This week the big news is the appointment (PDF) of Dorothy Kosinski as the new Director of The Phillips Collection. She’s currently the Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Dallas Musuem of Art, and comes with an impressive résumé that include extensive curating, acquisitions, and teaching experience. Kosinski will officially take over next spring, to replace retiring Director Jay Gates, just in time to take the reins on a five-year strategy the…

Written by DCist contributor Amy Cavanaugh The Tuareg people, who once roamed a region of the Sahara, are the subject of a new exhibit at the National Museum of African Art. Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World uses art to explore the present-day world of a nomadic tribe, and explains that though the end of French colonial rule and droughts made most Tuareg settle down permanently, many aspects of their lives…

>> DAM! Fest kicks of with its first night of shows featuring a dozen different bands at three venues, including New York’s A Place to Bury Strangers (don’t miss our interview with the band) and Dirty on Purpose at the Rock and Roll Hotel, Vandaveer and Julie Ocean at the Red and The Black, and Foreign Islands at DC9, among many others. Check out our guide to the DAM! highlights. >> Two film festivals open…

MONDAY: Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert D. Kaplan will be at Politics and Prose to discuss his latest book, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts. According to Kaplan, journalists are too quick to report on the negative aspects of the military. Commence with bickering over the Iraq war … now. 7 p.m. TUESDAY: Blogger Diane Vadino will be at Olsson’s in Dupont Circle to read from her first novel, Smart Girls Like Me. 7 p.m. She’ll also…

“Books,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin, “are a load of crap.” No doubt Larkin, one of the most gifted lyric poets of the 20th century and a career librarian at the University of Hull, was being ironic. But irony or no, the participants and sponsors of this Saturday’s National Book Festival vehemently disagree. Held every year for the last six years on the National Mall — rain or shine — the festival brings together marquee-name…

It’s round two of the official opening of the fall art season. If you didn’t get to check out all the openings last week (and who humanly could have?), spend part of your Saturday afternoon perusing the rest — our reviewer particularly enjoyed the show at Flashpoint. But block off your evenings for the parties to celebrate the following openings: >> Up in Bethesda, it’s the big night for the Trawick Prize finalists, as they…

David Macaulay, the self proclaimed “explainer of things,” has been drawing and illustrating architecture for the past 30 years. In The Art of Drawing Architecture, the National Building Museum showcases Macaulay’s knack for deconstructing buildings and showing their many layers from various perspectives. Preferring simple materials, such as pen and ink, Macaulay recreates vast spaces on single sheets of paper. Spanning his career, the exhibit starts by documenting his most recent work, Mosque, a book…

What makes a champion? Is it commitment, the ability to spend the long hours necessary honing a skill to a razor’s edge, forgoing the simple pleasures of idle laziness the rest of us take for granted? Is it drive, that fire in the belly that pushes a winner on, past discouragement, past early failures, past the point when lesser beings throw in the towel? Maybe it’s simply birthright, taking advantage of those innate abilities that…

THURSDAY: >> Flashpoint puts a little twist on the gallery show with Anonymous III by WPAC. The show will feature 100 works by established and emerging artists from the D.C. area, but every piece will remain anonymous until it’s purchased by an art lover who will have to appreciate quality over a name brand. The gallery will hold a reception this evening to scope out the goods, but you won’t be able to purchase anything…

>> Welcome to March and another First Friday in Dupont Circle from 6 to 8 p.m. Find the gallery locations here. >> We’ve all got our old movie favorites. If you pop in Gone with the Wind everytime you’re home sick, or channel surf for old episodes of I Dream of Jeanie on a Sunday afternoon, you’re just the person Mark Bennett is drawing for. His India ink draftings of the fictional homes used in…