Jon: I was born in DC, and currently live in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of downtown.
Jon: Why not? It’s an international city full of culture and power — but still a small town.
Jon: I would start the day with a long walk with my dog to the Mall. After that, I’d take a long, hot shower and then meet a friend at an art museum to reflect on how beautiful the world can be. We’d picnic with a bowl of hummus at Little Sesame, followed by a nice nap. I would finish the evening with a passeggiata with my partner Michael to discover what’s opening soon.
Jon: While I enjoy attending holiday services with my family, I am more strongly affected by the culture of being a Jew. During lockdown, I took up baking, and have done pretty well with challah, bagels, hamantaschen, and babka. Years ago, I reworked my grandmother’s traditional Ashkenazi dishes into a variation that was a little healthier. I recently took up Yiddish, and have been working on a family tree project, for which I have been able to trace my roots five generations back to the shtetls of the Pale.
Jon: I am one of 26 artists selected to create a cherry blossom chair sculpture, and am very happy to have been included. My chair is located at the Penn Branch shopping center on Pennsylvania Ave, SE in Ward 7. It’s a center I know much about, as I helped to create a pop-up mini golf course there three years ago, and, according to my parents, was conceived in their first apartment a few blocks away.
Jon: I consider myself a multidisciplinary artist – I work in many mediums, as the mood takes me. I have written plays and musicals, produced and directed films, blown glass objects, designed and wrapped a city trash truck, created multiple film and arts events in the DMV and around the world, and I knit while flying from place to place. To me, they are all projects which help me express what I want the world to represent – beauty, simplicity, kindness, and belonging.
Jon: I have always been fascinated by design, so while in college, I interned at a few advertising agencies and opened my own shop to make CD and pizza money. After graduating, I landed a big client, and made a go of the ad biz for about 15 years. When I hit 35, I had an epiphany about what being creative really means to me, and went to film school to learn about filmmaking.
After film school, I made a few movies, but decided that I was better suited in promoting the works of others, so I started the DC Shorts Film Festival. I grew the event from a one-day series of screenings to a week-long event that is one of the largest and most significant shorts fests in the world. Creating DCS led to many other paths, including event production and arts consulting, and starting new festivals in the UK and elsewhere.
Currently I am finishing up production of a documentary about Alma Thomas, a Black woman artist who was based in DC. Born a generation after slavery, Alma Woodsey Thomas grew up in the South, in a home where education was a priority. At 16, with racial tensions high and no further schooling options, her family moved to Washington, DC, where she started her incredible life of firsts: the first Fine Arts graduate from Howard University, the first African-American Woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1970s, and the first African-American woman to exhibit her paintings in the White House. All the while, she taught art at Shaw Jr. High for 36 years, pioneered educational techniques, travelled the world, and crossed racial barriers. Yet she did not receive national attention until she was 80 – six years before she passed.
Her story is fascinating, and resonates with anyone who needs to do what makes them happiest.
Jon: The film is being released this July and will tour with a four-city museum retrospective exhibition. It will make a stop at the Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle next fall. We are planning special screenings at the new MLK Library, and at select film festivals – because everything comes around to where I started.
Jon: The art scene in the DMV is incredibly vast — and surprisingly open and welcoming. The cherry blossom artists all banded together and now we communicate daily through IG, sharing resources and new commissions.
I would start with the central repositories of info and money. Each municipality has their own arts organizations, including the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Arlington Arts, Arts Fairfax, and Creative MoCo, among others. Then find like-minded artists on social media — there are so many great forums to read through.
I was fortunate enough to move into a building full of artists of various disciplines. That really kickstarted me to pursue other styles, including photography and glass. Over the years, we have banded together to create a few group projects, including a few musicals we presented at the Capital Fringe Festival.
Jon: Relax. Everything will happen, just not in the timeline you, or others, imagined.
Jon: …opinions abound. Express yourself robustly.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog and on this website are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the organization GatherDC, the GatherDC staff, the GatherDC board, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
