It has been a few years since I participated in Art All Night. It’s an annual festival that goes on in various neighborhoods in the District of Colombia. There are exhibits, vendors, performances, interactive activities, film screenings, and the like. The first time I went, I think I was a freshman in college. I traveled all the way to Northeast DC to catch an exhibit that looked interesting. It was a mobile art museum set up in what looked like an RV or a small camper.
I told my friend Monica about it at the last minute and we decided to attend. This time I went to the one that was in the Shaw neighborhood, adjacent to Howard University. We had a hard time finding it at first and just ended up wandering around for a while. We found what looked like a central area where there was a wrestling ring set up. There was a man performing while people wrestled around him in the ring. It didn’t hold our attention for long. We decided to meet up with our other friends and go from there.
We ended up waiting about twenty five minutes for our friends to arrive because they stopped for pizza and didn’t even tell us. We were upset for a while but all that went away when they arrived because we were excited to see them.
We ended up just wandering around with our bigger group for a while. We walked down the street and grooved to a New Orleans jazz band that was stationed outside of the nondenominational church on Georgia Avenue. We finally ended up finding the central area for Art All Night. There was a woman blowing bubbles into the crowd and breathing fire. There was tons of people selling amazing art and stylish clothes. There was even a short film being projected onto the side of a building. The film was about politics and our current United Stated administration. The energy was amazing and I was able to have conversations with some cool people. The crowd was a bit overwhelming though so we decided to leave.
One of the friends in my group ran into some other friends who directed us to a place where we could make paintings. We headed there and thought we were lost for a while but we finally made it. We sat there for about an hour just painting and talking about a lot of different things, like babies and tattoos and spirituality.
Everyone got pretty tired and bored so we decided to head back to campus. The city was still very much alive and we had to maneuver through a lot of traffic and crowds. We made it back to campus but we decided right before we went in the dorms that we were hungry. We decided on McDonald’s but it was extremely crowded and rowdy so we relocated to Subway. A man came in and started asking us about our paintings. He made me laugh with his interesting commentary about angels. After that, we retired for the night and all returned to our respective dorm rooms.
Around The Way with Alexsis 