Contemporary Art

Now that there is an agreement between the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design and the University of Maryland to pursue some kind of collaboration or partnership, it's tempting to think the coming months will be all about details, granular negotiations about how the arrangement will be structured and perhaps a little horse trading as the two parties try to figure out how to get the best out of each other. That is, of course, all necessary. But if the...

Two thousand museums across the country will offer free admission to the active duty military personnel and their families, the National Endowment for the Arts announced Tuesday. The NEA, in cooperation with the Department of Defense and Blue Star Families, a nonprofit for military families, is supporting the annual initiative, which provides free admission to participating museums from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The groups made the announcement in Washington on Tuesday at the Smithsonian American...

"Visionary art" is the polite term for stuff made by untutored artists, sometimes called "outsider" or "naive. " But, then, most visual artists aspire to being visionary, or something like that. And the pieces in " Messages From Outsiderdom ," the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery's abundant exhibition of the genre, are not especially naive. With its candy colors and junkyard ingredients, the work may be friskier than the most austere strains of contemporary art, but it's been executed with ample craft.

RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia Commonwealth University's planned museum of contemporary art has its first director. Lisa Freiman's appointment was announced Wednesday. She will come to Richmond from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she is the senior curator and chair of the contemporary art department. VCU's Institute of Contemporary Art is expected to open in 2015. Besides her duties as director, Freiman will also be a professor in VCU's School of the Arts. Her official arrival at VCU...

CORRECTION: The Galleries column about D.C. art dealer Leigh Conner said she owns the Northeast Washington building that houses her gallery, Conner Contemporary Art. The building is co-owned by Conner and her partner, Jamie Smith. Word of advice: Art dealer Leigh Conner is many things -- well-connected, a powerhouse, the District's top gallerist -- but one thing she isn't is laid-back. Never, ever cross her. Trust me, I know. Conner is the public face of Conner Contemporary Art, the Trinidad gallery she runs...

RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia Commonwealth University's planned museum of contemporary art has its first director. Lisa Freiman's appointment was announced Wednesday. She will come to Richmond from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where she is the senior curator and chair of the contemporary art department. VCU's Institute of Contemporary Art is expected to open in 2015. Besides her duties as director, Freiman will also be a professor in VCU's School of the Arts. Her...

Anyone who arrived at Conner Contemporary Art after 5 p.m. on July 9 had to stand in the back. Almost 200 people showed up to the night's event, a discussion panel and party for the (e)merge art fair, an exhibition of contemporary art that will take place in September at the Capitol Skyline Hotel. This city long recognized for art that is old and historic is, it appears, becoming a hub for art that is bold and new. Alice Denney, who founded the Washington Project for the Arts...

Two hours by highway up the coast from Barcelona, and another 20 minutes over winding cliff-top roads, sits one of today's great temples to artistic innovation. The artworks to be found there one evening this summer included a pair of fried rabbit ears, a plate of embryonic pine nuts and a Styrofoam box filled with "Parmesan air," a frozen foam so light you could barely feel it on your tongue. In a more rococo mode, there were also translucent Parmesan...

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden needed to be energized. And Richard Koshalek, the director since April at the modern and contemporary art museum, had a long list of ideas to do just that. Among the things his institution needed, Koshalek decided, was an extra space, one that would provide a conversational tent for the dialogue he wanted to build with new partners and artists. And so, voilà: On the drawing board is a 145-foot-tall temporary inflatable structure that's intended to sit in the...

Fred Ognibene calculated that it would take 89 spotlights to give the artworks in his apartment the lighting he thinks they deserve. And so, in pursuit of this well-illuminated dream, he has turned his home into a mini construction site. The furniture is shrouded in plastic, the walls are bare and everything is coated in a fine layer of dust. That's stressful for a highly organized, meticulously groomed person. But on a recent evening, Ognibene, a physician and one...

Now that there is an agreement between the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design and the University of Maryland to pursue some kind of collaboration or partnership, it's tempting to think the coming months will be all about details, granular negotiations about how the arrangement will be structured and perhaps a little horse trading as the two parties try to figure out how to get the best out of each other. That is, of course, all necessary. But if the...

GALLERY OPENING OF THE WEEK Followers of the contemporary art scene may recall Kathryn Cornelius's performance at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, during which she married and divorced seven strangers in one day. Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m., Curator's Office hosts a reception for an exhibition based on the fallout of that event. " Let's Not Ever Be Strangers Again " features video, photographs, audio and installation documenting the stunt. On April 13 from 6 to 9 p.m., Cornelius opens her studio ...

The Washington Project for the Arts is moving to the Capitol Skyline Hotel on Feb. 1 for the remainder of the year. The WPA's administrative offices and exhibition space will take up residence in a suite on the fourth floor of the hotel overlooking the pool. The hotel, on I Street in Southwest, is owned by Miami-based contemporary art collectors Donald and Mera Rubell . Mera Rubell suggested the move after coordinating with the WPA on several events, including SynchroSwim, the...

Institutions must evolve, not simply to survive but to command their futures. While I feel far too removed from the Corcoran to comment with authority, what I can do is offer an inspiring model of re-imagination outside Washington: the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This institution, which I now have the privilege to lead, has boldly reinvented itself twice in its nearly 140-year history. Located in the home of philanthropist T.B. Walker, this first public art gallery west of the Mississippi...

Sitting on two acres in Georgetown, the West Heating Plant is a mothballed gem of federal architecture. It stands 110 feet tall, with 20,000 square feet of mostly empty space inside an elegant masonry shell. Long vertical window cuts give the box an elegant, severe grandeur, characteristic of the classically inspired but spare style of federal architecture of its time. It is also, as a Sept. 5 letter written by Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, said, "the last surviving...

DON'T MISS The most unsung museum in a town of showboating art spaces is probably the Art Museum of the Americas . But even those familiar with the beautiful Spanish Colonial building just a couple of blocks southwest of the Corcoran may not be aware that the museum — which has developed a reputation for organizing intriguing special exhibitions of contemporary art — also has a permanent collection. The collection doesn't get aired out much, so " Constellations:...

The Smithsonian Institution yesterday selected Richard Koshalek, former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, to lead the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The appointment of Koshalek completes the turnover of leadership among three of the Smithsonian's national art galleries. Besides the Hirshhorn, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African Art have had new directors appointed within the past year. Reached in Los Angeles, Koshalek said now is an opportune moment to reposition...

The District is one of the few large urban areas seeing an apparent increase in graffiti, and officials are uncertain about the causes. The city is on track to spend twice as much to remove graffiti from public and private buildings this year compared with 2010. In the previous fiscal year, the Department of Public Works removed 1,780 instances of graffiti. But in the first seven months of the current fiscal year, DPW workers have removed more than double that: 3,946. Officials in Baltimore and...

As the world economy began to tank about five years ago, a curious thing happened at the top level of the international art market: It started to boom. At the annual spring art auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's in New York and their branches around the globe, deep-pocketed bidders snapped up Braques and Bacons, Klimts and Kandinskys, often at record prices. Now with the global recession officially over but the American and European economies still shaky, auction records for blue-chip modern and contemporary art continue to be...

"Visionary art" is the polite term for stuff made by untutored artists, sometimes called "outsider" or "naive. " But, then, most visual artists aspire to being visionary, or something like that. And the pieces in " Messages From Outsiderdom ," the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery's abundant exhibition of the genre, are not especially naive. With its candy colors and junkyard ingredients, the work may be friskier than the most austere strains of contemporary art, but it's been executed with ample...