Such is the theme of “In the Tower: Mark Rothko,” now showing at the National Gallery of Art. A small collection of works spanning his career are on display: Each prominently utilizes blackness, whether as merely an accent or as a vehicle to explore the vast potentiality of the anti-color.

Rothko, labeled an abstract expressionist, is probably best known for his great canvases comprised of stripes, or even simply squares, of pure color. Although initially experimenting with pictorial scenes and even surrealism, Rothko has distilled the notion of what art is, providing emotionalism through his skilled architecture of color and space. What the paintings lack in images, they make up for in meaning through his expert combinations of pure color.

Such familiarity with this usual idea of a color-centric Rothko is instantly defied upon entering this latest exhibit. It is best to enter “The Tower” of the National Gallery through the elevator to see his earlier works first before witnessing the grand finale, the “Rothko Cathedral.”

The small and intimate collection of nine of Rothko’s small to medium works begins with his expressive figures of the 1930s, moves on to the surrealism of the mid-1940s, “multiforms” of the late 1940s and finally reaches his classic style of the 1950s. Overall, the paintings have thick oily brushstrokes layering grays, blacks and other neutrals, with an occasional bright color thrown in.

In an untitled picture, known as “Man with Green Face,” the subject’s deep green flesh forces the eye to explore the true color of the man’s seemingly plain black jacket. The repeated brushstrokes slick on layer after layer of darkness. Rusty shading gives depth and definition to the black mass, revealing the man’s folded arms.

In another untitled piece, known as “Reclining Nude,” the artist is still in his early figure stage, but his exactitude when using color is further explored. A black bed that the woman lies upon takes over the page, covering almost all of it. But the intensity of the black — more brownish with a blue underlay — makes the pale, fleshy nude stand out. The contrasting darkness makes her appear more rounded, dimensional, as if her misshapen body and askew legs were about to emerge from the canvas.

The blue tones of the black pop against the mustard-colored floor and red nightstand. In spite of the dull coloring, the feeling of this painting isn’t melancholic. The figure appears blithe and content, gesturing her arm out as if she’s blowing a kiss. The exhibit proves that the dark colors do not have to equate to despair, although that was often suggested by critics due to Rothko’s moods, which culminated in his 1970 suicide.

Rothko advances in his style during his mid-‘40s “multiform” period, a bridge between his surrealism and later chromatic purism. Multiform “No. 10” has a dusty peach background with black blocks throughout the canvas, softened with a veil of gray brushstrokes. These dark forms float around the many blocks of color, seeping into one another in a calculated randomness. There is a dull pulsation to the picture as the black is not what it seems, with purple shadows as a backlight to the looming forms. Acid green and yellow light up the neutral, shadowy canvas.

These early paintings provide an intimate look into Rothko’s stylistic formation leading up to drama and darkness of “Rothko’s Chapel.” Collectors Dominique and John de Menil asked him to decorate a Catholic chapel (now non-denominational) they built in Houston, Texas. He surprised them with bold, gargantuan canvases done in his classic style, but missing his signature colors. The blacks, however, layer and differ, engaging the viewer in reflection, and appropriate for a chapel, provide a meditation. Dominique recalled of the pieces, “I felt held up, embraced, and free. Nothing was stopping my gaze, There was a beyond.”

The “Tower” exhibit, a trapezoidal room with white walls, houses seven black rectangles on the walls. On first glance, they seem to be only black squares. But standing in front of them for a while, the differences in the shades appear. Each canvas is composed of two blacks. The center blocks of black are subtly shinier, whereas, the flat, suede, alternate black lies beneath.

The monochromatic subtleties make themselves known: jet black, carbon, espresso, ink, eggplant, ebony. Suddenly you realize what your mother meant when she said that your black belt didn’t match your black shoes.

And yet, each individual color seems perfectly black, but only when adjacent to an alternate black does it seem rather off-black. This intersection of simplicity and complexity will definitely turn off the casual viewer. The massive black squares can have the same effect as a wall of paint chips at The Home Depot.

It may be hard to “get,” or even like, but it is interesting to stare at. Rothko didn’t just place manufactured colors next to each other, the color was laboriously achieved (although by the time of the Chapel pieces, he was in such poor health he had to oversee the paintings produced by assistants, taking over three years). Coat after coat of oil paint, the smoky edges of the contrasting blocks bleed into one another giving it an organic feel.

The austere drama of these simple black forms was designed not to be intimidating, but intimate. The de Menil’s chapel incorporated a subliminal echo of tradition with th assemblage of squares resembling an altar’s triptych. The meditative effect of the surroundings is enhanced with an instrumental piece made by his close friend Morton Feldman under Dominique de Menil’s instruction. Rothko was an avid reader of Friedrich Nietzsche, and The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music inspired the artist.

From that work, Rothko believed that a complete harmony required a full spectrum of emotions and media. The swirling strings, at times ambient, other times terror-filled, permeate the open space with a hypnotic poignancy, as the dark figures surround the Tower’s expanse.

Sarah Amos is in her second year at Georgetown studying Culture and Politics. When she’s not in the the office of The Hoya as editor of their A&E magazine, The Guide, you can find her studying Arabic, playing intramural soccer, or eating raw cookie dough with her roommate. Her interest in art began at an early age, with her mother, an art teacher, who taught her about Monet and van Gogh before her times tables. (Math was never Sarah’s strong suit.) She hopes to pursue a career in journalism — and is currently accepting job offers, so she doesn’t have to nanny again this summer.

Black on Black: Rothko by Sarah Amos is one of the five finalists in the 2011 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge.

Images in this piece are: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1964, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Copyright © 1997 Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel from the National Gallery of Art website, Untitled (Reclining Nude) 1937/1938 oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc, and Mark Rothko, Vision at End of Day, 1946, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. from the exhibit website.

The Montreal-based septuplet similarly poses the difficult questions of the age on their latest release, sometimes ironically and sometimes earnestly. Thematically organized around the threat of suburban sprawl and the replacement of one culture with another, the band manages to avoid the inevitable downer-type sensibility associated with suburban sprawl and instead replace it with total searching exuberance. Like Faulkner, they simply “decline to accept the end of man,” a challenge made immediately clear from Win Butler’s first declaration on the album amid friendly, pleasant piano plinks: “The suburbs are a lonely drive / and you told me we’d never survive / grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving.”

This is the album Arcade Fire have been waiting their whole career to make. People are going to go under this album and not come out until they’re old and grey. If folks got excited about Funeral and Neon Bible, both of which teetered around 46 minutes of orchestral art-rock, then they should probably sit down for this one, because there’s far more being said here. Where Funeral built tunnels and made connections, The Suburbs shirks any peacemaking or coming-to-terms; instead, it shouts desperately for any sign of real life, of hearts beating real blood, echoing Springsteen’s query: “Is there anybody alive out there?”

The weird thing is, The Suburbs exhibits no huge sonic departure from AF’s previous work, but the smallest choices make the biggest difference. Like how the last high-pitched note on “Month of May” sustains gorgeously into the rockabilly opening of “Wasted Hours,” which is for all intents and purposes the ideal end-credits-to-a-film song. Or how the final track “The Suburbs (Continued)” reprises the opener of the same name, or how the guitars glitter on the soothing “Rococo,” or how the end of “Suburban War” crashes most bellicosely, almost visually. Continuity is the name of the game here, aided by a few sets of two-part songs, like the melodramatic, appropriately flat “Sprawl (Flatlands)” and the peaking, soaring “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).” The first “Sprawl,” the only lull on the album really, forms a platform for the second, which is a jam and a calling– specifically, “Come and find your kind.”

Perhaps the most impressive feat here is that in addition to cultivating an album that overwhelms musically, Arcade Fire has essentially made a concept album, one that pleases your ears as it eases your mind. Let us remember that North American suburbs popped up around the same time as Faulkner’s speech, creating enclaves of homogeneity and much-needed post-war stability under the watchful eyes of Truman and Eisenhower, which more or less resulted in an eventual cultural backlash (Howl, anyone?) And I mean, in every line and arching note on The Suburbs, I hear echoes of John Clellon Holmes’ 1952 essay, “This is the Beat Generation,” in which he describes a generation for which “the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable,” one that “exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe.” Arcade Fire sees these same suburbs aged 60 years, and reacts with a satisfying dissatisfaction to this “valueless abyss of modern life,” which evidently (and disturbingly) has only gotten worse. That’s why the album’s escape-at-any-cost-and-take-who-you-can-with-you nature is so appealing. Win Butler practically declares a call to action in the hard-rocking “Month of May”: “I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light / But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”

It is with this simultaneous care and rebelliousness that the album makes its biggest statement; the music itself is equal parts moody/thoughtful and wild/free, which suits the material. From the first notes of “City With No Children,” the listener is greeted with wall-to-wall jubilation, like the pivotal sounds of rock ‘n’ roll in big bold blocky print font, an energy that is sustained for the full 60 minutes.

Keenly, even in their exuberance, the band does not lose sight of keeping their message gravely serious, even when Butler’s darling falsetto threatens to win fans simply for aesthetic appeal. It’s both droll and concerned, like Bowie’s “Heroes,” which seems to be echoed most obviously on synth-bopper “Modern Man” and “Ready to Start.” Bowie’s Major Tom was an amusing character that evinced real pain, a strange literary device that Arcade Fire grasps with ease in “Ready to Start”: “All the kids have always known / that the emperor wears no clothes / but they bow down to him anyway / because it’s better than being alone.”

“Half Light II (No Celebration),” is an instant stunner, a gently-sung track that boasts rapid heartbeat drums and a songwriter’s firm structure. It opens with a resignation (“Now that San Francisco’s gone, I guess I’ll just pack it in.”) and follows with deep-seated fear (“Pray that I don’t live to see the death of everything that’s wild.”) But beneath it all rumbles a vague hopefulness (aided by a joyful “Woo!”), a story of barreling back and forth from coast to coast, taking what is left in these desolate suburban outposts and finding the heart that must beat there because humanity is eternally, hopelessly alive. Or, as Faulkner puts it:

“It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.”

Or, for The Suburbs: you can take the heart and soul out of the man’s land, but you cannot take the heart and soul out of the man. And Butler comes back with a vengeance and a promise on “We Used to Wait,” which chronicles nostalgically the olden days of long-distance pen-and-paper communication over clean 60’s keyboard riffs before building to an arresting climax: “Now we’ll scream and sing the chorus again!”

By the time the final track comes around, the old-school cinematic “The Suburbs (Continued),” all that’s left is a question, the only way to end an album like this. The opening track is reprised beneath an orchestra and some haunted, ethereal vocals that aren’t quite sad or backwards-looking as much as they are eerie and intriguing, and the whole elusive nature of it redirects the listener to consider the driving force behind all of The Suburbs: Where are we? Who are we? Where are we going? And what will await us when we get there?

Faulkner provides an answer to that, too. “The last sound on the worthless earth,” he once said, “will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.”

Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Caroline Klibanoff is a junior at Georgetown University, majoring in American Studies and minoring in Film & Media studies, with a special interest in the uncertain future of the American press. She currently serves as General Manager of WGTB Georgetown Radio, where she also hosts a weekly show and writes features and reviews for The Rotation, WGTB’s online publication. She has previously written for Paste Magazine, The Georgetown Voice, and the Georgetown Hoya, where she continues a biweekly column. Caroline is also a musician and enjoys recording, and hopes to further develop her creativity and production skills through new ventures in filmmaking. Her current projects include creating a documentary on music in sacred spaces and cultivating a spring music festival for WGTB.

“Arcade Fire, The Suburbs” is one of the five finalists in the 2011 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge.

Klibanoff’s review was first published August 4, 2010 on WGTB’s The Rotation, the online publication of Georgetown Radio. You can see it as it was first posted here.

The first room features Turner’s tumultuous and ethereal seascapes. Ghostly ships linger on the horizon and ocean skies are awash with violent oranges and purples. These luminous and sky-filled water paintings of his are, for me, the apotheosis of 19th century British painting. One of the best, “Charing Cross Bridge,” shows the Houses of Parliament just visible in silhouette through the heavy hanging mist of the Thames. Hints of dawn — rose and orange — suffuse the painting, with everything else a gentle blue-grey. These misty paintings, pre-Impressionist, are almost atmospheric studies.

The room that follows is highly varied — dim and lovely Daumiers, a Manet and even some Renoirs. Daumier is especially well-represented, with everything from his caricature sketches to his more famous oil paintings. Renoir’s “La Parisienne,” a painting of a tall, beautiful woman dressed all in royal blue, is a highlight. The painting — of a Parisian actress — was shocking when it was first painted because of the subject’s direct gaze and loosely tied hair. Though she is covered neck to toe, it’s not hard to see that provocation even now due to her arresting bright blue dress and strong face.

One of the lovely, unexpected surprises is James Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Gold — St. Mark’s, Venice.” St. Mark’s Cathedral looms through night mist — somehow both exquisitely detailed and murky at the same time. The cathedral itself is not idealized — it’s a little dirty with a hint of scaffolding through the fog — but somehow more striking for that (perhaps because Whistler knows that those dark and dismal Venetian winter nights are really the best ones — the quietest and the loveliest). In fact, the Davies sisters apparently shared a great love of Venice, visiting many times together and collecting paintings of the city, several of which are featured in this exhibit.

Another apparent favorite of the sisters is Maurice de Vlaminck’s fiercely colored and skewed landscape paintings. One of the minor Fauvist painters, de Vlaminck was inspired by the color experiments of the Impressionists.

Mysteriously, though, and strange in light of the title of the exhibit, Cezanne only has two paintings in this collection — one, a fairly standard landscape: purple mountains, blocks of green and brown in the foreground. The other, “Provençal Landscape,” is lovely and dynamic — a tumult of color, twisting purple trees set against the pink earth.

Visitors end the exhibit with two of Carrière’s Maternity paintings — “Maternity” and “Maternity (Suffering).” These two paintings of a mother and child are brown and pink canvases, misty and lovely, though not, like many other paintings of this exhibit, imprecise. Rather, Carrière paints light on skin with such exquisite care that the paintings are exacting even though indistinct. These two sensual, subtle and graceful paintings are the perfect end to an exhibit filled with quiet surprises.

What other exhibit would juxtapose solidly Academic paintings and Cezanne? The collection is lovely — feminine, almost — and entirely unexpected. You may see any number of Impressionist exhibits, Academic exhibits, Fauve exhibits or Post-Impressionist exhibits — this is unusual because of the charming scramble. There is the familiar — Monet’s water lilies — together with the unexpected, the overlooked and the quietly gorgeous.

Annalisa Quinn is a junior at Georgetown University. She is a double major in English in Classics, with a focus on Ancient Greek. A native of Washington, DC, Annalisa has a lifelong interest in the DC arts scene and hopes that it will play a part in her future career. After college, she plans to pursue graduate studies in Ancient Greek Literature or English.

“Turner to Cezanne” is one of the five finalists in the 2011 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge.

Think back to your rebellious phase – that time in your life when you felt like Big Brother was out to get you and your parents just didn’t understand (Will Smith knew it best). Mine was the product of a discovery of old-school punk rock bands like the Clash combined with an eye-opening reading of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in my sophomore year English class. Regardless of whether your own period of defiance was spurred by leather-wearing anarchists or peyote-smoking hippies, though, the latest photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Art speaks to the nonconformist in all of us.

The exhibit, Beat Memories: the Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, is a wild and exciting look into the world of the Beat Generation, a group of writers including Jack Kerouac, William S. Borroughs, and Ginsberg himself that became prominent in the 1950s – a time of extreme materialism, fear and conformity in America brought on by the Cold War and the anti-Communist sentiments of Senator Joe McCarthy during the Second Red Scare. Kerouac’s On the Road, Borroughs’ The Naked Lunch, and Ginsberg’s Howl were the major defining works of this generation, one which rejected these modern societal norms and turned instead to experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, and Eastern religion. They preached lives of spontaneity, simplicity, and self-discovery, all the while expressing their contempt for the conformist culture in which they lived. Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” is a prime example of the prominent influence of Eastern thought and philosophy on the Beat writers, who often incorporated the fundamental ideas of Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern religions into their writing as a means of conveying the problems they saw in their contemporary American society.

The photos themselves – which constitute the first-ever scholarly exhibition of Ginsberg’s photography – create a fascinating ride through the unorthodox lives of these countercultural icons as seen by the poet himself. For the most part, they are candid portraits of Borroughs, Kerouac, and others, accompanied by a poetic, stream-of-conscious description of the images’ contexts written in Ginsberg’s sloppy scrawl. Together, the photo and the text work like Dick van Dyke’s magical sidewalk chalk drawings in Mary Poppins, allowing the viewer the opportunity to leap right into the scene at hand and be transported directly into the wild world of the Beats.

Upon entering the exhibit, you learn that Ginsberg picked up photography after purchasing a thirteen-dollar Kodak camera at a pawn shop in 1953 (with which many of the early prints were taken). That fact alone speaks to Ginsberg’s style, both as a poet and a photographer; he is at once spontaneous and romantic, aware that the quality of his work comes not from the quality of the materials with which he works, but from his own unique observations of the world around him – and, as one can see after viewing these first few images, he did not need a fancy camera to capture this unique perspective.

Ginsberg once said that “the only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does” – and it would appear that that’s what photography does as well. His photographs are simultaneously iconographic and intimate, strange and personal. They capture the Beat Generation’s philosophy of living in the moment while maintaining awareness of the beauty which surrounded them. They serve as instantaneous glimpses into the lives of a group of people who were both disheartened by the society in which they lived, one guided by convention and fear, and enchanted by the world that existed beyond these confines of conformity. They are the graphic version of Ginsberg’s poetry – spontaneous, personal, unconventional, imperfect, and shamelessly honest. They are portraits of iconic, countercultural voices as seen through the eyes (and lens) of another. One of the marks of a successful portrait is its ability to capture the unique spirit and persona of the sitter, and, though he is by no means considered one of the great American photographers, he certainly achieved success in this regard. Through his photography, Ginsberg captured not only the carefree personalities of his close friends, but also the greater spirit of an entire generation of like-minded writers, artists, and thinkers who dared to be different.

So, the next time you’re feeling like just another sheep in the flock, take my advice: abandon the flock. Get off campus, hop on the Metro, and head down to the National Gallery to take a ride on the Beat bus for yourself. This exhibit is sure to inspire as well as entertain and, if nothing else, to remind you to embrace your own individuality.

Clare Donnelly is a junior at Georgetown University studying Art History. A proud native of the Ocean State, she quickly fell in love with D.C. and its vibrant arts scene upon moving to the city for her freshman year at Georgetown. It was not until this past semester, however, that she made her foray into arts journalism, serving as a columnist for The Guide (the weekly magazine for The Hoya, Georgetown’s student newspaper of record). When not busy eating, sleeping, and breathing the arts, Clare also takes part in Georgetown’s New Student Orientation, Relay for Life, and student theater. She is currently studying abroad in Brussels, Belgium.

“Turn on, Tune in..” is one of the five finalists in the 2011 DC Student Arts Journalism Challenge.

“Erin Petty wrote an article for the City Paper November 18, 2010 titled, Color Theory: Racial Stunt-Casting on D.C. Stages, or Is It Just “Nontraditional?” After reviewing a few examples, she writes, “actors weren’t just cast because they were great for the role, but also because the director had something to say”, and the color of the actor helped the director make the statement. Petty goes on to explore the casting of a black woman in the JonBenet Ramsey role in the Woolly Show House of Gold. In talking about House of Gold with my friend Emily (who attended with me) we discussed how the directors made choices to bring a slight remove from the extreme creepiness, and that the color of Ramsey’s character was one of those things.

The character on stage declaims that she is white, but the audience sees the actor is black. This relieves the viewer: we are in a fiction world – the world of theater. The action of the play is overwhelmingly disturbing, and this affect — stunt-casting, perhaps — actually is what makes the action congestible….”

Click here to read the entire post, which goes on to consider how audience/director preferences are implicated in casting decisions and discrimination. Click here to read the article by Erin Petty which inspired Bettmann’s post. Image in this post is from Petty’s post, and the production House of Gold at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

…Some have chosen to protest the removal of Wojnaricz’s piece. But in a stunning show of solidarity, other museums in Washington, DC are lining up behind the National Portrait Gallery with their own displays of preemptive self-censorship.

National Gallery of Art Director Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III announced at a press conference this morning that in response to possible future pressures from as-of-yet-to-be-determined organizations, his museum would begin a vigorous campaign of deaccessioning.

“As some folks phoning television talk shows have pointed out,” the director said, “representations of the prophet Muhammed likely would never be shown in local museums out of political correctness—or fear of offending Muslims.”

“It turns out,” he continued, “that our museum has significant holdings of pieces informed by Western contact with the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran. Rather than tempt fate or invite comment, we’ve decided to sell the whole lot off immediately.”

Powell predicted further problems down the road. “We’re meeting right now to consider closing the entire East Building—which, as you know, houses some artworks created within the last 100 years. That time period is awfully fresh—there’s a lot of unresolved history to chew on, lots of issues. Until things get a bit more inert, a bit less interesting, we should probably hold off on showing any of that work or saying anything about it.”

Click here to read the entire post.