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.
Corcoran & The National Gallery of Art Partnership
George A. Morton’s Residency
- George A. Morton Residency (Sept. 2026 )
(Monday, September 14 - Friday, September 25, 2026)
George Morton’s residency examines the digitization of contemporary and traditional head busts to expand representation within the traditional cast‑hall pedagogy.
Corcoran Studio staff, James Huckenpahler, Isaiah Aladejobi, and Kiara Rivera, worked directly with George Morton on scanning models of a variety of Corcoran community members (students, faculty, and staff). During the residency, George Morton and Corcoran staff led demonstrations of a 3D printing process from start to completion as a means of George's reframing of 19th and 20th century cast halls.
- Public Conversation at The National Gallery of Art (Sept. 2026 )
(Saturday, September 19, 2026 from 1pm - 1:45pm )
How might our reimagined American art galleries inspire contemporary artists and visitors alike? Award-winning artist George A. Morton joined Sarah Cash, associate curator and acting head of American and British paintings, for an in-gallery talk about the influence of John Singer Sargent on his creative practice.
Workshops
- Corcoran - Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Census (Bison Bead Project) Workshops (Sept. – Oct. 2026)
Corcoran Flagg - Gallery 209
(Every Tuesday from September 8 - October, 20, 2026)As part of artist, Cannupa Hanska Luger's Bison Project, participants will be invited to create clay beads, representing the current living wild bison population across North America. Each bead becomes a tangible act of remembrance and regeneration. Once created, these clay beads will be joined together to create life-sized sculptural forms of bison as abacus that count and celebrate the return of free buffalo herds, marking survival not as scarcity, but as abundance and continuity.
- The National Gallery of Art - Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Census (Bison Bead Project) Workshop (Nov. 2026)
National Gallery of Art - Education Studio and Cascade Café
Sunday, November 1 from 12pm - 3pm
Saturday, November 7 from 12pm - 3pmIn Cannupa’s Bison Project, participants will be invited to create clay beads, representing the current living wild bison population across North America. Each bead becomes a tangible act of remembrance and regeneration. Once created, these clay beads will join together creating life-sized sculptural forms of bison as abacus that count and celebrate the return of free buffalo herds, marking survival not as scarcity, but as abundance and continuity.
For Freedoms Opening Reception
- For Freedoms Opening Reception (Oct. 2026)
Corcoran Flagg - Atrium & Bridge
(Show Opens: Wednesday, October 28, 2026 from 6:30pm - 8pm)
RSVPJoin us for the opening of two exhibitions: REFLECT, a body of work by Cannupa Hanska Luger tracing the evolving life and legacy of his Mirror Shield Project, and Eric Gottesman’s NIGHT AND DAY, which examines censorship, cultural memory, and artistic expression under conditions of political repression. Together, REFLECT and NIGHT AND DAY consider how artists confront cultural erasure while creating space for memory, connection, and collective action.
At the center of the evening, Luger and Gottesman will be in conversation around a question that runs through both exhibitions: How do artists decide what risks to take? What are the consequences when an artist does take a risk? And what does it mean when they do not?
Throughout the evening, visitors are also invited to take part in three hands-on making stations drawn from the artists’ practices. Create a mirror shield in solidarity with water protectors; make a clay bead representing the wild bison population in the United States as part of Luger’s Census (Bison Bead Project); or respond to banned books, suppressed texts, and contested images through collage, writing, drawing, and image-making.
Exhibitions
- Eric Gottesman’s NIGHT AND DAY (Oct. 2026 – Feb. 2027)
Flagg Gallery One
(Wednesday, October 28, 2026 - Friday, February 19, 2027)For Freedoms presents artist and educator Eric Gottesman’s NIGHT AND DAY which centers on Ethiopian journalist and author Baalu Girma’s controversial 1984 Amharic novel Oromay, written under the Derg regime and banned shortly after its publication. Drawing on Gottesman’s deep engagement with the novel, NIGHT AND DAY considers how artists create, communicate, and sustain cultural memory within and against conditions of censorship, political repression, and state violence.
The exhibition extends beyond the gallery through a library of banned books, a self-guided workshop station that invites visitors to respond to censorship through writing and drawing, and a public conversation on how artists sustain creative practice amid sociopolitical pressure.
- Cannupa Hanska Luger’s REFLECT (Oct. 2026 – Feb. 2027)
Flagg North Atrium
(Wednesday, October 28, 2026 - Friday, February 19, 2027)REFLECT traces the evolution of artist Cannuap Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shield Project. In 2016, when the Dakota Access Pipeline threatened the waters of his ancestral homelands, Luger circulated a video demonstrating how to make “mirror shields” from inexpensive materials. Conceived during the Indigenous-led resistance at Standing Rock, North Dakota, the tutorial functioned as a call to collective action, an invitation for people across the country to stand in solidarity with the Water Protectors. Carried by Water Protectors in frontline actions and collective formations, the mirrored surfaces offered protection while redirecting the field of vision. More than a thousand mirror shields were created and transported to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp.
The exhibition brings the project’s history into the present, treating the archive as a resource to be carried forward and put into practice. Photographs, videos, garments, ephemera, and community-generated documentation reveal a collective artwork shaped by those who made, carried, adapted, interpreted, and activated it.
Corcoran Student Activation
- Corcoran Interdisciplinary (CorX) Course: Call and Response: Creating the World We Want (Dec. 2026 – Feb. 2027)
Corcoran Flagg - South Atrium
(Show Opens: Tuesday, December 8th, 2026 from 6:30pm - 8pm
Show Run: Tuesday, December 8th 2026 - Friday, February 19, 2027)The course will culminate in a collective multidisciplinary project combining exhibition, performance, and publication that will run in the South Atrium from Tuesday, December 8, 2026 - Friday, February 19, 2027. How can one person impact their community, a city, or an institution through creative action? Call and Response: Creating the World We Want draws on the partnership of the Corcoran and the National Gallery of Art and invites students across all disciplines to examine the roles of artists and institutions in shaping cultural myths and realities.
SELECT PHOTOS FROM PAST PROGRAMMING
Upcoming Events
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.
