Vice President Joe Biden’s communications staffers apologized yesterday for forcing a student reporter to delete photos he took while covering an event in Rockville.

The 40,000 people who eventually piled into the exclusive upper ballrooms and cavernous underbelly of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center looked like they were having a good time.

The author Natalie Hopkinson was at the Chevy Chase store last night promoting her new book Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, but the go-go soundtrack she brought with her was shut down.

Photo by KentonNgo.News came out late this week that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired the video, David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly,” that the Smithsonian removed from an exhibit in the National Portrait Gallery in December. The MoMA, a private institution, has certainly never scared away from exhibiting controversial art. While this is certainly a powerful statement to the merit of the video, as Kriston Capps points out,…

Last night, the Washington Jewish Community Center (DCJCC) hosted a packed house of over two hundred people for the highly-anticipated panel discussion “hide/SPEAK: An Evening with David C. Ward of the National Portrait Gallery.” The panel also included Transformer director Victoria Reis, ARTINFO blogger Tyler Green and DCJCC Bronfman Gallery director Dafna Steinberg.

But everyone was there to hear Ward, the National Portrait Gallery historian and co-curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, explain his stance on the Smithsonian’s controversial decision to pull the Wojnarowicz video and their subsequent rejection of AA Bronson’s request, made in protest, that his work be pulled from the show and returned to the National Gallery of Canada.

Photo by yospyn. It’s been a few weeks since the National Portrait Gallery chose to take down David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” after conservative writers and Congressional Republicans complained. A few protests followed, various galleries are now showing the piece, the Andy Warhol Foundation threatened to withdraw its funding to the Smithsonian. Now the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation is threatening to do the same, if the Portrait Gallery does not reinstate the piece…

After two local artists were detained and “banned” from the Smithsonian museums for screening a recently censored video on an iPad in the lobby of the National Portrait Gallery, they’re planning more long-term methods to get the artwork shown and provide some public shaming while they’re at it. Mike Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone are now working to obtain permits for a temporary structure to be erected outside the NPG which will screen David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in my Belly through next February – the run of the exhibit Hide/Seek, from which is was removed.

The recently maligned National Portrait Gallery was the setting Thursday night for a protest over its controversial removal of a video piece, A Fire in My Belly by artist David Wojnarowicz, from its GLBT-focused exhibits. TBD reports that a crowd of about 100 people showed up, walking from the Transformer Gallery, which started displaying the 4-minute segment in question the day before, near Logan Circle to the front steps of the National Portrait Gallery on…