John Anderson

It’s a simple question: who painted the Obamas’ official White House portraits?
We know what you’re thinking: Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald painted the wildly popular portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. They went on display at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, and are currently on a national tour.
But we’re talking about the official White House portraits. Since the Kennedy Administration, the White House Historical Association has commissioned them for the...

A DC-area non-profit transforms the stories of healthcare workers into poetry.

An obituary and remembrance of DC photographer, Mark Power, who started the photography program at the Corcoran College of Art in the 1970s, and influenced photographers Sally Mann and Nancy Rexroth.

Exhibition catalog for the memorial retrospective exhibition, Yuri Schwebler: The Spiritual Plane, a conceptual artist who worked in DC from 1970–1980, and who took his life in 1990.

The exhibition, slated for summer 2020, was a part of the Alper Initiative for Washington Art, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC.

The link will download the PDF.

While the Smithsonian’s art galleries remain closed to the public, there’s plenty of terrific galleries art lovers can visit around the city. This Dupont Circle gallery is one of them.
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Art-seekers in the D.C. area might find themselves at a bit of an impasse, with the region’s biggest art museums—namely those under the Smithsonian’s umbrella—closed thanks to the government shutdown. But all is not lost: The region’s rich gallery scen...

As a material, fiber has as much ubiquity as paint—perhaps more given its everyday utilitarian qualities. You wear fibers, sleep between layers of fibers, dry yourself with fibers, walk on floored surfaces of fibers, even drape windows with fibers. Go to an art gallery, however, and more often than not you’ll find paint instead of fiber. But beneath the surface of all that paint: a fiber canvas.
So it’s refreshing to see fiber as the...

Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun: Reframing Abstract Expressionism quickly addresses its truths: Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun never shared a studio, didn’t work together, weren’t friends, and didn’t live in the same town. The two also had scant communication. On a couple of occasions Herzbrun wrote Hartigan to entice her to teach at American University, which Hartigan rejected. And, in 1974, Herzbrun sent Jack Rasmussen, then...

Standout Piece: Alma Thomas’ “Untitled.” (There are several works by this non-title in “Alma Thomas: Thirteen Studies for Painting”; this is the one numbered AWT-108 in the catalog.) From a distance, the work appears to be nothing more than a sequence of paint splotches, varied in hue, in only a couple of discrete widths, arranged into haphazard columns across the paper: It’s Gene Davis meets Clyfford Still distilled into overgrown p...

This past Friday, Arlington County marked the 30th anniversary of Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park, the first since the artist's death from leukemia in February. There was plenty of pomp, with remarks from Arlington County Board Chairman Jay Fisette and Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, but there was very little circumstance: The sun did not shine; it was too dark to play. While the features of Dark Star Park—spheres, reflecting pools, poles, trees—were visible, there were no shadows from the poles ...

Standing behind the 1986 video sculpture Family of Robot: Hi-Tech Baby, Associate curator Michael Mansfield turns it on from his smartphone. It’s one of the robots in the exhibition “Nam June Paik: Global Visionary,” open through Aug. 11 at Washington’s Smithsonian American Art Museum. The museum manages electronic artworks with software on its central server. After logging into the server with a virtual network computing (VNC) app on his phone, Mansfield can operate and monitor every work on...

In 2002, when the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired Nam June Paik’s "Electronic Superhighway,” a neon-outlined wall of televisions that forms a map of the United States, it didn't arrive in a truck or a van. Instead, it arrived in a box, in pieces: some electronics, videos, broken neon, and most surprisingly, no televisions.
Turns out, there is more to displaying a Paik than plugging it in and turning it on.
“One thing about [Paik] is that he never curated his career,” says Betsy Broun...

If you tuned in yesterday to The Kojo Nnamdi Show‘s segment on the Corcoran controversy, you didn’t hear much new: mostly rehashed arguments that have been covered by this blog, the Washington Post, and e-mails from the Save the Corcoran campaign. On one side, the museum’s director and board says the institution is too cash-strapped to undertake $130 million in renovations, which is why the Corcoran should look into selling its build...

Donkey Kong isn’t the only 800-pound gorilla in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s newest blockbuster-to-be, “The Art of Video Games.” From the moment you step into this, the first survey of video games in a major art institution, two heavy questions linger. What are these products designed by a bunch of Japanese guys doing in a museum dedicated to work made by Americans? And, perhaps more pressingly: Is this stuff art?

Nintendo, ...

Conner Contemporary’s current show, “Memorial to a Marriage,” by Patricia Cronin, is a spare exhibition containing the title work, cast in bronze, and a small maquette of the same sculpture off to the side. The sculpture depicts two (nearly) life-sized figures laying on a bed, nude except for the drapery of bed sheets, embracing and asleep.
The entire piece seems apart from the 21st century, a transplant from a different age.