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.

Henry Clay Folger and his wife Emily wanted to create a monument to Shakespeare in the U.S. capital. This would be their gift to the American people, an architectural presence on Capitol Hill, and an anchor to the nation’s cultural mile. This exhibition shows how Henry, and after his death, his wife Emily, worked with architect Paul Philippe Cret to create a marble building that looks like a book, and speaks to the hope that Washington DC would become a cultural center.

By the late 1960s, the United States was in pitched conflict both in Vietnam, against a foreign power, and at home—between Americans for and against the war, for and against the status quo. Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 presents art created amid this turmoil, spanning the period from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s fateful decision to deploy U.S. ground troops to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Sài Gòn ten years later.

Artists Respond is the most comprehensive exhibition to examine the contemporary impact of the Vietnam War on American art. The exhibition is unprecedented in its historical scale and depth. It brings together nearly 100 works by fifty-eight of the most visionary and provocative artists of the period. Galvanized by the moral urgency of the Vietnam War, these artists reimagined the goals and uses of art, affecting developments in multiple movements and media: painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance, installation, documentary art, and conceptualism.

MARCH 15, 2019–AUGUST 18, 2019

Smithsonian American Art Museum (8th and F Streets, NW)

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!

For an artist, it is always a unique challenge to glean new insights from complex phenomena, such as that of human migration—an ancient, mysterious process that involves many peoples and nations and a welter of data and cultural forces. In CONSTELLATIONS/MIGRATION, Rome-based artist Pietro Ruffo draws inspiration from the geographers, cartographers, and astronomers of antiquity to tackle the timeless mysteries of human movement, conflict, and assimilation. Assuming that migration and resettlement have always been central to the survival of all species, the artist explores these elusive themes in a series of extraordinary works that reflect on the ancient frictions and fusions between peoples, places, and cultures of the world.

Meet America’s most popular First Ladies at Madame Tussauds Washington, DC.

Madame Tussauds is an international chain of wax museums, and the Washington D.C. location opened in 2007 and is the 12th of their many locations. These museums are popular due to their themed rooms featuring famous people from politicians to actors to athletes. with one of D.C.’s most popular rooms being the President’s Room. This tourist stop is the perfect place for photo ops and “Instagrammable” moments.

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

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.

As part of a series of installations celebrating its golden anniversary, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present “One Year: 1968, An American Odyssey,” a one-room exhibition that looks back at an extraordinarily important and memorable time in American history. The show relies on some thirty portraits to tell the story of 1968, the year when the Vietnam War reached a turning point, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, and television sets displayed everything from the Olympic Games to the first manned orbit of the moon. Memorably, it was also the year that the Portrait Gallery first opened its doors. The subjects featured in the exhibition continue to resonate in our collective memory. Representations of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon will share the walls with portraits of cultural figures such as Peggy Fleming, Arthur Ashe, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Depictions of other significant personalities, notably the Apollo 8 astronauts, will round out the exhibition.

June 29, 2018 – May 19, 2019

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.

In his current body of work, Eric Uhlir explores abstraction in a visceral language of paint, considering the line between reference and history in an attempt to give voice to conflicted space. Irreverence and absurdity battle amid parables of conflict between civilization and the natural world.

Each piece springs from the experience of looking, using varying degrees of abstraction as the scaffolding on which he hangs references and structure to entice the viewer, while leaving entrances and exits relatively unobstructed. References are not secrets in these kinetic abstractions, they’re the condition of the work which enables the viewer to travel fluidly between content and context. A Géricault shipwreck or heroic Joan Mitchell become the culturally shared currency that allows us to relate to each other and make sense of a seemingly senseless present built on the triumphs and tragedies of the past.

9 Hillyer Court, NW, Washington, DC 20008
Phone: 202.338.0325
Email: gallery@artsandartists.org

Gallery Hours*
Tue-Fri 12-6 pm, Sat-Mon 12-5 pm, and by appointment

Admission: FREE; $8 suggested donation

Palm Springs, California is known as a playground for the rich and wealthy. However, the area was once a desert outpost and home to Native Americans. This exhibit focuses on the conflict that arose over a one-square-mile-tract of the city’s downtown, which formed the heart of the reservation belonging to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. Section 14 will show how the area became a hotbed for issues like tribal sovereignty, economics, race and land zoning from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Six new solo exhibitions open May 2

Opening Reception with the Artists: Wednesday, May 8, 6:30-8:30 pm

Paula Cleggett: Shine the Light (oil painting)
Elizabeth Dranitzke: Portraits of Women (photographs)
Jenny McGee: Reality No More (oil painting)
Mike McSorley: Introspection/Inspection (oil painting)
Andrea Ottesen: B o t a n i k a ! (photography, acrylic painting, mixed media)
Yemonja Smalls: MetamorphoSIS (mixed media)
Desiree Sterbini: With These Hands (oil paintings)

Gallery Hours

Monday-Thursday: 8 a.m.-7 p.m.
Fridays: 8 a.m.-6 p.m.
Saturdays: 8 a.m.-5 p.m.
Sundays: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Occasional closings for special events—please call (202) 549-4172 for confirmation of open hours on a particular day