While Crowds Are Away, Catch These Art Displays

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THE BEST TIME to check out art — if you're a resident of the District or its environs — is assuredly over the holidays. The day after that last holiday party, make it a point to spend some quality art-viewing time free from the teeming masses that usually crowd the area's museums and galleries. Here's an agenda of some exhibitions you shouldn't miss during the holiday lull.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART: Homer, Eakins, and Bellows — American Paintings 1870-1925. Easily the most crowded of area art institutions any other time of the year, the National Gallery is surely the first stop on the agenda of any resident hoping for spend some quality time with classic art works. From the permanent collection comes this show of American masters, which closes Dec. 31. Winslow Homer's 1877 painting Autumn, at right, is exactly the sort of work that demands close reading that the NGA rarely affords: The autumnal theme seems like a just-plausible excuse for the artist to break out with the abstract energy of the fall leaves in the piece.

» National Gallery of Art, Constitution Avenue and 4th Street NW; 202-737-4215; closed Jan. 1. (Archives-Navy Mem'l)

RENWICK GALLERY: Wendell Castle's Ghost Clock. This writer cannot recall ever seeing this piece, even during the off season, without another gawker or two in the room. That's fine, though — the eerie sculpture tends to hush its audience. The piece is, of course, not an object draped in cloth, but rather carved from bleached and laminated mahogany. Fans of trompe l'oeil chicanery won't find a better example from the genre in the city.

» Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street NW, 202-633-2850 (Farragut West)

CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART: Wild Choir — Cinematic Portraits by Jeremy Blake. The tragic biography of Jeremy Blake — who, after the suicide of his collaborator and partner, Theresa Duncan, apparently took his own life by walking into the Atlantic Ocean — has all but outpaced the artist's work itself as a draw to his solo museum show. The exhibit, curated by former Corc-er Jonathan Binstock, represents a sort of last testament by the artist, if only by circumstance. Viewers may not find many clues about the nature of his death in his neon, elastic, abstract video portraits based on subject ranging from fashion icons to rock n' roll — but they will find the last complete statement, so to speak, that the video artist made. Sodium Fox (2005) is pictured at left.

» Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW, 202-639-1700; closed Tuesdays and Jan. 1 (Farragut West)

KREEGER MUSEUM: Tucked away among the estates of Foxhall Road, the Kreeger Museum is a jewel — a small but distinguished collection in a space by Philip Johnson that couldn't possibly fit it any better. Although the Kreeger will be showing works that inspired Johnson — including several pieces the architect owned — in the spring, currently there's no special exhibition. Enjoy a traffic-free drive through Georgetown along the way to the museum, then linger over works by Elmer Bischoff and David Park — both West Coast painters who don't get a lot of play here in D.C.

» Kreeger Museum, 2401 Foxhall Road NW, 202-338-3552; Note: The museum will be closed Dec. 31 and Jan. 1; Reservations are required for weekday visits and tours but not on Saturdays.

ARLINGTON ARTS CENTER: Art Enables. We're an unabashed fan of so-called outsider art. As an organization that supports mentally disabled artists, Art Enables shows area painters whose work ranges from abstraction to portraiture to landscapes. Much of the work has a local focus: Consider paintings by Charles Meissner, whose works document his life as well as changes in and around D.C. His self-referential art features funny and occasionally disarming texts — such as his observation, juxtaposed over the sky of a landscape painting, that the artist's mother thinks that Art Enables is a better environment for the artist than working at the Dairy Queen in Germantown, pictured above.

If outsider art isn't to your taste, there's a mess of other shows going on at the gallery, including a group show ("Hope and Fear") of eight artists and three individual solo shows by Young Kim, Joe Mannino, and Jennifer Levonian.

» Arlington Arts Center, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington; 703-248-6800; Open Dec. 26-Dec. 29, noon-5 p.m.; Closed Dec. 31-Jan. 1; Regular hours starting Jan. 2, open Tuesday through Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (Virginia Square)