Okay, fine, most weekends are the best weekends to see art in D.C. We’re incredibly lucky to live (or live near) a city that is filled with top shelf museums curating top notch exhibitions that educate and challenge and enrich your life. Any day is a good day to spend a few hours walking through the National Gallery of Art or the Phillips Collection or Hirshhorn or NMWA or the Renwick or the Portrait Gallery or the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the list just goes on.
The reason we’re throwing this little mini guide together, is because going through our inbox, we realized a bunch of amazing exhibitions and festivals are opening / closing this weekend. It’s one of those crazy weeks were everything is happening at the same time and it feels very exciting. Below, we have five solid gold art picks that are going to make your weekend a little brighter.
Future Sketches @ ARTECHOUSE is closing this Sunday
Look, it’s no secret that we’re big fans of ARTECHOUSE The exhibitions they bring to D.C. are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. The cutting technology and responsive art makes it all feel like the art gallery of the future. It also doesn’t hurt that this is one of the only galleries in D.C. churning out art themed cocktails in the middle of the exhibition. Future Sketches is an especially fascinating exhibition, with its wild interactive elements and deep AI technology. This weekend is your last chance to see the exhibition before it’s gone forever. Don’t let this one slip away.
Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico @ National Museum of Women in the Arts opens this Friday (AKA today)
From our review: A leg brace posed in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom, flocks of birds over a cemetery, a boombox carried through the mountains, delicate angel wings paired with a white silk dress, a crown of iguanas. Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, which is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) from February 28 to May 25, is a photography exhibition that celebrates rituals big and small, arcane and common. Fiestas in Chalma (a town sixty miles from Mexico City that is well known for its religious activities which combine indigenous culture and catholic dogma) garner the same attention and affection from Iturbide’s camera as a muxe (an indigenous transgender women from Juchitán) applying her makeup. Iturbide acknowledges the symbolism in everything, using shadows, reflections and isolated imagery to deepen the themes woven throughout her work.
Riffs and Relations @ The Phillips Collection opens this Saturday
From our review: How do you even begin to cover an exhibition as historically rich, layered and multifaceted as Riffs and Relations, the newest exhibition taking over the top floor at the Phillips Collection? It feels impossible to talk about any one piece, or any one room, when you can feel the conversations between the artists, both across walls and across decades. Riffs and Relations is so many things, a groundbreaking amalgamation of artists, a crash course in both African American and European art history and what feels like a never ending stream of artists referencing, critiquing and sustaining other artists. If you cannot already tell by the way I’m writing about it, Riffs and Relations is required viewing. You need to see and read and think about all of it.
Black to the Future Festival @ Anacostia Arts Center is open this Saturday
Black to the Future isn’t just an art festival, it’s also celebration of locally owned black businesses, an excuse to eat some good food, shop at a cool pop up market, dance to some sweet music and learn a little bit about health and wellness. Go to support local artists and stay for all of the other awesome things the Anacostia Arts Center has in store.
Degas at the Opéra @ National Gallery of Art opens this Sunday
This is a very specific media problem, but there were so many art previews this week, I had to miss Degas at the Opéra. I will be correcting that as soon as the exhibition opens to the public this Sunday. Featuring 100 pieces of Edgar Degas’s work, this is an exhibition that is going to teleport you out of D.C. Before you know it, you’ll be at the Paris Opéra, walking around in your finery, slipping backstage past the dancers and sneaking into the orchestra. This is the kind of art you can lose yourself in.
