Thing 156: Artomatic

When I was a sophomore in college, I met a local boy who was an artist and into graphic novels. We kinda liked each other and he asked me out on a date. He came to pick me up from Foggy Bottom, and I asked him where we were going. "The waterfront," he replied. "We're going to see an art show."

Looking back, my narrow knowledge of DC at the time was downright shameful, but I was so confused when we got on the Metro to go to the Georgetown waterfront, and even more confused when we transferred to the green line. When we emerged, there didn't appear to be any water in sight, only a Safeway, a parking lot, and a rather large, abandoned-looking office building.

You've guessed it -- the waterfront was of course the Southwest waterfront, and the art show was Artomatic. It all felt very glamorous and exciting to be in an exotic part of the city and seeing an alternative, indy art show that sure had some weird stuff. Sadly, the boy and I never made it to date two, and I barely stepped foot in Southwest after that.

It took eight years for Artomatic to come back to the waterfront, and it took me that long to pay it a return visit. On Saturday, I strolled down the waterfront, now the home of the stadium and a neighborhood I frequent (the Boyfriend has lived in the littlest quadrant nearly a year), to a shiny new office building that has been taken over for the month of June by all manner of artists and performers.

If you haven't yet been to Artomatic, I'm not sure what you're waiting for. I guarantee: You will find something in this art show that you love, if only because of the sheer magnitude of works of art available to see. The show is nine full floors, of which we only made it through three, and as it was we saw gorgeous, thought-provoking, silly, ugly, weird, scary and peaceful works. Sculpture, oil, watercolor, installation, tin foil, greeting card, photography and marshmallow pieces. You will find something you cannot live without, and something you'd wish you'd never seen, before you leave.

I am primarily attracted to photography, and really loved Tony DeFilippo's photos of the District, as well as Jim Darling's portraits and stories in his 100 Strangers project. I also love abstract art with bright colors and repeating patterns, and was completely drawn in by Joel Church's pieces. I enjoyed Ginny Kinsey's block prints, with their messy outlines and unique point of view, and I still don't know what to make of Bunny Noir, but I really enjoyed it.

And that was from one third of the entire thing -- before my brain shut off and my stomach started growling. Think of all the fabulous things I've missed in the other six floors! And the live performances that happen through the day, each day!

Artomatic continues through July 5. Don't make the mistake I did by waiting eight years between visits.

Related: Crafty Bastards, Arts on Foot and an Afternoon at the Galleries.

Thing 61: Arts on Foot

Oh, DC. It is so good to be back. How I’d missed you.

The west coast is nice and all, but you have to drive everywhere and public transportation, if it exists, costs a lot more than Metro. Sure I got to eat at Chez Panisse and the Bi-Rite Creamery, but give me Central or Larry’s Homemade any day of the week. I’ll trade in horses and fig trees for the Capitol dome and my trendy corner of Logan any day.

I hit the DC tarmac running, with a weekend chock full of fun DC activities, which I’ll reveal all in due time. Allow me to start with the Arts on Foot Festival. Food! Music! Visual art! Performing art! Comedy! Drama! Cooking! Cheese! Wine!

Welcome home.

What a joy to walk around Penn Quarter in the September sunshine smelling garlic shrimp and listening to a boisterous gospel choir singing “When The Saints Come Marching In.”

I arrived at the festival near 1:00, after a late and large brunch, which I immediately came to regret because of the all the food booths set up from local restaurants. Cowgirl Creamery had a cheese plate, Rosa Mexicana was dishing out fresh, chunky guacamole, and La Tasca was frying shrimp in garlic olive oil and serving them over paella. All the small plates cost $1 - $5, and while I didn’t sample anything, Jodi was able to make a nice mini meal on the cheap.

I wandered over to the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which was selling reduced-priced preview tickets for their upcoming season, selling old props and costumes from prior performances, and offering a behind-the-scenes tour of the theater. After perusing through the leftover junk on sale, I decided to wait for the tour. The tour didn’t start for another 20 minutes, so I popped across the street to check in with the Bead Museum. Although the sitcoms soundtrack wasn’t playing, it was just as odd as ever. A man stationed at the front was offering the new comers to help them “get oriented” to the museum and its one room. They’ve replaced the Shakespearean exhibit with “The Timeless Cowrie” – a collection of various pieces using the small snail shell that is seen in many parts of the world as sacred or as currency. Or around the necks of stoners and frat boys.

The tour of Woolly of led by the artistic director himself, Howard Shalwitz, and he showed us through the scene shop and into the green room and onto the stage. He explained about how Woolly came to inhabit such prime real estate: the condo complex used to be a federal parcel of land, and the requirement for development was that it must include space for a theater. Woolly signed on with a developer from Texas who worked with them to meet the federal requirements as well as their own, and now they have this angular and spare theater space which includes a fairly large scene shop, two hundred seat courtyard-style theater, and rehearsal and workshop space.

After the tour, I wandered back over to the main area of the festival. They had a tent set up proclaiming "cooking as art," which was holding demonstrations by local chefs. Jodi and I waited patiently for the next demo to start, watching a sous-chef unwrap about fifty small paper plates covered in plastic wrap with pretty pink and pale green foods on them. Then the chef from D'Aqua arrived, spoke briefly about his Italian-style seafood restaurant and the process by which they cure their own salmon in-house. The demo itself consisted of his assistant putting a couple of layers of seafood into a round mold, and the wrapping it in cucumber. And then the masses crowded to the table to demolish the fifty small plates of samples.


Finally, we headed to 9th and G, across from the library to the Flashpoint gallery and theater space to see a free performance by the Washington Improv Theater. In the small black box theater, five improvisers did a 'long form' improvised show, meaning that it wasn't the games and short skits you may be used to if you've seen Who's Line Is It Anyway? It's a more theatrical form of improv that attempts to tell multiple stories that thematically come together. It's pretty difficult and some of the threads succeeded and some of them failed, ultimately weaving together stories of tadpoles, hardware scandals and love on a train.

I stuck around for the free workshop they offered after the performance, in which a dozen of us learned some of the very basics of successful improvising. Although I knew many of the games and lessons already (I did quite a bit of improv acting in high school), it was fun to jump back into it and remember the rush of getting on stage without knowing what the other person is going to suggest and just going along for the ride.

And after all that, it was nearing 5:00 and I headed for home, tired from the day and exhilarated from being back in this city, surrounded by art, theater, music, good food and sunshine.

Thing 25: The Bead Museum

The Bead Museum does some serious multi-tasking. It encompasses a permanent exhibit, two temporary exhibits, a library, a gift shop and an ode to TV theme songs -- all in one room.

Located on 7th Street between Gallery Place and the Navy Memorial, the Bead Museum is a small storefront in a larger office building, around the corner from the Olsson's bookstore. The word 'museum' conjures the image of a large space, perhaps a series of galleries, perhaps a tour guide or a docent, maybe even a security guard. But walk into the bead museum and there is definitely only one room. And one guy sitting behind a jewelry case reading a magazine. And that is...it.

My three friends and I burst into the museum, seeking respite from the cold, almost-rainy Saturday afternoon. We are the only ones there. We get our bearings, readjusting our preconceived notion of a museum to this one-room reality. Almost immediately, we notice that the theme from Beverly Hills 90210 is playing.

We start to our left and learn about beads as religious iconography. A glass panel shows off examples of rosary beads from Christianity. The Judaism panel displays silver necklaces with stars of David and the five-fingered palm, known as a chamza, that wards off the evil eye. I notice the theme from The Simpsons is now playing.

I continue to work my way around the room, admiring Islamic prayer beads, Hindu beads, and anamist beads. Now, suddenly, I am in the library. Bookshelves line one wall, packed full of books about, well, beads. Who knew you could write so many books about beads? If you have any sort of curiosity about the history, significance or techniques of beads, head over to the Bead Museum's library. I imagine it is a pretty comprehensive collection on the subject.

After the library, you arrive at the permanent exhibit: a world bead time line. At this point, the theme from Night Court is playing. The time line starts out at 10,000 BCE and progresses around one wall of the room until the present day, with examples of beads from the different eras from all around the world -- South America, South Asia, China, Europe...small and large, glass and clay, all colors, all patterns, representing people or animals or just ornamental.


Finally, to the theme from Growing Pains, we have come full circle and are in the store section of the museum. The jewelry in the case -- a collection of really beautiful necklaces, earrings and bracelets -- is all beaded, of course. Big beads and little beads are all available, from the very affordable to the more expensive. I was eyeing a necklace of light blue beads and silver and it was only $40, which is pretty reasonable. In the end I passed on it though, and crossed the room to look at the Shakespeare exhibit.

As part of DC's Shakespeare in Washington festival, the Bead Museum features three cases in the middle of the room with beaded jewelry, costumes and props that are inspired by Shakespeare's plays. You can see the necklace that Queen Gertrude might have worn in Hamlet, the beaded hat that Henry VIII made famous, and Desdemona's strawberry handkerchief. As far as we could tell, these pieces had been designed specifically for the museum and have not appeared on the stage anywhere.

The museum took us about half an hour to see in its entirety, and then we headed next door to Olsson's for some coffee and some book browsing. I'm glad I went though -- the idea behind this blog is to go out of my way to find the treasures of DC, and this is definitely not something I would normally have sought out. But the museum's unique and narrow mission, its tiny setting and its very strange choice of soundtrack make this a fun and different place to visit.

Thing 17: The Matisse Cut Outs

This was supposed to be a post about going to the top of the Washington Monument. But it turns out that you need reservations and tickets ahead of time for that...so that post is going to come just a little later this year.

In the meantime, we were two girls in matching "I [heart] DC" t-shirts we'd bought three for $10 at a stand up the street from the Monument. We'd already asked a hapless GW student to take our picture with the Monument in the background, proudly showing off our matching shirts and $5 sunglasses. "So, where are you from?" he'd asked after taking our picture. "DC," we answered in unison. He looked at us with a cocked head, clearly confused, and we skipped off towards the Monument.

When our original plans to see the top of the Monument didn't pan out we decided that the day was simply too perfect and our matching outfits simply too funny to just turn around and go home. "We can see the Matisse Cut Outs," Good Friend Lisa suggested as an alternative. I had never heard of them. "When Matisse was starting to go blind, he couldn't paint anymore. So instead he made cutouts of colored paper and glued them to together." They are only available for viewing in the East Wing of the National Gallery at limited times, to protect them from sun damage, and GFL had never had a chance to go see them. The East Wing is on the other end of the Mall from the Monument, and we strolled arm in arm across the Mall enjoying the sunshine, watching the joggers and the puppies and the tourists and some woman in four inch stilettos totter up the the dirt path.

We dipped into the East Wing of the National Gallery and made our way up to the Tower, a single, trapezoidal room on the fifth floor where the cut outs are displayed. There are four of them housed here, and they are absolutely striking. First of all, they are huge. Bigger than you'd ever dream. For some perspective, here is GFL standing next to one:


Then there are the colors. The colors are bright and full of life, magenta and green and orange and blue and yellow -- and they all work together and come alive. One of the works, just a single cut out piece of paper, portrays all the life and movement of a woman carrying a basket of pomegranates down the road, turning to face the viewer and dropping three pomegranates as she does. And this is a solid color, cut out piece of paper. The man was a genius.

We marvelled at the cutouts and whispered a little bit about their color, composition and balance (GFL knows a lot about art). Then we wanted ice cream.

The gelato in the basement cafeteria of the National Gallery is wonderful. It's worth the trip over there alone. I ordered a cup of vanilla and chocolate, GFL ordered vanilla and blueberry. The flavors are rich and concentrated, and a wonderful treat on a sunny afternoon.

Side Note: Congratulations, Hoyas. I happened to be on M Street on Sunday Night when all Hell broke loose. I only captured 30 seconds of video, but this impromptu parade kept up for a solid twenty minutes.

Thing 8: An Afternoon at the Galleries

And to think, Wednesday it was snowing and I was yearning for a hot toddy. I woke up late this morning and it was a glorious Spring day! Sun's out, a cool breeze is blowing and I could leave the house without coat or scarf. The perfect sort of day for a leisurely lunch and a tour of some local art galleries, which is exactly what I had planned with my friend Emily.

Emily owed me a lunch from a previous occasion, and she picked DCHot!. Being a sucker for a good toasted sandwich, I was happy to try this small place, located on P Street just west of Dupont Circle. I had the "Kansas Roast Beef," which boasts some of the tenderest roast beef I've ever had on sandwich, and a creamy horseradish sauce. The shop is cute, with a kitchy collection of old DC license plates on the walls and a variety of old timey Coca-Cola advertisements. After lunch, Emily and I crossed over to the east side of Dupont to explore some of the art galleries tucked away along 14th Street.

When I first arrived in DC, there wasn't a whole lot going on 14th Street. There was the Studio Theater and the Black Cat, but this historically black commercial corridor hadn't yet fully recovered from the riots in 1968, when it was burned and gutted. Then the Whole Foods moved in at P Street, between 14th and 15th. This precipitated a rapid revitalization and gentrification of the neighborhood. Restaurants, bars, funky little shops and very expensive furniture stores now line 14th Street, as well as art galleries.

We stopped first at the Irvine Contemporary, a spare white space at the corner 14th and P. The exhibition, "Joseph McSpadden: Flesh and Bone" was my favorite of the three collections we saw. McSpadden's works were of two varieties: thick slabs of oil paint the circumference of quarters stacked on top each other into small peaks and valleys, or five foot long waterfalls of dried oil paint, each color its own fiber, dripping down and pooling at the bottom.

The artist sums up his collection by stating: "My work confronts our expectations of painting, questioning how the object is animated and who is responsible for animating it." I love the idea of re-imagining oil paint as a 3D medium, rather than relegating it to its traditional two dimensional function; making sculpture with it. The colors were earthy and fleshy and the sculptures so appealing, I had to remind myself not to touch them.



Just up the street, we next visited the Randall Scott Gallery. They currently have a show called "All Things Said, In Motion," featuring the work of five artists who use motion in their work. This gallery had a lot of multimedia works, including an installation representing a deconstruction of grass growing in a field, complete with little boxes of sand and wind blowing long, single strands of grass. For $4,000 you can own Dane Picard's dvd, "Cheetah Hands," what he calls a "hand mosaic" that animates the outline of a cheetah running using only hand gestures pieced together in squares. Emily's and my favorite was probably a series of really beautiful photographs taken by Rob Carter at sunset in Mauritius. The colors were so vivid and vibrant, the images calming and still. The series of the four of them was beautiful put together, and made me long for a higher level of disposable income.

Finally, we visited the Adamson Gallery across the street and in the same building as Veridian, a restaurant I'm itching to try. This show featured an eclectic mix of artists and mediums, including cast resin on wood that looked like those drawings of skin cells in high school biology text books, and a photograph of lightning against a red sky with an 8 x 10 mirror on one side and titled "The Dalai Lama." My favorite in this collection, without question, were two 3' x 4', black and white photographs of smoke rings. The detail of the smoke curling, curving and dissipating is truly beautiful.

Thus concluded our afternoon touring the diverse collection of art galleries on 14 street. I'm well aware that both Dupont and 14th Street are brimming with hidden galleries, and this will probably be the first in a series of gallery tours. We just couldn't bear to be out of the nice weather any longer though, and Emily and I headed down the street to Dupont Circle to while away the afternoon reading in the sunshine.