From Friday night’s opening reception (StereoVision)
With only half a roof and no back wall, the Anacostia building that Duane Gautier was eyeing for an art gallery needed work. After significant renovations, Honfleur Gallery opened in 2007. Balloons dropped. Applause echoed through the District. Reviewers flocked across the Anacostia River to see the latest addition to D.C.’s art scene.
Just kidding.
The gallery was met with incredulity and even contempt from residents of the very community it hoped to serve. The month Honfleur opened, The Washington Post quoted disgruntled business owners and people who said Anacostia needed jobs and schools, not an art gallery.
“There was some legitimate concern by residents saying ‘why an art gallery? Why here? It’s never been done before. What’s it going to do to the neighborhood?’” Gautier recalls. “I basically said it’s an experiment to see if we can bring arts and culture east of the Anacostia River.”
But culture does of course exist independently of art, and both the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site and Anacostia Community Museum already provided the neighborhood with the former. The Smithsonian museum celebrates its 50th anniversary next year, but while it sometimes hangs art on its walls, the curatorial focus is on culture. Honfleur Gallery brought art to the historic neighborhood, and as Duane clarifies, brought the cultural element closer to downtown Anacostia.
Anacostia Community Museum Public Affairs Specialist Marcia Baird Burris says the gallery filled a void. “We often get phone calls from local artists who want their work to be exhibited at the museum, but we’re not an art museum,” she says. “As a history and culture museum, we’re always focused on the issues”
Since it opened, Honfleur has aimed to solve one issue: local artists’ need for a space to show their work. The gallery dedicates at least one show a year to artists who live, work, or have roots in Wards 7 and 8.
“The East of the River Exhibition,” which opened Friday, returns after a decade-long tradition of bringing local art to the community that Honfleur Gallery calls home. This 10th anniversary retrospective exhibit includes pieces by artists who have shown work in each of the past exhibits, plus one emerging artist.
Jonathan French is one of the returning artists. Originally from New Jersey, the photographer says when he first moved to Anacostia, “I was shell-shocked there were no galleries over here. Moving here and finally hearing about [Gautier’s vision], it actually made me reminisce about the East Side of New York when it was called Alphabet City.”
French says Anacostia’s art scene has changed since 2006—Anacostia Arts Center opened in 2013, as did the Anacostia Playhouse—but so has the rest of the community. “You have to see the businesses that are coming,” he says. “You have the new juice joint around the corner, you have the new Jamaican place, you have Busboys & Poets coming, so it’s not just the art scene, but a growing of business and people becoming aware of the area.”
That awareness is key. “Last year over 25,000 people came to the Anacostia Arts Center or Honfleur Gallery. That is amazing,” Gautier says. “If someone had said in 2007 that we’d have 25,000 people in 2015 coming to see art venues on Good Hope Road, I would have asked you what you were smoking—even though that is now legal.”
But he doesn’t give the gallery full credit for that transition. “It’s sort of egotistical to say Honfleur is what started it,” Gautier says, but he does think Honfleur showed the way and demonstrated that people would come to see art in Anacostia.
By GarberDC.Kate Taylor Davis is vice president of ARCH Development, which runs both Honfleur Gallery and the Anacostia Arts Center. “I think when Honfleur started, it was fairly radical in that it was taking a stand, “she says. “It was more about the community and the artists and standing up that Anacostia is a really amazing place.”
But Davis says there’s a careful balance that needs to be maintained. The two spaces for art are for the community, but they’re not community centers.
That’s where Honfleur’s Cultural Programs Associate Terrence Nicholson comes in. The curator of the 10th Anniversary East of the River Exhibition lived at the end of Martin Luther King Avenue SE from the late ‘70s until the early ‘90s and remembers a few scattered small businesses, but not much in the way of art.
“When I was in high school and certainly afterwards, my idea about the arts was that I needed to get on a bus and go across town,” he says. “But at the same time, I knew personally artists who lived in Anacostia that were good.”
Today, Nicholson helps those artists hone and showcase their skills. He has a soft spot for artists who don’t know how to package their work, the people who walk in to the gallery with photos of paintings on their phone or drawings rolled up under their arm. They remind him of himself. He was accepted to the Corcoran School of Arts and Design after his teacher wrote a letter to the college’s dean. “I had a lot of nurturing,” he says, a benefit that he’s paying forward to artists who show promise, but have minimal training. Burris says. “I think that is what enriches the life of the community.”
“When you are around fast runners, it’s going to make you run faster,” Nicholson says. But just because artists can walk in off the street doesn’t mean they have an automatic “in” to Honfleur’s exhibits. “We have to have a standard,” he says.
French says that even established artists like himself are held to that standard. The competition for Honfleur’s shows can be fierce. “You look at the work and say, oh, that’s why I didn’t get in, he says.
Nicholson points to Elana Casey, the emerging artist featured in the 10th Anniversary East of the River Exhibition.“She’s talented,” Nicholson says of the recent Corcoran grad who he fancies himself as a sort of big brother to. “I think it’s our obligation as well as showcasing great artists, also challenging them to grow so that if we take them and pluck them out of Anacostia and drop them into Paris that they won’t get eaten alive.”
The atmosphere of community at the opening reception for the 10th anniversary exhibit was “palpable,”says Nicholson. “I don’t know where each person was from, but the overall vibe was that people felt at home,” he says. “One of my favorite comments of the night came from a neighbor who told me that she was glad to see east of the river artists given the opportunity to show their greatness, which she already knew existed.”
“We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard so that there’s no misconception that it is a quality art gallery,” Gautier says, adding that the concept seems to be catching on, at least among art critics. “They’re reviewing the work, where in the first few years we basically had to beg, or they would come down to do something negative.”
“There are super talented artists who happen to live in Wards 7 and 8,” he says. “It’s important to me that we’re part of the conversation about D.C. galleries.”
If the increasing number of reviews and visitors are any indication, then slowly but surely, Honfleur and Anacostia by extension are becoming part of that conversation.
The 10th Anniversary East of the River Exhibition runs through September 16th at Honfleur Gallery. An Artist Talk will be held on August 26 from 7-9 pm.
