COVER STORY

One year ago this week, D.C. shut down. At first it was voluntary; within the space of days, it was mandatory. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In the minds of most people, coronavirus went from being an ambient threat to a clear and present danger. Music venues, museums, movie theaters, and performing arts spaces shut down for the safety of the public. While we hoped closures would only last a matter of weeks, or maybe months, there were no guarantees that the organizations that had to cancel their in-person events could survive the financial hit. Some didn’t. There are legitimate reasons to be optimistic about 2021, tempered by the fact that emotionally, physically, and financially, we’ve got a long road back to “normal.” We’ll keep reporting on that road.

Our State of the Arts guides, published in the spring and fall, usually list film, music, comedy, museum, books, dance, and performance events scheduled for that season, with a host of recommendations from our critics to help you plan your outings. Our last one was published in February 2020, and almost nothing included in it came to pass. Though many organizations are now offering a slate of robust programming, both virtually and in person, and we’re building our online events calendar back out, a typical guide isn’t possible right now.

Instead, we’ve taken a different approach. The six stories in our cover package all check in on a specific segment of D.C.’s art scene, one year after the first lockdown. Inside, you’ll learn how comedy shows popped up in alleys and backyards, how an all-volunteer small press published—and sold—an anthology remotely, and how a performance artist is adapting his practice now that he can’t capture the attention of a crowd. We also check in on an unconventional music venue and arts space, how local theaters are engaging filmgoers, and how one group took art installations mobile and outdoors. Together, they speak to how the industry as a whole has handled the pandemic, and to how it’s recovering. —Emma Sarappo

By City Paper Contributors · Illustration by Maddie Goldstein

Staying Rooted

The Takoma arts venue and DIY space Rhizome DC has managed to host workshops, art exhibitions, and even concerts over the last year.

By Dora Segall

Contributing Writer It’s Jan. 14, 2021, and Rhizome DC is hosting a virtual event called “Mindful Listening in Isolated Times.” Molly Jones, a Chicagobased improviser and composer, has been practicing sound-based meditation for the past 11 months and wants to share the experience with others.

“Unlike a lot of Zoom meetings, I would invite you, if you’re comfortable, to turn on your microphone,” Jones says. “We’re trying to perceive the electronic space we’re in together as an extension of our physical space.” She leads a listening-focused meditation, and speaker view flicks to various screens as the clanking of dishes or a smattering of conversation cuts through the silence.

Jones’ workshop, from her effort to foster a sense of community online to her lack of previous experience as a mindful listening facilitator, encapsulates the work Rhizome DC, a nonprofit community arts space in Takoma, has been doing this past year. Before March 2020, Rhizome was largely a music venue that hosted several shows per week. But since the pandemic’s start, music venues around D.C., from Black Cat to The Anthem, have hosted few, if any, events because of social distancing mandates. Some, including U Street Music Hall, have closed permanently. Throughout this devastation, Rhizome has remained active by hosting regular virtual workshops, ranging from a “puppet lab” to a “dream cafe,” as well as some outdoor concerts and a few socially distanced visual exhibitions. Layne Garrett, Rhizome’s program director, attributes the organization’s success relative to traditional music venues, in part, to its diverse programming pre-pandemic.

“Workshops and other educational programs have happened all along, but they have made up a bigger share of our online programming,” he says. “It’s a more natural fit online than trying to re-create the experience of live music or other types of performance. … It seemed like the most fertile ground to focus on.”

Since opening in 2016, Rhizome has presented visual art exhibitions, music-making workshops, and pretty much any other arts-related activity imaginable in addition to live performances. The organization’s mission helps to explain its eclectic programming. According to its website, Rhizome is “exploring new approaches to grassroots community education which seek to blur the lines between amateur and professional, teacher and student, and which free learning from rigid models of instruction and explication.”

Rhizome schedules and runs its events through volunteer-based leadership—the organization is run by seven board members, and Garrett is the only one receiving pay. The organization covers its rent, event costs, and Garrett’s salary with donations and occasional grants. Despite the limitations of a non-professional staff, not having a slew of employees on payroll has allowed Rhizome to remain active during the pandemic.

The organization’s focus on grassroots and non-hierarchical education shines through its current programming, perhaps even more so than it did when Rhizome focused on live music. In addition to

online workshops, the space has offered modified visual art exhibitions. In October, art educator and curator Paula Martinez put on a show called Água Parada (Portuguese for stagnant water) on Rhizome’s top floor.

“I [originally] had an idea for a show … called Água Viva … about this feeling that I have, that usually comes in like January or February, [of missing] the feeling of being sweaty in the summer,” Martinez says. When the pandemic reached D.C., she “thought it needed to be tweaked a little bit. I couldn’t make a show as if this

summer was just the same as all the other summers I’ve had.”

The pandemic’s impact on her interactions with gallery visitors resonated with Martinez: Rhizome allowed only one group into the building at a time, so she ended up giving each one a personal tour of the exhibition.

“I thought that was a really positive experience, where I built a show and then was able to learn more about the show as I talked

to people about how they perceived it,” she says.“If I wasn’t doing this exhibition during COVID, I wouldn’t have been able to get that kind of experience.”

Despite its temporary shift away from music, Rhizome has managed to host more concerts than most local venues this past year: In the fall, it hosted a number of outdoor concerts on the building’s

Rhizome DC lawn. Luke Stewart, a board member since 2020 and a nationally renowned bassist, even performed at two concerts in September and October.

“I think performing outdoors is always a fun experience, and I think we’re kind of normalized at this point to people wearing masks and being socially distanced,” he says. “If anything, it felt special because I could feel the need for it. People were really excited, on a level that hasn’t been experienced ... to witness live music, so the connection with [the audience was] that much deeper, perhaps.”

ColinWhite, a Riggs Park resident, agreed. On Nov. 21, he went to a concert featuring local bands RosieCima&WhatSheDreamed and Lightmare, his first since the pandemic reached D.C.

“To be able to just appreciate and enjoy music in that kind of communal setting with other people, where you take it for granted for your entire life and then it’s gone, it was really, really impactful,” he says. He added that he was impressed by Rhizome’s social distancing measures. “It was just a really well put-on event,” he says. “You made the reservations ahead of time, everything was very much social-distanced, everybody was masked up, [and] it was outside, so I felt really safe.”

Though Rhizome stopped putting on outdoor shows as it got colder, the board plans to begin offering them once more as the weather warms up.

“I’m looking forward to picking [it] back up again in the spring, assuming that COVID numbers drop again,” Garrett says. “They have to drop sometime, right?”

And though the pandemic did not deal as harsh a blow to Rhizome as it did other arts spaces, Rhizome continues to worry about its future—the board learned in August of a proposal to develop affordable housing that may displace it.

“We definitely have months to be there, but exactly how many months is up in the air,” Garrett says. The board is actively looking for a new space and hopes to find one that will allow them to stay in Takoma and continue putting on outdoor events.

If Rhizome’s ability to adapt during the pandemic is any indication, a move is unlikely to prevent the organization from continuing to find a home for nontraditional arts programming in D.C.

“We have a couple hundred monthly supporters who have stuck with us. Artists haven’t disappeared. People’s need for community and for connection and for higher-level interactions with ideas and experiences outside the realm of the mundane day to day—it’s all still there,” Garrett says. “We’re just doing our small bit to make things happen, to provide those opportunities.”

Mapping a Course

Maps Glover is a performance artist who wasn’t able to perform because of the coronavirus. Here’s what he did instead.

By Michael Loria

Contributing Writer “The rush of performing is pretty unmatched,”Maps Glover says. “That vibration of you and the audience connecting on that unspoken level is an unmatched feeling, and I miss it tremendously.”

Glover, a performance and conceptual artist originally from Charles County, Maryland, has a slight build and an easy smile. Before the pandemic, he was one of D.C.’s leading emerging artists, known mostly for his performance work around police brutality, which became a dominant theme in his practice in 2017. This time last year, he even had plans to work in Asia. He’s reluctant to go into detail, but the pandemic put that, and most other arts events, on hold. Museums closed, galleries closed, and artists working in different media were forced to rethink their practices. The lockdown cut into Glover’s work, and he slowed down. But in isolation, he returned home and discovered new layers in his artistic practice, even if he still misses the in-person connections of performing.

Over the last five years, Glover built his work around in-person encounters. His last exhibition and public performance, Maps Glover: Save the Seed, took place in the fall of 2019 at Culture House DC in Southwest. Along with a performance piece, “Jump for the Life,” he showed paintings and made the space his own by painting the walls and suspending works from the ceiling. Seeds are a trope in Glover’s work; they refer to development of community, of intention, or of Black artists like himself. “The future of the art world is Black,” reads a T-shirt on his website.

“Maps was one of the more established emerging artists,” says Save the Seed curator and art adviser Andrew Jacobson. Jacobson describes it as “more of an experiential show,” he says, “as opposed to a typical gallery setting, which is dry, you have an opening, and passed food and wine and white walls.”

For Save the Seed, Glover re-created “Jump for the Life,” a work he developed in collaboration with photographer Timoteo Murphy. In the original performance, Glover spent 24 hours visiting and jumping at sites throughout D.C. chosen by Murphy based on their significance in his own life. Glover jumped in honor of victims of police brutality in the U.S., and Murphy documented each leap. In “Jump 31,” Glover is well off the ground with toes pointed down and his neck arched back. In another, his legs are bent, his knees nearly touching his chest, as his arms splay out to each side. Physical stress often plays a role in Glover’s practice. “You give a day, they gave their life,” Glover says.

In a 2019 interview with the Washington Informer, Glover described choosing to jump as a celebration of the victim’s presence. “I wanted to create an image that felt as if their souls were being released out the body right before they passed,” he said at the time. At Save the Seed, Glover jumped 655 times—the total number of people killed that year by police when he first conceived of the artwork in August 2019. By the end of 2019, there were over 1,000 victims, according to the Mapping Police Violence database.

Glover became known in the D.C. arts community for works like “Jump for the Life,” but he only incorporated performance into his practice in 2016, when he had a residency at Latela Curatorialin Brookland. The work was called “Maps in a Box,” and he performed by necessity more than anything. “I didn’t have access to any of the resources that I typically use to make art,” he says, “and all I had was my body.” Glover created a “tattered box” from canvas, plastic, and tape. Passersby looked in and saw Glover seated inside. This was after the nonprofit arts space Union Arts closed, and Glover saw how artists around him had no space to show work or even work in. “Knowing I had nothing to offer in terms of space or money,” he says, “I offered my body as an example of creating regardless of space, just standing up for art.”

Inside the box, Glover realized the physicality of performing connected him to the work. “How can you be more focused on an issue you’re talking about than creating the issue and putting it on your body?” he says. Viewers also engaged with him differently. “It goes from people saying with the painting ‘That’s really nice, those colors are really beautiful,’ to ‘I just sat there and I watched you for 30 minutes and I was brought to tears.’” The live component made it more compelling. “People can see themselves in the performance quicker than they can see themselves in a painting,” he says.

“Maps in a Box” was a protest, according to Glover. “It was me feeling so compelled to do something to be aligned with the community,” he says, “to show my support.” It led to work like “Jump,” and social solidarity became central in his practice. But in lockdown, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained national attention after the killing of George Floyd and people grappled with his work around police brutality, he also reconsidered the work. “Conceptually and intentionally, it sends a purpose, but I was asking myself what I could actually do to say something, to express how I was feeling,” he says.

When the world shut down, Glover returned to Charles County and pivoted again. He did video work for Transformer, a gallery he’s worked with before, he contributed to the Arlington Arts Center virtual exhibition By Proxy, and he painted. “You can’t compare a global pandemic to any other [thing],” he says, “but the artist life in D.C., it prepares you for hard times, and for having to figure it out. You’re always just trying to figure it out.”

Blair Murphy, AAC’s acting executive director, recruited Glover for By Proxy. She knew his work from a performance on 14th Street NW a few years before. She followed him on Instagram and found his presence there to be a performance, too. “For a lot of artists, social media is about promotion, but for Maps, [it] is the medium he’s using,” she says, referring both to his posts and his live sessions during which he paints and chats with viewers. The dexterity of his work and his online presence, Murphy thought, would work well in a digital exhibition. “The fact that [performance] is about a person moving in space, it lends itself to online presentation, or can be videotaped, it can live in that space in a way that other artwork can’t. With painting, the difference between showing a painting in a gallery and showing a painting as a JPEG on a computer, there’s sort of no upside to having it on a monitor,” she says.

But she also says Glover’s performance has always relied on the power of in-person interaction. “He works in a way that’s somehow trying to connect with the audience or get a response from the audience,” she says, “which is not always how artists approach performance … with [his] performance there’s a sense of facing outward or reaching outward into the world.”

Murphy categorizes the work as “social practice,” “where artists create situations for people to be involved in,” she says, “as opposed to creating an object or as opposed to performance being some sort of physical action that people witness.” For By Proxy, Glover returned to the idea of the seed. He had participants communicate the impact they wanted to have on their communities and grew rosemary, sage, and a little mint with that intention, which could later be consumed as a tea.

Tad Sare, chair of animation at Delaware College of Art and Design, where Glover studied photography, always expected his former student to meet 2020’s challenges. He knows how dynamic Glover is. “He engages with new media, no problem,”

Maps Glover at Save the Seed

says Sare, “digital, traditional, oh, he’s all about it, it doesn’t matter for him; he can create images, tell stories however.” That’s why he expected Glover to be a good fit for Awesomesauce, a pandemic-accessible DCAD show he was organizing. The show highlights the work of former students who have shifted their practice away from traditional fine arts. “He’s able to see, ‘If this isn’t working for me, I’ll go this way,’” Sare says. “You can see that in his artwork too, that’s why he has such a range of stuff.”

Awesomesauce opened in early February. Glover’s piece, “Aquarius fly trap,” is on view from the street outside the gallery. The work consists of three dioramas or portals, which passersby look inside to view videos in which Glover is performing. Viewers under 6 feet tall have to stand on their toes to see inside. “We’ve both been giggling about that,” says Sare, “that idea of people having to physically stretch in order to witness his work.”

The portals are called “Salvation,” “Solar Plexus Chakra,” and “Depression,” and Glover says the work is about the tension between how feelings of liberation and salvation can exist in the same person experiencing depression and imprisonment. Glover also refers to “Solar Plexus Chakra” as the “home” box.

Inside the “home” box, you can see the two characters who Glover builds “Aquarius fly trap” around: One is a traveler from the future, and the other is an incarcerated person. The “Depression” portal features a split-screen black-and-white video, and the incarcerated figure stands on both sides of the screen. One yells while the other is ashen-faced. “What’s coming out of my mouth might not always show up on my body,” Glover says, “and what’s happening on my body you might not hear.” The two go back and forth. The incarcerated figure quickly calls to mind Glover’s social justice-driven performances, but he stresses the metaphorical terms of the work. “It’s hard to put words to something that is an isolating experience,” Glover says, “where I don’t know what I’m thinking or why I’m thinking, but it’s happening, dammit.” Illustrating what he can’t describe has been an impulse for Glover since childhood, when he remembers imagining screaming so loud his voice box would run out and drawing a picture of what that felt like.

Sare finds “Aquarius fly trap” more sophisticated than Glover’s past work. “His performances are fantastic,” Sare says. “He can go big and grand, he’s captivating, you want to watch him.” But the narrative of the portals is stronger. “Some of the performances,” Sare says, “are so site-specific [that] even looking at the documentation on YouTube afterwards you think ‘This is great, but I don’t get it.’”

But the subject matter surprised Sare because he had never seen Glover down while at DCAD. “When he came into the room,” Sare says, “the whirlwind followed him.” He saw the spiritualism in Glover’s work, the connection to art history, contemporary culture, and being a Black artist; but he hadn’t seen Glover’s work look inward like this. Sare sees Glover in this work. “It’s more about his biography than any references outside himself,” he says. “It’s all internal, these things he wants to talk about.”

Glover puts what’s different about “Aquarius fly trap” into the context of his wider work. “When I was younger, the most important thing for my artwork was for people to just like it,” he says, “to just say that’s good, that was the goal.” He sees that early work as less honest. “What I was doing before was being afraid that my concept might be too obscure or too abstract,” he says, “so I would try to dumb it down to get people to connect to it, but that’s not me.”

He laughs as he says this. “I’m just getting more comfortable in my skin,” he says. “I’m becoming more fearless in terms of what I think is important to express, which is the juxtaposition between depression and salvation, both of those things existing in a person, in an experience.”

For the time being, in-person performances are still out the window, but Glover’s taken it well. Lately, he’s been developing a new series of paintings that he’s posting on Instagram. They’re portraits constructed from collages of figurative paintings and abstract paintings. Like the future traveler from “Aquarius fly trap,” they depict figures from other realities. Many feature Glover’s signature “matter” patterns, which look like pulsing neural networks. For Glover, these patterns signify potential. “Everything is made up of matter,” he says, “and before it gets to the point of being something, it could be anything.”

Each painting comes with a brief description in the caption. One reads: “A face anybody could love. Name: hey love, Planet of origin: heart center, Mission: to love.” A figure’s eyes droop like they’re going to slide off the canvas. “I’m just rearranging the pieces of life,” Glover says, “and trying to paint them and make them beautiful before they disappear into nothing, return to matter.”

We Hear America Writing

Washington Writers’ Publishing House managed to launch an anthology in a year with no physical events or in-person editorial meetings.

By Hannah Grieco

Contributing Writer The pandemic forced writers and publishers (and everyone else, for that matter) to reconsider their daily actions. Canceled in-person events meant no book tours. Readers couldn’t meander through bookstores, or pick featured books off curated tables. Friends couldn’t linger at The Royal or The Coffee Bar chatting about books and couldn’t swing by a Tuesday night reading at Politics and Prose.

An abundance of well-known writers live in the D.C. area, and the city has an active small press scene, with many publishing houses collaborating and adding to the literary community. Beginning last March, these publishing houses, in concert with independent bookstores and literary organizations across the city, developed a thriving virtual literary scene. But since small presses lack the budgets and social networks of larger publishers, they rely on the local literary community and word of mouth to sell books. And all of the D.C. area presses faced a similar struggle: How could they get books into readers’ hands without inperson events?

Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a small press that utilizes a cooperative, volunteer-based model to publish area authors, had to consider the reality of pandemic-year sales when it proceeded with publishing the new anthology This Is What America Looks Like. In a typical year, WWPH chooses two winning manuscripts from local writers to publish, and those writers later volunteer with the press to help publish others’ books. In early 2020, before the pandemic reached D.C., it temporarily shifted to an anthology format in order to highlight a wide variety of authors and poets. The coincidental nature of the timing whispers of fate. The call for submissions came in February, just a few weeks before the first lockdown. A few weeks later, the world seemed to explode and shut down simultaneously, and books weren’t on most of our minds. But writers process through the written word, and so editors decided to move forward.

“This Is What America Looks Like was a repeated chant at the 2017 Women’s March—an acknowledgement of the diversity, size and peaceful passion of the crowd on that cold January day. Every work of art, no matter the subject, is a portrait of its time. This theme, this title, declaims that truth self-consciously,” says Kathleen Wheaton, president of WWPH. “That writing keeps happening, even, and maybe especially, in times of crisis.”

But getting the word out has been tricky, and as is the case for many publishers right now, sales have been lower than usual. WWPH prints on-demand, which allows some flexibility when compared to ordering large numbers of books to sell at a time. It still has to sell at least 500 books to break even, however, and that’s incredibly difficult right now.

“For a small literary press, in-person readings and events are vital—it’s like a Tupperware party. You invite everyone youknow, show them a good time, and hopefully they’ll buy something before they leave,” says Wheaton. “So COVID is really devastating for us—you can’t make the audience laugh or teary in the same way over Zoom. You can’t write personalized dedications in the books.”

Word of mouth is even more of a lifeline for small presses and authors now. One listener might hear a poet read at a Zoom event, such as The Inner Loop or The Literary Cypher, and then purchase their book through a link to the press itself or a local bookstore. From there, it’s all about the reader sharing their enthusiasm via social media. Without in-person book launches, tours, or even casual dinners with friends, readers aren’t able to connect over what we love in the same way. After much discussion, the team at WWPH made the decision to push ahead, hoping they wouldn’t regret it.

More than 500 writers submitted stories and poems, to the delight of volunteer editors Caroline Bock and Jona Colson, both of whom have published books with WWPH. They opened the submission window to the entire D.C. region, including writers who had lived, worked, or grew up here, and looked for a mix of new and established voices to create a spectrum of pieces from raw and edgy to reflective, sorrowful, and more.

“We were overwhelmed with submissions,” Wheaton says. “Writers were writing through this, channeling their grief, their worry, their rage. And the work was amazing. We finally settled on including 100 writers and poets, and the pieces are not only individually stunning but they reflect and build beautifully on each other.”

From start to finish, the entire process was done virtually—a new approach for the editors. The team met for regular Zoom meetings and sent hundreds of emails and texts as they navigated the difficulties of pandemic publishing.

“We worked through unexpected production delays due to the pandemic. Most notably, details that were ‘easy’ before the pandemic, such as registering copyright with the Library of

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Congress, were delayed weeks,” Bock says. “We went right down to the wire with our February publication date. Maybe all books are made this way, but I think we felt the weight of 100 writers on us.”

This Is What America Looks Like is wildly diverse, with short stories exploring D.C.’s streets and landscapes and poetry speaking to relationships and experiences that redefine what identity means. In “Myrna,” the opening short story, author Mary Kay Zuravleff (a former City Paper contributor) dives into the immigrant experience and takes readers back to 1934 as a precocious girl faces her father’s declining health due to black lung. From there the anthology twists and turns—reminding us what America can, should, and shouldn’t be.

In “Trail Walk” by Robert J. Williams, two students discuss friendship and racism along the Metropolitan Branch Trail. When a woman jogs by, LaShawn tells his white friend, “Wasn’t but one of three things was going to happen for me, two of them bad. One of them really bad. Me, I got to stay paranoid like. Let’s see what happens to you with the next one.”

In “American Progress,” poet Venus Thrash compares photographs of Emmett Till and Tamir Rice: “Staring at the photos side by side / they could be brothers.”

In “Invisible Woman,” poet Mary Ann Larkin writes about growing older as a woman. “I am vanishing from men’s dreams, from their poems,” she tells us. “No one’s hot breath whispers: wait.” And in “Emergency Vehicles Coming Through,” Robert Hershbach cuts through the noise of this past year with: “Our roads are sized for catastrophe, /the cul-de-sacs like asphalt skating rinks, /built for firetrucks to turn in, / the layout in general a banner campaign /with a message for us all: look, look /someday you too.”

This Is What America Looks Like offers what Wheaton describes as “a refracted and kaleidoscopic picture of contemporary D.C.” Even in its hardest places, readers connect with the stories and poems it contains. This is our home, and we see its ugly truths side-by-side with its beautiful moments.

Tara Campbell, a D.C. writer whose prose poem “Lamentations for the Dead in a Barbaric Land” appears in the anthology, also launched her own book this past summer, Political AF: A Rage Collection. Her book’s press, Unlikely Books, faced the same challenges that WWPH faces now.

“I posted invitations on social media for authors with books launching in March and April [of 2020] to come do their belated launch events with me, thinking surely everything would be back to normal by the end of the summer. Now we’re all on Zoom, and author copies are gathering dust on the shelf,” Campbell says.

One bonus of continued virtual events: The literary community itself has become more inclusive. With more bookstores hosting book launches, panels, and readings, more people can hear their favorite authors read from new books. Those who cannot attend in-person events are hoping that some events stay virtual and that all events continue to have the option of attending via Zoom or another online platform.

Advocates hope that continuing to offer virtual or hybrid events could increase book sales for everyone, despite sales being low this past year. But it might take some creative thinking on the part of booksellers offering incentives or personalized virtual author experiences, to make this happen. The real benefit is an expanding, inclusive community, which they hope, over time, supports everyone’s writing. Small presses exist at the heart of the literary community, offering publishing options for writers in all genres—focusing as much on art as on sales.

“Community is essential,” Wheaton says. “Most small presses function on tiny budgets, with staff that are in it for the love of literature rather than the money.”

More than 120 people attended the virtual release of This Is What America Looks Like, which WWPH co-hosted with The Writer’s Center on Feb. 5. That’s an enormous turnout in a Zoom weary world and proof that readers still care deeply about connecting with the writers they love.

Laughing Matter

A crowded comedy club is the coronavirus’ dream, so comics took their shows outdoors. Those impromptu shows might end up changing comedy’s status quo.

By Chelsea Cirruzzo

Contributing Writer Comedians agree their art is best performed where a contagious virus might thrive: small basements with low ceilings packed to the brim with people. That’s the kind of place where a comic will know immediately whether or not a joke has landed, either from the laughter bouncing around the room or the immediate silence. The proximity means they can take the temperature of the room and adjust their jokes to the crowd.

That’s what John Hedrick used to do. The 23-year-old has been performing stand-up comedy since 2018, and he’s always preferred these kinds of small, intimate spaces. On March 11, 2020, he was doing back-to-back shows in D.C. venues, first at Hook Hall on Georgia Avenue NW, then at Exiles on U Street NW. But as the night wore on, the crowd thinned, because by March 11 it had become clear a novel, flu-like virus was spreading throughout the U.S., and no one knew what to expect or how to behave.

“I remember looking around and thinking I probably shouldn’t be here. None of us should be here,” Hedrick recalls.

A few days later, D.C. would completely shut down, and Hedrick’s prospects of performing for a packed bar would evaporate for the next year. Like many performers, he tried to organize his own virtual shows. While some comics have found success this way (including local comic Jenny Cavallero, whose Instagram shows only feature sober comedians), Hedrick’s attempts at performing to a row of grainy, muted squares were “awful.”

It wasn’t until the warmer months that things started to change. Hedrick was finally invited to a comedy show held outdoors and hosted by local comic Mike Kurtz, founder of CryBaby DC. There, he found people, masked and scattered throughout the yard, awaiting a comedy show.

Many local comedians headed outdoors in 2020, subverting the idea of how comedy is typically performed and giving comics the chance to not only perform, but produce stand-up comedy. Hedrick says the inspiration to launch his own outdoor shows came from Kurtz, who began bringing comics outside in June.

Kurtz, a 31-year-old from Prince George’s County, started producing his own shows as part of CryBaby DC two years ago. In June, as the region slowly began to reopen during a drop in COVID-19 cases, Kurtz got a friend in Northern Virginia to lend his backyard for an outdoor comedy show. During that first show, comedians performed from a wooden board in the middle of a garden to roughly 15 people sitting in camp chairs.

It was amazing. “It felt like real comedy experiences because of the intimacy of a backyard,” Kurtz says, comparing the shows to other outdoor shows he’d done in New York City pre-pandemic. They were larger and often interrupted by people walking dogs or running through the show. In the Virginia backyard, Kurtz says he found a relaxed audience that was “willing to laugh.”

“It just felt normal in a situation that was not at all normal,” he says.

From there, he began to run shows every week through mid-November, stopping only when it got too cold to continue. His shows took place in Cheverly, as well as backyards in Columbia Heights and Brightwood Park.

“I started having a great turnout, and all I had to do was post on Instagram and people would be there,” he says.

By mid-summer, his shows were spilling out of his friend’s backyard and into an alley near Wonderland Ballroom on Kenyon Street NW. With a 50-person gathering limit, Kurtz began to require people to RSVP in order to receive the address. They also had to compete with low-flying helicopters and sirens (thanks to their proximity to Medstar Washington Hospital Center), as well as the occasional visit from cops asking them to keep the noise down.

But Kurtz says the shows were “an outlet for comedians but also for audience members to have something to do that was positive and safe.”

“Being able to get onstage was big for a lot of people’s mental health, a lot of comedians’ mental health,” Kurtz says. “I had somebody tell me that if it weren’t for my show ... they probably would have killed themselves. It sounds like an exaggeration but they’re not somebody who would tell me that, you know, jokingly.”

Kurtz’s outdoor shows inspired others to try their own. That included Hedrick, who teamed up with fellow comics Alex Asifo, 23, and Kaleb Stewart, 24, to create Shows We Put On. They all agreed: They needed to perform again.

Asifo had recently returned from New York, where he had been performing in March 2020, and Stewart had a bunch of shows lined up in D.C. after performing in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. “Everyone was bogged down in the house. We all know that people have to live,” Asifo says, meaning people needed entertainment—and so did he: “I’m a comic. I can’t be on Zoom forever.”

They started in late July, putting on shows in Hedrick’s backyard in Columbia, Maryland, using a stage made out of a wooden bed frame. They managed to get roughly 40 people to their shows, which included both comedy and live music, by the end of the summer.

“No one has seen live music in a very long time. So that was another thing to get people to come,” Hedrick says. They also invited a lineup of comics they knew well to perform.

The introduction of more outdoor shows, however, didn’t mean all comics managed to eke out some success during the pandemic. Newer comics still might find themselves struggling; the comics behind the outdoor shows say they often booked people they already knew. The trio behind Shows We Put On explain it this way: Comedy is a tiered system. The top-tier comics are the ones who were getting booked at comedy clubs all the time. Now, they’re the first picks for outdoor shows because producers behind the shows know they’ll be good. Meanwhile, lower-tier comics, the ones who had been trying to get their names and talent out there via open mics, are a bit out of luck.

“Especially in the pandemic, if you want to be on a comedy show, you already have to know people,” Stewart says. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t try to help newcomers a little.

A backyard comedy show put on by CryBaby DC in Columbia Heights in August 2020 Stewart says he would sometimes book newer comics because he wanted to give them the same chances he once got.

“Everything is getting more and more complicated and confusing,” Stewart says. “So just to give [them] a chance to show your talent.” Asifo says they also tried to mix up their lineups, bringing on more women, for example, or just ensuring various comedy styles in a given show.

But beyond a few extra dollars and a wooden stage to perform, the renaissance of outdoor comedy shows in D.C. also might’ve given local comics something else: booking power. And that could mean big things for the future.

“People aren’t going into comedy clubs. You have the same booking power as any of these higher comedy clubs. The power’s in your hands,” Asifo says. It worked for him. Before the pandemic, he was getting booked a lot in D.C. He was on the up-and-up. Now, “I don’t really care if this club is not booking me. I book myself,” he says.

Like Kurtz, the trio promoted their shows on Instagram. Tickets originally started at $7, but they eventually bumped the price up to $15 to pay both comics and musicians. It wasn’t a ton of money, Stewart says, but “it was worth it because we were keeping comedy alive.”

Being outdoors wasn’t a perfect replacement for comedy clubs, though, and there’s a reason why: It can be hard to appeal to an outdoor, masked crowd. Jokes might take forever to travel around the backyard, and comics may not be able to tell if a joke landed.

“As we do a comedy show in somebody’s yard, the laughs literally evaporate into the atmosphere,” Stewart says. Hedrick describes it like talking to an ex: You’re familiar, yet distant.

But as the summer went on, more outdoor shows began to crop up. Jenny Questell, 28, and Caitlin McDevitt, 26, got started in September, resurrecting their brand Living Room Shows—which they started at the beginning of 2020—after performing at outdoor shows done by CryBaby DC and Shows We Put On. But they added their own personal flair: Living Room Shows were originally meant to be intimate house shows. Now, they had to do them outside where, rather than cozy and close in living rooms, participants were masked and scattered around a yard, and laughter and reaction were much harder to gauge. Still, Questell and McDevitt threw themselves into trying to instill that same level of intimacy through decoration.

“We think about a lot of little details,” McDevitt says. “We were building an aesthetic.”

That included decorations, hand sanitizer, fairy lights, and cupcakes. When the temperature dropped, they passed out blankets and hot cider until it finally was too cold to continue in November.

Unlike the others, Questell and McDevitt enforced a paywhat-you-can model by putting a Venmo handle onto a sign at the show, which Questell says worked better than charging $10 a ticket; some people ended up paying $20 or $30 after enjoying a show.

Questell agrees bringing about outdoor shows has given more comics power in the scene. “We’ve all sort of figured out how to run these outdoor shows,” she says. “If hopefully we get out of this and get to move back inside … some different key players are kind of on the scene, as far as producing goes.”

But Kurtz, who played a big role in starting these outdoor shows, adds that many comics still lost time in furthering their careers. Many comedy venues have also closed. But that means the community has become closer, he argues, and Kurtz says that will bring many of them back to the stage, either via more outdoor shows or eventually getting back into crowded bars.

“I think it’s impossible now to take comedy for granted, with everything that’s going on, with having lost it for so long,” Kurtz says. “It’ll be the comedians who will cherish the ability to get onstage so much more.”

At the Movies?

Some theaters bring the movies to you; others let you bring your own to their screens. One thing they can’t do: host normal screenings with a theater packed full of people.

By Alan Zilberman

Contributing Writer The postponement of wide releases in movie theaters, along with their widespread closing, all seemed to happen so suddenly. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, major studios pulled their blockbusters from theatrical release. The superhero film Black Widow has been delayed indefinitely, while the release date for the James Bond film No Time to Die was postponed three times. Left with few major titles to show, theaters across the country closed.

A year later, studios are experimenting with how they’ll release their films to the public: Warner Bros. unveiled a hybrid streaming-screening model for its major films, while others will head directly to Video on Demand platforms. Along similar lines, cinemas big and small are finding new ways to survive. In the D.C. region, guidelines for opening theaters vary by locality, so there was never a one-size-fitsall solution. In order to survive, owners of three independent cinemas in the area had to figure out precisely what their community wanted.

Cinema Arts is a small, independently owned theater in Fairfax, nestled in a corner of Fair City Shopping Mall. Stepping into the mall is a bit like time traveling into the 1990s. It looks abandoned, a vestige of a shopping experience long past its prime. As for the theater, whose lobby is adjacent to a Korean BBQ joint, the picture and sound system are perfectly immersive, although the auditoriums themselves lack the polish of a state-of-the-art multiplex. For theater owner and manager Mark O’Meara, who also owns the University Mall Theatres on Braddock Road, Cinema Arts’ first and most immediate post-pandemic program was curbside popcorn. Theaters were completely closed in the middle of March 2020, and this was one way he could keep his employees working. O’Meara was surprised by the outreach and enthusiasm. “We just had someone come into the theater, pay for a candy bar with a $20 bill, and say ‘Keep the change,’” he says.

Once Virginia theaters reopened under phase three of Gov. Ralph Northam’s COVID plan on July 1, there were few movies actually available to play, so O’Meara took an idea from University Mall and applied it to Cinema Arts. “You know, we were [renting out] theaters for kids’ birthday parties at University Mall. Why don’t we do something here?” That’s how he came up with Gather Round, a program where someone can rent out an entire auditorium for a private screening, with a maximum of 10 people per showing in accordance with the guidelines. For two hours and a price starting at $100 (increasing with the number of guests in your party), you can watch a new release or whatever DVD or Bluray disc you have. According to O’Meara, what people bring is all over the place, although Frozen and The Goonies remain popular. “Every time I ask [my customers] how they liked it, and they always say, ‘You know, I forgot how great it was on the big screen.’”

There is something to that repeated refrain. In the fall, for my birthday, my wife booked a double feature Gather Round just for the two of us. We watched Phoenix, a German World War II drama from 2014, and the Gene Hackman thriller The French Connection. The experience is a lot different than watching something at home, to the point that I was moved by how much I missed it. The experience washed over me, affirming the gorgeous unreality that only movies can provide. The sound is a huge factor, since I had forgotten just how loud music, gunfire, and explosions can be with massive theater speakers—my wife visibly jumped in her seat when the aggressive music kicked into gear. Even though we were all alone, things almost felt like they were normal. The program has proven to be extremely popular, and O’Meara books around 180 Gather Rounds a month. He has felt “humbled” by the number of families and friends who’ve tried Gather Round for themselves.

Other jurisdictions aren’t able to offer the same program as Cinema Arts. Since they closed last March, movie theaters in the District have not been allowed to reopen. But even if theaters opened in the District tomorrow, David Cabrera is not certain he would want pre-pandemic crowds. Cabrera is co-owner of Suns Cinema, a boutique movie theater in Mount Pleasant that is equal parts theater and lounge. Since the public health emergency began, Cabrera’s philosophy has been “Let’s not pretend that this does not suck.” Suns is too small to accommodate safe social distancing—anyone who has been there knows the rows are practically on top of one another.

His intermediate business plan, therefore, is twofold: He offers curbside cocktails along with a virtual program. Suns partnered with Kino Marquee, a virtual streaming partnership that links VOD art films directly with individual independent theaters. Cabrera says some titles have been more successful than others—there was a lot of enthusiasm for the Brazilian Western Bacurau and the economics documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century—but he sees a bigger opportunity with Eventive, another streaming platform. He plans to use the platform to partner with the American Genre Film Archive and its back catalog of cult favorites. Patrons of Suns are more about Fitzcarraldo than Frozen, so the idea has potential.

Eventive isn’t just popular for hole-in-the-wall theaters like Suns. In Maryland, where openings vary by county, Silver

Suns Cinema

Spring’s AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center also opts for the service. Director of programming Todd Hitchcock isn’t annoyed that his Montgomery County theater remained closed while theaters in adjacent Howard and Anne Arundel counties could open in recent months. “We are more focused on opening for real,” he says, but he realizes that his audience “is desperate for something to engage with at home.” To that end, he has found success with a series of virtual festivals: The Latin American Film Festival, the European Union Film Showcase, and Noir City performed better than expected (the first two festivals have been mainstays at AFI for more than 30 years). Hitchcock figures that a festival, unlike Netflix’s latest new release, creates a sense of connection because there is a shared purpose. Virtual audiences are more together when they appreciate a particular genre or part of the world.

Still, Hitchcock acknowledges that the virtual festival space has its limits. “We only have a fraction of the viewership we once had,” he admits. On the other hand, he recognizes the nature of virtual viewing means he can engage with cinephiles who may not have initially traveled a long distance to watch a movie. By reaching folks who are not traditional festival-goers, he might convert them into committed, flesh-and-blood fans once theaters reopen. Both Cabrera and Hitchcock think it may be possible that they finally open their doors in the spring or summer. It’s still a long way off, and as Cabrera half-joked, “We don’t want to kill anyone.”

Now that people are getting vaccinated and experts see the proverbial light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, there are renewed questions about what is and is not safe. Actually, we shouldn’t say “safe,” according to Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University. “[Safe] is a four letter word … What we are talking about is risk reduction because ‘safe’ has the aura of completeness. We cannot be completely safe in our current environment.” If he and his wife—both of whom are vaccinated—went to the movies, they would wear masks and adhere to proper social distancing, whether in line or in the auditorium.

When I told Schaffner about Gather Round and my birthday gift, he laughed and said, “I hadn’t thought of anybody doing anything so elaborate and extraordinary. After you interact with the theater manager … in effect [the auditorium] is like being at home watching television.” Adding people to Gather Round would increase risk, of course, but Schaffner figures that this reevaluation of deliberate risk reduction will become increasingly important as the vaccines roll out and the landscape of the pandemic changes.

Whether we are talking about a virtual festival or curbside popcorn, there is one thing that these risk reduction techniques cannot replicate. “You currently cannot have the experience of being [in the theater] with a lot of other people,” Schaffner says. More jurisdictions are opening their cinemas—New York City reopened cinemas to limitedcapacity this week—so these concerns and risk management techniques will become more urgent.

In a recent presentation about virtual film festivals from the Film Festival Alliance, 32 different festivals gave their audience awards to 32 films—there was zero overlap. That is a revealing statistic: Unless we are with other people, there is little chance to feed off each other, to share all the thrilling emotions of a communal viewing experience. That kind of energy, one that is unique and ephemeral, is part of why I feel so at home at the movies in the first place. There is a sense of validation or belonging when everyone collectively experiences the same film, whether it’s funny, thrilling, tragic, or something in between. We cannot have that yet, but these theaters—in their own way—are trying to preserve the memories.

Moving Pictures

Through a tumultuous year, CulturalDC managed to put on timely programming. Now, they may even be able to bring back canceled exhibitions from last spring.

Jennifer Anne Mitchell

By Jennifer Anne Mitchell

Contributing Writer Last March, a 22,000-pound, 320 sq. ft. shipping container sat outside Union Market. The portable art space is CulturalDC’s Mobile Art Gallery, used since 2019, which typically hosts three to five exhibitions per year at locations throughout the city.

Then COVID-19 happened. CulturalDC had to pause the Mobile Art Gallery’s installation Rendition, which was supposed to be on view from Feb. 8 to March 29, 2020. Rendition was a commentary on the type of consumerism prevalent in Union Market and how cultural identities—in particular, African and African American identities—are used to sell things. One side of the installation featured life-size replicas of a Cameroonian statue painted in shades of black and blue. The other displayed brightly colored masks of different shapes and sizes, painted with fluorescent acrylic paint to abstract them from their original form.

“It is about the way that Blackness and Africanness is used commercially and it’s turned into a commodity,” artist Zoë Charlton, an associate professor of art at American University, told City Paper in March 2020. “It’s transactional.”

Rendition’s commentary on how the Black community has been mistreated would become especially relevant in the wake of the racial justice movement that gained momentum after George Floyd’s killing. Just before the pandemic hit D.C., Charlton emphasized that she didn’t think conversations about how Black identities are used to sell products should be limited to a certain time and place.

CulturalDC provided a platform for these conversations. Rendition spoke to issues that would become essential elements of a vital national conversation. Even the method of making art accessible through nontraditional means, like the Mobile Art Gallery, illustrates that CulturalDC was thinking of these issues well before the pandemic made them urgent.

In 2020, CulturalDC scrapped plans and scrambled to reinvent itself in the rapidly changing arts landscape. It paused and rescheduled indoor exhibitions, then set up a virtual happy hour series with artists, “Shaken Not Stirred.” The group sold work by local artists in the online CulturalDC Art Shop (including a benefit sale of a $2,000 screenprint to support local artist Yar Koporulin, who died from lung cancer in late October). To bring art to the people, CulturalDC blasted projections from a twopart video installation, Subversions, on 14th Street NW. And the growth seems to just be getting started: The organization will soon announce its new Capital Artists Residency, an Amazonsponsored residency program for artists of color.

“Our job always is to try to find artists and platforms, and provide artists with platforms,” explains executive director Kristi Maiselman. That ethos proved to be especially valuable when artists lost many of their traditional opportunities.

For more than 20 years, CulturalDC has made its name with provocative art installations around the city that speak

Subversions

to the times, like Ivanka Vacuuming by American conceptual artist Jennifer Rubell in February 2019, which featured an Ivanka Trump look-alike vacuuming a pink carpet in the former Flashpoint Gallery space—and invited the public to throw crumbs on the carpet and watch the vacuuming. (CulturalDC owned Flashpoint from 2003 to 2017 and ran the Mead Theatre Lab Program in the space from 2005 to 2017.)

CulturalDC then pivoted to its Mobile Art Gallery in 2019 so the organization could engage with more communities by bringing art directly to them. The Barbershop Project, for example, explored Black masculinity and vulnerability through the art of hair. It was housed in the portable art space from May to August 2019 at THEARC on Mississippi Avenue SE, then from September to October 2019 at T and 14th Streets NW.

Local musician Kokayi, a Grammy-nominated D.C. native, sees the Mobile Art Gallery as an outlet for artists and viewers among “a plethora of galleries that necessarily don’t serve a particular public.” When he spoke with City Paper in March 2020, Kokayi pointed out the space benefits the community—by exposing them to artists they might not otherwise come across—and gives artists a chance to make the money they need to continue their artistic practice.

The group’s mission is to “provide unconventional space for relevant and challenging work that is essential to nurturing vibrant urban communities.” When a pandemic and a historic movement against anti-Black racism upended daily life in America in 2020, relevant and challenging work was especially called for, and CulturalDC responded with a creative approach. Digital exhibitions weren’t part of its pandemic programming; instead, gripping public art was the focus.

“We shifted in the fall to how we could utilize Source Theatre as a way to show work,” Maiselman says. “As we realized that this was going to go on longer that we anticipated, we wanted to find a way.”

Teri Henderson, a Black, Baltimore-based curator and staff writer for BmoreArt, had produced video installations in Baltimore. After Maiselman saw them, she reached out to bring something similar to Source. The result was Subversions, a powerful example of art responding to current events. The two-part video installation was projected onto Source’s exterior so people could see it when they were walking by or riding on a bus, Henderson says, without having to step inside a museum or gallery—a strategic decision during the pandemic. Bringing art to the community made it more accessible, Henderson notes, since viewers didn’t need a computer or internet access.

Henderson says producing Subversions during the public health crisis meant “everything is just about being in flux and making adjustments.” She had to figure out technology hiccups, traveled from Baltimore by MARC or Uber to get to the District and, once the projections were up, recalled how happy passersby said they were to see art on the street. According to CulturalDC, there were limited opportunities to photograph the installation, but they had to make do.

Henderson says the original idea to tackle race and representation in the second part of Subversions felt especially pertinent after the insurrection at the Capitol; the video installation, “As An Enemy,” was on view from Jan. 29 to Feb. 28. “I knew that I wanted it to be about race, absolutely,” she explains, “but I didn’t just want it to be so simple, like, ‘Here’s a show about race.’”

In November, she started planning to build on a project she created in the summer of 2020: The People United, a window exhibition at Current Space in Baltimore Henderson developed with Brandon Soderberg, the former editor in chief of Baltimore City Paper. It featured the work of seven Black photographers who documented the protests after George Floyd’s killing and a video installation Soderberg created that included a collection of footage relevant to his book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of American’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, co-written with Baynard Woods. The video includes bodycam and surveillance footage of the Gun Trace Task Force, a group of police officers indicted on federal racketeering charges in 2017. The squad broke into homes, stole drugs, and horrifically mistreated Black people in Baltimore, targeting vulnerable individuals with records who they thought wouldn’t file a complaint.

Henderson and Soderberg remixed this footage for “As An Enemy,” the second part of Subversions. (The first part, “United in Democracy,” ran from Oct. 30 to Nov. 30, 2020.) The Current Space installation utilized tube televisions, so they burned the footage onto DVDs to project onto Source. Henderson says though these are images of Baltimore, the art installation is a commentary on the racist legacy of policing all over the country.

The racial justice movement and the pandemic have not only influenced CulturalDC’s current programming and plans for the future; they’ve also given new perspective to earlier CulturalDC shows. And as vaccination rates rise, CulturalDC is beginning to plan to show art in a world that’s something more like normal.

Up next, CulturalDC is reviving a Mobile Art Gallery art installation by Washington area artist Andy Yoder. Yoder’s installation piece, Overboard, connects to consumer culture, showcasing more than 100 shoes Yoder made from mostly recycled materials. The show was originally scheduled to open in the Mobile Art Gallery in April 2020; it’s now rescheduled for spring 2021.

After learning about the Mobile Art Gallery, Yoder was inspired to create an installation that directly connected to the gallery’s shipping container space. Research led him to a story about a shipping container that fell off its freighter during a tropical storm in 1990 and spilled tens of thousands of Nike sneakers into the Pacific Ocean. The shoes are based off the Air Jordan 5, and some are made with reclaimed materials found in recycling bins like Wheaties, 7 Up, Kool-Aid, and Coca-Cola packages.

Overboard is partly a commentary on consumerism and how sneakers have been gentrified, Yoder says. Another part is environmental.

“I would like to give people pause, make them ponder what happens when you go online and you order something from China,” Yoder said when he spoke with City Paper about his exhibition in 2020. “An idea of our footprint, I guess, if you want to make a bad pun, on the planet’s environment.”

This motivation predates the COVID era, when ordering essentials online became commonplace to mitigate the virus’s spread. Reflecting on the countless shipping containers that have made our lives safer throughout 2020 puts a new lens on Yoder’s installation, too.

The topsy-turvy year resulted in another huge development for CulturalDC, which will soon announce its Capital Artists Residency. The inaugural resident will be Los Angeles-based artist Umar Rashid, also known as Frohawk Two Feathers, who produces colorful paintings informed by cultural references like Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American hide paintings, Persian miniature paintings, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts. His work will be shown in a September Mobile Art Gallery installation.

Maiselman says the Capital Artists Residency grew out of 2020’semphasisonequityandracialjustice.“We’vehadapretty broad view of artists’ perspectives that we want to include,” Maiselmannotes.“AndIthinktheeventsof2020havereinforced that.” She hopes this residency will keep the momentum going. Theresidentartistscanstayforonetothreemonthsandreceive housing,studiospaceandastipend.Maiselmansayspartnering with big-time funders like Amazon won’t change CulturalDC’s localfocus,andtheintentionistobringartistsandcuratorsfrom outsideoftheDistrictintocontactwiththecommunity.

Henderson hopes conversations about race and class continue long after 2020. “It can’t just be because we have so much time at home and the world is different. It has to be an actual shift that stays,” she says. “I shouldn’t be the last Black curator to do something on 14th Street.”

Jennifer Anne Mitchell Rendition