influence of Impressionism while also paying tribute to the extraordinary quality of the light that far north in Jutland. The ray of sunlight that darts through the blue room’s window doesn’t look like an impression of light—it looks for all the world like the painting itself is being viewed next to a window. You barely notice the small girl seated in the chair, quietly knitting, and it’s telling that the title of the painting refers to its most compelling subject.
Jackson Pollock’s “Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist). Photographs courtesy of the Phillips Collection.
When it comes to art history, says Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski, there are always figures who tend to be neglected. “People get pushed to the margins,” Kosinski says. “It’s somehow easy for art historians and critics to forget about them as artists.”
“Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet”—February 9 through May 12 at the Phillips—examines the personal and artistic relationships among three Abstract Expressionists working in the mid-20th century. Along with the famous artists Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, the exhibit shines a light on the lesser-known Alfonso Ossorio, whose career as an artist is often overlooked because of his more prominent roles as friend and collector.
Ossorio—born in the Philippines, raised in England, and educated at Harvard—was from a wealthy family, giving him the means both to acquire and to create art. In 1950, he traveled to France to meet Dubuffet and was greatly influenced by the Frenchman’s interests in art brut, or outsider art—work made outside the establishment, without formal training. Ossorio later bought an estate in the Hamptons, near where Pollock had a home.
Showcasing Ossorio at the Phillips is nothing new: The museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, purchased several of the artist’s works in the 1950s. Kosinski—who got to know Ossorio in the 1980s and describes him as a “really brilliant, challenging, experimental artist”—is thrilled to see this show come to fruition: “We’re proud to bring the story into the public eye and give Ossorio his due as a seminal figure in this story.”
“Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet” at the Phillips Collection. February 9 through May 12. Admission $12.
This article appears in the February 2013 issue of The Washingtonian.
See Jackson Pollock’s “Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)” as part of the Phillips Collection’s “Angels, Demons, and Savages” exhibit. Image courtesy of the Phillips Collection.
Museum Exhibits
Opening at the Corcoran February 23 is “Pump Me Up: DC Subculture of the 1980s,” a show curated by graffiti historian and film producer Roger Gastman. The groundbreaking exhibition looks at the cultural movements of go-go, punk, and graffiti that thrived in DC in the 1980s—a decade otherwise blighted by crime and crack. Through April 7.
At the National Gallery of Art, “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900” is the first major US show dedicated to a group of artists that included painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais and designer/writer William Morris. The exhibit, comprising more than 130 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, is accompanied by a smaller one looking at the group’s designs for books.
Also at the NGA, “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, encompasses 200-plus photographs showing how artists played tricks on viewers without software. February 17 through May 5.
The Phillips Collection explores the work of three artists and friends, two well-known and one less so, in “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet.” The show reveals the personal and artistic relationships between the pair and aims to highlight Alfonso Ossorio, whose body of work is often overlooked by art historians. February 9 through May 12.
“Shooting Stars: Publicity Stills From Early Hollywood and Portraits by Andy Warhol,” opening at the Corcoran February 9, explores fame and the silver screen through Polaroids and promotional photographs of actors displayed alongside black-and-white works by Warhol. Through April 21.
Opening February 2 at the Freer Gallery of Art, “Arts of Japan: Edo Aviary and Poetic License” includes two shows highlighting some of the Freer’s masterpieces from the Edo period, which spanned the early 17th to late 19th centuries. “Edo Aviary” showcases spectacular stylized paintings of birds, while “Poetic License” reveals how literary traditions in Japanese culture influenced art. Through August 4.
Opening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts February 15 is “A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony.” The show looks at Ancher, a Danish painter and a key figure in the Skagen group, an Impressionist-influenced movement working in northern Denmark at the turn of the 20th century.
On display alongside the Anna Ancher show is “Freya Grand: Minding the Landscape,” an exhibit of paintings by Grand, an artist living in Washington who is known for monumental landscapes and murals documenting striking parts of the world from Ecuador to Scotland. February 1 through May 5.
“Bound for Freedom’s Light: African Americans and the Civil War,” opening at the National Portrait Gallery February 1, marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by exploring the experiences of activists and artists such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. Through 2013.
One of the features of the Kennedy Center’s Nordic Cool festival is “New Nordic—Architecture and Identity,” an exhibition from Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art looking at Scandinavian design and architecture. It runs February 20 through March 17 at the KenCen.
“Pageant of the Tsars: The Romanov Coronation Albums” opens at the Hillwood Museum February 16, revealing ornate albums created over the reign of the Romanov dynasty. Through June 8.
