Get Your Kicks...At Signal 66
Washington D.C.'s Shaw neighborhood is a mixture of small businesses and boarded up storefronts, small art galleries and liquor stores. It's a transitional neighborhood—the kind of place where people can still buy a row house on the cheap, then upgrade it and reap a great reward for their investment later. The Shaw neighborhood is turning around.
This was one of the neighborhoods most hit by the riots of 1968, and it has been struggling to recover ever since. But now the city is building a huge new convention center there, and the neighborhood is on the brink of a major revitalization.
Part of the neighborhood is known as NoMa, short for North of Massachusetts Avenue. It's becoming known for the art scene blossoming there, and one of the galleries that is flourishing there is Signal 66
Two of my friends and I made our way there for a reception on a recent Friday night. I had heard about it through a WashingtonPost.com entertainment chat—one of the chat hosts recommended it as an alternative to bars and other more traditional meat market scenes.
It's a risky thing, recruiting friends to go to an unknown place on a Friday night, but my friends were up for an adventure, and it turned out to definitely be that. The closest Metro station, Mt. Vernon Square-UDC, is only a few blocks from the gallery, but the under-construction convention center lies between the station and where we needed to go. I carefully checked the map in the Metro station, but ended up leading us the wrong way around the construction, which meant we had a much longer walk than necessary. If you're trying to get to the gallery, turn left out of the Metro station instead of right—you'll get there much faster.
After a relatively unsafe walk through deserted streets, during which we agreed that we all fully expected to get mugged, we found our way to Blagden Alley, the brick-laid alley where the gallery's entrance is located.
The current show up in the gallery's main space is Three Stories. The gallery literature describes it better than I ever could—here's what it said:
"ABOUT THREE STORIES
Artist Pat Rogan explores the difficult intersection between Timothy McVeigh's heinous 1995 massacre as his ticket to stardom and our culture's insatiable need to be entertained, at Signal 66, Washington DC's premier independent art gallery.
Rogan's paintings create an alternative narrative in which McVeigh bombs the Oklahoma City federal building as a heroic but misguided, revolutionary act. When the media paints the former soldier as an uninteresting loser-loner, he strikes back by demanding that his execution be broadcast publicly. As a martyr, his public execution plants the seeds of revolution that flourish in the distant future.
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