Lynn Skynear says she's spent the last year working to display the works of Miami-based neo-Pop artist Romero Britto in her Adams Morgan gallery, Skynear Designs. As of Tuesday night, that dream has been realized, and as a permanent fixture of the 18th Street NW store.

Hallie DelVillian, Skynear's creative director, says Britto—who often depicts cartoonish, positive scenes in jarringly saturated colors—is a good fit for the store, which sells art, furniture, and clothing. “Britto’s art is joyful and optimistic in a cruel world,” DelVillian says. “It made sense to launch the gallery with him.”

Although Skynear's  Britto display is billed as the "Skynear + Britto Gallery," Britto doesn't have an ownership stake. DeVillian describes the arrangement as an "experimental consignment."

Britto first came to wide notice through a 1989 Absolut Vodka ad. Now, his artwork is ubiquitous in Miami and is often found in celebrities' art collections.

Crowds as chipper as the art on the walls packed Skynear Designs Tuesday. “The art is really beautiful, very different, and unusual," said Frank Sciacca, a West End resident who collects art. “I see a couple that I may be interested in buying.”

Temporium, meet cherry blossom.

In one year, three temporary pop-up shops have opened along D.C.'s commercial corridors, part of the D.C. Office of Planning's larger scheme to harness the development-spawning power of tchotchkes and the young people who love them. The most recent project—Garment District on 7th St. NW—closed on Sunday, but don't put away your glue sticks just yet. Adams Morgan gets its own youthful pop-up this weekend, boostered by the edgy, totally DIY National Cherry Blossom Festival.

Non-profit organization Adams Morgan Mainstreet has joined with the annual traffic-snarling hellfest to open the Very Cherry AdMo Pop Up Shop, opening for 15 days this Sunday at 2421 18th St. NW, the space formerly occupied by Uptowner Cafe and Caribou Coffee. Very Cherry's offerings will be a far cry from the rock bands, man-punching-bear T-shirts, and leather-bound flasks of past grant-funded Temporia; this one should have a decidedly family-friendly atmosphere. So are pop-up shops going Disney?

Lisa Duperier, president of Adams Morgan Mainstreet, says it's all about diversity. The shop will combine local artists with a heavy dose of Cherry Blossom-y entertainment, including kabuki dance and a kimono display. Duperier says the Very Cherry shop—unlike Shaw's Garment District or the Mount Pleasant Temporium—is meant to draw tourists to Adams Morgan. But according to Cherry Blossom Festival publicist Danielle Piacente, the pop-up shop is all about appealing to locals. "We try to expand our events to appeal to residents as much as tourists," she says.

Savvy residents might know what a pop-up shop is, but it's not clear if many out-of-towners will. Duperier recognizes this, and says the shop's rotating themes and flexible hours—seven days a week, unlike past pop-ups—will help it draw in the visor-clad crowd, even if the concept and wares are a little non-traditional. "We have somebody who makes bags out of recycled records," she says, and another who "takes old cloth and used jackets and makes belts out of them." We'll have to wait to see how that stuff goes over with mom and dad, but if the crafts don't reel 'em in, there's always Adams Morgan's best-known tourist attraction: alcohol.

The Very Cherry AdMo Pop-Up Shop is open noon to 9 p.m. Sunday to Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday from March 27 to April 10 at 2421 18th St. NW. Feeling left out, cultural class? There's always the sure-to-be-decadent Cherry Blast party, put on by the Cherry Blossom Festival and the Pink Line Project. This year, it takes place April 2 at 8 p.m. at 700 Water St. SW.

Post-Woodstock, Videofreex blossomed into a collective, with eight other founding members. The group first occupied a Soho loft, where they put together a pilot for CBS about the turbulent times, featuring interviews with such figures as Yippie Abbie

The Videofreex, circa 1970, in their Soho loft. Standing (from left): Skip Blumberg, Chuck Kennedy, Davidson Gigliotti, Parry Teasdale, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, and David Cort. Seated (from left): Bart Friedman, Carol Vontobel, Nancy Cain, and Ann Woodward. (Photo by Bill Cox)

Hoffman and footage of Vietnam war protests and police brutality (it was summarily rejected by the network, though the head of programming called it “way ahead of its time”). The Freex then moved to upstate New York, where they lived in a 17-bedroom house until 1978, making more videos, running a pirate television station called Lanesville TV, and having a good time—“with and without the use of drugs,” says founding member Skip Blumberg, 64.

Blumberg, who now teaches film and video at Hofstra University, will be on hand Wednesday evening at a screening of Videofreex clips at the District of Columbia Arts Center in Adams Morgan. Joining him will be Eddie Becker, 60, a D.C.-based videographer who collaborated with the Freex, and Rhea Kennedy (an occasional contributor to this blog), 30, daughter of Chuck Kennedy, another founding member who passed away in 2004.

On the docket are excerpts from interviews with Hoffman and Black Panther Fred Hampton, as well as bits from Lanesville TV, including the Lanesville TV Newsbuggy. This segment shows a Videofreex member wheeling a baby buggy around town, interviewing locals about subjects ranging from feeding their pigs to their favorite yoga poses.

While the Videofreex’s work may look antiquated now, it was revolutionary in its day. “All of a sudden you could see interviews with crazy people with wild hair,” Becker says. “You didn’t see that on TV before; it was tightly controlled.” And Blumberg notes that though the group’s main goal was to have fun with the new medium, part of that fun involved serious goals, namely “to make the world a better place, to make it more fair, and to bring justice.”

For Kennedy, involvement with the Freex provides a link to her father and promotes her goal of restoring more of the group’s work. While the Video Data Bank has restored a number of Freex videos, there are hundreds, if not thousands, more in need of funding and attention. “It’s especially important to do this now, because the Videofreex are not immortal,” she says. “My dad’s already gone, and the other people who can tell us about the clips are not always going to be around, either.”

Blumberg is particularly glad for Kennedy’s involvement. “She’s going to be a Videofreek after I will be,” he says.

The "Videofreex Pirate TV Show Clip Screening" takes place Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the District of Columbia Arts Center, 2438 18th Street NW. To reserve tickets ($5 each), call (202) 462-7833 or e-mail info@dcartscenter.org. There will be an after-party at Sutra Lounge, 2406 18th St. NW.

Photo and video courtesy of the Videofreex.

That's because Roblest is taking over that alley tonight and tomorrow to stage "Present Interval/Intervalo del Tiempo," which will fill the space with sound, light, neighborhood vignettes and cityscape images—using projectors, mirrors spinning on disco-ball motors, and, of all things, the song "Tequila." I spent about 40 minutes Wednesday night watching Roblest and a small team testing the project in pieces, and I'm still not exactly sure how to describe it. But I'm guessing that an art intervention will only do the usual Adams Morgan set some good.

The projected images are "video poems," Roblest's term for his attempts to visualize poems he's written on the page. Before he took up installation and video art, Roblest was a notable Mexican poet. "In Latin American, people don't read but they watch TV," Roblest says. They also don't tend to go to museums, he says, at least in cities where admission to large arts institutions isn't free. Hence Roblest's focus on art in public spaces.

Yes, that is a giant "For Lease" sign in Crooked Beat's window. But the Adams Morgan record store isn't going out of business, owner Bill Daly assured me this afternoon. Daly's landlord raised his rent, but he's got a new location lined up—"down the street" from the current 18th Street location, he says, and of a similar size. He wouldn't say much more about the move.

"We don't need the impulse traffic," says Daly, who moved his store to D.C. six years ago from North Carolina. The store's customers won't change their habits based on the move, Daly says, and he does about 30 percent of his business online. Last year was Crooked Beat's best ever, he says, and this year has been "pretty good." He just can't afford the higher rent.

He says he'll announce the new location next week.

City Desk runs down another recent Listserv-fueled controversy involving public art in Adams Morgan—involving, it so happens, a number of people who figured into the last one we wrote about.

Scott Vogel, the fine arts editor at the Post, resigns.

You dig the new M.I.A. song; you're not sure what to make of its bloody, NSFW video. Now learn about the band it sampled, Suicide. Obligatory D.C. connection: Vintage D.C. indie-poppers Black Tambourine recently recorded a cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" for an excellent reissue.

When will Brightest Young Things introduce us to some gallery boys?

Pitchfork's oral history of Galaxie 500 is really special. Spend your morning reading it and listening to this:

Cheerio!

When I began looking into the fracas that derailed a proposed public artwork that would've stood in the plaza at 18th Street and Columbia Road, an editor here suggested I pay particularly close attention to the rodent angle—some opponents of James Simon's Bicycle Musician sculpture took issue with its inclusion of a small bronze rat that would've sat on a bench in the plaza.

After all, my editor said, the rat is the patron saint of Adams Morgan.

"It is, and there's nothing wrong with that," says the Adams Morgan-based artist Manon Cleary, whose varied and celebrated career has included 25 or 30 paintings depicting white rats.

Once upon a time, before she was mostly confined to her palatial, antique- and ephemera-stuffed apartment in the Beverly Court building on Columbia Road, Cleary used to sit on the stoop and observe the packs of rats that would crawl out from under the structure. She began painting rats in the '70s, after she included two white rats in a cover illustration she made for a 1973 issue of Potomac, the precursor to Washington Post Magazine—it was for a story about scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health experimenting on humans instead of rats. Around that time a friend gave her a rat as a birthday present; it was named Ramona, or Ramon. At first she thought the rat was female. “It had enormous testicles that I thought were breasts,” she says.

She's owned nine rats, one of which appeared with her on the cover of Washington City Paper in 2004. The story, by John Metcalfe, begins with this image:

Manon Cleary has a pet rat, Boo Boo. Cleary lets her play on her bed and rock-climb on her body. But today, Cleary had to lock Boo Boo up.

“She chewed through my tube,” says the 61-year-old artist, watching the red-eyed albino rampage around in her cage. “That’s OK,” she chides. “You deserve it.”

Cleary takes the four steps from Boo Boo’s box to her bed and sits down on it, legs crossed. She reaches over to the cannula stretching from the oxygen machine by the dresser and straps it around her head. Ever since her lungs gave out in 1999 from prolonged exposure to toxic fixatives and a since-discarded smoking habit, she’s been compiling a mental list of health hazards: moldy rooms, Comet cleanser, perfumed women in elevators. Now Boo Boo is on the list, too, for severing the plastic breathing tube on one of Cleary’s portable oxygen tanks.

“Hurray, kill Mommy!” deadpans Cleary.

When I met yesterday with Cleary, her husband F. Steven Kijek, and the photographer Tom Wolff, she was witty and animated. "We're all a little crazy here," she said. She showed me her current rats, Sable and Angel (the latter is white), as well as some rat-related memorabilia—like her rat shrine, her membership card from the Rat Fan Club, and several recent rat-related publications that have reprinted her work. There's Jonathan Burt's 2006 book Rat, a history of the creature that's part of Reaktion Books' "Animal" series and includes one of Cleary's rat paintings. Two more works appear in the introductory issue of The Rodent Reader from earlier this year, along with a profile of Cleary by the magazine's managing editor, Mil Scott. (Her rat works, and her works in general, have appeared in numerous other books and magazines.)

So while Cleary wasn't crazy about about James Simon's proposed sculpture, she was mostly irked by his rats, which look like "look like dinosaur embryos with tails," she wrote last week. Looking at his  installation of rat figures from Brazil, she says she isn't sure that he's ever even seen a rat.

Rats, Cleary says, don't deserve their stigma: They don't smell; they're quiet; they're friendly. And since owning her first rat—which, she told City Paper in 2004, died of "high cholesterol and no movement"—she's learned much about how to care for them. For one, she always owns two at a time, so they can keep each other company. The Rat Fan Club's founder, Debbie “The Rat Lady” Ducommun, even taught Cleary how to save the life of a rat that was choking by swinging it by its tail like a helicopter blade. Rats, Cleary says, have no gag reflex.

For this week's print Washington City Paper, I wrote about a proposed piece of public artwork, Bicycle Musician, that would've stood in the plaza at the northeast corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road in Adams Morgan. The work by Pittsburgh artist James Simon was derailed by a letter-writing campaign last fall—at least partially because its final proposal involved an exaggerated bronze rat that would've lurked on a bench in the plaza. Adams Morgan's rats are "one of our bigger problems in the neighborhood,” Denis James, the president of the Kalorama Citizens Association and a vocal opponent of Bicycle Man, told me earlier this week. On the other hand, the panel of neighborhood residents that recommended the inclusion of a rat envisioned it as a playful ode to Adams Morgan.

But I left out a little bit of rat-related Adams Morgan art history, which Manon Cleary pointed out to me in an e-mail last night. A celebrated painter and a longtime fixture of Washington's art scene, Cleary was the subject of a lengthy and excellent City Paper profile by John Metcalfe in July 2004. For the cover, Darrow Montgomery captured Cleary and her pet white rat, Boo Boo.

James Simon's Bicycle Musician rat

Cleary has owned rats and painted them; she's undoubtedly an expert. So she takes some exception to the rodents that James Simon depicts:

The only problem I have with his rat(s) is that he doesn't know their anatomy...............they don't have rows of teeth and if you open their mouth you will see they have fangs instead of bottom teeth (that look like top teeth  and two razor sharp teeth on top.  The Brazil rats are sort of offensively un-rat like.  Who knows, maybe the rats of Adams Morgan voted 'cause they were personally offended by how he portrayed them.

his rats in Brazil look like dinosaur embryos with tails.

Here's a PDF of Simon's final Bicycle Musician proposal (the rat is on page 6). Here's his rat installation from Brazil.

Top photo by Darrow Montgomery.

Jumbo Price: Simon’s sculpture (shown in an artist’s rendering) was too costly for some of its neighbors.

Ultimately, the rat didn’t cost Adams Morgan its quarter-million-dollar bicyclist. But it didn’t help.

The proposed 12-foot-high clay, concrete, and plaster statue—portraying a goateed man straddling a bicycle, strumming a ukulele, and carrying a bag spilling over with fruit, athletic balls, and, in some drafts, a chicken—would have been installed on the northeast corner of the intersection of 18th Street and Columbia Road NW. Bicycle Musician earned its final approval from the federally appointed Commission of Fine Arts on Sept. 17, following an almost yearlong process—one heavily criticized by opponents of the project—and attempts to bring a sculpture to this corner that began in 2002.

Nine days later, the sculpture was effectively killed. Chalk it up to a string of explosive messages from neighborhood residents on the Adams Morgan e-mail list, and dozens of letters sent to the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which would have funded and overseen the project. "Art is incredibly subjective as you know, and we want to ensure that the art in the plaza is reflective of the Adams Morgan community," DCCAH Executive Director Gloria Nauden wrote on the Adams Morgan e-mail discussion list. "At this time we have decided to table this project."

And now, the $200,000 that had been proposed to fund the project—and, according to artist James Simon, around $50–70,000 to cover revisions to the project that included benches and trees—will go to other art projects, perhaps in other neighborhoods. "The money that was proposed to fund the ‘Bicycle Man’ project at 18th and Columbia Road remained within [DCCAH]’s capital budget after the project did not move forward due to a lack of community support," writes Rachel Dickerson, the commission’s public art manager, in an e-mail. "The funds have since been applied towards other public art grant programs and commissioned projects that were ready for implementation this fiscal year."

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners Bryan Weaver and Mindy Moretti guess that DCCAH received about 40 or 50 letters last September complaining about the sculpture; one of the opponents, Kalorama Citizens Association President Denis James, declined to make an estimate. The complaints were severalfold: that the sculpture was a poor representation of the community, that its selection process hadn’t been inclusive, that it was an eyesore. And that among the plaster critters it would’ve arrayed around the plaza, there was a cartoonish, bulbous rat.

It was an incident reflective of both the difficulties the city has faced developing the intersection (it took the Department of Transportation the better part of the last decade to transform a right-hand turn lane into the plaza, which has gone on to host pop-op installations sponsored by HBO and the government of Colombia) as well as the tensions facing Adams Morgan. Weaver characterized it as a standoff between a relatively young and racially diverse panel selected by ANC1C and approved by DCCAH, and "this monolithic group that opposed it. They tended to be white and older." And for DCCAH, it’s not hard to read the affair as an embarrassment. Representatives of the commission declined to answer questions unless they were sent through e-mail. Asked whether DCCAH has plans for more artwork in the Adams Morgan plaza space, Dickerson wrote, "Not at this time." Asked how the debacle might affect DCCAH’s approach to art projects in the future, she replied, "We received a lot of feedback about this project and will continue to invite community feedback on all our projects."

Simon, a sculptor known for his large and exaggerated figures, who is currently creating a memorial for slain police officers in his native Pittsburgh, says he first found out that Bicycle Musician had been shelved through a reporter who called him for comment several days after he got the green light from the Commission of Fine Arts. Soon he spoke to DCCAH staffers: "The girls who run the public art program worked really hard. They really wanted to make it happen," says Simon. "They didn’t tell me very much. They told me it was tabled. Why it was tabled I don’t know. All public art projects have various degrees of opposition but that’s just the nature of the game."

Simon eventually hired a lawyer to help him recover some of his expenses, like graphic design and architectural fees. He says he received $12,000 in an out-of-court settlement. He doesn’t think he came out ahead, however: "When any artist gets accepted for a commission [like this], you have to clear your schedule for a year," says Simon, stressing that he was about to sign his contract for the commission when it was tabled. "Then it’s canceled right before you start. You can’t compensate for that."

James, who wrote an opinion piece on the sculpture for the newsletter of the Kalorama Citizens Association (but stresses that the group doesn’t necessarily share his view), wasn’t surprised to learn that the money would no longer be slated for a public sculpture in Adams Morgan. "That sounds kind of logical," he says. "I don’t think that it was a good use of public money," he adds. "I’d rather see $200,000 go to a better use than that." Part of his opposition, he says, has to do with the process, which he says was "secretive." He dismisses claims by Weaver and Moretti that the process—which included an online poll to determine the winning artwork and a well-advertised public meeting attended by about 50 people—was inclusive. "A hundred to 150 people did some sort of an online survey—there’s 17,000 people that live in Adams Morgan," he says. "When you’ve got only a couple hundred people responding, that’s not much of an effort. No matter how you want to defend it."

Weaver—who did not serve on the art panel but helped solicit applicants for it—says the ANC, following parameters set by DCCAH, wanted a group that was representative of the neighborhood and could offer professional and artistic insight. They contacted about 10 people, he says, six of whom initially ended up on the panel (A DCCAH commissioner was also aboard, and a final member joined sometime around last May following complaints that the members were too young). Moretti says that the panel held several public meetings during the selection process that were advertised on flyers and on the Adams Morgan list. The community panel considered the 148 portfolios—the largest group of applicants ever for a DCCAH project. It then narrowed its short list to five and then three applicants before putting the proposals to the public in an online poll. Bicycle Musician won. Both the panel and DCCAH approved the results. The artwork then moved to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which recommended several revisions before ultimately signing off on the sculpture.

"It’s frustrating," says Weaver, because opponents of Simon’s artwork "sent out e-mails about how horrible the process is and the horrible waste of money it was."

"At the time," he says, "my idea for the panel was to get people who…aren’t on the Adams Morgan Listserv, and try to bring those folks in to do something that all of them view as immensely positive. In the end it soured them on doing anything with local politics and neighborhood affairs."

And then there was the issue of the rat.

Simon’s original proposal, submitted last spring, didn’t include any rodents. "He had done an installation with rats in São Paolo, which is really cool," says Moretti, explaining how, on the panel’s suggestion, Simon inserted a rat that would have lurked on one of the benches in the installation. "Anybody who denies that there are rats in this neighborhood is just delusional. And so we thought it would be fun and a bit of an ode to the neighborhood to put a rat in it. But some people are a bit psychotic when it comes to the rat issue."

"It’s one of our bigger problems in the neighborhood," James says. He characterizes the neighborhood’s rats as a health menace, not something to be celebrated.

"The rat—that’s an easy revision," says Aniekan Udofia, a prolific muralist in D.C. who lives in Adams Morgan and served on the art panel. "If people send e-mails in saying we don’t like the rat but we like the concept of it all, that’s a different story. But when you say ‘I don’t like it at all and there’s a rat,’ then that means something else."

Brian DeBose, the communications director for Ward 1 councilmember Jim Graham, who was instrumental in securing funding for the sculpture project in its early days, characterized the series of events thusly: "They held a bunch of meetings in the community, six to seven meetings, a design was chosen and after the design was chosen the artist provided a mockup. There was a rat that was a part of it, and people who had not previously shown up and had no interest in it suddenly showed up and were outraged."

Moretti and Weaver don’t expect to see the funds return to Adams Morgan for another project, primarily because they don’t think the DCCAH wants to repeat such a battle. "Now the plaza’s going to sit open, unused," says Moretti, although, she and Weaver say, they’re eager to see more activities, like free concerts, there. Adds Moretti, "Adams Morgan’s just the coalition of No."

Another Random Joint – Kev Brown from Humble Monarch on Vimeo.

Word to Rakim, Adams Morgan weekend nightlife is a bit like a walk through hell, having your dome frozen and your eyeballs swelled. Double-Polo'd fratboys do battle over jumbo slices, too far gone girls puke in alleys and drunk dudes holler sloppily at your girlfriend with both hands. But hey, some people dig that scene.

Either way, the mellow boom bap of DC's own rapper/producer favorite Kev Brown (De La Soul, Low Budget) seems like an unlikely soundtrack for this madness. Yet this short clip from Kev's Random Joints LP was shot squarely in the heart of that chaos and some how manages make sense. The crowds look absolutely jolly in this video and even the for-no-reason firemen that sometimes clog traffic in front of Tom Toms are happy to see Kev. Adams Morgan should consider hiring directors HumbleMonarch to produce a fluff piece to promote the neighborhood.