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.
Washington DC
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Budget Cuts May Kill a $9.5 Million Art Grant Program
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.
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Will a Government Shutdown Close DC Museums?
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.
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Fire in Smithsonian Facilities Building, Natural History Museum Safe
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.
Posted inArt
Interview with Hide/Seek Co-curator David C Ward
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.
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DC Arts Community Protests Smithsonian Censorship (Photos)
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
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Signs of Protest: One Nation Working Together with Marker + Paper + Political Opinions
Washington, DC — This is a protest post. A post about a protest in the city that is Paris done in the American wide style (not the Las Vegas lights-and-money-style) on the banks of the Potomac; the city of pearly bureaucrats, and neo-cons, and neoclassical columns; all things National, American, U.S.A. This post explores the signs at last Saturday’s progressive protest, One Nation Working Together: Jobs, Justice, and Education for All.
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Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Photographs on Display
I had no idea renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was an avid amateur photographer. A current exhibition of his black and white snapshots are on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and they are annotated by Ginsberg himself, who rediscovered his early photos (made between 1953 and 1963) in the 1980s.
