Tryst has opened up a cafe outpost at the Phillips Museum. Can Tryst make it work? The museum has tried in the past partnering with various vendors to run its in-house cafe. A few years back, the Phillips even made something of an exhibit out of it: "this is not that CAFÉ," a disastrously named [...]

The copy editors among us will remember the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran (WPA\C), the backslash-abusing acronym for the artist-membership nonprofit organization. Once upon a time, the \C represented the merged interests of the WPA and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The short history: The WPA launched in 1975, merged with the Corc in 1996 [...]

Martin Sullivan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, announced this week that he will step down, leaving a leadership gap at the museum. That isn’t the institution’s biggest problem, however. It has long suffered under its self-imposed conservative mission, one that assembles artworks as so many images in a celebrity slideshow. Granted, the Portrait [...]

National Portrait Gallery Director Martin Sullivan, who weathered a political storm after Secretary of the Smithsonian G. Wayne Clough censored an artwork on display in the museum's "Hide/Seek" show in late 2010, is stepping down for health reasons. The museum's curator of prints and drawings, Wendy Wick Reaves, will serve as acting director while a [...]

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden just announced three new hires. Adam Budak, a curator from the Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria—an institution with a bubble even weirder than the Hirshhorn's—will serve as the museum's new curator of contemporary art. The museum also hired assistant curators Melissa Ho, an art historian from [...]

The answer's no, according to Liz Diller, principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architecture firm that designed the Bloomberg Balloon, even though it'll be taller than 130 feet tall once it's inflated. In a TED Talk posted in April, Diller talks about how her firm came to the award-winning design. She gets into a [...]

It's a banner day for jocks in the District: Last night, the Wizards, Nats, and Caps all pulled off big wins. Which leads, well, me to ask: Can artists get a taste?
Looks like the answer's yes. Marty Youmans, the owner of the building of artist studios and live/work spaces at 52 O St. NW, is [...]

The Hirshhorn has added two more acts to the lineup for its May 11 live-show version of its massive Doug Aitken music-video installation, Song 1. Nico Jaar and Oneohtrix Point Never will join confirmed acts High Places and No Age for a special "After Hours" party sponsored by Wired and Pitchfork.
Oneohtrix Point Never, a synth act with [...]

Those jerks at Gawker caught the episode of Celebrity House Hunting that all of us in the District surely missed last night while we were celebrating another big Caps win. Let's thank Gawker for watching bad television so we don't have to, because last night's ep saw one very special celebrity hunting for a house [...]

On my way out the door last week to meet the artist Song Byeok, I grabbed a book off the shelf—a catalog of North Korean poster art assembled by a collector whose fascination with the propaganda of the Hermit Kingdom outpaces even my own. It features nearly 300 pages of reproductions of North Korea’s kitschy [...]