Wannabe No More: the Washington Art Scene Gets Serious

Known primarily as the seat of our national government and as a swell spot to visit and take in the memorials and sights, Washington, DC, has long been, regrettably, a city perpetually on the verge of growing up and becoming a real center for the fine arts.

Ok, to be fair, Washington does have a long and respectable standing in the art world, more than is commonly acknowledged. Even before Paul Richard, working for the Washington Post, and Ben Forgey, writing for the now vaporized Washington Star, began taking seriously the Washington art market, there were significant exhibits at the “P St. Galleries,” Jefferson Place, Henri Gallery, and the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, among others. These shows were important to Washington for a number of reasons, but most especially because they provided for its citizenry a forum for the discussion of their noted artists and of the political and sociological issues around which the 1960’s crystallized.

Subsequent to that time, this forum faltered with the closing of once successful galleries and the influx of new galleries which, despite their best efforts, could not unite their various constituents to sustain the momentum and drive it would take to move Washington’s art market to a position of prominence like that enjoyed by the galleries of New York City or Paris, for example.

So what’s different now? Well, a number of things, actually.

First, the commitment and collaboration of Washington’s art dealers is starting pay off. The Art Dealers Association of Greater Washington, DC, established in 1981, and Jane Haslem’s websites artline and artlinePlus, launched in 1995, have done much to legitimize, cultivate, and promote the Washington art scene. Their work, along with that of countless others in and around the Washington metropolitan area, is starting to get noticed.

artDC Show Director Ilana Vardy describes what is going on in Washington right now as “a kind of arts awakening…with new galleries, non-profit institutions, artists, and collectors coming together in a more synergistic way.” Summit Business Media, owners of the artDC fair, originally visited DC with the hopes of finding a new city in which to launch a fair. Once they arrived, says Vardy, “they wondered why no one else had [done so] earlier.”

“Washington, DC, is a show organizer’s dream,” Vardy insists, “because the demographics couldn’t be better. The untested part is if the communities in the region will buy contemporary art,” which is crucial for the fair’s continued success. Vardy and Smart Business Media are betting that they will and are already looking forward to expanding the fair next year to include even more international galleries once they are sure of the support system locally.

Norman Parish, owner of Parish Gallery and President of the Art Dealers Association of Greater Washington, DC, also sees the opportunity represented by the fair in a very favorable light. Exhibiting the works of “mid-career and master painters with sculptures and photography,” he anticipates the fair will “lift the level of art exposure and acceptance in Washington…and attract and educate new collectors of art.” Parish understands the new fair as both a forum for advancing the arts in Washington and as an opportunity to make sales.

artDC, as you’ve probably heard, is Washington’s first ever international art fair. Housed in the lavishly refurbished Washington Convention Center, NW, Washington, DC, the fair is bringing in more than 80 dealers from around the globe to exhibit their inventories.

There is also ColorField.remix to be excited about. Independent of the fair, in what it describes on its website as “the largest celebration of painting ever held in the Washington area,” ColorField.remix, an event “conceived by the Kreeger Museum and…held in partnership with Cultural Tourism DC, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Washington, DC, Convention and Tourism Corporation,” draws upon more than 30 Washington area galleries, museums, and businesses to revisit the Color Field movement in general and the Washington Color School in particular.

The show, beginning in April and running through to the end of July, will feature both a look back at the works of Washington artists Gene Davis (at Marsha Mateyka Gallery, the Kreeger Museum, and the Phillips Collection), Tom Downing and Kenneth Noland (at Osuna Gallery), Howard Mehring (at Conner Contemporary), and Morris Louis (at the Phillips Collection). It also seeks to explore the influence of Color Field and Washington Color School artists in the recent works, for example, of Bill Hill and Judith Seligson (at the Jane Haslem Gallery) and Lou Stovall (at Prada Gallery).

Together, artDC and the Color Field exhibitions seem to represent a serendipitous alignment of the fine art stars over the greater metropolitan area. Building on Washington’s respectable past, hopefully, these two events will have the felicitous effect both of establishing Washington, DC, as a major city among city art centers and of creating a forum for its citizens, just as the Washington Color School once did, to contemplate the artistic, local, national, and global issues of our time.
 

John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic