To D.C. kids in the 1990s, graffiti artist Cool “Disco” Dan was a legend without a face. They didn’t know what he looked like, whether he was alive or dead, or why his s...

The good thing about photography is that it apprehends reality exactly. But that’s its limitation, too. So almost as soon as the medium was invented, photographers began tin...

From an early age, Andy Warhol collected Hollywood publicity stills. On the other side of the Atlantic, so did Robert Hunter, a British devotee of silent cinema. Hunter’s co...

What if you threw an inauguration and every president — dead ones included — came? There would be a lot of grousing (“My hair did NOT look like that”) and some hurt fe...

When Paul Singer died in 1997, he left a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey stuffed with history. Not his own: Singer, a psychiatrist, was a collector of ancient Chinese arti...

We all have days when we fail at multitasking. Michelangelo could relate. The Renaissance man — who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — left unchecked items on his...

Video artist Nam June Paik’s work is well-represented across Washington’s public art collections. His oversized “Electronic Superhighway” (1995-1996) — hundreds of t...

Ellsworth Kelly is a hard-edged man. The 89-year-old American abstractionist’s paintings feature hard geometric forms and stark single-color blocks. But Kelly took a more fl...

If you think the art in Xavier Veilhan’s Phillips Collection exhibition “IN(Balance)” — the sculptures, the mobiles, the paintings and the photo-based works, both abst...

In October, we passed an unsettling milestone: the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a terrifying 13 days in which President John F. Kennedy steered the nation off...

Is that a skull? Knitting and crocheting flaunt some serious attitude in “High Fiber: Women to Watch 2012,” a survey of work by seven textile artists from the U.S., Britai...

It took eight years, 200 commercial flights and 58 boat trips before ornithologist Edwin Scholes and photographer Tim Laman could say they’d made history. The pair are the f...

One day, someone is going to get smart and open a children’s museum called “Buttons You Can Push.” The setup will be one giant room with thousands of buttons, none of wh...

We all can’t stop by the White House to see its 54 decked-out trees this season. We can admire the next best thing, though, just around the corner: the tree in the main lobb...

There’s a lot to envy about James Bond, what with the gadgets and the suits and being allowed to drink on the job. Take a look at column B, though, where you’ve got a whol...