Thursday, October 5th 6-8 PM
Washington Project for the Arts
2124 8th St NW
Which 30-year-old DC art space got its start by petitioning Mayor Walter Washington to take over a room filled with broken parking meters
Which nonprofit gallery dedicated to women in the arts opened its doors in a former doctor’s office located inside a leaky English basement apartment?
To find out, join us for the release of We Are SO Not Getting the Security Deposit Back; a Guide to Defunct Artist-Run Spaces (DC Edition). This zine is is the first of a series conceived by the NYC-based art blog Art F City, and co-published by the DC-based artist initiative Beltway Public Works with curator Blair Murphy. It documents spaces from the 1970s to the near present, and includes long-running entities like Market 5 Gallery and the Washington Women’s Art Center, and short-term projects such as FLEX, which ran for two days in an unrented ground-floor retail space. Publishing these stories makes visible the role of artist-run spaces in the cultural fabric of the city. As Paddy Johnson writes, projects like these, “made with love and tears” are “the ones least likely to be archived — and most precious to us.”
