“The National Park Service said Monday that the Washington Monument will be closed indefinitely and that the 5.8 magnitude earthquake in August had done more damage to the monument than had been previously disclosed.” [WashPo]
Washington DC
WASHINGTON, DC — The crack epidemic in the Nation’s capital reached new heights yesterday when the news came out that the Washington Monument has a crack problem. The monument has been closed indefinitely and rumors are that the Congress is attempting to secure a room at Betty Ford for the 555 foot object. [SPOOF]
“The Washington National Cathedral, the highest building in the city, suffered damage in Tuesday’s earthquake, with three pinnacles in the central tower breaking off, a spokesman said.” [Reuters]
Today, the Martin Luther King, Jr National Memorial opened in the nation’s capital. The project includes a 28 ft tall granite monument on the National Mall carved by Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin. It is the first monument to a non-US president on the National Mall and the first dedicated to a black American, except, well, it is memorialized in white … to fit in, we assume.
Washington, DC is a great museum town. During my dozen or so trips over the years I have yet to see all the Smithsonian institutions so I didn’t feel the need to ventured far from The Mall for my art fix. This time I avoided the Smithsonian all together and headed for one situated in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of the city, The Phillips Collection. This jewel box of modern art — and not soo modern — avoids -isms so you ended up encountering the art of 19th C. America to 20th C. France or 17th C. Spain in just a few steps.
The list of domestic spending cuts for the new national budget announced by the US government this morning includes $13 million in funding cuts for both the NEA and the NEH, but that’s just the start of the damage. $8.5 million has been cut from the NGA budget, and reduced funding to a program that supports Washington’s private artistic organizations by 75 percent.
This weekend, the usually free National Gallery of Art might not be. In fact, it could not be open at all. With the possibility of a government shutdown looming as a result of disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over the national budget, public museums may be the first institutions to close their doors at the end of this week.
If you, like I did, logged on to the internets this morning and noticed something about the Natural History Museum being on fire, don’t worry: it’s not the museum that’s on fire, it’s their facilities building. Bad, but not catastrophic. Phew.
David C. Ward is co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition, which has become a lightning rod for right-wing attacks on the federally funded Smithsonian institution. The show is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture. There are many LGBT images on display but the work is not limited to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender artists and encompasses work by many names that are mainstays in art history, including Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, AA Bronson, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
But what has really catapulted the show into the limelight is the fact that last week Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough ordered David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video pulled from the National Portrait Gallery show.
About 150 protesters assembled at in the brisk cold outside Transformer’s gallery space before marching to the National Portrait Gallery in Chinatown. That’s not a small number: More than 100 people standing up for the memory of David Wojnarowicz and the sanctity of the museum as a space free from politics. These protesters stood up for LGBT rights.
All photos by Natalie Cheung, and reporting by Kriston Capps, critic for Washington City Paper
