What’s missing from DC’s arts and culture coverage
And what that gap means for all of us who live here
The Washington Post didn’t publicly announce the end of its “In The Galleries” column. Instead, local artists, curators, and gallery owners found out via an email from longtime writer Mark Jenkins.
“I’m very sorry to send you this news,” Jenkins wrote.
Every Sunday the column was a beacon where artists and galleries hoped to make even fleeting appearances. While it typically only featured three short reviews of local exhibitions, it was at least a predictable space in The Washington Post.
Now, that’s no more.
For BmoreArt, Cara Ober and Michael Anthony Farley spoke to local gallerists and arts organization leaders about their disappointment and concern. Their sources worried that “the people who want to live in a city because of all the ‘nice things,’ because of all of the excellent cultural offerings — whether galleries, museums, pop up art, fairs, exhibitions, experimental performance — will be disengaged and uninformed.”
While the arts community was reeling, Jenkins was not surprised. Over 40 years writing for the Post, he witnessed the prioritization of a wider national and international online audience. With this shift, Jenkins said, local coverage, and the community connection that comes with it, is “unraveling.”
Readers used to be able to follow an art show from promotion to execution. That coverage might include a preview story based on a press release. After the exhibition opening, performance, or artist talk, there would be an in-depth recap of the event with interviews with major players — the artists, the host, and attendees — or a review from a seasoned critic providing analysis and vital historical context.
I spoke with local artists, historians, publishers, arts organizations, and curators to better understand what is unraveling, and what it could mean. They each stressed the immediate and long-lasting impacts of this dwindling coverage on DC. I also heard from them that while national politics and institutions often overshadow the District’s historical and artistic legacy, the two should actually be framed in direct conversation. As an artist and DC resident, I am drawn to the resilient creative forces that exist here and I believe the people who drive those forces deserve to be recorded, referenced, and remembered.
The end of “In the Galleries” followed many other print and online closures that were contributing to critical arts coverage, including DCist, Brightest Young Things, Pink Line Project and the pause of Dirt DMV. While our experience of traditional coverage has changed over decades, local newspapers at one time could reliably and effectively collate and broadcast a wide variety of arts experiences to a large audience. Today, niche communities find each other through a handful of Instagram accounts, blogs, and the occasional review.
What’s happening in DC is happening nationally. In 2019, Neiman Reports asked 327 arts writers and critics about their experience in the changing publishing landscape. Mary Louise Schumacher’s report “Visual Arts Journalism: Newsroom Pressure and Generational Change,” found that “for those who do have staff jobs, fewer than one in 10 felt ‘very secure’ in their positions. A third of all respondents report that their jobs are ‘not at all secure.’”
The survey replicated a few questions from a 2002 study done by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. That study “looked at a more tightly focused group of traditional art critics” — on staff at a general-interest outlet, focused on writing about visual art — identifying 230. Eleven years later, there were fewer than ten. In an article about the decline, Andrew Russeth pointed out that there wasn’t a short supply of critics — just full-time gigs. Many arts writers had turned to online publications, blogs, and independent websites to work. Russeth could see the optimism in these new models and Schumacher agreed that “online outlets are leading the vanguard in arts writing.”
While online outlets are leading the way in experimental and critical coverage, DC locals have difficulty finding them. The Pew Research Center found that a majority of adults in the Washington, DC area said the arts are either important for daily life, important but not for daily life, or at least interesting to follow. However, just 29% of that majority said it is very easy to stay informed on the topic.
Our neighbors are right that the information is hard to find now — and it may be even harder to find in the future, Dr. Joshua Shannon, Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Maryland explained: “As a historian, I find [decline in coverage] kind of frightening, because the idea that you could go back to the past and kind of pinpoint it with this physical record is a really lovely skill to be able to practice,” Shannon said. “But when you don’t have a physical record, it’s, gosh, it’s a lot harder.”
Writers who might have filled full-time critic jobs in the past now face precarious, undervalued freelance careers, according to Nathalie von Veh, Storyteller and Regrants Manager at Washington Project for the Arts (WPA). While arts websites may be the vanguard, the majority of arts journalists surveyed for the Neiman Report article “make only half of their total earnings or less from their arts writing” and “more than half make $20,000 or less a year.”
The instability in the industry means organizations like WPA and the artists they work with consistently struggle to find writers to cover events. Some have supplemented the loss by creating their own blogs and newsletters with artist interviews and recaps. DC’s creative community, von Veh observes, fights for visibility, competing against national and international cultural institutions, like the Smithsonian museums.
“But then there persists this amazing alternative art community, DIY community, that will always be here, I feel, no matter what challenges we have,” said von Veh. She continued, “That community has faced so many challenges, not only the coverage but also the lack of vertical space, the gentrification, which means that there’s less house venues or alternative artist-run spaces.”
To von Veh, DC is a great place to start as an artist, but to sustain? She sees artists — like the writers who cover their work — moving to Baltimore, New York, or other cities to be able to have mid-career support. A part of that support is being critically examined.
“I think we’ve never had the coverage that perhaps these artists, the artists in DC, deserve,” von Veh observed, explaining that it isn’t just about recognition, but critical engagement that asks about the artist’s intention, the artwork’s relationship to societal issues, and how it connects locally.
Curator Fabiola R. Delgado knows what it’s like to have her work, and the artists she exhibits, go unseen.
She sees the role of the curator as a bridge between the arts and the public. R. Delgado’s background in human rights law shapes her curatorial practice, which focuses “on themes of migration, diaspora, and cultural memory.”
R. Delgado curated her first exhibition in New York last year which led to a full-page feature in The New York Times. Even publications in Baltimore, namely BmoreArt, have covered her work in DC.
However, she said her work has gone “largely unnoticed” by local press.
“It’s disappointing, especially in a city that prides itself on cultural richness.”
She continued, “Press, ultimately, helps ensure that meaningful work doesn’t go unnoticed. For emerging artists, in particular, press coverage can open doors, connect them to new audiences, and sometimes lead to future opportunities. For curators, it’s a way to communicate the intent and significance of an exhibit, helping audiences understand its broader relevance.”
For von Veh, outside engagement with the work is a vital part of the artistic process — “not only to engage in the ideas or even critique or give positive feedback in terms of what is happening, but also to provide this record of what has happened.”
Shannon, the art historian, agrees, noting the broader societal implications: “There’s a question here, not only about who is being covered and in what way, for what audience, and by what medium, but which parts of that will be visible in the future.”
“I liken the art scene in DC to dandelions that grow in concrete parking lots: never sure of the future, but always happy to be alive,” Murat Cem Mengüç wrote in a September 2024 roundup of upcoming arts shows for Hyperallergic.
While national publications like Hyperallergic occasionally spotlight the DC arts scene, local writers who are attuned to DC’s dynamics can better report on the undulations of support.
Phil Hutinet, a DC native who started East City Art (ECA) in 2010, feels good about 2025. The city’s only publication focused on the visual arts, ECA announced in December that a donor made a substantial gift to support the critical writing program.
“I’ve got a core group of good writers. I’ve got decent sources of funding to sustain what we’re doing. And I think that I’ve always been good at adapting to technology,” said Hutinet.
He believes that there’s more art being produced in DC than ever before and that DC “is becoming a real capital city at last… not just a political seat, but it’s also becoming a major cultural center for the United States.”
Creatives are making DC that kind of city for themselves and the local community. For instance, muralist and designer Peter Chang has spent the last 20 years supporting local artists through event organizing. With Ally Mumm, he co-founded the organization USAN USAN, which put on its fourth Umbrella Art Fair in November at Union Market. Designed to help artists grow their local reach, the fair featured approximately 100 artists and, in a rare move among art fairs, didn’t take a cut of their sales.
“The arts are the backbone of culture, and the stronger art scene you have, the stronger your culture is in that city or town or country,” said Chang. He said discourse after the show is critical for the growth and expansion of the creative scene.
That creative scene often feels sequestered, and relegated to the background while national and international institutions stay at the center.
DC’s arts community is “passionate, resourceful, and driven by a desire to make art accessible and impactful,” curator Fabiola R. Delgado said. But it gets overshadowed by “the grandeur of the national museums and monuments.”
“Important and impressive as they are, they tend to draw attention away from the everyday creators and residents. People sometimes forget that DC is a real city, with real people making real art,” said R. Delgado.
Our city’s artists have a unique and crucial power both in their neighborhood and their country. Local reporting on arts and culture provides a portrait of the city, its residents, what they create, and what that means in a broader social context now and in the future.
R. Delgado explained that she does her best to document her exhibitions and archival materials but wonders, “if I’m the only one keeping track, how will others ever know about them? Did my work truly exist? Perhaps only for those who experienced it firsthand.”
She often thinks about the future artists, curators, and historians who might miss her work’s impact. “Without these records, so much creative history risks being forgotten and important artistic discourses left out.”
Like von Veh writing coverage for her own organization or R. Delgado archiving her work, publisher Hutinet also recognizes the critical historical work of reporting the East City Art is contributing to: “We have this massive base of resources that of which I’m a steward for not just the present, but also for the future.”
Hutinet’s neighbor Cheryl Edwards is a visual artist. She is 70 years old, and has lived in DC for 30 of them. She said she worries about younger artists who are just beginning their careers because they need the reviews to grow, building their “art legacy.” She advocates for preserving those legacies and has led workshops on the importance of archiving.
She said the whole ecosystem plays a role, and writers are critically important — but that local artists deserve better than what we have now: “If we’ve participated in exhibitions in DC that are delineated as very strong and good exhibitions, the least that we could expect is that it’s documented with an article in the form of a review.”
She continued, “We all may disappear and die, those words are still there, right? So that’s the treasure.”
Edwards knows the vital importance of protecting that treasure. She is African American and grew up in Miami during Jim Crow and Segregation, as artists and organizations brace for another Trump presidency, Edwards offers perspective.
“I’ve been through this. I feel that African Americans at that time were resilient. It’s not pleasant. But what can happen now is to go deeper into your work,” she said.
She said the whole creative ecosystem must come together, stop operating in silos, hold on to each other, and collectively push forward because there is a vibrant community here and a lack of support. Now, even when working with larger institutions, local artists are at risk of losing support. Edwards curated a show for the Art Museum of the Americas, slated to open March 21, but it was canceled following “executive orders from the Trump administration to eliminate federal funding for diversity initiatives.”
She affirmed that the work of artists now is to ask: “Am I making the work from my interior? Am I being authentic? Am I documenting who I am and how I see the world around me?”
She continued, “Now is the time to do your work, because the work that you make now is going to be very significant and important in the future.”
You can find local art history in The Kreeger Museum’s recently published exhibition catalog from The DMV Collects the DMV or by exploring DCPL’s The People’s Archive (artists can even add to the archive!).
Mark Jenkins has continued to independently review local exhibitions through his recently started newsletter DisCerning Eye.
You can follow the author’s work talking with artists at warp_dmv. Blogs DC Trending, greg.org, and DC Art News offer insight, and The Washington Informer Bridge covers a variety of creative cultural scenes. Stay connected to local theater through DC Theater Arts and find out where the next jazz legend is performing at CapitalBop.
Clarification (3/20/2025): Writing on Phil Hutinet and East City Art was updated to clarify that his comments referred to the organization’s critical writing program.
