Thousands of locals attend National Gallery Nights, the museum’s themed celebrations of arts and culture at the East Building.

And don’t miss a Theaster Gates performance and Brutalism appreciation at the Hirshhorn.

It reopens on September 30 with 12,250 square feet of new spaces, a completely reorganized permanent collection, and three thrilling temporary exhibitions.

The permanent collection returns to a newly renovated building along with three temporary exhibitions.

Much to the surprise of print-is-dead doomsayers, a handful of new and used bookstores have even opened up in the past year or two.

Paper sculpture artist Nate Lewis has his first show, the East City Art Regional Juried Exhibition returns, and other arts events this month.

From ones found on the National Mall to smaller galleries around the city.

This month, enjoy Asian pottery, a look at the Bauhaus School and several interesting panel discussions, all of which will help keep you cool during the hot summer months.

Fashion and art have long been BFFs, and the relationship won’t be cooling anytime soon. Hot off the catwalk at London’s Fashion Week in September stalked some tremendous “art-dipped” designs for Spring/Summer 2011. Mary Katrantzou offered a baroque, gilded and glittering aesthetic that’d give any portrait of an 18th century aristocrat a run for its money. Felicity Brown bundled voluminous, hand-painted dresses down the runway, inspired (she says) by Toulouse-Lautrec’s women. And Holly Fulton packed some serious art-fashion punch with obvious Art Deco, Bauhaus and Cubism input.

David Smith’s “Circle I”. Written by Aleid Ford, who is profiling 365 masterworks at the National Gallery of Art this year for her project Art 2010, which appears on her website, Head for Art. Circles crop up all the time in art, as catch-all symbols for things like union, wholeness and cyclicality. It was the circle that the sculptor David Smith (1906-1965) selected as the sole compositional focus for his works of the early…