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.
Washington DC
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.
Art
Visions of Urgent Abstraction
DC-area artist Rushern Baker IV’s abstractions attempt to find meaning in the chaotic world outside the canvas.
Art
The Timely Dissent of a Vietnam War-Themed Show
Less than a mile from the White House, the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Artists Respond boldly surveys how artists wrestled with showing how their government had gone wrong.
News
Artists and Drug Policy Activists Protest FDA’s Role in Opioid Crisis
Nan Goldin was among the artist-activists who gathered in Washington, DC to demand the FDA address the "public health impact of the opioid crisis."
In Brief
A Rediscovered Portrait of Harriet Tubman Is Unveiled
The National Museum of African American History and Culture will display a new portrait of the legendary abolitionist that "adds significantly to what we know about this fierce abolitionist."