11/30/2023
Over Thanksgiving break, we learned of the passing of WPA’s incredible founder Alice Denney. She was 101 years old and lived a truly remarkable life that left a deep imprint on DC, contemporary art, and all who knew her. It’s an honor to carry forward her legacy through our work.
As we move closer to WPA’s 50th anniversary year in 2025, we are developing a digital archive and will be prioritizing an early chapter of our research on Alice and her extensive work and vision with WPA. For those who knew and loved Alice, we look forward to hearing from you about your memories and stories.
You can read more about Alice Denney’s inspiring life and legacy here: https://wapo.st/46zgmVz
“Mrs. Denney’s most enduring creation was the Washington Project for the Arts, an organization that she founded in 1975 to provide workshop, exhibition and performance space for experimental artists.
Initially functioning from a condemned storefront space downtown that charged $1 a year in rent, the initiative received funding from the Cafritz Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and remains in operation today.
Mrs. Denney stepped down as director in 1979 to become board chairman. The WPA, as the project is known, rose to national attention in 1989 when it presented a retrospective exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, many of them sexually explicit, that had been canceled by the Corcoran amid a political furor over the exhibit’s partial federal funding.
“Imagine what we would have missed, imagine how much duller the art scene here would be,” Post art critic Paul Richard once wrote, “had there never been a WPA.”
Photo Credit: Alice Denney, Founder and Director of Washington Project for the Arts at the Punk Art Exhibition in 1978. Photo by Paul Fineberg.
