Photo by Jeff Chin

If what Arts Desk is reporting this afternoon pans out, this is a pretty shattering development for Washington’s artistic community. Kriston Capps (a former DCist contributor) reports that the Corcoran Gallery of Art is contemplating selling its Beaux-Arts building on New York Avenue and 17th Street and moving elsewhere.

The Corcoran, which moved into the building in 1897, might even exit the District altogether and move to the Alexandria waterfront, according to sources the City Paper heard from.

The noise that the Corcoran could change its address appears to stem from some decisions made in the past few years since the appointment of Harry F. Hopper III as the chairman of the museum’s board, which is meeting today:

One described the decision as the result of a reorientation of the institution’s leadership. Tax records show that in 2009, the Corcoran—under the guidance of Hopper, the newly appointed board chair and a venture capitalist—spent more than $600,000 on a “strategic management plan” provided by the consultancy Real Change Strategies, Inc. That study cost nearly as much as all of the Corcoran’s top executive salaries combined for that year. The board also moved to sell a 16,000-square-foot development site adjacent to the museum. Carr Properties broke ground on a 122,000-square-foot office there in April.

In 2009, Fred Bollerer, a partner at Real Change, was named chief operating officer at the Corcoran. When then-director and president Paul Greenhalgh resigned the following year, Bollerer, a venture capitalist with no prior experience in museum administration, was named interim director and chief executive officer of the Corcoran—a position he still holds.

Of course, exiting such an ornate and treasured location and putting it on the open market could cause quite the stir. The Corcoran’s former director, David C. Levy, tells the City Paper it would be more advisable to sell the place to another museum.