Results tagged “publicart”

Penn Quarter Living gives us a heads up that there is a not very well publicized public meeting scheduled tonight to discuss a proposal to install a large mural at one entrance of the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station. The Chinatown Community Cultural Center is 'proposing a “large-scale Chinatown mosaic mural” for the 7th & F St Metro entrance, otherwise known as the Verizon Center entrance. The proposal will be presented by Martha Jackson Jarvis, who painted the mural for the Anacostia metro station,' says PQL. If you're the sort of resident who likes to complain bitterly about not having input on public art installations you deem to be ugly, these are the sort of meetings you need to start attending. Tonight's meeting is at 6 p.m. at the CCCC.

   

Greater Greater Washington has been following the selection process for a planned public art installation that's going in at the northeast corner of 18th and Columbia Road for at least a few months now, so we tip our hats to them for first drawing our attention to it. Despite the call for artists having been initiated over a year ago, a list of semi-finalists having been selected back in March, a community survey posted online at the end of April, and a decision on the artist made in June, the thing simply managed to go largely under our radar until Friday, when GGW posted an announcement that the selection had been finalized. The chosen artist, James Simon, is planning a large set piece of statues called "The Bicycle Musician," depicting a musician playing a guitar while perched on a bicycle, with a little dog looking up at him. It hasn't been a popular choice with everyone. Writes David Alpert:

Many residents dislike the piece, and KCA President Denis James editorialized against it. It was my least favorite of the three, as well, and doesn't provide seating while the other two do. In our poll, it came in last.

       

Last night the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities held a meeting in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library to solicit opinions regarding public art in the city. DCCAH hired consultants (Via Partnership and Todd Bressi, an urban planner) last summer to research and present a five-year plan to identify locations, projects and collaborations that would most benefit both the residents and visitors of D.C. Last night's meeting invited city residents to come and interact with advocates of public art, with the goal of developing new ideas and hearing what citizens want to see.

In the NoMa BID's ongoing quest to spruce up their neighborhood, they now have a $50,000 matching grant awarded by the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities for the installation of public art. They intend to use it for artwork along First Street NE, an area currently zoned for mixed-use development. The cash is through the Public Art Building Communities grant program, "which offers funds to eligible artists and nonprofit organizations for the creation and installation of permanent public art projects in the District, including sculptures, mosaics, murals, special paving, custom benches, artistic gates, and more." Local artists, take note: the NoMa BID is putting out a call for artists very soon (keep your eye on their web site), with hopes to have the work completed by fall of 2009.

It's Friday, D.C., and if you live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, you may have suffered a lengthy power outage yesterday after a manhole exploded and injured a Pepco worker in the area. The worker suffered second degree burns but will recover. If you're a bit of a science geek like us, you immediately began Googling something like "How exactly do manholes explode?" after you read the above story, so allow us to save you...

Good morning, Washington. Looks like we have two new D.C. Council members this morning: Muriel Bowser, a 34-year-old ANC, took the Ward 4 seat vacated by Mayor Adrian Fenty, and Yvette M. Alexander, a 45-year-old former insurance regulator, took the Ward 7 seat left behind by Council Chair Vincent Gray. Both women ran in extremely crowded fields, but received the endorsements of their predecessors which allowed them to stand out from the pack (and raise...

April is a huge month for visual art in D.C. Friday marks the beginning of the twofive-week-long Artomatic, while later this month we'll be treated to the first ever international art fair in the city with artDC, both of which we'll tell you more about as they come closer.

>> Show 'Em How It's Done: Remember how much we hated the Art Walk? We can't fix the mosaicked drain gutters (ugh), but you can do your part and dress up the rest. The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities is soliciting entries for the next exhibit entitled Drift. Hat tip to Lenny from Mid Atlantic Art News for this info, and who also tells us that the first exhibit may have suffered simply...

The proposed 2007 budget shows $9 million for the Commission on Arts and Humanities, but total arts funding sprinkled throughout the budget adds up to at least $35 million. Most of it shows up in the budget of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development. While supporting the arts should be part of a broad economic development strategy, it would be far better to list all arts funding in one place, presumably the Commission on Arts and Humanities. Doing this would lead, I hope, to better discussions about how to set priorities in this area.

, installed by the DC Arts Commission and hailed by Mayor Anthony Williams as "an example of how art can transform the mundane into an exciting aesthetic experience." It transforms something alright, but not the parking lot as much as our view on who should be allowed to design public art in this town.

MEET BORF at Dupont Circle

Don't get us wrong, we like public art initiatives. But this DCist (and we know many others) have grown somewhat tired of the animal-themed public art/charity fundraiser displays. We think they may have run their course. Sure, Pandamania and the Party Animals were great ways to showcase the talents of local artists, but in a city that also serves as a world capital, we would hope that there would be a little more investment in...

(Photo of a photog let loose around the Tidal Basin from DCJohn's Flickr photostream.) We guess they're the D.C. version of the Gates. Instead of visitors in Central Park looking at saffron fabric, we have visitors in West Potomac Park admiring a blanket of pink flowers ... except that unlike Christo's public art, the cherry blossoms will return next year, assuming a swarm of beavers or northern snakeheads don't crawl out of the water...

Drawing 2004" src="http://www.dcist.com/archives/2005_2The-Gates.jpg" width="181" height="300" align="right" hspace="5"/>New York City is buzzing with the imminent opening of Christo & Jeanne-Claude's public art project, "The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005," this Saturday (weather permitting). The Corcoran, capitalizing on this buzz, is offering a "Preview" program of the project tonight at 7 p.m. Michael S. Cullen, Christo historian and sometime project director, will speak about previous projects on which he worked with the artists, including "Wrapped Reichstag" (1991-95), "Surrounded Islands" (1983), "Pont Neuf Wrapped" (1985), and "Umbrellas" (1991), (for more info, check out the artists' website). Cullen will discuss the similarities and differences between the several projects and answer questions from the audience. While this DCist is intrigued by the program, the $20 public fee ($15 for museum members) is pretty hefty. It seems to us that the $20 could better be used to fund a spontaneous roadtrip next weekend to see the project in person.

A controversy has been shaking the visual arts community following the firing of Philip Barlow, the curator of the Washington Projects for the Arts/Corcoran's "OPTIONS 2005" biennial. The root of the artistic flap can be traced back to two public art exhibitions, the Party Animals and Pandamania, the much-loved sidewalk art/charity projects organized by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Welcome to October! Crisp autumn breezes, the scent of spice in the air, and tons of activities abound during one of D.C.’s most pleasant months. How better to enjoy October than to tackle a few tried and true amusements that make D.C.-area living so pleasurable. DCist offers a few suggestions. Suggestion 1 – Quit the city. Sure D.C. is great, but one aspect that makes D.C. so liveable is the city’s close proximity to…well, the...

The Washington Post Magazine piece this weekend on the Moscow subway got DCist thinking. Where is all the public art in WMATA's metrorail system? In Moscow, the system has chandeliers, mosaics, stained glass and marble-clad platforms. Of course many of these pieces glorify the height of Soviet communism, but if Stalin could have created such an artistic system, couldn't Lyndon Johnson have mandated some sort of artistic glorification of American democracy in "America's Subway?"

As D.C. juveline car theives are snatching cars for joyriding at alarming rates, police in Calvert County are not pursuing the case of the mysterious seahorse sculpture-napping that appears to be teenage prank. The beloved statue was outside the Adams Ribs restaurant near Prince Frederick earlier this summer when it was stolen. The sculpture is back, the Post reports, found dumped behind the cafeteria at a county middle school, where a group of the school's students painted the fiberglass creature in the spirit of Vincent VanGogh's "Starry Night" for a countywide public art project. Police said that if the horse was returned unharmed by the end of September, they wouldn't pursue the case.