Washington DC

In Brief

Hobby Lobby Will Return Biblical Antiquities Allegedly Stolen by Oxford Professor

The Museum of the Bible, founded by the owners of arts-and-crafts store chain Hobby Lobby, will turn over biblical fragments it had acquired from an Oxford professor.

Announcement

Apply for the Corcoran School of Art & Design’s New MFA in Social Practice

Applications are now open for a unique interdisciplinary MFA combining socially engaged art with a focus on public policy. Applications accepted through April 1, 2020.

Art

Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun, Two Unorthodox Abstract Expressionists

Part of the movement’s second generation, the artists embraced personal sentiment in their references to nature and popular culture, resulting in abstractions that are simultaneously experiential and devotional.

Interview

A Conversation with Rose Issa, Champion of Artists From the Middle East

On the eve of her exhibition at the new Middle East Institute Gallery, Issa talks about her decades-long curatorial career, the shifting infrastructure for artists in the region, and the need for memory and archives.

Art

The Art Handler Who Saved the Emancipation Proclamation From Drowning in Mountain Dew

Calder Brannock was told he was just transporting an empty vitrine from the National Archives in DC north toward New York. That wasn't the full truth.

Art

The International Spy Museum Seen Through the Eyes of a Human Rights Expert

"This feels like a loss," said Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch while touring the museum, flagging several errors in how curators have presented the history of torture and interrogation.

Art

A History of Holocaust Denial Comes Under Scrutiny in The Evidence Room

The Hirshhorn Museum exhibition, filled with reproductions and plaster casts of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, works through the wounds and scars of a gruesome history.

Art

The Cultural Legacy of Animals in Japanese Art Over 17 Centuries

With more than 300 works drawn from 66 Japanese institutions and 30 American collections, this is likely one of the largest exhibitions of Japanese art that a generation of Americans will ever see.

Art

Untethering Filipino History From American Exceptionalism

At the Katzen Art Center, Maia Cruz Palileo portrays the resilience of ordinary people, setting the stage for greater discussions of postcolonial heritage.

Art

The Empresses of China's Forbidden City Get a Splendorous Look

Within their historical context in an exhibition at Freer | Sackler, the empresses of China’s Qing Dynasty succeeded in making meaningful lives for themselves, and that is something to celebrate and admire.

Art

The Material Legacy of Matrilineal Power in China’s Qing Dynasty

Many of the objects in Empresses of China's Forbidden City, 1644-1912 at Freer | Sackler have not previously been available for research, have never traveled outside of China, and might not be likely to reemerge again.

News

Will Washington DC’s Art Commission Fall Victim to a Fight Between the Mayor and City Council?

When an ambitious roadmap for transforming Washington DC into an arts mecca was unveiled last month, it should have been a political coup; instead, it may have triggered a political collapse.