Art losing its toehold in downtown Washington

Thirty years ago, Washington’s old downtown was the center of the city’s visual arts scene. Galleries, studios and not-always-legal artists’ apartments filled older buildings, most awaiting redevelopment. Cheap rents and hangouts such as d.c. space and the original 9:30 Club drew artists and fellow travelers (notably musicians) to the neighborhood.

Today, in the redeveloped downtown, arts spaces are mandated by zoning, yet the arts scene is hard to find. Nearly a dozen exhibition spaces populate the area bounded by Fourth and 15th streets and Pennsylvania and New York avenues, but most don’t have access to the street and aren’t clearly identifiable from outside. They are in lobbies or tucked away in office building interiors. To visit some you have to sign in at security desks.

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‘Site Aperture’ opening reception at Flashpoint Gallery. Installation view of Margaret Boozer's ‘Line Drawing’ and Mia Feuer's ‘Rebirth.’

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Laris Karklis

The Washington Post

A guide to the downtown arts district.

The spaces “are quasi-public,” says gallery owner George Hemphill, who organizes shows at Carroll Square, 975 F St. NW. “Well, they are public. But you have to be pretty motivated to go to them in most cases.”

Not only is the scene hidden to passersby, but it makes for friction between the arts community and property managers managing expensive real estate.

Some property managers view the arts requirement as “a poison pill,” says Zenith Gallery owner Margery Goldberg, who programs art for the lobby at 1111 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

And some arts programmers feel their selections are encumbered by conservative office environments. “The restrictions are so enormous, of what you can’t do, that by the time you’re done can’t doing, you don’t know what to do,” says Goldberg.

The D.C. government’s downtown arts requirements were “all very, very well-intentioned,” she adds. “You know what they say about good intentions.”

Location, location, location

When the area’s redevelopment as a “living downtown” was envisioned in the 1970s and ’80s, part of the concept was to have art galleries buttress the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery (mostly along Seventh Street) and a “theater spine” (on or near E Street). These goals were advanced by the District’s Office of Planning, as well as the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp., a federal agency that closed in 1996.

The city has used various methods to encourage arts uses, says Anne Corbett, executive director of the Cultural Development Corp., a nonprofit group that was created to find space for artists and that runs the Gallery at Flashpoint at 916 G St. NW.

Flashpoint exists because the city owned the building and required an arts use when it sold it. Carroll Square — which hosts law, government and investment offices, but also the Caos on F gallery and subsidized artists’ studios — was created by a historic preservation deal. And some of the earliest arts tenants in new or redeveloped buildings were required by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp.

In the mid-’90s, the city implemented zoning to require arts, part of the plan for the Downtown Development District. “A lot of establishments are a result of the zoning,” Corbett says. “They’re just not galleries,” but also theaters.