If the fiery hell holes of silent elevator shafts and devilishly high heat indexes have D.C. repenting with sweaty Hail Marys, there is an escape: find Alabama’s finest photographer and sculptor William Christenberry at any of four art relief stations around the city. Cool A/C, (photographed) ice-cold Coca-Cola, and – Hallelujah – none of those famous Tuscaloosan chitlins! Get on up, lil’ doggies, and drag yourself along on a Christenberry tour that’s as Southern as…

Brent Baumgartner hardly has any work. He’s something past thirty years and prolific, both in sculpture (soft, hard, Sculpey, latex body casts) and painting. “But most of the stuff is gone. I mean, painted over, or just gone.” Only the slides of much of his work remain. What the Corcoran grad has left is meager, propped in the corner of his one bedroom apartment and studio. The place is treacherous, a hazard to his…

What’s so great about a beach photograph? There are few artistic outlets for the digital camera-clutching traveler more instantly rewarding than pointing at the red ball on the spiky, waved sea and clicking. Pure pastiche, quick beauty. No need to run a light meter or take a tripod. The stuff is art before it enters the shutter. So there’s this show by large-format sometimes fashion photographer/videographer Renate Aller. It’s at Adamson Gallery, a gallery…

Two weeks ago, when toddler’s tromped over Marco Maggi’s paper installation Hot Bed, they missed the chance to continue their contemporary art critique downstairs on Jim Lambie’s Zobop, a colorful taped-down hell. The work outlines the original architecture with alternating vinyl lines of spastic color across the entire floor. But kids, this thing is gonna take razor blades and forty of your short legged friends – Zobop has got to go. Now, we’re no…

If the heat and dung aura of the National Zoo is keeping you away from its fated elephants and panda parties, there’s a better venue out there — this one offering delicious A/C and, for the right price, the option to take home some cuddly animals. Irvine Contemporary’s new show Animalia gives us bears, lizards, and giraffes, in one of those nice clean galleries to boot. Contemporary aesthetics of cutesy things aside, this show is…

In the same gallery with string art and postmodern bric-a-brac, a visit to the Hirshhorn’s third floor will now reveal the intricacy of contemporary drawing when it meets all-out boring honest to goodness work. From the same art student friends you’ve heard wax endlessly on about Art School Confidential and how “Drawing dude, that’s the new painting,” comes blabbing praise for the uncool, unneurotic, even chubby Marco Maggi. But this time they are dead…

J.T. Kirkland: Blogger, Kentuckyan, Publisher, Artist, and by day, IT guy (oh, and former DCist contributor). At least that’s what I imagined the door might say outside his studio/home when we visited him in Ballston last week. Where does the guy keep his spandex-kevlar lined jumpsuit? I was prepared to believe that he may jump out of his two story rental at any moment to call on one of his multifarious duties. But there’s focus….

There’s this unwritten rule for contemporary art history students: don’t do a thesis on a living artist, ’cause they’ll contradict you faster than you can say feces-spattered-canvas. So it’s with great caution and wide ambiguity that the Corcoran’s Contemporary (re)defined attempts to organize contemporary work in a large two-part exhibition. This is a buckshot at art related by chronology, with packeted galleries casing recent trends in art like material based abstraction, graffiti, and text or…

Last month the Experimental Media Series, a showcase of video/audio mashups and original work, debuted at the Corcoran. The first part in a three part series, featuring the video work of Noah Angel, Champ Taylor, and D.C. blogger Rob Parrish, ended in a rawkus punk delivery by The Videohippos. That performance incorporated gas mask microphones, Mario Paint visuals, and sound that smashed iPod 110 decibel caps. Needless to say it’s gonna be loud when the…

So, when a Washington Post art critic tells an artist that their work is the only salvageable thing in an art show of six-hundred pieces, that’s a good thing, right? Maybe not when it’s spat with the vitriolic follow-up that, “glass is such a gorgeous medium it’s hard to screw it up.” Which is funny, because technically glass blowing is pretty easy to screw up. It took 2,000 years of work, from Mesopotamia to…