Alice Denney, a contemporary art collector active on the Washington scene, founded the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) in 1975 as a "service center" for area artists and performers. The WPA's mission was not simply to provide a place for artists to show their work or perform, but also to make available advice in arts management, grantsmanship, career development, and legal rights. Denney launched the WPA with a grant from the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, a tiny[clarification needed] staff, a three-story building, and a lot of goodwill. The WPA officially opened in April 1975 with a multidisciplinary program that included a broad survey of Washington area visual art.
Denney stepped down as director in early 1979.
Al Nodal, hired by Denney, succeeded her as Director in April 1979. Nodal continued to emphasize the work of area artists, but he added more shows featuring out-of-towners. Nodal started the WPA bookstore, which featured an unusual selection of artists' books and launched a new program to encourage the production or artists books. To support his programs, Nodal landed major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the District of Columbia's Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 1980, WPA held its first auction fundraiser. Nodal ended his directorship in 1983, after WPA's move out of its original 1227 G Street location.
The board hired Jock Reynolds in the summer of 1983,[1] to replace Al Nodal as Director. The programming under Reynolds received regular coverage in the national art press, shifting WPA from primarily serving local artists to serving a national audience. This shift for the WPA was met with mixed feelings, some welcoming the national prestige, and others accustomed to WPA's mission to focus on local Washington, D.C., artists. Through his leadership, Reynolds launched an aggressive capital campaign in the spring of 1988 where he brought in generous[clarification needed] support from the federal and local government, art foundations, individual donors, and more than eighty corporations or corporate foundations. This raised the bar for WPA, and to maintain its level of activity in the future, it would need to raise close to $1 million each year. In December 1989, Reynolds took a sabbatical and decided not to return to Washington, D.C..
John L. Moore III, who was already at the WPA, filled in as acting director, from August 1989 until the board hired Marilyn Zeitlin, a contemporary art curator, as executive director in May 1990. The budget for the fiscal year 1991 was set at around a million dollars, but Zeitlin was only able to raise a fraction of that amount.
The WPA continued to mount an impressive array of programs,[citation needed] but financial problems overwhelmed the organization. When Zeitlin left in May 1992, Don Russell, who had been on the WPA staff in the 1980s, was hired back. At that time, one of WPA's mainstays for financial support, the National Endowment for the Arts, was beginning to eliminate funding for artists spaces. In April 1995, Russell resigned. Christopher French, who had joined the Board in the fall of 1994, was asked by the trustees to assume the position of Interim Director to address the financial and programmatic challenges. In just three months, he reorganized the space, trimmed the budget, developed a new exhibition of local photographers, and mended fences with the local art community.[2] With increased financial pressures mounting, French renegotiated the terms of the WPA's lease on their flagship building on 7th Street NW and closed its doors.[3] By December 1995, WPA was almost bankrupt.[4]
21st Century
With the support of the Board, French entered into discussions with the Corcoran Gallery of Art to explore an affiliation or merger between the two institutions.[5] In 1996, a generous handful of board members and avid WPA supporters paid off the WPA's outstanding debts, wiping the slate clean. With the support of David C. Levy, the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Corcoran board of trustees, and members of the art community, the WPA's operations were transferred into the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran. The Corcoran would provide in kind support, including an office in the museum's curatorial department, equipment, technical assistance, and the like, but no direct financial support. Having put in motion what was considered the only option for the continuation of the WPA, French stepped down as interim director while remaining as chair of the board until January 1997.
In 1999, Marta Kuzma served as director. Kuzma's term attempted to redirect the program to address Washington, D.C., as a unique context for international contemporary art projects. She resigned in June 2001 after mounting friction with a Board more focused on serving the local community. After Kuzma's departure, Annie Adjchavanich was named director. While Adjchavanich was director, she ramped up programs for area artists and recruited new members. In March 2005, Adjchavanich left the WPA\C and Kim Ward, previously membership and finance director, was named acting director until August 2005, when hired as executive director.
Under the leadership of Kim Ward, the Washington Project for the Arts legally separated from the Corcoran Gallery of Art on December 31, 2007. The organization returned to full autonomy with an office and micro gallery space near Dupont Circle, ending the eleven-year partnership with the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
In 2008, the organization was a finalist for the Mayor's Award for Innovation in the Arts.
In 2009, Lisa J. Gold was announced as the new director.[6] Under her leadership the WPA continued the growth and refocusing started by Kim Ward and conducted several key exhibitions[7][8][9] and moved to a larger, permanent space.[10] She left in 2016 and took a position at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden as director of public engagement.[11]
In 2016, Peter Nesbett was announced as the new director.[12] In 2023, Travis Chamberlain became director.[13]
The different spaces of WPA
When Alice Denney founded the WPA in 1975, she was lucky to snare a rundown building at 1227 G Street, NW, Washington, DC from the city's Redevelopment Land Agency. The rent was only $1 a year. Renovated on a shoestring budget, 1227 G Street included 5 galleries, a film screening room, a performing arts space, and offices. A small board, over half of whom were artists, advised the programming and exhibitions associated with the G street Space.
In 1982, 1227 G Street was sold to developers and WPA was evicted from its original location. Then director Al Nodal supervised WPA's move to the Jenifer Building in the 400 block of 7th Street, NW, Washington DC. Rent was no longer $1 per year, thus straining the WPA's resources considerably.
In 1985, only three years after the move from 1227 G Street to the Jenifer Building, the WPA's new home was sold again. The WPA relocated to 7th and E Streets, NW, to what had been a Kresge five and dime.[14] Then director Jock Reynolds made a deal with the new owners of the Jenifer Building that would allow WPA to move back into the building after it was renovated. In December 1988, the WPA was able to move back into its improved 11,000sqft (1,000m2) space, all because of an aggressive fundraising campaign led by Reynolds.
In 1996, the WPA was supported by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and became the WPA\Corcoran. It moved its space into an office in the Corcoran's curatorial office. No longer with an exhibition space of its own, the WPA\C relied on collaborations and donations of space from other area arts organizations.
After separating from the Corcoran, the WPA moved to an office and micro gallery space at 2023 Massachusetts Avenue, near Dupont Circle.
In 2016 the WPA moved into its new home in the Atlantic Plumbing development, over the 9:30 Club north of the U Street Corridor.
In June 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled The Perfect Moment: Robert Mapplethorpe Photographs, which included (among other things) sexually explicit images involving gay BDSM, and two photos of children with exposed genitals. This was in the context of the culture wars of the late 1980s, when Sen. Jesse Helms, Rep. Dick Armey, among others, questioned grant funding for individual artists, from the National Endowment for the Arts, for art that they considered "morally reprehensible trash."[17][18] Not wanting to let an important exhibition fall to the wayside, the underwriters of the show went to the WPA,[19] who presented the controversial show in its own space from July 21 – August 13, 1989.[20] 48,863 visitors, a standing record, attended the exhibition.[21][22] There was a seminar about the historical impact 20 years later.[23]
In the fall of 1989, The Blues Aesthetic exhibition was held.[24]
In October through November 1995, it showed a retrospective of the artist Noche Crist, Romanian rhapsodies.[25]
In December 1995, Hostile Witness was shown, by the artist, Shailish Thakor.[26]
In the summer of 2005 the WPA\C organized one of its largest membership shows ever at the seven spaces that made up the Warehouse Galleries, Theater and Cafe complex on 7th Street, NW in Washington, D.C. Titled and curated by F. Lennox Campello,[27] "Seven",[28] the show included works by Sam Gilliam, Mark Jenkins, Frank Warren, Tim Tate, Chan Chao, and many other well-known DC area member artists.
In December 2005, WPA\C mounted PostSecret, a project founded by Frank Warren. In a donated space on M street in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., thousands of postcards that were sent into Warren were placed on display. The exhibition drew in large crowds, many whom waited in line to see the exhibit, and can be credited as the most successful exhibition since the Mapplethorpe show.
In 2006, it sponsored Wallsnatchers, an exhibition of graffiti art, at a vacant Staples building in Georgetown.[29]
In May 2010, WPA collaborated with The Pink Line Project for Cabaret (re)Revolatire. This event, curated by Alberto Gaitán celebrated the historic Cabaret ReVoltaire series that was presented by WPA in 1992.
The WPA Biennial exhibition OPTIONS, features under-recognized and emerging artists from the mid-Atlantic region.[9]
Past exhibitions and programs include, Wall Snatchers, The Experimental Media Series, The Hot House Video Series, Seven, Sculpture Unbound, Anonymous I, Anonymous Returns, Anonymous III, Conversions, Punk Festival, and many more.
WPA has collaborated with American University, The Ellipse Arts Center, Edison Place Gallery, Washington Sculptor's Group, District of Columbia Arts Center, Flashpoint, Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art & Design, Warehouse Arts Complex and Theater, Creative Alliance at The Patterson, Gallery5, and many others.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government by an act of the U.S. Congress, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 29, 1965. It is a sub-agency of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Events from the year 1989 in art.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University.
The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design is the professional art school of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1878, the school is housed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the oldest private cultural institution in Washington, located on The Ellipse, facing the White House. The Corcoran School is part of GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and was formerly an independent college, until 2014.
The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a New Deal work-relief program that employed professional artists to create sculptures, paintings, crafts and design for public buildings and parks during the Great Depression in the United States. The program operated from December 8, 1933, to May 20, 1934, administered by Edward Bruce under the United States Treasury Department, with funding from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
The Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during a time when society, the arts, and people were changing quickly. The founders of this movement are Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, however four more artists were part of the initial art exhibition in 1965.
The Jefferson Place Gallery was an art gallery in Washington, D.C., founded in 1957 and closed in 1974. It had been located at 1216 Connecticut Street, NW in Washington, D.C.. The gallery was associated with the Washington Color School artists.
Alice Denney was an American art curator and arts administrator. Denney has been considered to be an important figure of the Washington, D.C. avant-garde arts and had been the mentor to a number of Washington D.C.'s artists.
Lowell Blair Nesbitt was an American painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor. He served as the official artist for the NASA Apollo 9, and Apollo 13 space missions; in 1976 the United States Navy commissioned him to paint a mural in the administration building on Treasure Island spanning 26 feet x 251 feet, then the largest mural in the United States; and in 1980 the United States Postal Service honored Lowell Nesbitt by issuing four postage stamps depicting his paintings.
An alternative exhibition space is a space other than a traditional commercial venue used for the public exhibition of artwork. Often comprising a place converted from another use, such as a store front, warehouse, or factory loft, it is then made into a display or performance space for use by an individual or group of artists. According to art advisor Allan Schwartzman "alternative spaces were the center of American artistic life in the '70s."
Randall Junior High School is a historic building at 65 I Street, Southwest, Washington, D.C.
David C. Levy is an educator, museum director, art historian and artist, designer/photographer, and musician. He is a principal in the consulting group, Objective Focus LLP. He was President of the Education Division of Cambridge Information Group from 2007 to 2018, and President of Sotheby's Institute of Art and founding Chairman of Bach to Rock. He was president and Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, from 1991 to 2005, and Chancellor of The New School for Social Research in New York City from 1989 to 1991. From 1970 to 1989 Levy was Executive Dean and CEO of Parsons School of Design. He holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia College, Columbia University and a master's degree and PhD from New York University.
The Perfect Moment was the most comprehensive retrospective of works by New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The show spanned twenty-five years of his career, featuring celebrity portraits, self-portraits, interracial figure studies, floral still lifes, homoerotic images, and collages. The exhibition, organized by Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia, opened in the winter of 1988 just months before Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS complications on March 9, 1989. On tour, in the summer of 1989, the exhibition became the centerpiece of a controversy concerning US federal funding of the arts and censorship.
Benjamin Abramowitz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. First recognized for his contribution at age 19 as senior artist with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York City, he is among the most respected Washington, D.C., artists of the past century.
Jane Shelton Livingston is an American art curator. She is the author and co-author of numerous books and catalogs.
Tazuko Ichikawa is an artist, primarily a sculptor, based in the Washington, D.C. area. Her studio is in Maryland. The forms of her sculptures are abstract, organic, and streamlined, and she employs natural materials. Curved, draping, bending, and flowing shapes repeat throughout her body of work.
Alessandra Torres is an American visual artist of Puerto Rican ancestry. Torres was raised in Puerto Rico, and now she resides in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Rubell Museum, formerly the Rubell Family Collection, is a private contemporary art museum with locations in the Allapattah neighborhood of Miami, Florida, and the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Opened to the public in 1993 and formerly housed in a warehouse in the Wynwood Art District, the museum and its collection were developed by Mera and Don Rubell, Miami-based art collectors who have played a significant role in the city's development as a center of the international contemporary art market. The museum relocated to a significantly larger campus in Miami, and opened a campus in Washington, in 2019 and 2022, respectively.
The National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO) was, from 1982 through the early 2000s, a Washington, D.C.-based arts service organization which, at its height, had a constituency of over 700 artists' organizations, arts institutions, artists and arts professionals representing a cross-section of diverse aesthetics, geographic, economic, ethnic and gender-based communities especially inclusive of the creators of emerging and experimental work in the interdisciplinary, literary, media, performing and visual arts. At the apex of its activities, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NAAO served as a catalyst and co-plaintiff on the Supreme Court case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley having spawned the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. NAAO's dormancy in the early years of the 21st century led to the formation of Common Field.
↑ Morrison, Keith. Art in Washington and Its Afro-American Presence: 1940-1970. “This exhibition and catalogue would not have been possible without the generous support of the Washington Post Company and The Washinton Project for the Arts.” https://keithmorrison.com/?page_id=1228
↑ Ferdinand Protzman (September 23, 1995). "Romanian rhapsodies". The Washington Post: C-2. Archived from the original on October 19, 2012. Retrieved February 28, 2009.
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