Eight Works of Art Hiding in New York City

With its abundance of museums, art galleries and street art, New York City has long been a mecca for world-class art. However, many of the city’s most impressive pieces of artwork are hidden in plain sight, and you just have to know where to look (or listen) to find them.

In her new book Art Hiding in New York , writer and art curator Lori Zimmer leads readers on a journey through Manhattan highlighting some of the island’s art gems tucked away in office building lobbies, downtown lofts and churches—all of them accessible (and free!) to the public.

About 10 years ago, Zimmer began documenting all of the artwork she’d happen upon while navigating her way through the city’s bustling streets. “I was fired from a job at an art gallery and traumatized; I didn’t know what else to do with my time, so I started walking every street in Manhattan and began noticing the city’s abundance of art,” Zimmer says. “I would go home and do research on each piece.” In 2012, she launched a blog called Art Nerd New York where she'd record her findings. Now that blog has turned into a book, which features illustrations drawn by Zimmer's childhood friend, Maria Krasinski .

While many of the artists featured in the book are relatively unknown, others are household names, including Keith Haring, Salvador Dalí, Diane Arbus and Louise Bourgeois, offering readers a window into the city’s lesser-known art scene.

“The book is designed so that you can carry it around in your bag while you’re exploring the city,” she says. “I want people to use their imaginations and open their eyes to the city's hidden art.”

It’s easy to get swept up in the cacophony of sights and sounds pulsating through Times Square, but if you listen closely, you’ll be in for a surprise that often goes unnoticed by the crowds storming midtown. Located beneath the subway grates on a pedestrian island on Broadway between 45th and 46th streets, sits a sound sculpture created by artist and classical musician Max Neuhaus. Aptly named Times Square , the installation emits a steady low drone that plays on a continuous loop 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When Neuhaus made the installation in 1977, he intended for it to blend into the surroundings, and to say he was successful would be an understatement. Most people don’t even realize it’s there, and when they do, they chalk it up to the sounds of the city. “People often mistake it for a subway train below,” Zimmer says.

As with most bustling sidewalks in Manhattan, if you don’t pay attention to where you’re walking, you might run head-on with another person. But on a stretch in SoHo, it pays to look down. It’s there, at 110 Greene Street, that Belgian artist Françoise Schein planted a work of art directly into the sidewalk. Called Subway Map Floating on a New York Sidewalk, she created the work in 1985 after receiving a commission from a local real estate developer looking to spiff up the area outside his building. The result is a 90-foot long exaggerated replica of the city’s subway lines built using lengths of stainless steel that interplay with illuminated rounds of glass embedded into the cement. “The sidewalks are hollow in SoHo because of the buildings’ basements,” Zimmer says, “so at night the lights sparkle from below.” Although the piece does call to mind the subway, Schein was inspired by a less likely source: the human circulatory system, with the subway lines as veins. “She saw Manhattan as a living thing,” Zimmer says.

Works by the late pop artist Keith Haring can be spotted throughout his adopted hometown of New York City, with notable pieces on display at Astor Place , on the walls surrounding the Carmine Street Pool and along FDR Drive in East Harlem . However, there’s one piece in particular that many people might not be aware of since it’s located in an unlikely spot: inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the city’s Upper West Side. While religion was a topic Haring rarely visited in his art, for this piece he was inspired by the life of Christ. The result is 260-pound, five-by-eight-foot triptych altarpiece finished in white gold leaf but depicted in Haring’s classic style of bulbous human figures.

The Life of Christ is one of many artworks on display at the largest cathedral in the world; it was also Haring’s final project before dying from complications from AIDS in 1990, a month after he completed the piece. “[The triptych] is one of nine works he created as part of a series,” Zimmer. “The other pieces can be seen in other cities around the world, like [at the Saint-Eustache Church ] in Paris.”

One of the city’s newest art pieces is also one of its most accessible to the public, despite it being housed inside an office building. Located in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, the scrolling 65-foot-long LED screen by multimedia artist Jenny Holzer can be seen from the street thanks to the plate-glass windows encircling the space, offering a peek of an ever-changing piece of art. Unveiled in 2006, the glowing installation features poems and prose written by New York luminaries like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop, poet and writer Allen Ginsburg and poet and novelist Langston Hughes. More recently, the screen has featured poems written by local children, which will remain part of the permanent installation. “I love that you can access it without entering the building,” Zimmer says. “There’s a park across the street from it with some benches where you can sit next to a fountain and have a little moment.”

SoHo is known for its abundance of art galleries, but one art space remains largely hidden from the masses. Inside a nondescript building at 141 Wooster St. is a sprawling art piece called The New York Earth Room . Created by the late Walter De Maria, an artist and sculptor, the creation stretches across 3,600 square feet of empty floor space and is comprised of 280,000 pounds of dirt. Interestingly, the same dark soil has been in place since the piece debuted in 1977. The room is one of several similar works created by the artist (past locations include stints in Germany). “I always take people there whenever they visit,” Zimmer says. “It smells like earth, but in a good way, and sometimes I’ll just stop in for a meditative moment, since the soil absorbs outside sounds.” One reason why it isn’t well known is because photography isn’t permitted, helping to protect the space from social media’s prying eyes. While the space is currently closed to the public for the summer (it’s during this time of year that workers cultivate the soil and remove any errant mushrooms), it’s expected to reopen in the fall.

While this metal sculpture by the late artist Louise Nevelson is plainly visible at the intersection of Maiden Lane and William Street in Lower Manhattan, its relevance in the art world is far less known. Like many women artists before (and after) her, the Russian-born sculptor was no stranger to the misogyny permeating throughout the art world, but she didn’t let this dissuade her from making a name for herself by creating a comprehensive portfolio of artworks throughout her adopted city. One such example is Shadows and Flags , a towering piece built of weathered steel that she created in 1977. The piece mimics the skyscrapers shrouding Louise Nevelson Plaza where it’s located. The plaza also happens to be the first public space in the city to be named after an artist—either male or female—reiterating her notable position in the New York art scene. “You can see other examples of her work at Louise Nevelson’s Chapel of the Good Shepherd [inside Saint Peter’s Church],” Zimmer says. (The chapel is currently closed for renovations.)

The Gay Liberation Monument at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village was created as a way to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, a social uprising led by the gay liberation movement during the summer of 1969. Designed by the late sculptor George Segal and constructed of cast bronze covered in white lacquer, the sculpture resides within Christopher Park, located across the street from the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar and the movement’s epicenter. The serene scene of four people (two men and two women) shows the loving relationship between each couple. The sculpture almost never made it to New York City due to a public outcry of what was considered a controversial subject at the time. (From 1986 to 1991, it was installed in Madison, Wisconsin, before being moved to its permanent home in the park in 1992.) “I can’t believe it was too controversial for New York City at one time,” Zimmer says. “You think of New York as a liberal place, but apparently the rulers that be didn’t feel that way.”

In the water lapping up against the shoreline of Battery Place on Manhattan’s southern tip sits a metal sculpture that changes depending on the time of day. Working with the tides, the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial by French-Venezuelan artist Marisol Escobar (often known simply as Marisol) is either fully visible or submerged underwater. The bronze sculpture, which was unveiled in 1991, is based on an historical event that took place during World War II when a Nazi U-boat attacked a merchant marine vessel, and as the victims grasped to their sinking boat in an attempt to save their lives, their German opponents photographed them. “I love that this piece interacts with the city,” Zimmer says. The memorial pays tribute to the approximately 20,000 Merchant Mariners who were killed or lost at sea during the war, according to the book. “When the tide comes in, it looks like the soldiers are drowning. If this piece were on land, it wouldn’t have the same effect.”

A New Virtual Tour Takes Us Inside Architect Edgar Miller’s Masterwork

On the 1700 block of Wells Street in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, a curious red door is hard to miss. It looks like something that belongs in a medieval castle. Every inch of it is ornately carved. The brick façade around the door is studded with tiles laid in an idiosyncratic array of geometric patterns. The modes are different, but they don’t clash.

This mélange of styles typifies the work of Edgar Miller, a 20th-century artist and architect who has been largely overlooked by history. While many people have walked by the door and the façade, very few—likely less than one or two thousand—have ever gotten a chance to see what’s behind it: Glasner Studio, a private apartment completed in 1932 that’s considered Miller’s masterwork. A new virtual tour by the young nonprofit Edgar Miller Legacy , which does not own but has exclusive access to the space, allows anyone to step inside, and learn more about its enigmatic creator.

“Miller’s little-known today because he was ahead of his time,” says Marin Sullivan, an independent curator who was involved in the creation of the virtual tour. “He worked much like contemporary artists do today, crossing disciplines, audiences and pursuits. He was a fine artist as well as an architect and a graphic designer. But, because he didn’t fit into just one category, he got dropped out of history.”

Born in 1899, Miller had a bucolic upbringing, mostly in Idaho, where he developed a fascination with the natural world. From an early age, he had a talent for drawing, which led him to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But traditional art training bored him. The school was focused on technique, while Miller yearned to engage with big ideas about the meaning of art, according to the 2009 book Edgar Miller and The Handmade Home, the only comprehensive volume on Miller’s work. He dropped out after a couple of years and, in 1919, became an apprentice to Alfonso Iannelli , who was well known as a sculptor, commercial designer and metalworker. Iannelli had created concrete sculptures for the Midway Gardens, a three-acre music pavilion on Chicago’s South Side that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Miller spent five years at Iannelli’s studio, where he became skilled in sculpture, stone cutting, mural painting, casting and woodcarving. In 1923, an advertisement titled “The Parade of Chicago Artists” described Miller: “the blond boy Michelangelo sculpts, paints, batiks, decorates china, makes drawing, woodcuts, etching, lithographs.”

Through Iannelli, Miller developed relationships with key players in the Chicago art and architecture scene, such as Holabird & Root, one of Chicago’s leading architecture firms. He worked on murals and installations for the firm. He also worked on projects across the country, including ornamentation for North Dakota’s capitol building in Bismarck, an acclaimed series of stained glass windows in architect Barry Byrne’s Church of Christ the King in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and murals for Fred Harvey restaurants—a chain of eateries in railroad depots—in three states. He rarely, if ever, turned down a job, and he worked in both architecture and graphic design. In the ‘30s, Miller’s most prolific decade, his work included stained glass for major office buildings and mausoleums, stone sculptures for churches and other facades, murals for restaurants and private clubs, book covers, and advertisements for the department story Marshall Field and Company. (Some of his architectural projects and murals survive, but many do not). One trade magazine, Modern Advertising on Display , said he “pioneered the use of modern art in advertising,” while Architecture magazine hailed him as “a new luminary.”

While he was working on his commercial projects in the ‘20s, Miller was also making art independently, and he was part of a rich community of bohemian artists. One of them was his friend Sol Kogen, who hatched a plan to create a new artists’ colony in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, where rents were low. Kogen had the money to buy old buildings, and his idea was to have artists rehab them in exchange for rent. The first such complex is now known as the Carl Street Studios, at 155 West Burton.

One of Miller’s heroes was William Morris, a leader in the British Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, which sought to vindicate crafts made by hand and so-called decorative arts in an increasingly industrial world. Morris believed a home could be a complete work of art, bringing together all of the arts. Miller sought to create such a work at Carl Street, and for him that meant that every detail was embellished. “Miller was part of this movement of romantic eclecticism, the idea of art, design and architecture all coming together,” says Zac Bleicher, founder and executive director of Edgar Miller Legacy. The Carl Street Studios were Miller’s first chance to achieve his vision, and he threw himself into it with the feverish intensity with which he approached all his projects. “Miller had to be creating at all times,” Sullivan observes.

Miller made major architectural changes to the Victorian building, including removing floors to create two-story vertical windows. His process remains something of a mystery: An architect, Andrew Ribori, was designated to consult, but Miller rarely sought his advice, instead improvising from rough sketches or nothing at all. He was helped by builders and artisans he knew and trusted, including his brother and sister. While Kogen had enough money to buy the buildings, there wasn’t much budget beyond that, so, Miller salvaged his materials from wrecking sites. From his rural upbringing, Miller was accustomed to working with whatever was at hand, and creative reuse became an important part of his process.

Miller adorned spaces with as many handmade details as he could: frescoes and murals, tile friezes, iron railings, light fixtures he built himself, and built-in fireplaces surrounded by tile mosaics. Bleicher says, “At Carl Street, a little moment of genius will appear around a corner—a stained glass window, or a mosaic.” In the ‘40s, a writer for The New York Times Magazine described the studios: “In this one structure, there’s a touch of Moderne, Deco, Prairie, Tudor, Mission, a little English Country House and Arts and Crafts.”

The Carl Street Studios, which are still intact and privately owned today, were a progenitor of Glasner Studio, which is considered Miller’s masterpiece and is the subject of the new virtual tour. In 1928, Kogen purchased another apartment building at 1734 N. Wells Street, now known as the Kogen-Miller Studios. The wealthy industrialist R.W. Glasner, who had been following Miller’s career, commissioned him to make one of the nine apartments into space where he could entertain. “Finally, Miller had the budget to do everything that he wanted, and Glasner gave him free reign,” Bleicher says. Over several years, Miller packed the four-story, 3,000-square-foot studio with stained glass windows, wood carvings, tilework and bas-reliefs.

The apartment changed hands over the years, but remarkably, Miller’s work remained intact. Frank Furedy, a businessman who held a number of patents, bought the apartment in the 1940s and brought Miller back to create a carved ceiling on the first floor that depicts the world’s greatest scientists and inventors, such as Guglielmo Marconi, who invented the radio. (Furedy himself was included). A carving of a mushroom cloud with “AD 1945” below it reflects the fact that the first atomic bombs had just been dropped. In the ‘60s, the apartment was owned by civil rights activist Lucy Hassell Montgomery, who hosted her radical friends there, including Fred Hampton, a leader in the Black Panther Party hiding out from the FBI, who deemed him a threat. (The apartment was added to the FBI’s hotspot list). In the 2000s, the space was restored by owner Mark Mamolen, and filled with period furniture and collected works by Miller, such as painted ceramics, drawings and pieces of murals.

Edgar Miller Legacy began offering small public tours of Glasner Studio in 2014. The apartment complex is still privately owned—Glasner Studio itself is owned by a member of Bleicher’s family—so access is limited. The organization estimates that fewer than a few thousand people have ever seen the space over the course of its existence. (The fact that his best work is in private homes is yet another reason why Miller remains little-known).

“Glasner Studio is like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” says Richard Cahan, co-author, with Michael Williams, of Edgar Miller and The Handmade Home . “It shows how Miller had an encyclopedic mind, for architecture, humanity and life itself. He did everything in a completely spontaneous manner, and he had fun, unlike most architects. It’s impossible to place him in the pantheon of Chicago architecture, because he was an original.”

The virtual tour allows viewers to explore a 3D rendering of the space and click on various elements to read text, listen to audio clips and watch videos about them. Walking in the door, one can see up to the second level, and a two-story stained glass window. Above the door is a white plaster bas-relief that depicts five muses: dance, music, drama, art and, in the center, architecture. “Miller believed architecture was the highest art form, where science and technology blend with artistic expression and produce harmonious living environments,” Sullivan says in the tour audio.

Visitors can follow the stairs, which are covered by elaborately carved wood latticeworks—some geometric, some featuring flora and fauna—up to the top floor, where they’ll see The Garden of Paradise stained glass window, the space’s apotheosis, both literally and figuratively. Sullivan calls the window, which is nine feet tall and 20 feet wide, spanning an entire wall, “one of the greatest secular stained glass pieces in America.” Jungle animals, birds and nude men and women are stylistically posed in an idyllic garden. In one of the 24 panels, a woman caresses a stag. The window epitomizes Miller’s ideas about the sanctity of nature and his wish for humanity to live in harmony with it. A pitched ceiling makes the room feel like a cathedral.

“All of Miller’s many influences are in that window,” Sullivan says, of The Garden of Paradise. “Medieval, byzantine, modern, organic naturalism, there’s so much synthesized, yet it’s not discordant.” A chevron pattern appears in the window and throughout the house and is thought to demonstrate the influence of Mexican folk traditionalism, in which a zig-zag signifies the cycle of life, ascending from birth into life and then descending into death.

“While nothing can replace seeing Glasner Studio in-person, a virtual tour is in some ways a better way to it, because in person the space can be visually overwhelming,” Cahan says. “I had to walk through it many times before I could grab it in my mind. But I knew immediately I’d never seen anything like it before.”

Edgar Miller Legacy created the virtual tour when Covid-19 made it impossible for people to tour the space in person. Glasner Studio has been closed for public tours since March. The nonprofit hopes the tour will raise awareness of Miller’s work, and encourage preservation of the spaces and more scholarship on the artist. Miller’s papers are housed at the Chicago History Museum, but he has been little studied, Sullivan says. “There’s been a lot of scholarship about art and architecture in mid-century Chicago, but not as much about the interwar years,” she observes.

According to Bleicher, Miller was part of an experimental culture in the 1920s and ‘30s that had a hopeful vision for the future. That vision didn’t pan out because of the Great Depression, and a very sterilized style of architecture and design took over after World War II. “Miller challenged expectations, molds, ideas about what art can be,” he adds. “Exploring the living spaces he created, you see his philosophy of unbridled creativity. We hope people will see that and be inspired.”

For Cahan, Miller’s “legacy” is hard to pin down. “When I think of the word legacy, I think of people following in a person’s footsteps,” he says. “Nobody has followed in Edgar Miller’s footsteps, because nobody can do what he did.”

Artist Jeffrey Gibson’s Artwork Activates Overlooked Histories and Marginalized Identities

Artist Jeffrey Gibson , a half-Cherokee member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, takes a multidisciplinary approach to his work—he is painter, sculptor, photographer and performer. His oeuvre is an artful mashup that challenges his audience to question cultural and political assumptions. For his material, he mines his Native-American heritage, his youthful exploration of nightclub subculture and his global education in Korea, Germany, England and other countries where he lived growing up. His artistic emphasis can be said to be a collaborative embrace of marginalized identities, nonconformists and societal outsiders.

Gibson particularly resonates in this moment in time. His artwork is layered in both the country’s history of cultural erasure and its present climate of divisive politics.

“As the times have become increasingly more political, people have begun projecting more politicalness into the work,” notes Gibson, whose most recognized artwork is a series of repurposed Everlast punching bags adorned with embroidery, multicolored glass beads, fluorescent nylon fringe, metal jingles and labeled with pop song lyrics. “And then I almost am responding back,” he says. “Because I am enjoying the conversation.”

Whether geometric paintings of acrylic and graphite on rawhide or dazzling, patterned tapestries, inspired by traditional quilting and an indigenous craft narrative, Gibson’s facility across mediums reflects a profound understanding of formal abstraction. Among his influences are American and European modernists, such as Sol Lewitt, Josef Albers and Bridget Riley. His work incorporates materials such as goat fur and deer hide, as well as most recently, the crafts of Algonquian birch biting and porcupine quillwork, practiced by tribes long before European settlers arrived.

Issues of colonization— both within museum walls and beyond—never stray far from Gibson’s mind. In his 2015 American History , a multi-colored wall hanging, he incorporated the text: “American history is longer, larger, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

Born in Colorado Springs, Gibson, 47, the son of a U.S. Department of Defense engineer, recounts moving every two to three years during childhood, alighting in North Carolina, New Jersey, Germany and Korea. Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Royal College of Art graduate program, Gibson studied painting throughout. But he cites the punk and rave culture of the club scene he took in while in his teens and 20s as being as influential to his artistry as his formal training. “Looking back at the music that was being played in the late 80’s and 90’s, what we were dancing to in a celebratory way was oftentimes a cry for help, talking about HIV explicitly in some of those lyrics,” explains Gibson. “But I realized that there was a reason why that music spoke to me. It spoke to me as a young, queer, non-white man.”

This week, Gibson brings that discourse to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., with his multimedia choreography, titled “To Name An Other." The performance features drums and 50 participants, who self-identify as indigenous, Native American, LGBTQ, or as people of color, outfitted in Gibson’s elaborate handmade garments.

It is the latest iteration of the museum’s “Identify” series. “We’re opening up what a portrait can be,” says the museum’s Dorothy Moss, who is curator of painting and sculpture, as well as Identify’s director.

Gibson is well suited to be the tenth commissioned “Identify” artist, joining others such as the renowned James Luna , Martha McDonald , J. J. McCracken , María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Wilmer Wilson . The purpose of the project is to shine light on gaps in the museum’s early collection, acknowledging those persons that are missing, says Moss. As museums throughout the U.S. grapple with long-standing institutional imbalances, “Identify” confronts racial absence in art and American history through the lens of performance.

“I’m really hoping that Gibson’s work will give those who felt silent during this political moment a voice,” Moss explains of the 50 volunteer-performers, as well as the text Gibson incorporates into the performance. Gibson's brightly colored garments for each of the participants are paired with digitally printed slogans such as: “They Fight for Clean Water;” “Powerful Because They Are Different;” “Their Votes Count;” “They Speak Their Language;” “They Identify As She” and “Their Dark Skin Brings Light.”

The strategic use of text is a hallmark of Gibson's aesthetic and recalls the works of Jenny Holzer and HIV-AIDS activist David McDiarmid .

“He is allowing people to be visible, who have felt unheard and vulnerable in our current climate,” says Moss.

Gibson’s use of native beadwork, quilt-inspired craftsmanship and protest slogans is being recognized for propelling contemporary art and social dialogue forward. But his creation of his first iridescent punching bag, the 2011 Everlast , was a deeply personal experience. Gibson recalls, an amorphous sense of frustration — questioning whether he even wanted to be an artist — during doctor recommended therapy. “By the end of the first session, there were lots of issues surrounding classicism, racism, homophobia, very specific to the art world in a way that was clearly the root of my frustrations,” he says. “Working with that therapist led to a physical trainer and then boxing, as a way to bring back together my mind and my body and to try to unify those things that felt very disjointed to me.”

For this year’s Whitney biennial, Gibson hung Keep on Moving (2019), a quilted flag-mural prominently in the museum lobby, above the ticket counters, with the statement: “Thank you for the space you hold. Know that you are loved. Keep on Moving. Don’t Stop.”

Visitors are confronted by the artwork’s prominent placement as they wait the 5 to 20 minutes it takes to purchase their entry passes. “It’s about saying what I think needs to be said, and what is the right thing to do,” Gibson says. “I feel it would have been irresponsible for me to not express some things with so big a platform like this.”

True to Gibson’s visual lexicon, the artist seizes the opportunity to empower viewers. Whitney Biennial co-curator and art historian Jane Panetta says Gibson's text—a powerful fusion of art and language—is as much a protest of contemporary injustice , as it is a declaration of strength against inequity and prejudice. “While always grappling with tough issues about his queerness, about his being an indigenous artist,” Panetta says, “he’s always tried to ask, how can I grapple with these issues but think about a positive voice, a productive voice.”

This month in New York City, both the New Museum, where Gibson has been an artist-in-residence this past spring, and the Whitney Museum of American Art are showcasing Gibson’s garment-like works. For his June 8 encore presentation of “To Name An Other,” taking place at the New Museum, performers will again enliven his textiles through drumming, procession and motion to mark the close of Gibson’s residency. Referencing his deep interest in issues of appropriation and narratives of conflict, Gibson titled the final work of his residency program at the New Museum, The Anthropophagic Effect , after poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” an essay about how communities should “devour” or cannibalize a colonizer’s culture in order to reject domination. The work includes four of his garments alongside Choctaw and Cherokee dresses, and an array of materials from plastic beads, nylon ribbons, brass grommets, dried pear gourds and baskets.

Always exploring new histories of indigenous craftsmanship, during his New Museum residency, Gibson took up Southeastern river cane basket weaving, for example. “Jeffrey is somebody who is really interested in how different cultural forms are constantly, always touching one another,” says the New Museum’s associate curator Sara O’Keeffe. “A big part of the garments that Jeffrey’s been making over the last few years is to think about them activated and not simply shown as artifacts in museums across the country.”

"Identify: Performance Art as Portraiture—Jeffrey Gibson: To Name An Other" takes place May 22, 2019 at 5 at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.