Author / firewallcafe

The Heart Gallery Podcast, Rebeka Ryvola de Kremer talks to artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee. Joyce works with video, digital photography, and interactive installation that combine social practice with institutional critique. Curious about how the act of seeing is transformed by technology, her artwork examines how mass media and visual culture shape notions of truth and understanding of the “other.”

At the Hirshhorn Museum, an ominously beautiful cloud of hundreds of plastic bottles hangs from the ceiling. Further north, at the Kreeger Museum, an aluminum photo collage reflects tiny slivers of the viewers’ faces among images of deep-sea corals. These works intend to connect viewers with environmental issues that often feel far-off. 

Three different District art museums—the Hirshhorn, the Kreeger and the Freer Gallery of Art—currently have exhibitions or events focused on environmental justice and the climate crisis, bringing environmental issues to life in a way that science and data rarely can.

The first puzzle of the Kreeger Museum’s “Perplexity” is “Where is it?” Pieces by seven former Hamiltonian Artworks fellows are scattered through galleries filled primarily with items from the permanent collection — and even installed in a fireplace, which is where Amy Boone-McCreesh’s “Good Luck Charms” hangs. The goal is to juxtapose the new works with the Kreeger’s mostly 20th-century holdings.