Red on Blue Waterfall by Pat Steir. (Courtesy of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center Art Collection)

By DCist contributor Becky Little.

When I’m feeling melancholic and on the verge of infinite sadness, and want to get lost in a big building where I can look around, I think of art museums. D.C. has plenty of options: the Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery, or (not as big, but still good for my purposes) the Freer.

But I’d never considered the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. So when I got a tip that they have an art collection, and that they give public tours, I decided to check it out.

According to its website, the Convention Center’s free “Art at the Center” tours highlight “the best kept secret in the nation’s capital” —over 130 works of art, comprising “the largest public art collection in the District outside of a museum.” Having never been inside the Convention Center, I imagined a secret treasure room filled with sculptures and paintings.

To my slight disappointment, there was no treasure room. Instead, the collection is displayed throughout the building, and is clearly visible to guests. It’s a “secret,” though, because most people only know about it if they’ve already wandered around the Convention Center. Due to events, the Center usually only gives four curator-led tours of the collection per year.

“The Convention Center has put out a lot of energy to try to get the word out,” said Joan Oshinsky, the managing curator, when I spoke to her after her most recent tour on July 31. “And you can see tonight … that was a decent group for a Friday night in a summer in Washington.” (Fourteen people attended.)

So what makes this collection special, besides the fact that it’s not in a museum? As Oshinsky was proud to point out, more than fifty percent of the artists represented are from the Washington area, and many of them are important to D.C.’s art history. The collection features several pieces from people who were involved in the Washington Color School, an art movement during the 1950s and 60s that originated in D.C.—including Many Things, a work by renowned abstract painter Sam Gilliam.

There’s also several site-specific pieces that were built for display in the Center. Lingua, by Jim Sanborn, consists of two columns etched with writing in eight languages. I’m more into paintings and collages than big bronze columns; but they did look spectacular after the sun set, when the lights inside the columns projected their etched text onto the walls (earlier in the day, this was harder to see).

“Lingua” by Jim Sanborn (Courtesy of Walter E. Washington Convention Center Art Collection)

The Shaw Wall is particularly important, not just for its art, but also for what it represents. According to a Shaw resident who spoke up during my tour, she and other community members had wanted to make sure that the Center would give something back to the community after its construction displaced residents in the early 2000s. The wall, along with ongoing community job programs, is how the Center responded to their concerns.

The Shaw Wall features four pieces by the neighborhood’s residents, and my favorite was Shaw, The Root and Fabric of a Community, a collage by Frank Smith and Arnetta Lee that visually maps Shaw’s history. I would have loved to have looked at this wall for longer, but one of the bummers of the tour was that it was so rushed.

The Convention Center’s art is spread farther apart than it would be at a museum, and my tour group had to hustle between pieces to see everything that Oshinsky wanted to tell us about. Often, this meant that we passed a lot of interesting pieces that we didn’t have time to look at because they weren’t part of the program.

This is an unresolvable dilemma, since it would have taken much more than the planned hour and a half to linger over everything that the group wanted to see. But unlike at a museum, you can’t stay to look around when the tour is over—at the end, security locks up, and the guests have to leave.

This left many of the people in my tour group wondering if they could come back to view the art another day on their own. Oshinsky told them that they could, they’d just have to email the Center and schedule a time when the building wasn’t booked up.

So, my recommendation to those who want to view the collection is this: RSVP for a tour to get familiar with the art and its context, but make sure to plan a date to go back later when you have enough time to look at everything for yourself.

“Art at the Center” tours are held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (801 Mount Vernon Place NW, Washington, D.C. 20001). The next tour date is not yet listed on their website. To request an additional tour or ask about when you can visit the collection, email community@eventsdc.com or call 202-249-3200.