How did you spend your summer vacation? Minimalist composer Richard Chartier spent his in the basement of the Museum of American History. For three months, starting in June, Chartier recorded the "Grand Tonometer," a four-octave instrument built by German physicist Rudolf Koenig from 1870 to1875. Recording each of the instrument's 660 tuning forks from strike [...]
Good morning, D.C.! It looks as if Virgin FreeFest was worth whatever you did or didn't pay for it: Most of yesterday's news was roundup upon recap upon review of Ludamalkmuganza.
But, fortunately, TBD also recapped the most awesome nerd summit of the decade, "By Any Other Name: An Evening of Shakespeare in Klingon." The performance [...]
Louise Bourgeois, the subject of a major retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum last year, died of a heart attack yesterday in New York at the age of 98. She was best known for her deeply psychological sculptures inspired by childhood memories, sexuality and relationships. Her most famous works are a series of giant bronze spiders [...]
By his biography, John Gerrard would not be the most obvious artist to zero in on America’s desolate, rural terrain, but somehow the Dublin-born, Vienna-residing artist became fascinated with the horizontal, largely featureless landscapes of the great American interior. In a three-work exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gerrard offers views of three [...]
Washington, D.C., may have been her home, but often, sculptor Anne Truitt's mind was somewhere far away. As she worked, she lost herself in childhood memories, but her pillarlike sculptures stood tall like buoys, allowing her to navigate through adulthood's choppy waters. Staid and strong, they made tangible her fraught past in order for her [...]
2009 was the year that Washington's art museums decided they wanted to become relevant, topical, and just plain popular, writes critic Jeffry Cudlin in our Arts in Review issue. To judge by the exhibits, however, it was also a year prizing insular artists who kept a distance from larger trends. Cudlin writes:
At the Phillips in [...]
If Hirshhorn Museum Director Richard Koshalek gets his way—and it seems he will—then beginning in 2011 the National Mall will get a pretty striking makeover. Well, at least for two months a year.
News of the plan to install a giant bubble atop the Hirshhorn—the inflatable, removable, 145-foot structure would snake through the museum's central courtyard—broke [...]
Hello! Hirshhorn Director Richard Koshalek wants to put a giant bubble on top of the museum. Wuh?
Writing in the New York Times, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff details a plan for a blue, 145-foot inflatable structure (he describes it as a multipurpose meeting hall) that would bloom from the museums's central courtyard twice a year and [...]
Artist Yinka Shonibare MBE tolerated a discussion at the Hirshhorn last night with Karen Milbourne, a curator at the National Museum of African Art, but the effort strained him. To be fair, it must be terribly frustrating to spend your career making art that defies the stereotype of "African Artist," only to be asked all [...]
