Ward 5 Calendar

Event Name:

• Art Opening
  

Date:

• Fri, August 10, 2012
  

Tme:

• 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Location:

• 12th Street Gallery

Export Event:

• iCal

Category(ies):

• Arts-Culture

Please join us for the Opening Reception of  “Church Porch”   ( see attached invitation)

ARTland/Brookland

Arts and Culture Temporium Project

3500 12th Street, NE, Washington, DC 

August 10 through 26, 2012 

Opening reception August 10, from 5 until 8 pm  

Open Friday and Saturday 5 – 8 and Sunday 3-6 

Tom Rooney

Ray Allard

Bonita Bing

Lisa Farrell

Daniel Hutch

Lisa Mundy

Russell Simmons

Daniel Wolkoff

Lisa Farrell, curator

Church Porch — the idea for the exhibit finds its inspiration in the location of the temporary storefront

gallery on 12th Street — specifically, its close proximity (across the intersection) to the front entrance

of a neighborhood focal point, St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church.  Physically, the two buildings

can be seen together when wandering up or down 12th Street. When the view of the two buildings

merge together in the same sightline they can also move together in one’s imagination, conceptually forming a modern day Church Porch.  This vision can expand outward to include all corners of the intersection of 12th and Monroe Streets in Brookland.

The traditional Church Porch is a room at the main entrance to a church separate from the sanctuary, usually lined with benches. In the past people met in the Church Porch to conduct financial or civic matters. The 12th Street corner storefront, transformed into a temporary art gallery during the

Temporium Project, functions in a way similar to the archaic church porch, by providing a cultural

and commercial focus point for community and engagement at the church, but not in, the church.

Expanding the vision of the conceptual Church Porch outward, one can likewise include the

Masonic Temple, across from the 12th Street Gallery. Today, a now famous neighborhood

hardware store, (and formerly the location of the Brookland Post Office), sustains the street level

corner of the historic Masonic Temple’s building.  The hardware store, like the Post Office before,

continues to engage and serve the community in the Masonic Temple’s building, but is separate

from the Lodge’s restricted area.

The conceptual Church Porch may focus on the overlap in space that is shared between commerce

and activity and places of worship and meeting places that are together in close proximity in city neighborhoods, and in Brookland the overlap was first shared on the four corners of this intersection.

St. Anthony’s is the established neighborhood church that stands on the corner at the center of the

place where the commercial district grew up in Brookland. The historic Masonic Temple (Lodge),

another focal point of the neighborhood, was later built at this intersection to be positioned close to

St. Anthony’s.  A convent makes it’s home on the opposite corner.  

Wandering from the intersection of 12th and Monroe Streets away from the commercial corridor

and deeper into Brookland’s neighborhood one can find numerous places of religious study, worship

and meeting, where congregations large and small gather in places as varied as small chapels, storefront churches, immense and intimate local and national churches, and major religious institutions, that in some

way share in the vision thread of the conceptual space of the Church Porch.

The conceptual Church Porch offers an expression of this time and this place.

 **for further information or review call or email, Lisa Farrell  at lisa5farrell@gmail.com or 202-368-0038