Abe Pollin changed the face of downtown D.C. when he opened the MCI (now Verizon) Center over a decade ago in Gallery Place, across the street from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The new building was a welcome addition to the neighborhood that was suffering from crime and neglect, which kept visitors away. He built it, they came, and the neighborhood hasn't been the same since. Pollin, the owner of the Washington Capitals, the Washington Mystics, and the Wizards, died on November 24, at the age of eighty-five. His legacy in the business, sports, and philanthropic worlds is legendary, and is deeply tied to Washington, D.C., his hometown since moving here as a boy in the 1930s.
To coincide with the opening of the MCI Center on December 2, 1997, and to welcome our new neighbors, American Art curated the exhibition Time Out! Sports in Art. Some people bake cakes. We decided to show our neighbors what we're all about. "It was our way of saying, hi, we’re glad to have you around, and boy, you don’t know what a difference you're going to make," says George Gurney, deputy chief curator, who organized the exhibition.
"It was a nice way of using the permanent collection," adds Gurney. "It was an opportunity to do it with sports and with all media---painting, prints, sculpture, and photographs. We hoped that if people went to a sporting event and then visited the museum, they would find something that related to their interests." The exhibition included Harold E. Edgerton's stop-action photographs of athletes in motion, Morris Kantor's painting Baseball at Night (on view in the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists ), William Zorach's sculpture Football Player (The Lineman), Alex Katz's print The Swimmer, and even Man Ray's bronze Square Dumb Bells.
Today, American Art is in the middle of the new downtown that Abe Pollin helped to make possible. The bustling locale led to the museum's decision to stay open untill 7 pm each evening, when most other cultural institutions have shut their doors. "I love to tell people that when they have finished looking at all the other museums, they can come to look at us,” says Gurney.
