1. art and entertainment
2. visual art and design
3. painting

TheInTowner
Now in Our 46th Year of Continuous Publication
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Issue
June 12
MAY
2015
Vol. 46, No. 11
®
Since 1968 • Serving Washington D.C.’s Intown Neighborhoods
Whitman-Walker Health Set to Open at
its New 14th Street Building in May
By Ben Lasky*
W
hitman-Walker Health, founded in
1978 as Whitman-Walker Clinic to
serve the gay and lesbian community in
DC and in the ensuing years has been a
leader in the fight against AIDS while at the
same time expanding its services to include
overall primary healthcare, is moving from
its main facility at 14th and R Streets, NW
a couple of blocks south to a brand new
building at 1425 14th Street. While the
grand opening will take place in early June,
Whitman-Walker expects to begin serving
patients on May 18.
This building, originally planned by
neighborhood based arts promoter and
developer Giorgio Furioso to be for offices
and retail, while still in the planning stage
he was approached by Whitman-Walker
seeking to be the prime tenant. As a result,
with a long-term lease arrangement entered
into, he had the 41,000 of net usable space
re-designed to Whitman-Walker’s specifications.
The new facility is a clear upgrade over
the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center’s
cramped interior, which had never been
designed as a medical clinic. When the
facility opens, it will be fully state-of-the-art
and have a larger pharmacy than at the old
location and 24 patient examination rooms
–- double from before the move. The dental
clinic area will occupy 6,000 square feet,
allowing for an increase from the present
three to nine rooms and to better serve dental surgery patients as well.
Cont., WHITMAN-WALKER, p. 5
photo—courtesy Whitman-Walker Health.
View looking east across 14th from the corner with
Church Street.
Marie Reed School Modernization Addressed
in Fully Detailed Community and ANC-1C Vision
Statement Sent to DC Agencies, Architects
By Anthony L. Harvey
T
he
Adams
Morgan
Advisory
Neighborhood Commission’s (ANC)
well-advertised April 20th special meeting
in the family room of the Marie Reed
Elementary School drew a capacity crowd
of ANC commissioners, DC public school
and health center administrators, teachers and education specialists, leaders of
photo—Daquella Manera.
☞ What’s Inside? ☞
2Editorial
6 At the Museums:
Smithsonian
American Art Museum
7 At the Museums:
Smithsonian National
Museum of African Art
neighborhood citizen associations, parents
— some with their young children in tow
— and community activists, many of them
users of facilities and services at Marie Reed,
including those provided by the District’s
Department of Parks and Recreation.
The meeting was convened to allow the
Commission to hear comments and reactions to a 20-page draft resolution entitled
“Marie Reed: A Vision for its Renewal” —
widely circulated in English and, through
DC Public Schools in Spanish for elementary school Spanish-speaking households
throughout Adams Morgan — and electronically accessible via the Adams Morgan/
Yahoo listserv and on the ANC’s website.
The draft resolution was the result of a
series of community meetings and open
forums conducted by the ANC and Marie
Reed’s Principal Katie Lundgren beginning in the late fall of 2014 and continuing
through the first four months of 2015. The
ANC convened six open forums and con-
Preservation Board Acts to Protect
Significant Parts of the Corcoran’s
Historic Interior from Alterations
By Anthony L. Harvey
I
n a unanimous decision at its
April 23, 2015 public meeting,
the Historic Preservation Review
Board (HPRB) unanimously voted
to landmark the interior public
spaces of the former Corcoran
Gallery of Art over the strenuous
opposition of George Washington
University (GWU), the DC Court
of Appeals’ appointed new owner
of the dissolved Corcoran’s flagship gallery and college of art and
design building at 17th & New
York Avenue, NW.
Acting at the behest of an application for landmarking from the
DC Preservation League DCPL),
HPRB, on the recommendation of the District’s Historic
Preservation Office (HPO), found
that the building’s interior, like
its already landmarked exterior,
photo—courtesy DC Preservation League.
merited designation “for its assoThe
grand
stairs
leading
to the Platt addition (Clark
ciation . . . with the institution of
entry as viewed looking down from the second
the [1869-established] Corcoran wing)
floor atrium balcony.
gallery and [1878] school, their
contributions to the culture of the
city and nation, and the shows, exhibits and other events that punctuated its his-
photo—courtesy DC Preservation League.
Looking up at the rotunda dome oculus that
greets visitors as they enter the Platt addition.
tory. While the most important spaces were public ones, there are also a
boardroom and library that are fine
and intact and intimately connected
to the history of the administration of
the institution.”
The Corcoran Gallery is actually
two buildings, both designed by master architects, the first, which faces
17th Street, by Ernest Flagg in the
mid-1890s to house the 19th century
collection of W.W. Corcoran and
fellow donors which had outgrown
the original Corcoran Gallery at
17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue
designed in 1859 by James Renwick,
Jr. (and now part of the Smithsonian’s
American Art Museum).
The second building, designed
by Charles Adams Platt in 1925,
extended the Flagg building westward along C Street with a further
addition directly behind the original
Cont., CORCORAN, p. 3
Cont., MARIE REED SCHOOL, p. 5
See in Special Online Content:
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To access “What Once Was” (successor to
the “Scenes from the Past” feature), click
the link button on our home page. Being
on our website allows for more extensive
text & more images than was possible
when in the issue PDFs.
Around Our Community Column
Now on Website as Community News
To access Around Our Community,
click the Community News link button
on our home page.
n
Ecuadorian Embassy Sustained Significant
Earthquake Damage, August 23, 2011
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Balancing Neighborhood Retail: The 25%
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Reconstructing Historic Holt House
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When Does My Cast Iron Staircase Need
Attention?
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at right.
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Page 2 • The InTowner • May 2015
From the Publisher’s Desk...
By P.L. Wolff
T
NEXT ISSUE—JUNE 12
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Publisher & Managing Editor—P.L. Wolff
Associate Editor—Anthony L. Harvey
Contributing Writers—
Mike Persley, Ben Lasky
Layout & Design — Mina Rempe
Historic Preservation—Stephen A. Hansen
Restaurants—Alexandra Greeley
Food in the ’Hood—Joel Denker
Real Estate—Jo Ricks
Photographer—Phil Carney
Webmaster—Eddie Sutton
“District Residents to Republicans in
Congress: ‘DC is Not Your District’”
he title we are using in our commentary this month is not ours. We have taken this directly
from a press release received a day prior to when we were to decide what our topic was to
be. We were so impressed with what we read, and even more so upon speaking with one of the
key persons behind the message quoted above, that we decided this is much too newsworthy
–- and important –- not to share with our readers and urge them to share with others of their
acquaintance in Congressional districts where voters have sent to Congress the worst of the worst.
Led by DC native and Capitol Hill resident Justin Robinson, a typical non-government,
hardworking employed District taxpayer who is simply fed up by how he and all of us are so
openly disrespected by a reactionary majority of the Congress and with others of like mind, a
new political action committee (PAC) has been organized for the purpose of, as stated in the
group’s announcement, “holding accountable Republicans in Congress who have been inflicting their own ideology on District of Columbia residents who didn’t elect them.”
As explained in their release, “Not Your District PAC will be an effort to educate voters in
the congressional districts of members who have played an active role in overturning the will
of D.C. voters and to let them know that their elected representative is not doing the job they
sent them to Washington to do. [The PAC will] spotlight ways that these members of Congress
have failed their constituents by spending more time worrying about D.C. rather than their
own district.”
We do not know for certain what might have been the “last straw” for these justifiably
outraged fellow DC citizens, but for us it surely was the recent overwhelming vote in the
Republican-controlled House of representatives to overturn the city council’s recently enacted
“D.C. Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act.” This legislation has now
added to our local human rights law a provision making it illegal to discriminate in employment against women who utilize birth control methods, opt for an abortion during the period
permissible by law, use in vitro fertilization –- or even get pregnant by a man not the husband
or unmarried.
In allowing this resolution of disapproval to be brought to the House floor for a vote, Speaker
John A. Boehner stated that the “issue is one of religious liberty.” That, however, is simply
nothing more than a smokescreen to mask the real motivation of pandering to the Tea Party
and other far-right politicians who hope to gain points at home.
Like the PAC’s organizers, we are sick and tired of this meddling into our decidedly local
affairs by politicians who have no connection with our municipality other than they spend
some number of weeks here as part of their own employment for which they were “hired” by
people far away from here who clearly have no interest in our local laws any more than we do
of theirs.
These politicians were not “hired” to meddle with us but, rather, to attend to the concerns of
those who “hired” them. Not Your District PAC’s Robinson has hit the nail on the head when
he stated, “I think it’s absolutely hypocritical and undemocratic for a member of Congress to
spend so much time talking about local control or states’ rights to turn around and use the
power of the federal government to overturn laws that D.C. residents overwhelmingly support.
I believe that if voters in their districts knew what their member of Congress was actually doing
with their time in Washington, they’d be angry. We want these politicians to spend less time
worrying about us, and more time worrying about creating jobs or educating children in the
community that elected them.”
As one of the PAC’s leaders, 15-year downtown resident Brad Bauman explained to me, their
strategy will be to utilize not just traditional channels but to put out the message through social
media and thereby enlist volunteers from all over to contact voters –- using voter registration
lists and other sources -- in Congressional districts from which the worst offenders have been
elected to educate them about this hypocrisy of outspoken advocates for local control and the
feds “off our backs” nevertheless doing to us that which they claim is exactly what they are
against.
We know from what we have witnessed with tourists visiting here, when those good people
from out in the hinterland learn that their members of Congress are constantly looking
for ways to overturn our local laws that have no applicability to anything approaching the
national interest they are astounded. If this message can be effectively targeted in the offending
Congressional districts to cause constituents to confront their representatives and express their
displeasure, something positive may get set in motion.
The PAC plans to announce its first group of targeted members of Congress and begin the
process of educating voters about what their elected representatives are doing to us instead of
doing for those who elected them. If one signs up at www.notyourdistrict.com to volunteer or
just to be in the loop for information, all will be welcome. Whether DC resident or from far
away, we urge participation.
Founded in 1968 by John J. Schulter
Member—National Newspaper Association
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17th Street Festival
Saturday, September 12, 2015
12:00-6:00 p.m.
photo—courtesy DC Preservation League.
View looking across the south end of the second floor atrium. To the right (not shown) is the stairway
leading down to the Platt addition; to the left (partially shown) the entry into the grand gallery running
the length of the building’s 17th Street front.
CORCORAN
From p. 1
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Registration is open now until it is sold out!
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The mission of Historic Dupont Circle Main Streets is to
expand its coalition of neighborhood stakeholders; retain,
expand, and attract a mix of neighborhood businesses;
manage and improve our public spaces; assist independent
business owners; preserve the diverse and historic character
of our neighborhood; and promote Dupont Circle as a
shopping and dining destination.
www.DupontCircleMainStreets.org
Advertisement
building, this for the purpose of housing
Corcoran trustee and former Senator W.A.
Clark’s extensive art collection — much
as it had been housed in his enormous 5th
Avenue Manhattan mansion.
The application for this interior landmarking was initiated during a recent period
of administrative and management unrest
at the Corcoran when the Gallery’s Board
of Trustees began considering the sale of its
magnificent art collection or, as an alternative, the sale of its historic Beaux Arts-style
building (and the Corcoran’s few other
remaining real estate assets) and simply
moving, or to cut loose the college, downsize the Gallery and move its operation to
Alexandria or to some other more affordable
District or Washington metropolitan area
space.
A decade earlier was the abortive attempt
by the Corcoran to raise a District matching grant of $40 million to kickstart an
enormous building fund drive for a Frank
Gehry designed Bilbao-style addition to its
building. It was proposed to be constructed
into and on top of the existing structure,
obliterating such grand historic spaces as
the rotunda and the Clark Landing, two
interior spaces that ceremonially connected
the Flagg and Platt buildings, and thereby
reorienting the Corcoran’s grand stairs,
in the infelicitous words of the architect
(and designer) at a press briefing unveiling
the model for the addition to a role such
as that of providing access to caterers for
social events at this proposed new destination event site. The building’s grand new
entrance would have been reoriented as
well to the New York Avenue side of the
Corcoran rather than across from the White
House on 17th Street. This proposed plan
was approved by the HPRB but never carried out as its fund-raising efforts failed.
The subsequent and final results of this
consequent collapse of the Corcoran trustee’s nerve and its beleaguered management
efforts were played out in a cy pres proceeding in DC Superior Court last year — a
process that served to ratify and approve the
trustee’s petition for dissolving the Corcoran
and distributing its assets — 17,000 works
of art and an art conservation endowment
— to the National Gallery of Art. All other
assets — the college, the renowned Flagg/
Platt building, $35 million for restoration
and other real estate and endowment funds
— to the George Washington University.
The gifting of the Flagg and Platt buildings to GWU were stipulated to be for art
exhibition and art college uses only, with
the National Gallery assigned a tenancy in
the grand, high-ceiling second floor galleries of the Flagg building for the display of
fine art from its newly augmented collections — a task for which the exhibition track
record of the National Gallery is recognized
to be of the highest quality.
In considering the interior designation
application, HPO’s staff report observed
that master architect “Flagg’s work is most
remarkable for its grand sequence of spaces,
from entry vestibule through the monumental, columned two story atrium and
grand stair serving a variety of galleries on
the first floor and soaring [gallery] rooms on
the second. Calculated to show even huge
works to their best advantage, the spaces are
architectural works of art themselves.”
Flagg’s hemicycle, which resolved the
architectural problem of the acute angle of
the building at the corner of 17th Street and
New York Avenue drew special praise from
the HPO staff report, which further noted
that it served to connect the gallery to the
art college. The report also praised the Platt
building addition’s attention to the shape
and size of the more intimate, domestic
style rooms of its ensemble of galleries on
the first floor of the Clark Wing, said to
correspond to the rooms of Senator Clark’s
New York City mansion where his art collection was previously installed. While the
basement level, accessible at grade from C
Street and serving as actual first floor access
to the Clark Wing, was proposed by DCPL
for designation, no mention was made of,
in the words of Corcoran Curator Emerita
Linda Crocker Simmons, the vast space
represented by the building’s subbasement,
one containing large studio spaces.
While the thoughtful and discursive HPO
staff report attempts to steer a practical and
realistic ship of interior landmark designation between the shoals and rocky crags of
overly restrictive historic preservation and
freewheeling adaptive reuse, the report’s
recommendations to the Board come down
hard on the side of the DC Preservation
League’s recommendation for the landmarking of all interior public spaces. The
report eloquently describes the hierarchy of
these spaces, beginning with the “immensely tall” front galleries on the second floor
along the 17th Street side of the building,
“which could be said to be the proper termination of the sequence through the original
building that begins at the main entrance.”
The second floor galleries, together with
parallel galleries across the atrium balcony,
will be used for publicly accessible National
Cont., CORCORAN, p. 4
Page 4 • The InTowner • May 2015
CORCORAN
League’s application.
Deleted were “the entire basement,
From p. 3
which is now carved up with partitions; the
four galleries at the southeast corner which
Gallery art exhibitions, while GWU will have been subdivided into offices; the first
provide public access to the Salon Doré, the floor auditorium in the Hemicycle, where
Clark Landing, the vestibule, rotunda, atri- the columns and raked floor are structural,
um, and grand stair. (These were the only but the remainder of the elements and
spaces recommended by GWU for interior finishes are modern; the two first floor gallandmark designation.) The remainder of leries at the northwest corner of the Atrium,
the building will be repurposed, with the one of which has been altered to serve as
approval of HPRB, for College uses.
an exhibit space for the art school, and
The report continues with descriptions of the other recently had its window openings sealed with the construction of the abutting
office addition; and Gallery
2 in the second floor of
the Clark Wing, which has
been used for storage for
many years.”
HPO also stipulated the
addition of the first floor
of the main staircase in
the Clark Wing and the
inclusion of the secondary
stair at the north end of the
atrium. “This handsomely
designed and intact stair,”
the report noted, “with
marble treads and decorative ironwork, was suggested for inclusion by the
property owner’s team.”
The website for the DC
Office of Planning provides
on-line access for students,
the general public, and
those simply fascinated
with the weeds of DC
and federal historic preservation rules, regulations,
and legal and regulatory
precedents, as well as the
extraordinarily informative
photo—courtesy DC Preservation League.
filings, oral arguments, witMain entry vestibule, looking out to 17th Street.
ness testimony, and HPRB
deliberations — including
the HPO staff report and
the Clark Collection gallery rooms in the recommendations in this precedent-setting
Platt-designed Clark Wing, noting that “the interior landmarking designation case.
second-floor galleries [there] do not have
[Editor’s Note: We first reported on the
the same clear axial views and flow that the DC Preservation League’s application filed
Flagg’s do, but as a group they demonstrate with the Historic Preservation Office to
the careful working out of the proportions of designate the interior as an historic landeach room, so that their heights vary in rela- mark. See, “Corcoran Gallery Building
tion to their length.” These, together with Abandonment and Sale May be Derailed by
the intimate first floor Clark Wing galleries, Interior Landmark Nomination Filing with
which gracefully lead to the Salon Doré, City,” InTowner, October 2012 issue pdf,
and the boardroom and library, argued the page 1. Of special interest are the vintage
staff report, “are fine spaces representing photographs accompanying this news report
significant aspects of the institution’s his- on page 6, as well as the two on the front
tory and development. They should not be page; these very much help in understandexcluded just because they may not evoke ing the case for interior landmarking.]
thee same sense of splendor.”
The motion for approval by HPRB Chair Copyright © 2015 InTowner Publishing Corp. All
Gretchen Pfaehler of the HPO staff report rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part
was adopted unanimously. The key portion without permission is prohibited, except as provided
of that report dealt with recommended dele- by 17 U.S.C. §§ 107 & 108 (“fair use”).
tions and additions to the DC Preservation
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Page 5 • The InTowner • May 2015
MARIE REED SCHOOL
From p. 1
sensus sessions, including a walk-through of
the entire Marie Reed Learning Center “to
gain first-hand insights on the infrastructure
and to hear from teachers, administrators,
and health and human services staff.”
Additionally, Principal Lundgren conducted two open forums in November 2014
and April 2015 focused on the generation of
parent and teacher feedback. Also contributing to the creation of the draft resolution
were materials prepared for the Mayor’s budget forum in March 2015, data compiled
by several community groups, including
survey data from the grass-roots “Envision
Adams Morgan” process for defining needs
and preferences of the neighborhood — a
process led by the ANC and the DC Office
of Planning — and the monthly meetings
of the Marie Reed School Improvement
Team.
Parallel work by city agencies was another
vital part of this process according to the
overview of the ANC resolution document,
especially planning reports and specification
documents organized and prepared by the
District’s Department of General Services
(DGS), the Office of Planning, and the
District of Columbia Public Schools. Also
important to the community was the gaining of an “understanding of DGS progress
and planning to both conduct a feasibility
study and select an architectural firm to produce conceptual designs.”
These efforts resulted in an amended
and unanimously adopted resolution at the
April 20th special meeting of the ANC. A
model of clarity and concision, the document is prefaced by a vision statement for
the school and the community and then
followed by seven separate sections dealing
with the following subjects: “Architecture
and Site Design; Green Building and
Site Considerations; Dislocation During
Construction; Our Elementary School; Our
Recreational Facilities; Our Health and
Human Services; and a Proposal for a
photo—courtesy Adams Morgan Mainstreet Group.
Neighborhood teens enjoying an informal pickup concert.
Branch Library.”
After reflection on the movement in the
1960s and 1970s to create this visionary
learning center, complete with athletic and
recreational facilities together with healthcare services, community theater, and senior
citizen and other activities, a number of
which have fallen into disuse, the overview
observations are set out as follows:
“Many decades later, Marie Reed continues to fulfill many aspects of that vision;
“Over 400 elementary students get their
starts in life each year;
“Over 4,000 individuals get health and
human services each year;
“Annually, many thousands of people use
recreation services spread over the site, from
the community pool to the soccer field to
the tennis and basketball courts;
“Numerous cultural events are held each
year at the site, from movie nights to craft
fairs to craft classes.”
The need to either renovate or rebuild
this aging, dilapidated and awkwardly
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See pdf archive on home page for 12 years of past issues
designed structure –- ill-suited for the very
visionary, co-located array of individual and
interrelated services it has offered over the
last 40 years — is well known for the many
reasons outlined in the ANC resolution’s
seven sections. The fascinating and full text
of the Marie Reed resolution is accessible
on the ANC’s website; it is informative and
illustrative of the careful thought of hundreds of Adams Morgan residents and Marie
Reed stakeholders — captured in exemplary
prose by a dedicated ANC.
The document’s short and pithy concluding section regarding the community’s
support for a neighborhood branch library
reflects a long-felt recognition that Adams
Morgan, together with its immediately surrounding neighborhoods, is one of the most
— if not the most — underserved (or
not served) library “deserts” in the entire
District. The ANC resolution text concludes its overview paragraph on this matter
with the following statement: “The one
suggestion that has been overwhelmingly
made by community members that would
WHITMAN-WALKER
From p. 1
entail an entirely new facility is the proposal
to have a branch library on the Marie Reed
Campus.”
This is followed by the ingenious proposal that the architectural planners for
the new Marie Reed “conceptualize space
on the campus for a future branch library.
The geography should be such,” the ANC
continues, “that when eventually built, the
branch library would feel like it was always
intended to be part of the campus.”
In addition to its availability electronically, the ANC resolution has been forwarded
to the Adams Morgan community’s Ward
1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, DGS
and its selected architects Quinn Evans, DC
Public Schools, the other District agencies
with services, and service providers at the
Marie Reed Learning Center, and to such
potential new providers as the DC Public
Library.
Within the next month or so, the ANC
expects Quinn Evans to provide to the
community for its feedback schematics for
two to four alternative versions of a new
Marie Reed campus — from draft plans for
a renovation of the existing campus or an
adaptive re-use of all or parts of the present
structure to that of the construction of a
brand new campus. DGS and the architects
have tentatively projected a goal of the week
following the July 4th holiday weekend for
the community being able to deliver its recommendation for a preferred solution to the
modernization project.
In speaking with The InTowner on May
5th, ANC Chair Billy Simpson expressed
his and the ANC’s intent to publish by
the forthcoming weekend on the Adams
Morgan/Yahoo listserv and the ANC website a preliminary version of a schedule for
the months ahead, one focusing on a new
round of special ANC and Marie Reed
forums to gather community input for DGS
and the architects.
Copyright © 2015 InTowner Publishing Corp. All
rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited, except as provided
by 17 U.S.C. §§ 107 & 108 (“fair use”).
other providers, or making sure that LGBT
people feel empowered to seek out care that
affirms who they are, and are not seeing
a provider who is going to judge them for
their sexual orientation, their behaviors or
their gender identity.”
According to Jain, the new facility will be
strictly a medical center. Aside from a staff
break area with a few board rooms on the
sixth floor, the new building will be devoted
Editor’s Note: This article is a modified
to patient and client needs and services. All and updated version of the special report
administrative duties will continue to take posted to our website on April 25th.
place in the Elizabeth Taylor building, and
it will remain that way for the foreseeable *Ben Lasky, a contributing writer for The
future.
InTowner, studied communications and jour“Our board of directors is currently in a nalism at The American University.
process to evaluate opportunities for redevelopment of the Elizabeth Taylor site. So Copyright (c) 2015 InTowner Publishing Corp. All
long term, we do think that the site will be rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part
developed in some way” and that the deci- without permission is prohibited, except as provided
sion on how to redevelop is expected this by 17 U.S.C. §107 (fair use).
summer, Jain told this reporter.
While
Whitman-Walker
Health is most known for its
work with patients with HIV
and AIDS, its services reach far
beyond to encompass transgender care, research, STD treatment and prevention, mental
health and addiction services,
medical adherence case management, community health services, and pro bono legal aid,
among others, including Yoga,
acupuncture and Reiki.
To Jain, what sets WhitmanWalker apart is how it treats its
patients. “We provide culturally
photo—courtesy Whitman-Walker Health.
competent care for LGBT peo- 2nd floor waiting area with view out window looking west along
ple. Whether that means training Church Street.
Page 6 • The InTowner • May 2015
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN
ART MUSEUM
8th & F Sts., NW; info., 633-1000
Daily, 11:30am-7pm
n a terrific show of the best of the JapaneseAmerican 20th century modernist artist
Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s paintings and black ink
drawings, the museum’s curators along with
guest curator and Kuniyoshi scholar Tom
Wolf of Bard College, have brought together
66 masterworks from North American and
Japanese collections reflecting the relatively
short working career of this extraordinarily
talented artist.
Leaving aside Kuniyoshi’s prints and photographs, which deserve a separate exhibition of
their own, but referencing them in the catalog, Wolf and the Smithsonian curators have
assembled a knock-out show of 41 stunningly
colored and intriguingly complex paintings
together with 25 both delicately drawn and
brutally brushed drawings in black ink on
white paper.
The introductory paragraph in Professor
Wolf’s catalog essay eloquently sums up
Kuniyoshi’s career as a Japanese-American
artist: “Yasuo Kuniyoshi had no intention of
becoming an artist when he came to the U.S.
from his native Japan in 1906, only 16 years
old. Encouraged by a high school teacher in
Los Angeles to pursue his artistic talent, he
went on to become one of the most esteemed
painters in the New York art world in the years
between the two world wars. Kuniyoshi’s art
is subtle and sophisticated, idiosyncratic and
unique. During the course of his career it
ranged from deadpan humor through erotic
sensuality to deep tragedy. It is rich and profound, and should be better known.”
I
Kuniyoshi, Upstream (1922).
Washingtonians are fortunate to have seen
many of the greatest Kuniyoshi paintings
in collections assembled for public display
locally by Duncan Phillips in his eponymous
Phillips Collection, Joseph Hirshhorn for the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
on the Mall, and Sarah Roby and other donors
for Smithsonian American Art.
These works are gloriously included in
the present exhibition. Organized roughly
chronologically into three periods or stages,
the exhibition begins with very early work
— Kuniyoshi began painting toward the end
of World War I, extending into the 1920s
and the early and mid 1930s, continuing in
the late 1930s and World War II period, and
concluding with the post-war years and the
early 1950s. Professor Wolf described these
three periods as ones of Kuniyoshi’s life and art
beginning with youthful optimism, then settling into the somewhat accepting work of his
mature years, and concluding pessimistically
with death and dissolution in the third and
last period of the artist’s relatively short career.
At the Museums
By Anthony L. Harvey*
Kuniyoshi, Little Joe with Cow (1923) / licensed by VAGA, NY, NY.
For this viewer, the triumph of Kuniyoshi’s
art is the power and continuing complexity —
both aesthetically and in terms of ideas — of
the artist’s paintings and drawings throughout
these three periods of continual artistic development and constant productivity.
Beginning with the engaging
charm of Kuniyoshi’s first period,
one immediately encounters motifs
and stylistic innovations fusing
American folk and American modernism with Japanese cultural traditions — both pictorial and figurative. My immediate favorite is that
of the cow. Having been born in a
year of the cow, Kuniyoshi seemed
drawn to a stylized image of that
animal, all of his own — one depicting that famously peaceful bovine as
both horned and possessing a prominent udder, and serving pictorially to
enigmatically anchor many unique
compositions.
For example, a 1920 painting of
a variegated, densely overgrown and
flowering scrub bush with a classic
Mount Fuji background mysteriously displays a Kuniyoshi cow in a
lower, right-hand, signature corner.
It’s followed by a deftly drawn, utterly charming pen and densely and
delicately drawn black ink painting
of a boy trying to coax a calf into following him; titled The Calf Doesn’t
Want To Go from 1922, it was a 1953 bequest
to New York’s Museum of Modern Art from
Katherine Drier. A year later Kuniyoshi paints
his early masterpiece Little Joe With Cow —
the kind of work that stops you in your tracks;
Kuniyoshi, Torture (1943) / licensed by VAGA,
NY, NY.
the painting has somehow found its way into
the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
One of the early paintings best known in
Washington is the now iconic 1922-1923
Maine Family acquired by Duncan Phillips
in 1940 — a wonderful painting that is full of
the stylized motifs used by Kuniyoshi throughout the first part of this inter-war period.
It joins Child Frightened by Water (1924)
from the Hirshhorn, The Swimmer (1924)
from the Columbus Museum of Art, the
exhibition catalog’s cover painting which is the eccentric poet
and patron Scofield Thayer’s
bequest of Kuniyoshi’s 1924
Self-Portrait as a Photographer
to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, and the powerful Strong
Woman with Child from the
Sara Roby Foundation bequest
to Smithsonian American Art
(and many others) in the pantheon of great Kuniyoshi paintings. The back stories for these
paintings seem at times to be
as fascinating as are those of the
imaginative and unique paintings themselves.
Kuniyoshi, The Calf Doesn’t Want To Go (1922) / licensed by
Works of the 1930s follow and
SCALA Art Resource, NY.
reflect in part the time Kuniyoshi and his first
wife, the painter Katherine Schmidt, spent
in Paris. Two of my favorites are yet another
unique composition of Kuniyoshi — this a
still-life titled Weathervane and Objects on a
Sofa (1933) from the Santa Barbara Museum
of Art followed by the erotically charged
Girl Thinking (1935) from the Fukutake
Collection in Okayama, Japan — Kuniyoshi’s
birthplace.
The war years are personally dark and bleak
for Kuniyoshi as is the tragic history of that
era. Immediately upon the Japanese invasion
of Pearl Harbor Kuniyoshi is declared an
enemy alien, this after 35 years of productive experience as an American artist, and
his camera, binoculars, and bank account
are confiscated and his travel outside of New
York City is restricted. Only by living on the
East Coast rather than the West Coast does
Kuniyoshi avoid internment. He nonetheless
continues volunteering for war propaganda
posters and Voice of America broadcasts to
Japan. His paintings and drawings of the early
1940s reflect his determination to be, and to
appear to be, a patriotic American. Some of
this anti-Japanese work such as 1943’s Torture
and Water Cure No. 1 (Study for War Poster)
frighteningly presage U.S. actions in recent
armed conflicts throughout the world.
Some brightening in Kuniyoshi’s work
occurs after the war, especially in such a
beautiful yet enigmatic painting of a woman
holding a pencil-shaped rod to which a string
seems attached to a bird’s beak; the work, Look
it Flies, is from 1946. A beautifully colored but
even more darkly imagined work, Disturbing
Dream from 1948, is a circus themed painting
where a person unsuccessfully reaches out in
an attempt to catch a falling acrobat.
As the 1940s turn into the 1950s Kuniyoshi’s
color palette turns shrilly bright, and his
figures become less human and more menacing. Two examples are Fakirs (1946) from the
Smithsonian Sara Roby bequest and Mr. Ace
(1952) from the Fukutake Collection. The
exhibition closes with a tour de force of an
expressionistically brushed black ink drawing
of a heavily worked and extensively scratched
image of a powerful tree, completed in 1953,
the year Kuniyoshi died — painfully — of
stomach cancer.
A wonderful catalog accompanies the exhibition, beautifully printed and containing a
catalog essay by Tom Wolf; it is chock full of
insights and informative descriptions of the
works. There is also a well-produced YouTube
video of Professor Wolf’s lecture delivered at
the museum discussing both of what’s in the
show and what is not.
The exhibition continues through August
30.
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
Kuniyoshi, Fakirs (1951) / licensed by VAGA, NY, NY.
Page 7 • The InTowner • May 2015
MUSEUMS
From p. 6
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART
Independ. Ave. at 10th St., SW
info, 357-2700 / Daily, 10am-5:30pm
n a bravura exhibition of visual art works
by 42 contemporary African artists from
18 African countries — as well as from the
African diaspora — organized around the
fluid themes — heaven, hell, and purgatory — of Dante’s famous literary work The
Divine Comedy, the museum has grandly
expanded the scope and significance of its
already solid legacy of showing path-breaking, thought provoking, and challenging
exhibitions.
Curated by the scholarly literary author of
biographies of James Baldwin and Leopold
Senghor and three-continents art critic
Simon Njami, this huge exhibition covers
all four levels of the museum, together with
its stairways and landings.
The works on display in this adroitly
installed and subtly illuminated show are
extraordinary, both in their visual impact
and in the sophistication of their visual
exploration of the often terrifying concepts
of the inescapable transience of earthly
life and its consequent eternal death in
their realistically and symbolically depicted
visions or versions of such after life venues as
heaven and hell, as well as such way stations
as limbo or purgatory.
The exhibition opens on the lobby
floor with a magnificent photomural by
Bili Bidjocka titled Purgatorio. It depicts a
standing male figure, arms outstretched,
wearing western clothing with his head
topped by a classic fedora and his figure
wrapped in what appears to be a fragment
of a fisherman’s net. The photomural evokes
the famous Christ the Redeemer sculpture
overlooking the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.
It is followed by vitrines containing two
huge manuscript volumes where viewers
have written affirmations of last thoughts
before the age of the written word ceases.
Both works relate to another of Bidjocka’s,
Le Vestibule de l’Enfer, which presents this
same, Christ-like figure, darkened and carrying a shoulder pouch and standing before
a large panel of hand-written words — signifying values, intentions, and actions —
perhaps last words of both fulfillment and
regret.
A light-flooded stairwell leads one to the
first of three underground levels presenting
paradise, where one is introduced to the
most elaborate of the sculptural installations in the show, Jane Alexander’s Frontier
with Church, an eerie ensemble of lifesize human figures, some with oversize,
long-beaked, bird-like heads, others with
large-eared, alert expressioned dog-heads in
a spectral setting —- said in a catalog note
to make direct reference to the procession
encountered by Dante and Matilda at the
summit of Mount Purgatory.
The show immediately lightens up with
a large and brightly illuminated egg-shaped
sphere of cast and polished stainless steel by
Ghada Amer. Looming before one on an
ovoid-shaped, skeletal frame, The Blue Bar
Girls harkens back to an incident when a
woman political protester’s veil and clothes
were torn revealing her blue bra as she was
attacked and beaten by Egyptian police during a recent urban uprising. The sculpture
can be read as a three-dimensional work in
the round, full of wavy, dancing, needlepoint filaments or in a flattened, two-dimensional depiction as one of faces and figures.
Paradise is further depicted with a
sequence of six beautiful and tenderly drawn
etchings by Christine Dixie that celebrate a
boy’s symbolic transformation occurring
in an imaginary dream sequence titled
The Binding, a reference to the Biblical
I
Aida Muluneh, from the 99 Series (2013).
Abraham and Isaac near-sacrifice narrative.
The artist’s son was the model for this somber but engaging work.
Another elegiac work is Youssef Nabil’s
series of four enigmatic seascape photographs titled I Will Go to Paradise, Selfportrait. These depict the artist’s gradual
descent into a dramatically captured watery
paradise framed by a brightly setting sun and
the sunlight’s reflection on a narrow strip of
sand as the artist’s figure disappears under
the waves.
Yunki Shonibare’s inclusion in the exhibition provides a wonderful example of the artist’s post-Colonial work in the section called
Purgatory. This work, titled How to Blow Up
Two Heads at Once (Gentlemen), presents
two headless manikins in ornately patterned
and brightly colored Victorian-style swallow
tailcoats, shirts, and trousers, both wearing
high boots and standing in dueling positions holding flintlock pistols aimed at the
absent head — each to the other. Nearby,
Hassan Musa presents Biblical imagery that
Dante would certainly recognize in Les
Christine Dixie, The Binding (Burning) (2009).
Cles du Paradis gin to unknown destinations. As they cross
(Jouir, Combattre, seas, deserts and darkness, at the mercy of
Desirer), a stun- tragedy, their only companion is death.”
ningly colored
Nearby is, ironically, the most serene art
triptych of textile work in this part of the exhibition; it is by
compositions.
Moatz Nasar and is titled Dome. An installaOther stand- tion piece, shaped like a Buckminster Fuller
outs
include dome and constructed of irregularly shaped,
Dimitri
Fag- found wooden slats, a light source, and a
bohoun’s Refrig- bed or flooring of crystals, it is inspired by a
erium, described poem on love by the great Sufi thinker Ibn
as a quiet, inti- Arabi. This aesthetically pleasing work is of
mate
space solidly soothing quietude.
designed
for
Aida Muluneh’s mesmerizing photoreflection; it is, graphs of a model whose face and body
in fact, a stand- have been painted white, to express the
alone Catholic color bigotry of her native Ethiopia and the
confessional with social climbing while hiding behind masks
the
penitent’s of her neighbors, are chilling. So too are the
kneeler and hand hands and ears painted red to express, the
rests constructed artist is quoted in the catalog as saying, “her
as beds of nails rage at the “guilt associated with the thirst
spelling out the for upward mobility.” Cloth worn by the
message “Lord model comes “specifically from the southHave
Mercy” ern region of Ethiopia, which has endured
with decorations several centuries of oppression and slavery.”
from Moroccan Muluneh angrily asserts that “living in this
tarot cards on city we call Addis Ababa we don’t have to
either side of the confessional grill. On fantasize about going to the Inferno — I
the priest’s side one is greeted by a framed have seen and experienced enough things to
picture of a Jesus with gleaming, iridescent really make me question humanity.” These
eye sockets across from a bundle of switches cries from the heart make a fitting conclufor scourging, the two of which serve to sion to this epochal exhibition.
bookend a bench. The work is complete
The catalog accompanying this show is
with video and sound together with video a beautifully produced work. It is also quite
stills and text from family disasters such as “My
father was a rolling stone
and when he died all he
left us was questions.” It
is a terrific work.
Into the next gallery one finds Julie
Mehretu’s Fragment, a
densely layered architecturally embellished
urban street grid which
is overlaid with what
looks like angry clouds,
darkly expressed forces
of prey, and flying shards
of aggressive violence.
This sophisticated and
powerful work is fascinatingly at home among
both patronizing, ideal- Julie Mehretu, Fragment (2009).
istic art collecting elites,
and bad-boy Lords of the Universe like chaotic and difficult to use; in spite of its
Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
expense, it has no index and no meaningful
Hell, or “Inferno,” is appropriately the table of contents. It does, however, handstrongest part of the exhibition and is seem- somely document both the art and the artingly the most coherently organized. Its ists celebrated in this extravagantly fulsome
entrance is commanded by the presence show, and the critical essays and three sets of
of a large, vibrantly expressive sculptural dictionary entries for words relating to Hell,
piece by Wim Botha titled Prism 10 (Dead Heaven, and Purgatory are both fascinating
Laocoön), inspired by the ancient marble and informative, if overly complex in the
sculpture illustrating a dramatic scene from case of the essays. A graduate seminar on the
the Trojan War which was excavated in exhibition, the catalog, and lectures on the
Rome in 1506. Botha created his Laocoön globalism of contemporary art, especially
in light and airy, white polystyrene “in among African, Western European, North
sweeping movements,” as quoted in an artist American, Caribbean, and Latin-American
catalog note, “using limiting implements artists would be an experience to treasure.
but ones that allow for the spontaneous
“The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory
gesture to emerge — that allow sculpture and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African
to become as fluid and gestural as draw- Artists” continues through August 2.
ing or painting. The polystyrene, light and
ethereal as it is, is then translated in black Copyright © 2015 InTowner Publishing Corp. All
rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part
patinated bronze.”
A 30-minute interview video with Botha without permission is prohibited, except as provided
on YouTube titled “Beauty is a Difficult by 17 U.S.C. §107 (“fair use”).
Concept” is one of the best artist statements
I have ever heard. A more horrifying vision *Anthony L. Harvey is a collector of contemof Hell is provided by Jems Robert Koko Bi porary art, with an emphasis on Washington
— a crude rowboat containing 80 roughly artists. He is a founding member of the
carved human heads. It is, says the artist in Washington Review of the Arts. For many
the catalog, “almost an allegorical presenta- years he was the staff person in the United
tion of an unwilling journey. The inequality States Senate responsible for arts and Library
in the distribution of needs and rights for of Congress oversight by the Senate’s Rules
life in human societies is so immense that, and Administration Committee and the
for some people, the only way to hope or to House and Senate’s Joint Committee on the
survive is to leave their own country of ori- Library.