National Gallery - TEST
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.
- Wesaam Al-Badry
Wesaam Al-Badry is an award-winning documentary photographer, investigative journalist, and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, film, video installation, and sculpture. His powerful visual storytelling is deeply rooted in personal experience; born in Iraq, Al-Badry survived war zones and spent over four years in a political prisoners’ camp before resettling as a refugee in Nebraska. His early life, combined with years working in American factories, fuels a practice that centers dignity, resilience, and the lived realities of marginalized communities.
His work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions including Museum of San Francisco Fine Arts, the de Young (San Francisco), Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt), Lagos Photo, Cooper Hewitt Museum (New York), Cantor Arts Center (Stanford University), MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Marin, Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco, Diego Rivera Gallery, SF, Tacoma Art Museum Washington, Joslyn Museum (Omaha), and the Museum of Nebraska Art (Kearney), among many others. He has also shown at Jenkins Johnson Gallery (San Francisco) and the Bernstein Gallery (Princeton University). His work is held in prestigious public collections including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young), Cantor Arts Center (Stanford University), Toledo Museum of Art, and over thirty private collections worldwide.
Al-Badry’s photographs and essays have been published in leading outlets such as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, NPR, Fortune, The Nation, Forbes, Mother Jones, Reveal, Hyperallergic, Vogue Germany, Vogue Arabia, Art Unlimited Turkey, Süddeutsche Zeitung, White Hot Magazine, and Zoetrope, among others. He has collaborated with CNN and Al Jazeera America and contributed to PopUp Magazine and The Art Newspaper.
He has given talks at top institutions including Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, George Washington University, University of Washington (Seattle), University of Ohio, San Francisco Art Institute, Photo Alliance, Minnesota Street Projects, and through platforms like CNN and PBS.
- Peter van Agtmael
Peter van Agtmael is known for his deeply affecting, often surreal images, which explore themes of conflict, history, memory, nationalism, militarism, race and class. He was born in Washington DC in 1981 and was studying history at Yale during 9/11; an event that would be pivotal in shaping his life and career. He has spent nearly two decades covering post-9/11 America at home and at war. Since 2012, he has also extensively documented the Israel and Palestine conflict.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. Eugene Smith Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, several Pulitzer Center grants, and two World Press Photo awards.
Van Agtmael is the author of six books about the United States in the post-9/11 era. Look at the USA and Disco Night Sept 11 were shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Book Award, Buzzing at the Sill was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Award. His books have been featured on “Book of the Year” lists from The New York Times Magazine, Time, Mother Jones, Vogue, The Guardian and others.
Since 2014, Van Agtmael has been a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program. Van Agtmael joined Magnum Photos in 2008 and became a full member in 2013.
- Nekisha Durrett
Nekisha Durrett contemplates biases and the unreliability of memory, as information is filtered over time. Through deep research and material investigation, Durrett finds historical traces in the present that are filled with stories easily overlooked or not often celebrated. By illuminating these often hidden individual and collective histories of Black life and imagination, Durrett addresses her own younger self and the stories she wished she had learned. Her expansive approaches to artmaking include public art, social practice, installation, painting, sculpture and design. She has work in permanent collections at Arlington Arts in Arlington, VA, Baltimore Museum of Art, Miami Dade County, the Phillips Collection and the MLK Jr. Library in Washington DC, the City of West Palm Beach, and Bryn Mawr College in PA. She is currently a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
FOR FREEDOMS TOWN HALLS
Civic Art Lab presents American Realities: For Freedoms Town Halls, a series of artist-led conversations that interrogate the distance between American myth and lived experience. These Town Halls situate personal histories and collective struggles within the broader field of cultural production, asking how art can both reveal the fault lines of democracy and imagine more inclusive modes of civic belonging.
From Nekisha Durrett’s sculptural excavations of public memory, to Maurice Tyree’s The Darkest Parts of My Blackness, an intimate reckoning with trauma and transformation; from Corinne Botz’s Milk Factory, an embodied study of reproductive labor and the architectures of care, to Marina Berio’s Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, a meditation on legacy, racialized violence, and the language of images — each project destabilizes dominant narratives to foreground truths of the American and human experience. Together, these practices query the tension between America’s aspirational promises and its material realities, positioning art as both mirror and intervention while reorienting our sense of what a just and plural future might look like. The series opens space for inquiry, dialogue, and collective reflection, underscoring storytelling as a mode of repair and a catalyst for reimagining the possible.
- October 29th, Wednesday: MAURICE TYREE
Maurice Tyree is a native of Washington, DC. At the age of 27 he was convicted of murder. While incarcerated, Tyree worked to transform himself and now works to share his story while continuing his journey of self-improvement and activism as a writer, artist, and public speaker. He is the author of The Darkest Parts of My Blackness: A Journey of Remorse, Reform, Reconciliation, and (R)evolution. Tyree is also a member of Washington DC’s Commission on Reentry and Returning Citizens Affairs in coordination with the Mayor's Office on Returning Citizen Affairs (MORCA).
- November 20th, Thursday: CORINNE BOTZ
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Corinne Botz is a visual artist and educator based in New York whose practice encompasses photography, writing, and filmmaking. A sustained focus on space, gender, and the body, particularly relating to women’s experiences, is central to her practice. Her published books combining photography and writing include The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Phaidon/Monacelli Press, 2004), Haunted Houses (Phaidon/Monacelli Press, 2010), and Milk Factory (Saint Lucy Books, 2025). Botz’s photographs have been internationally exhibited at such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; Wellcome Collection; De Appel, Amsterdam; and Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at Benrubi Gallery and Bellwether Gallery in New York City; Alice Austen House, Hudson Hall, Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington D.C. and RedLine Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Granta, Foam Magazine, Bookforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Exit, Slate, Time: Lightbox, and Ciel Variable. Her Oscar-qualifying short film Bedside Manner (2016) won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC. She is the recipient of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation grants. Botz is on the faculty of International Center of Photography and John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).
RSVP link coming soon
- December 4th, Thursday: MARINA BERIO
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Marina Berio is a visual artist from New York City who works with drawings and photography to convey aspects of visual experience that are intimate and visceral. Berio is currently conducting research to expand a written piece about her family and the pictorial record of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Berio studied photography, drawing, sculpture and art history in college, and then earned her MFA in Photography at Bard. Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York City and is a founding member of PAIN, the activist group founded by Nan Goldin to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in creating the opioid crisis.
RSVP link coming soon
NOTE: All Town Halls will begin at 6:30pm
EVENTS & PROGRAMMING
Join us for installations, artist talks, and other public programming with artists whose work shapes
the Corcoran x National Gallery collaboration.
SELECT PHOTOS FROM PAST PROGRAMMING
IN THE NEWS
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: Billboards On View
October 8, 2024
For the next three years, this artist-led collective is in residence hosted in partnership between the Corcoran and the National Gallery of Art.
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.