Programs

Originally part of the 100-square-mile area surveyed in 1791 and 1792 for the nation’s capital, Arlington County is a tapestry of history woven from colonial farmsteads, Civil War fortifications, African American villages, and the people who have defined the county for more than two centuries. Travel journalist Barbara Noe Kennedy leads a day-long exploration of sites that reveal how Arlington evolved from a rural Virginia community into a modern urban county transformed by war, migration, segregation, and redevelopment.

Jump-start your creative ideas by enriching your sketchbooking with new techniques. Learn how to map your day, get creative with colored pencil on mid-tone kraft paper, and combine printmaking with watercolor.

Explore the many creative ways to work with paper and make personal storybooks by hand. Participants build and bind several books using standard bookmaking papers and thread as well as unusual materials such as manila folders and matchboxes.

Jancis Robinson has been writing about wine since 1975. She is the coauthor, with Hugh Johnson, of the new 9th edition of The World Atlas of Wine. Since it was first published in 1971, the Atlas has been widely recognized as an authoritative wine reference. In a conversation with Dave McIntyre, formerly the Washington Post’s wine columnist, she shares her expertise and insights on what’s new in the world of wine. The event also includes a wine tasting and book signing.

Can’t get enough of gel printing or just want to indulge yourself and experiment with techniques and materials? This intensive two-day class provides an opportunity to use a plethora of tools and materials for creating patterns and texture.

Discover the power of reflective writing guided by teaching artist and museum educator, Mary Hall Surface. Inspired by works of art by Hudson River landscape painter Jasper Francis Cropsey and poetry by Mary Oliver, explore the lessons that the season of autumn offers when we slow down, look closely, and reflect. Designed for writers of all levels, the workshop invites participants to look outward at paintings and poetry and to look inward through writing.

Historians view the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 as a turning point, igniting northern resistance to the expansion of slavery. Far less noted is the crucial role of political maps, which visualized that threat in meetings, newspapers, and pamphlets, helping forge the anti-slavery coalition that elected Lincoln. Historian Susan Schulten shows how these maps reshaped perceptions of the American West—and the nation itself.

The universe is far stranger than science fiction ... and it’s all real. Kimberly Arcand of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory leads a journey through weird and wild places in the cosmos, from merely mind-bending to truly extreme. Along the way meet quasars powered by supermassive black holes, city-sized neutron stars, and pulsars that keep time more precisely than atomic clocks, plus some wild worlds orbiting distant suns.

During the Civil War, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers endured brutal conditions in prison camps such as Belle Isle in Richmond. Yet many prisoners found creative ways to preserve their humanity: they sketched, carved, wrote, and crafted objects from whatever materials they could find. Kelly Hancock of the American Civil War Museum highlights works from its POW art collection. These deeply personal pieces reveal not only suffering but also endurance, resourcefulness, and the human need to create even in the darkest of circumstances.

In the 19th century, European artists looked to North Africa for exotic inspiration and new artistic experience. Eugène Delacroix spent six months in Morocco, filling sketchbooks that helped shape Orientalism. His example inspired Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Paul Klee, and August Macke. In a four-session series, art historian Joseph Paul Cassar examines how travel to North Africa reshaped their artistic ideas. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1 credit)