More than 30 Washington area museums, galleries, arts organizations and businesses will participate this spring in ColorField.remix, the largest celebration of painting ever held in the Washington area. The event honors the 1950s and 1960s Color Field visual art movement and the Washington Color School, which put Washington, DC on the art world map. ColorField.remix includes exhibitions, public art projects, artists’ talks, lectures, children’s programs, and special events honoring Color Field and Washington Color School painters as well as contemporary artists influenced by those movements. The project was conceived by The Kreeger Museum and is being held in partnership with Cultural Tourism DC, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Washington, DC Convention & Tourism Corporation.

“This is an exciting opportunity to examine and celebrate Washington D.C.’s artistic history, its international context and the impact of Color Field painting,” said Judy A. Greenberg, director of The Kreeger Museum. “The number of organizations participating in this celebration is evidence of how profoundly the Color Field movement permeated the consciousness of Washington’s cultural life in its time, and how it continues to sustain and inspire artists today.”

In addition to paintings, the celebration features drawings, photographs, sculpture, multi-media works, video installations and performance art.

• displays of Color Field paintings at local museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The National Museum for Women in the Arts; The Phillips Collection; and Smithsonian American Art Museum;
• an exhibition at The Kreeger Museum of paintings and drawings by Gene Davis, a native Washingtonian and one of the Washington Color School's most recognized figures;
• a public art project directed by the Corcoran College of Art and Design and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Students will paint stripes on Eighth Street between D and E streets NW The project, inspired by the 1987 commemorative street painting based on a Gene Davis work;
• the display at the National Gallery of Art of Helen Frankenthaler’s 1952 “Mountains and Sea,” a crucial painting in the development of the Color Field movement;
• specially designed Color Field-inspired windows at Neiman Marcus department store in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
• an exhibition at the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel of contemporary African-American regional painters who have been influenced by the Color Field;
• Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran has invited contemporary artists to reinterpret the Color Field artists with experimental media, sound and performance pieces during a curated and juried experimental media series.
• an exhibition of paintings by Leon Berkowitz, who in 1945 was integral to the formation of the The Washington Arts Museum which promoted the local arts scene and fostered interaction between members of the Washington Color School.