When Pae White and Virgil Marti met back in 1990, the artists' program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture was proving to be something of a letdown. They decided to make their own fun.

"We kind of created this fiction around a room that had a lot of expectation of community," White explains of the common area where students were expected to gather. "It was a kind of melancholic place." So she and Marti assembled a semi-regular publication highlighting the creative bonhomie that just wasn't happening off the page.

Friday, at the Hirshhorn, the artists' first collaboration since that summer will again strive for a communal space. This time they're taking charge from the ground up. Strewn throughout the lobby will be White's white foam-rubber couches, carved Thanksgiving-style with an electric knife. Their upholstery will be digitally rendered cotton tapestries: tinfoil run through a desktop scanner, a pink page from the Financial Times, a collage of newspaper headlines and images.

Curtains of fake-gilt cast bones by Marti will stretch to the ceiling, illuminated by his resin chandeliers of antlers and flowers. White's colorful lattice decals - abstracted from a dragonfly wing - will line the inner window-wall.

Over the past few years, the Hirshhorn has endeavored to make itself more inviting, whether by staging "Directions" shows in the lobby, as in the cases of Dan Steinhilber and Jim Lambie, or by hosting late-night extravaganzas - a '60s-style light show for "Visual Music," a 24-hour marathon for the Douglas Gordon retrospective.

The new traditions continue Friday, March 9, with an "After Hours" event that features a 9 p.m. Q&A with White and Marti and an 11 p.m. tour of "Refract, Reflect, Project" with curator Anne Ellegood. All evening, patrons of the cash bar can help themselves to do-it-yourself Lite-Brite art and the energetic sounds of DJ Ian Svenonius, former leader of the Make-Up and -remember, ladies? - once the Sassiest Boy in America.

--Glenn Dixon (Express. March 8, 2007)