National Gallery
ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP
In 2023, a new agreement between the George Washington University, the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art unveiled a new initiative to facilitate immersive learning, art-making and interdisciplinary research that will drive exhibitions, performances and curriculum at the Corcoran School.
The partnership includes space for students, artists, community members, museum professionals and faculty to collaborate as well as opportunities for students to gain hands-on learning with National Gallery experts. We want to foster work that is civically engaged, interdisciplinary and collaborative. The work will be experimental and help us consider how to do what we do differently.
RESIDENCY SPOTLIGHT: FOR FREEDOMS
The partnership is supporting a three-year residency program (2024-2027) with For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that deepens civic engagement through the arts by providing artists, institutions, and communities a decentralized space for connection, and the tools to support their creative capacities and resilience as cultural producers.
The second year of the For Freedoms residency, produced by the Corcoran/National Gallery partnership, unfolds as a Civic Arts Lab, an active space for civic and cultural inquiry and collective experimentation. Rooted in a spirit of collaboration, the Lab invites ongoing dialogue and creative practice that explore the intersections of artistic expression and civic life. Through participatory engagements and open-ended exploration, the Lab is a site for testing ideas and nurturing new ways of thinking, making, and being together.
“The kind of world that I want to live in demands that people be critically engaged and creative members of society,” Gottesman said. “As a result, I believe that we need to allow for more questioning and less dogma, more nuance and more ways of engaging so that we can have real conversations that may be limited to the current political options that we have.”
Eric Gottesman, Co-Founder, For Freedoms
2024-25 William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement
CIVIC LAB ARTISTS
Artists within the Civic Arts lab will engage with the Corcoran community through speaking engagements, studio and class visits, roundtable conversations, and projects.
- George Anthony Morton
George Anthony Morton is an Atlanta-based, award-winning artist and filmmaker known for his mastery of classical drawing and painting, and for his visionary leadership in arts education and cultural restoration. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and exhibited nationally — including in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, curated by Nicole Fleetwood.
A self-taught artist during his ten-year federal sentence, Morton immersed himself in the Renaissance tradition before earning a place at the Florence Academy of Art — later becoming its first Black graduate. His honors include Best Figure Drawing (2015) and Best Portrait Drawing (2016). Morton is the creator & subject of the Emmy-winning HBO documentary Master of Light, which follows his journey home and the healing power of art and fatherhood.
George is the founder of More Light, a nonprofit that merges classical mastery with trauma-informed pedagogy across correctional institutions, HBCUs, and museums. He lives in Atlanta with his daughter, Nuri.
- Eric Gottesman
Eric Gottesman (b. 1976 Nashua, New Hampshire) teaches, organizes, writes, and makes artworks with other people. His work addresses nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations. His projects question accepted notions of power and, by engaging communities in critical self-reflection and creative expression, propose models for repair.
Gottesman’s work is always collaborative; he has never made an artwork alone. Gottesman has presented his collaborative art projects at health conferences, universities, in government buildings, on the televised opening of the NFL season, on indigenous reserves, in post-war rubble, and at museums like MoMA PS1, MFA Boston, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Addis Ababa City Hall, the Children's Museum of Art in New York, the Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Center of Photography, the Addison Gallery of American Art and others. Sudden Flowers, his decade-long collaboration with young people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, toured that country in a series of street installations, and was published as a collective monograph.
Gottesman is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2020), a recipient of an ICP Infinity Award (2017), a Creative Capital Artist (2015), a Fulbright Fellow (2012), a Lightwork resident artist (2011), an Artadia awardee (2009), a co-founder of civic art collective For Freedoms, and a co-creator of the book For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? (2024). His co-translation of Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma’s banned novel Oromaye was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, only the second published English language translation of Amharic literature.
- Cannupa Hanska Luger
Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award-winning artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies that reflect Indigenous innovation and shift collective thinking.
Born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) and Lakota. His bold visual storytelling offers new ways of seeing our shared humanity while centering an Indigenous worldview.
With a socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice spanning public art, large-scale installation, ceramic sculpture, performance, time-based media, writing, and land-based actions of repair, Luger’s work blends critical cultural analysis with Indigenous advocacy and deep respect for the diverse materials, landscapes, and communities he engages.
Luger has been featured on the cover of National Geographic and profiled in The New York Times Magazine and Art21. He was named a Grist climate leader for driving fresh solutions to our planet’s most pressing challenges and is the recipient of numerous honors recognizing his groundbreaking work.
Luger is the 2026 recipient of the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide (Aora Press). In 2025, he received a National Geographic Society Wayfinder Award and was named a National Geographic Explorer. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Maine College of Art & Design (2025), the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (2025), the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship (2025), and the Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award (2025). Additional honors include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2024), Monument Lab Fellowship (2024), Soros Arts Fellowship (2023), Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), United States Artists Fellowship (2021), Creative Capital Fellowship (2020), Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2019), and a he was the recipient of the Museum of Arts and Design’s inaugural Burke Prize (2018).
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Times Square Arts Midnight Moment (New York, NY), the Sharjah Biennial 16 (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta, GA), among others.
Luger’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); the Nordamerika Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA).
He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery (New York, NY) and maintains a studio practice in Glorieta, New Mexico.
SELECT PHOTOS FROM PAST PROGRAMMING
IN THE NEWS
Maria Callas Opera Costumes to Be Exhibited for the First Time in the United States at GW’s Luther W. Brady Art Gallery
February 5, 2026
Callas at La Scala: Costumes for Ifigenia, Amina, Anna, Fiorilla” on view Jan. 21–March 21, 2026; free and open to the public
George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design Presents Americas, Part One of Exhibition Series
September 24, 2025
In collaboration with For Freedoms, Americas explores the work of two photographers looking at contemporary American experience over two decades
Corcoran, NGA partnership begins three-year residency with artist collective
October 21, 2024
The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design announced last month that it had expanded its partnership with the National Gallery of Art to include a three-year residency with an artist collective that produces multimedia art to uplift civic engagement.
For Freedoms Kicks Off Residency Hosted by GW’s Corcoran School and the National Gallery of Art
October 8, 2024
Members of the artist-led collective launched exhibit and joined GW and National Gallery for a series of events.
