Cultural Tourism DC Calendar

When caravans transported commodities to the Mediterranean world and Indian subcontinent, cities along trade routes like Timna (in today’s Yemen) became known for artistic production. Fine alabaster figures, impressive metal work, and funerary busts became hallmark’s of Yemen’s ancient cultural traditions. Long-distance trade with the Greeks, Romans, and Persians introduced artistic and cultural traditions to ancient Arabia. A Glimpse of Ancient Yemen highlights a selection of objects excavated from the region by the pioneer archaeologist Wendell Phillips and his team in 1950 and 1951. See this exhibit on display at the Freer|Sackler until August 2019.

Today’s culture makes it easy for American women to engage in the world around them, thanks to advances in both women’s rights and technology. But between 1820 and 1920, many women chose to respond to current events and trends creatively, through one of their prescribed activities: needlework. Quilts allowed women to engage in the world while conforming to their era’s gender roles, which restricted middle-class women to the private, domestic sphere. This exhibition will present quilts that reflect their makers’ interest in their world.

Open Monday – Friday 8:30 am – 4 pm and Saturday 9 am – 5 pm.

Questions? Contact Museum staff at 202.879.3241 or museum@dar.org

Trained in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting, Pakistani-American artist Ambreen Butt reimagines the genre to feature contemporary female protagonists and political subject matter. Her content tackles global issues of oppression and the role of art as social commentary. This exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts explores Butt’s art through her range of techniques, including drawing, stitching, staining, etching, and gluing. This exhibit is on display though April 14, 2019.

On view December 7, 2018–April 14, 2019

Purchase your tickets to the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Visit NMWA’s exhibitions and collection pages to see what is on view.

Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for visitors 65 and over and students, and free for NMWA members and youth 18 years and younger.

Public gardens across America are engaging, inviting, and dynamic. Gardens are living creations, as they display seasonal changes along with a constant ebb and flow. This exhibit celebrates American gardens created or renovated within the last five years. These gardens showcase new plant collections, create spaces for people to connect with nature, and foster sustainability. Come explore what’s new in public gardens!

Norman Rockwell’s masterpieces make their way to Washington as part of a major international traveling exhibition on the Four Freedoms famously outlined by Franklin D. Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.  In Enduring Ideals, Rockwell’s iconic paintings and works by other artists capture expressions of freedom from World War II to today.

February  13–April  29,  2019

Movie theaters are where our culture’s dreams and desires have been projected since the arrival of nickelodeons, providing an enchanting portal into a world where moviegoers could escape their everyday lives. Yet many historic theaters have not escaped the impact of social and technological change, nor the abandonment that has diminished our aging cities. Baltimore, thriving at the dawn of the cinema age, has been home to more than 240 theaters since its first Nickelodeon opened in 1905. Only a handful still function as theaters, but many survive in some form—ghosts on the gritty main streets of Charm City.

NOVEMBER 17, 2018 – OCTOBER 14, 2019

Although digital images dominate visual culture today, the photobook remains a meaningful and thriving form. A deliberate, ordered, and sometimes narrative arrangement of photographic images bound in a book with little or no text, the photobook is an intimate presentation from photographer to viewer, one on one. This selection of photobooks and photo zines, created by an international group of women artists in the last ten years, embodies essential truths told through eclectic visual vocabularies. The images encompass coldly objective photographs of American locations of mythic importance, digital photos snapped through a car window, and prints resulting from experiments with expired photo paper.

The Library and Research Center is open Monday–Friday, 10 a.m.–12 p.m. and 1 p.m.–5 p.m. and is closed on major holidays.

JUL 30 2018–MAR 29 2019

Explore headline-making FBI cases and learn how the bureau is fighting terrorism and cybercrime in this special update to one of the Newseum’s most popular exhibits.

From the Boston Marathon bombing to the Internet’s sinister Silk Road, go behind the scenes with the FBI to explore how crime and crime-fighting have evolved in the post-9/11 age. As the nation’s top crime-fighting force embarks on its second century, the exhibit will explore how the FBI detects and disrupts terrorists both at home and abroad, and thwarts powerful cyber criminals who steal data and money.

On display September 7, 2018 — July 7, 2019

John Lennon’s boyhood stamp album—including 565 stamps on more than 150 pages is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum. The exhibition coincides with the U.S. Postal Service’s issuance of the John Lennon Forever stamp, honoring the legendary singer and songwriter. The stamp is part of the USPS’ Music Icons series.

Lennon’s older cousin, Stanley Parkes, inspired the future Beatle’s interest in stamp collecting and gave him the album. Lennon rubbed out Parkes’s name and address on the album’s flyleaf, replacing it with his own signature and the address at Mendips, the home he shared with his aunt Mary (“Mimi”) Smith and her husband George. Already a budding artist, Lennon sketched beards and mustaches in blue ink of the likenesses of Queen Victoria and King George VI on the album’s title page.

On display until May 27, 2019

In addition to its permanent exhibition on the nation’s airmail service, the Postal Museum has a temporary exhibition, Postmen of the Skies.

In 1918 the first regularly scheduled airmail service began operations. Planes carried mail between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City. The nation greeted the new service with enthusiasm. Crowds surrounded airfields in all three cities, eager to watch history in action. The nation became more enamored with their postal pilots as the service grew. By September 8, 1920 mail was flying between New York and San Francisco.

The Post Office operated the service until 1927, having begun in 1925 to turn over some routes to private airlines. The new airlines built their businesses on the postal routes, infrastructure and pilots. Over the next decade, airmail contracts financed the fledgling airlines, serving to help build the nation’s commercial aviation industry.

Nov. 1 – April 28, 2019
Innovative Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will bring the largest interactive technology exhibition to the Hirshhorn in the museum’s history starting Nov. 1. Pulse will take up the entire Second Level, with three major installations using heart-rate sensors to create audiovisual experiences from visitors’ biometric data. Together, the biometric signatures will create spellbinding sequences of soundscapes, lights and animations.

Women who Work, Care, and Create
Featured Artists: Elizabeth Ashe, Jacqui Crocetta, Michelle Dickson, Elissa Farrow Savos, Susan Freda, Katharine Owens, Lynda Smith-Bugge, Paula Stern, Emily Tucci