Sight Scene: In Dupont Move, WPA to Delete Its 'C'

BY THE BEGINNING of next year, the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran will be no more. In its stead will be the Washington Project for the Arts, an organization that will in most respects be the same group. But for an infinitesimal fraction of time, neither will exist.

"Some split second of time between midnight and 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, there won't be any WPA anything," said George Hemphill, a local art dealer and WPA\Corcoran advisory board member.

Director Kim Ward said that the new WPA will be housed in a different location, leaving its home at the Corcoran. The new place? A 1,000-square-foot first floor area of a Dupont Circle rowhouse, but the organization has not yet publicly disclosed its new address. Ward said that the "rent was provided at the rate that a nonprofit arts group could afford."

Ward said that in the immediate future, the organization will be testing out its new legs. "This move gives us much-needed office and committee space," she said. The group has also tentatively planned to increase its staff size and operation. "I don't think it will increase immediately, in the next nine months, we want to finish our fiscal year [through June 2008] and see how things work cost-wise outside the [Corcoran] institution. We have to experience all the costs of being outside the institution," Ward said. She explained that the organization eventually intends to hire a part-time staffer to focus on development and marketing and a full-time hire to concentrate on programming.

Jennifer Motruk Loy, the chair of the advisory board, says that on Jan. 1, she will step down, passing her role to Andreas Tremols, an artist with a longtime association with the organization — though he will be acting as the chair of the board of directors. Hemphill will step into the role of vice chair of the board of directors.

"I'm pleased," Loy said. "Actually, I'm very proud — pleased is a side effect of that pride. I have a strong belief in everyone who's on our advisory board."

Ward said that the organization is planning a curator's office-style "micro-gallery" in addition to office and meeting space, but indicated it's not the group's answer to a need for permanent exhibition space of its own.

"We want to work toward some type of contemporary arts center. That's somewhere 3 to 5 years down the road," she said. "I'm very worried about D.C. losing its arts organizations to the suburbs and surrounding communities just because there's not any central destination for local contemporary art in D.C. If we don't meet and work together to create something, we'll lose these smaller and independent arts groups" to areas surrounding the District, she explained. Ward said she's meeting with a group comprising nonprofit and for-profit industries with an interest in contemporary art, and that they are in the very early stages of comparing models and brainstorming.

Those promising innovations are some time away, as the organization is re-establishing its brand. It remains to be seen how, exactly, the break from the Corcoran will affect the group's mission.

For years, the Washington Project for the Arts has had a neither/nor relationship with the Corcoran. Neither were the group's board of advisers under the direction of Corcoran officials, nor were they a proper board of directors. Neither was the group financially dependent on the Corcoran, nor was the organization fully independent.

In 2005, when the WPA\C fired Phillip Barlow, the curator for its Options Biennial (after he made statements publicly about artists he would not consider for the show), speculation was rampant that the Corcoran had intervened and brought about Barlow's termination. One board member seemed to suggest as much in a 2004 interview with The Post, saying, "WPA\C's power begins and ends with the Corcoran."

No longer, it would seem — though Ward says that she's never been subject to any curatorial guidance from the Corcoran. "I don't think you'll see this huge mercurial shift in programming."