We began this past weekend on cultured footing, with Dupont Circle’s monthly First Friday art gallery festivities. Sprinkled throughout the neighborhood, primarily on R Street and Connecticut Avenue, a number of galleries stay open late for a richy-rich block party of sorts. It makes for an oh-so-sophisticated Friday outing—noshing on wine and cheese, immersing yourself in the local art scene.
That is, unless you forget you haven’t eaten dinner yet and proceed to down a glass of free wine at each gallery. Of course, that’s exactly what we did, and two hours of gallery-hopping later, we were what I believe those in the art community would call plastered. We didn’t intend to be trashy, mind you, we just followed the cue of the crowd. I can only imagine how many ill-advised purchases have been made under chardonnay-fogged judgment (good thing we’re young and poor—no risk of waking up next to strange art for us!).
So though my advice would be to curb your wine enthusiasm a bit more than we did, I will say that our chattiness with artists infinitely increased as the night wore on. And since we saved one of my favorites for last, the upstairs Washington Printmakers Gallery, we got perhaps the warmest reception of all around closing time from local printmaker Mike Hagan, who was the man of the hour for his opening reception, “Hindsight is…60/60.”
Contrary to the artist in an undisclosed other gallery, who curtly directed us to the wine the second we arrived rather than assuming we were there for any legitimate reason, Hagan chatted with us at length about his works and printmaking techniques—I asked a bunch of questions—as well as his experiences over the past couple of decades in the D.C. art scene.
An aging hippie, he professed his influences of pop art icons like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol (going so far as to challenge us to locate the multiple Campbell’s soup cans cached in his own pieces). But what really struck me was how much he reminded me of practically every artist I interviewed in Iowa (a throwback to my days editing a small arts paper there), which was a strange sensation. Same salt-and-pepper mane, same convex belly, same resourceful ingenuity (he built his printmaking gear in his garage with odds and ends, based on books checked out from the library). It’s easy to assume artists in big cities are totally cosmopolitan, or at least of the starving hipster variety. Hagan, on the other hand, is an economist by day who burns the midnight oil with what seemed to be a blue-collar sensibility.
It was sort of inspiring, in a small way. But then again, I think I already mentioned I had, uh, drank my share of wine by this point in the evening?
Image by Mike Hagan
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