The Other Washington
I spent a few days in Washington, D.C., last week, in part to attend a national arts conference. At large-scale arts conferences actual art is difficult to come by, and midway through the day I started to feel like I was in a roomful of people talking on and on about ice cream in every flavor with fabulous toppings but there was no sundae buffet waiting for me once I left. So I stayed an extra day to take in some art and revisit some of the places I've been going to since I was a kid.
My first memory of D.C. is rather vague; with seven of us in the family, we spent most of our time corralling one another and arguing about what to see. As teenagers, my twin brother and I spent a week there geeking out on our respective obsessions of history and art. Then, in 1997, I spent a summer there as one of thousands of eager interns more than happy to fetch coffee and make copies. My overall memory of all these times is of forever being mashed in a crowd of tourists, not just from around the U.S. but from all over the world. Being in the Metro station; waiting in lines for the various behemoth museums and institutions; wilting in the heat along the wide expanse of the Mall; lining up for Cokes and ice cream from the sidewalk vendors... crowds of impatient tourists sweating like pigs and yelling at their kids have always been part of the experience of seeing our nation's historic and cultural treasures.
Knowing I had a short amount of time to try to see a lot, I was ready to muscle my way through throngs of museumgoers, so when I popped out of the Metro and onto the Mall I was completely unprepared to see... nobody. No hordes of Boy Scouts being marched around by uptight troop leaders. No groups of Christian kids in matching tie-dyed T-shirts privately wondering about the existence of dinosaurs. No high-school debate teams in khakis and white button-down shirts earnestly taking notes and dreaming of the presidency. Nobody.
After navigating both the Hirshhorn and the National Gallery fairly easily, I hightailed it to the Library of Congress and was oddly disappointed to be able to look at whatever I wanted, however long I wanted. Part of the experience is in that mash of people competing to glimpse an artifact or work of art previously seen only in books. Something is truly awry when, at the height of tourist season, our nation's capital is virtually empty.
I was relieved when one of my favorite museum moments finally happened--hearing a parent give an absurd interpretation of art to her kids. At a small exhibition of Diego Rivera's cubist period paintings, I overheard a mother telling her two bored daughters, "Okay, this is a Cuban artist who painted in the '30s and '40s so this work is art deco. Okay. Seen enough?" I guess we have.
