Washington Blade: Spotlight on Anacostia

I love my job! The Washington Blade did this really cool article on my employer (and favorite nonprofit) ARCH Development Corporation and our efforts in Anacostia. Get to know the wonderful people I work with and some of what we do to put Anacostia on the map. We work with so many great people in the Anacostia and Ward 8 community and we look forward to doing more. The article also mentions our upcoming project: LUMEN8Anacostia and our hopes for how this will benefit the community.

Go HERE to read the full article.

Excerpt:

With the Smithsonian here and a host of other well-established galleries hosting exhibits — sometimes of national renown — it’s easy to get overlooked in the Washington art scene. But there’s a flourishing art community east of the Anacostia River, a handful of galleries and, come April, a bounty of opportunities for everyone to see them both in the established art houses there and in a bevy of abandoned buildings and warehouses. 

Anacostia, just one of the Ward 8 D.C. Southeast neighborhoods east of the River, is changing. On April 14, residents there will launch Lumen8Anacostia, a three-month arts initiative that’s using a $250,000 grant the D.C. Office of Planning received from ArtPlace (a collaboration of nine of the country’s top foundations, eight federal agencies and six large banks that supports “creative placemaking” with grants and more) to be administered to four D.C. neighborhoods (the others are Brookland, Deanwood and the central 14^th Street area N.W.) to create temporary art and culture spaces in “emerging” neighborhoods where vacant and/or underutilized storefronts and empty lots will be transformed into art knolls. Arch Development Corporation, which has been working since 1991 to revitalize historic Anacostia with several initiatives and economic development plans, is implementing Lumen8.

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