Sumner School Today

Last year, I wrote about an exhibit on the life of Adolph Cluss, German-born self trained architect, who emigrated to Washington early in his life and designed an extraordinary number of the city's public buildings during the second half of the 19th century. The buildings were, I think, notable for the way they combined comfortable architecture to formal architecture.

A suprising number of those buildings have been demolished in the name of progress. Those that remain include both the Sumner and Franklin Schools.

The Sumner school is used for temporary exhibits, concerts, and so forth. I think it can be rented for functions generally (perhaps only by not-for-profits). It belongs to the school system and houses the public school archives among other things. It is fully restored.

Last year, they had an excellent exhibit about Cluss that very rew people went to see. They issued an excellent coffee table book on the exhibit, which I have recently seen for sale at the excellent store at the Building Museum. It is filled with photographs and interesting items about the history of the District in the post-civil war years.

I was in Sumner School today for other reasons and see that one room of the Cluss exhibit is still open, and encourage you to walk through it.

Why was I in the museum? Because I saw that there were two other exhibits which had recently opened. One, sponsored by a group called Friends Forever, which is a Zimbabwean art collective, is showing several hundred sculptures in stone by contemporary Zimbabwean artists. While some of the prices are in the thousands, some (most, perhaps, are in the $200 to $500 range. They are worth looking at, both for the artistry as well as the quality and variety of the stones used, as well as purchasing. The exhibit will there until the end of June, and it is to be replenished as works are sold.

The other exhibit, is by a Philippino-American artist named Nilo M. Santiago, whose works are primarily water colors. They are half-way between cartoons and traditional water colors (i.e., there is very little fading in and out, and many fine line boundaries), and are filled with bright colors. American subjects, Philippino subjects, and subjects painted on a round the world tour (including some interesting paintings of Russian cathedrals). The most interesting to me is a series called My Philippines, which treat his early life with his family in almost collage fashion (but not collages) with written explanations of the events taking place woven into the fabric of the oversize paintings. Would I acquire a Santiago? I liked the series on his life (about $700 each), but would hate to see the series broken up (there are five or six of them). The others, I would probably pass up.