Fall is for Photos

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Sarah Osborne Bender

Preparator Tom Bunnell puts the finishing touches on the photo installation on the second floor. Photo: Sarah Osborne Bender

Beginning today, Curator Elsa Smithgall debuts a selection of recently acquired photographs outside the Rothko Room, in anticipation of citywide festival FotoWeekDC (Nov. 9-18). The works are by living artists and take viewers from the cool desert landscapes of John Divola to the magical library conjured by Lori Nix to the mysterious nocturnal landscape with red shoes by Astrid Kruse Jensen. These works accompany another group of photos in a gallery just around the corner, Picturing the Sublime: Photographs from the Joseph and Charlotte Lichtenberg Collection.

Picturing the Sublime

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Experiment Station

Prepare to be awed. Picturing the Sublime: Photographs from the Joseph and Charlotte Lichtenberg Collection is now open. Here’s just a taste, but be warned: these photos reveal much more when viewed up close. For a smaller show (eleven works in total), I’m surprised by the range in content—there’s everything from the raw and untouched beauty of Richard Misrach‘s deserts to Edward Burtynsky‘s landscapes, so altered by human activity that I almost feel guilty calling them beautiful. The exhibition is on view through January 13, 2013, and on November 15 exhibition curator Susan Behrends Frank discusses the photographers and their works in a Curator’s Perspective.

Amy Wike, Publicity and Marketing Coordinator

Entrance to the exhibition Picturing the Sublime

Photo: Amy Wike

Image of three photographs featured in the Picturing the Sublime exhibition

Left to right: (1) Lynn Davis, Iceberg XI, Disko Bay, Greenland, 2004 (2) Carleton Watkins, Lower Yosemite Fall, 418 Feet, 1865-66 (3) Richard Misrach, Battleground Point #5, 1999. Photo: Amy Wike

Give it a Shot

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Experiment Station

As part of Snapshot, we put together a couple of interactive projects to get visitors thinking about and experimenting with documenting the world around them through a creative lens like the artists in the exhibition. We’ve shared the results of our Home Movie Contest here on the blog.

Now it’s time to share the results of a second contest–Give it a Shot–which challenged participants to snap a photo inspired by one of the paintings in the exhibition and upload it for a chance to win a Nikon 1 camera. After receiving nearly 100 submissions (which you can peruse on Flickr) before the exhibition closed May 6, we drew a winner at random. The Nikon 1 is en route to Caroline Olsen of Chevy Chase, and you can check out her photo and its inspiration below. Washingtonian has put together this slideshow of some of the submissions which its editors found most original and compelling.

(left) Maurice Denis, Noële and Her Mother, 1896. Oil on canvas, 13 1/8 x 15 1/2 in. Private collection. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. (right) Caroline Olsen's photo, inspired by the Denis painting