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SATURDAY: Little engineers and engineers-to-be will pour through the doors of the National Building Museum on Saturday for the fun and frolics of the museum's annual Engineering Family Day. Plenty of activities keep wee hands busy while teaching young and grown-up alike about such principles as thermodynamics, aerodynamics and something we don't understand but that involves balloons. And who doesn't like balloons?
» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; Sat., Feb. 20, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., $5 suggested donation; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)
SATURDAY: The youngest member of the Little Rock Nine, Carlotta Walls LaNier, will recount her experiences as a 14-year-old public school integration pioneer at the Newseum. She'll be joined by The Washington Post's Lisa Frazier Page, with whom she co-wrote her memoir, "A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School."
Although most of the Little Rock Nine stayed out of the limelight following high school, LaNier founded a successful real estate company and become an education and civil rights advocate. She received the Congressional Gold Medal (the nation's highest civilian honor) from Bill Clinton in 1999. Clinton also contributed the book's forward.
In addition to signing copies of the book, LaNier and Page will discuss the modern media's coverage of race and diversity.
» Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW; Sat., Oct. 3, 2:30 p.m, free; 888-639-7386, Newseum.org. (Judiciary Square)
Written by Express' Anne Polsky
Photo courtesy Ballantine
PHOTOGRAPHER JONAS BENDIKSEN says that you can't speak in generalities about the four urban slums he's lived in and documented since 2005.
But there is one striking generality you find in his immersive new show about slum life, "The Places We Live," at the National Building Museum: From Nairobi to Mumbai to Jakarta, corrugated sheet metal is a building material of first resort among slum dwellers. In Bendiksen's landscapes, metal roofs heave and jam together to the horizon, cresting like waves of a dull, rusted ocean.
People who live in slums are resourceful — the filth around them would seem unfathomable if someone were not out there fathoming it, beneath pirated power lines, in search of wire or plastic to turn into currency.
GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS look back as well as forward this fall with a slew of shows that focus on history -- James Osher's photographs, a look at industrialization in Japan, a visit from China's most famous army. There's even a jaw-dropping Hirshhorn exhibition that's been open for a while but won't be around forever.
William T. Wiley: Multitasker
Contemporary American artist William T. Wiley does it all, from drawing to sculpture to film. This retrospective features 88 of his works from the 1960s and on and takes a look at Wiley's ideas on war, global warming, racial tensions, pollution and practically every other problem facing the world today. Educational -- yes. Depressing -- possibly.
» Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1661 Pennsylvania Ave. NW; opens Oct. 2, through Jan. 24, free; 202-633-2850, americanart.si.edu. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)
ALMOST EVERYBODY has forgotten part of West Madison Street in Chicago except Jesus, the congregation of the Bibleway John 14:6 Ministry and the photographer Camilo José Vergara.
You likely won't find a more tenacious man with a camera than Vergara, who has been shooting the leftovers of American cities for 30 years. Over that time, he's turned special attention to the little city churches that fill up old shops and houses and, if nothing else, he's got a buried message for the mainline faiths, where collections are going dry: We're over here.
In a new show, "Storefront Churches: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara," at the National Building Museum, Vergara says he wants to catch these churches in an even light, but he's done a lot more. In more than 80 framed prints and 100 slides, his focus on architecture has taken him to faith at its most provisional behind signs lettered by hand to warn or uplift, ecstatic murals with often fierce-looking depictions of Christ (including one of "The Real Last Supper," in which Jesus and his boys are black), stenciled crosses and crucifixes and even a mail-order steeple to call the wayward to God. In these repurpose-driven lives, a former Honda dealership, an old furniture store and a Taco Bell each converts to an ark equally well.
Continue Reading "Heavenly Lights: Camilo Jose Vergara's Storefront Churches" »
RICHARD ROSS HAS photographed some of the world's most beautiful spaces, has made light a tangible subject, has peered into the faces of soldiers and gang members, and into the stolid emptiness of bomb shelters. This eclectic artist with the searching mind now turns his lens on "The Architecture of Authority," still, sterile or imposing places in which we the people are at a disadvantage, whether it's a Montessori school, Secret Service headquarters or even, wittily, an art gallery. The show is on display at the National Building Museum through Aug. 16.
» EXPRESS: How did you come to the subject?
» ROSS: I have no idea. It's sort of like, ideas fall into place at some point in your life. I studied international relations and political science, and I didn't want to do another series of beautiful photographs that were going to seduce.
» EXPRESS: What tripped the trigger?
» ROSS: I started out with going to a confessional in Santa Barbara and seeing the size of it, and then through a friend going down and looking at the robbery homicide interview room at Parker Center [the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters] and I realized the two were exactly the same size. ... It's like, "Let's get in this very intimate space and you tell me a secret and I'll tell you a secret, and that will make it all better."
Continue Reading "The Art of The State: Richard Ross' 'The Architecture of Authority'" »
PULL IN AT any designated scenic overlook in this country, and if there are facilities, they probably stink like summer camp and look like Siberian prison toilets.
It needn't be this way. As showcased in "Detour: Architecture and Design Along 18 National Tourist Routes in Norway," an exhibition at the National Building Museum, structures that frame the public's experience of nature can themselves be inspirational.
Architecture shows are always dependent on video (shipping fees being a real bear), and the most ingenious part of the "Detour" installation is an early 1900s-style viewing enclosure that screens footage of completed projects. Visitors peer into brass openings to see bridges, platforms and bird-watching blinds in use. Below the screen runs a sculpted map of Norway outfitted with LEDs that light up to indicate where each project is sited.
THESE PEOPLE MUST be deranged. They have cities where they water the trees with melted snow or light big grass fires to feed the soil. They warm their water underground, charge their batteries with the sun, plant weeds on the roof and some prefer wind power to coal. And they call this natural?
At the National Building Museum, "Green Community" will leave you thinking — hoping, maybe — that humans aren't such compulsive vandals after all. The notion of greenness comes up a notch from vegan shoes and Tom of Maine toothpaste to whole societies apparently hellbent on better housekeeping. There's Greensburg, Kan., redressing last year's killer tornado with energy-efficient new buildings and rain-absorbing landscape; little Stella, Mo., which with just 180-odd people has established, of all things, a town growth boundary; and our very own Arlington, where in 20 years, a Metro line has helped turn empty asphalt steppes into a new civilization.
THE NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM expands its scope to examine not just buildings, but also the "world between our buildings" — parks, gardens, sidewalks and so on.
A solar farm in Denmark and geothermal pipelines in Iceland are just two of the locales in this exhibit — other communities featured include Maui; Mendoza, Argentina; Greensburg, Kan.; and D.C. green initiatives.
» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; Oct. 23, 2008-Oct. 25, 2009; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)
Photo courtesy of National Building Museum
JUST IN TIME for Halloween comes Ghost Tours at one of the capital's creepier buildings, the National Building Museum. By day, it's one of D.C.'s most beautiful structures, but at night, the museum is inhabited by the ghost of John Wilkes Booth co-conspirator Mary Surratt (aka your tour guide) and plenty of other ghoulies.
» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; through Nov. 23, 8-9 p.m.,$18; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)
Written by Express contributor Nathan Martin
Addison Road