Weekly Art Lens by Beth Shook

Prince Of Petworth June 7, 2011 at 11:00am

PM @ the TM: Urban Picnic
The Textile Museum is staying open late this Thursday to co-host an “Urban Picnic” garden party with The Pink Line Project. The evening will include lawn games, music, drinks and a pop-up farmers’ market. Galleries will remain open for attendees to tour the ongoing exhibition Green: the Color and the Cause, which features an impressive array of green textiles, fabric sculptures and installations that explore natural resources and their repurposing (examples here). Just hope the 97-degree high for Thursday is an overstatement.
Where: The Textile Museum (map)
When: June 9 from 6 to 9 p.m.
How Much: $10

Wavelengths
Curated by microWave project, a local duo focused on promoting emerging installation artists, the latest exhibition at Honfleur appears pretty innocuous on paper — its theme is literally the word “wavelength.” But the four participating artists, Gretchen Schermerhorn, Jessica Braiterman, Alexandra Zealand, and Yasmin Spiro, employ their own artistic vocabulary to depart just enough from the subject to create a set of work that is both fresh and recognizable.
Where: Honfleur Gallery (map)
When: June 10 to July 22. Opening reception on June 10 from 7 to 9 p.m.
How Much: Free.

Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border
If there is one summer exhibition I’ve been looking forward to, it’s this one. Executed during his Blaue Reiter period, Painting with White Border of 1913 marked an important step in Wassily Kandinsky’s progression toward total abstract painting. This new exhibition at the Phillips Collection examines the artist’s painstaking creative process as illustrated by 12 preparatory works, other paintings from that period and an extensive conservation study of the final product. The study is the result of a recent collaboration between the Guggenheim Museum, which owns White Border and the Phillips, which owns a related oil sketch. The project promises to raise interesting questions about both Kandinsky’s artistic evolution and the ethics of conservation.
Where: The Phillips Collection (map)
When: June 11 to Sept. 4. Symposium on June 11 featuring scholars, conservators and artists Frank Stella and Leo Villareal (of National Gallery concourse light-installation fame).
How Much: $12 for adults; $10 for students and seniors.

Continues after the jump.

Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series
If Kandinsky pioneered abstraction in painting, Frank Stella and his contemporaries were some of the first to explore its outer limits. Though he has since departed from his hard-edge, geometric compositions of the 1950s and ’60s, Stella’s recent work continues to blur the lines between painting and sculpture, music and visual art. This summer the Phillips presents the artist’s Scarlatti K Series, a set of eight multicolored, blossoming sculptures in lightweight resin and stainless steel that were inspired by the sonatas of 18th-century Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti.
Where: The Phillips Collection (map)
When: June 11 to Sept. 4.
How Much: $12 for adults; $10 for students and seniors.

Between the Lines – Coming Home – All That Glitters
Three solo shows now on view at Conner Contemporary explore symbols of sexual identity. Joe Ovelman recontextualizes and resizes objects once used to facilitate anonymous sex, going so far as to render some unrecognizable, while Jeremy Kost portrays drag queens and other scenes of urban nightlife in Polaroids and cibachrome prints. Geoffrey Aldridge’s video art both exalts the disco ball as an icon of gay culture and tackles the friction between gay nightlife and the day-to-day. This is Aldridge’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Where: Conner Contemporary (map)
When: Until July 2.
How Much: Free.

Short list: The Kids Are Alright and New Loops at Civilian Art Projects; Evan Reed: Traveling Past Proun at Project 4 Gallery; “All for All: Collaborative Channeling with Nam June Paik” at the National Gallery of Art; DOCUMENTS: alternative guide to dc underground at Vivid Solutions.