American Magazine, Nov. 2013

By Lee Fleming
She had artist Claes Oldenburg
as a temporary tenant in her
basement. She turned a derelict
opera house in downtown
D.C. into a mecca for artists,
curators, and collectors from
around the world. And in the
process, she almost single-handedly created a
contemporary art scene in the nation’s capital.
At 91, Alice Denney, the pint-sized powerhouse
whom many call the doyenne of Washington
art, remains a force to be reckoned with.
Distinguished by signature giant sunglasses
and striking headpieces—from a striped
Cat in the Hat–inspired creation by couture
milliner Philip Treacy to a crocheted beer-can
number—Denney is still scouring galleries,
museum exhibitions, performance spaces, art
fairs, and artists’ studios in search of the new
and the provocative.
“I just liked talking to the artists,” she says
about how and why she got into the art world.
“That got me interested in doing things.”
Denney has never been one to hesitate to
engage people or experiences. Even as a child
in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, she would enlist
available talent to her projects. Gene Kelly was
an 18-year-old counselor at the camp near her
family’s summer cabin when Denney, then 12,
saw him dance. “He was good, so I asked if he’d
like to be in one of my shows”—referring to the
productions she would mount with local kids.
“He said yes, and he came to our house and had
a great time, so he kept coming back.”
While a student at Duke, Denney took
art history courses, which she loved. But her
passion really developed when, as a young
bride, she and friends would visit New York
galleries and hang out at the fabled Cedar
Tavern in Greenwich Village, where Willem
de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and
other abstract expressionist artists held court.
“It was so exciting hearing them talk about
their ideas,” she says. By the time Denney and
her late husband George moved to Washington
in the 1950s, she was hooked on the New
York movements that were transforming
contemporary art.
Denney’s
experiences
with the AU fine
arts faculty
had a major
impact on her
earliest efforts
George had been recruited to work for
then secretary of state Dean Acheson. That
left Denney with time on her hands to explore
the D.C. art scene. “There really was
nothing,” she says. Culture, as it existed in
Washington, consisted of staid museums
whose collections stopped dead at the
postwar period, a few music societies, and
the mainstream Broadway shows that came
through the old National Theatre. “We may
as well have been in a time capsule,”
says Denney.
She set out to change all that. Along the way,
she developed a reputation for her ability to
recognize talent in emerging artists and her
fearlessness to promote the new, the different,
and the challenging. The late Walter Hopps,
founding director of Houston’s Menil
Collection and former curator of twentiethcentury
American art at Washington’s National
Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian
American Art Museum), and himself no slouch
when it came to discovering new talent, once
called her “the best eye in the business.”
Jack Rasmussen, director of the American
University Museum at the Katzen Arts
Center, counts Denney among his earliest
art world mentors. “She told me, ‘Look
for artists you don’t understand. If art by
definition is something that didn’t exist
before, then if you immediately get something,
it probably isn’t art.’”
Denney’s experiences with the fine arts
faculty at AU had a major impact on her early
efforts. Their work on exhibit at the Corcoran
Biennial and at Franz Bader Bookstore and
Gallery sparked her interest in what was
happening at the university. In 1955 she signed
up for a life drawing course taught by Ben “Joe”
Summerford. “The course put me in touch
with artists like Alma Thomas [noted African
American abstractionist] and especially the AU
faculty, who were really serious and trying new
things,” she says.
It became clear that Washington artists
needed a place devoted to showing their art.
“They wanted a professional gallery. So I said,
why not start one?”
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