Exciting Museum Visits

One of the best courses offered in the Community Arts program is the ‘Art in DC’ course with Alice Cisternino. In this course, we visit various museums and galleries in the Washington area. The Smithsonian Institution is always featured, but Alice is far more creative than just selecting the big and often-frequented museums. She also chooses less well-known museums and galleries – last week, for example, we visited the Phillips Collection and the IA & A at Hillyer. You’ve probably heard about the Phillips Collection at Dupont Circle. It’s billed as the first modern art museum in the US, although this is contested by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Certainly, competition in the Art world is nothing new. But this museum, housed in the former Phillips home mansion, has gorgeously appointed rooms and furnishings. They have many famous paintings, including a large collection of Renoirs.

From the Phillips, we walked into the nearby alleys, and found the IA & A Hillyer galleries. According to its website, “The IA&A at Hillyer is a program of International Arts & Artists (IA&A), a nonprofit arts service organization dedicated to promoting cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally”. This gallery is non-profit and its goal is to support artists in their early career stages. Each year they have an open competition for artists to display work in the galleries, and they emphasize emerging artists from all over the globe. The works are truly interesting. We saw one exhibit by Middle Eastern artists which reflected the desperate plight of migrants and the challenges they face – and which mocked the image of restricting barbed wire by coating it in glamorous 14 carat gold.

The whole course is an eye-opener and in addition to introducing us to galleries and artists for which we are unfamiliar, the professor also organizes to have curators, owners and artists speak to us directly. You can’t get this if you just go to the gallery or museum on your own. That’s what makes the course so valuable and so rich an experience.

This week we are going to Artechouse; that’s a really alternative space! It is characterized as an experiential museum, where you immerse yourself in the art, perhaps even ‘becoming’ part of the exhibit. Last time I went there, the exhibit sensed the heartbeats of visitors and displayed them on the wall in lights. Wow. What a unique experience and well worth the trip.

I’d recommend this course to anyone who wants to get a flavor of the splendid variety of art which is available to us in this area. Of course, our very own MC has a gallery in the Cafritz Art building in Silver Spring, where you can also see some very innovative and creative art. Let’s get out there!