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 artist specializing in classical drawing, painting, and film. He honed his craft while incarcerated, later becoming the first Black graduate of the Florence Academy of Art. His work has been featured in MoMA PS1’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and in the HBO documentary Master of Light, which won top awards at SXSW and Sheffield DocFest. Through his studio, Atelier South, Morton teaches and promotes classical art traditions in Atlanta and beyond.
Wesaam Al-Badry
Wesaam Al-Badry is a documentary photographer, journalist, and interdisciplinary artist born in Iraq and raised as a refugee in Nebraska. His work addresses displacement, labor, migration, and resilience, blending investigative journalism with contemporary art to challenge stereotypes and expose systems of exploitation. Al-Badry’s art is held in major collections including the National Gallery of Art, the de Young Museum, and the Cantor Arts Center. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and Vogue.
Peter van Agtmael
Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer whose work examines conflict, memory, nationalism, and class in America and abroad. Since 2001, he has documented wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israel–Palestine conflict. His books, including Look at the USA and Disco Night Sept 11, have been internationally recognized, and his photography has earned Guggenheim, W. Eugene Smith, and World Press Photo awards. He has been a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program since 2014.
Nekisha Durrett
Nekisha Durrett explores memory, bias, and overlooked histories of Black life through research-driven, material-based works. Her practice spans public art, social practice, installation, painting, and sculpture. She has work in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, and others. Durrett 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) and Haunted Houses (Phaidon/Monacelli Press, 2010). 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
CORCORAN x NATIONAL GALLERY PROGRAMMING
IN THE NEWS
Corcoran School of the Arts and Design Joins National Gallery of Art to Host Three-Year Artists’ Residency
September 10, 2024
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and the National Gallery of Art enters a new phase this year with the beginning of a three-year residency.
Partnership Gives Students Behind-the-Scenes Access
April 3, 2024
A first look at the partnership’s early accomplishments, the beginning of a much broader and deeper collaboration in the months to come.
Old School Meets New School in Workshop on Curatorial Strategies
January 25, 2024
Mary Morton of the National Gallery of Art joined Caroline Woolard, Corcoran visiting professor, for discussion.
GW Students Given an Inside Look at Organizing Art Museum Exhibitions
November 2, 2023
Steve Mann of the National Gallery of Art presented an overall view of his job.
