Thursday, Saturday, and Wednesday: Women’s History Month DCAF Fundraiser at ANXO Cider

ANXO Cider is honoring Women’s History Month with a ton of events at their Brightwood Park location, housed within Brightwood Pizza & Bottle, raising funds for the DC Abortion Fund. Upcoming March events include Wednesday wine tastings accompanied with music by local DJs Em, Diyanna Monet, and Zoë Jorgenson Speirs, abortion-rights and women’s history trivia on Thursdays, and Saturday plant markets featuring women-owned local businesses. ANXO co-founder Rachel Topelius tells City Paper that the cidery has hosted events supporting DCAF since 2019 when anti-abortion protesters showed up to their first event. “Ironically, once the protesters showed up, we had people pulling over by the side of the road on Florida Avenue having no idea what we were doing but coming in because they wanted to support,” Topelius says. That first event led to years of collaboration and culminated in this monthlong programming supporting DCAF. In the years since, fundraising for DCAF has only become more pertinent as abortion access across the country has come under attack and the fund serves an increased population of abortion-seekers coming to D.C., long considered an abortion “safe haven.” This year’s fundraising endeavor is so important to Topelius that she’s been raising plants in preparation. “On both plant sale dates, we will also be selling tomato plants with all the proceeds going to DCAF. My husband and I wanted to contribute somehow, and we had always wondered what raising seedlings would be like. We decided, what better way to raise money for DCAF than with the building blocks of pizza aka tomatoes and basil? So we have been raising a variety of tomato seedlings in our house for the last few months,” says Topelius. Each event raises money for DCAF and continues the drumbeat leading up to DCAF’s My Body, My Festival in May. Trivia starts at 7 p.m. on March 21 and 28; the plant market runs from noon to 3 p.m. on March 23 and 30; and the wine tasting with music starts at 5 p.m. on March 20 at ANXO Cider, 711 Kennedy St. NW. anxodc.com. Free. —Serena Zets 

Tuesday: Nationals Futures Game at Nationals Park

Hope springs eternal: It’s the best time of year for most baseball fans. There are no losers before Opening Day. Last year’s last place teams are on even ground with the clubs that went to the World Series. Unfortunately for Nationals fans, their club did finish in last place in the National League East in 2023. The two most qualified MLB projection sources, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA and FanGraphs, are both predicting 2024’s Nats are expected to have an even worse year than 2023. There are zero (none, not one) Nationals players on ESPN’s ranking of the top 100 MLB players, joining fellow bottom dwellers the Athletics and Rockies. But the future is bright. Really. It is. According to ESPN+, the Nats farm system ranks 16th overall, but more importantly, ahead of rivals Braves, Mets, and Phillies. You’re not going to see a lot of these younger players in Washington unless you head to Nationals Park on March 26. The Nationals vs. Nationals Prospects game is essentially a bonus Opening Day for a ball club that’s doomed to have another failing season. Maybe most importantly, this is your first chance to see Dylan Crews, 2023 No. 2 overall MLB draft pick, currently ranked 5th best minor leaguer, at Nats Park. Jump on the Crews bandwagon before he plays his first game in the Majors. He’s the hope. The hope for 2025, hope for 2026, hope for 2027, etc. The Nationals take on the Nationals Prospects for the Nationals Futures Game at 12:05 p.m. on March 26 at Nationals Park, 1500 S. Capitol St. SE. mlb.com/nationals. $13–$420. —Brandon Wetherbee

Ongoing: Adrienne Moumin at the District Architecture Center

In her photography-based works, artist Adrienne Moumin, who is based in New York and Silver Spring, makes a point of going old-school. From a distance, her pieces—usually circles and spirals of repeated imagery—could easily pass for digitally manipulated projects. But Moumin’s technique relies on old standbys such as black-and-white film, chemical developers, enlargers, X-Acto knives, and dry mount. Not every subject in her District Architecture Center exhibit In Another Life works equally well; stripped of their color and clarity, her botanical images lack verve. On the whole, Moumin’s architecture-focused images are more compelling, often using overlooked details such as canopies above the front doors of apartment buildings as their building blocks. “Infinity Gate,” for instance, features a plethora of repeated images of a finial that tops a piece of ornamental ironwork, visually echoing an infinity symbol. “Evolution” dwells on cartouches from a stone edifice, arranging them into a Robert Smithson-style spiral, while “Matrix Retrograde” assembles reflected points of light into an absorbing pattern. Several of Moumin’s most impressive works, however, are those that take in wider swaths of buildings. Moumin deploys images of New York’s Flatiron Building to create a finely textured homage. But her finest work is a depiction of a 21st-century building in “On the Way Downtown (One Jackson Square)” that surprisingly trumps the beaux-arts masterpiece of the Flatiron. One Jackson Square is repeated four times, each with a symmetrical reflection below it; Moumin’s high-contrast portrayal of the Mies van der Rohe-style modernist structure fruitfully pairs reflective glass windows with the washed-out sky. Adrienne Moumin: In Another Life runs through April 12 at the District Architecture Center, 421 7th St. NW. Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. aiadc.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Opens Friday: Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 at the Hirshhorn

Trying to tell the story of art in a coherent way is challenging: movements and genre influences don’t always move in a straight line, and rattling off artist names and influences this way can sometimes feel like the art history equivalent of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 kicks off the museum’s 50th-anniversary year with the tall order of highlighting the museum’s works and tracing the rise of modern art. The century time period noted in the title is a bit misleading—there are 19 more recent works by contemporary artists among the over 200 on display here to show how past works reverberate through to the present. Though Revolutions is so jam-packed that it threatens to overstimulate, it’s an undoubtedly impressive showcase of the Hirshhorn’s collection, and a peek at how the museum situates itself in the art world. Regardless of the messiness of mapping global and historical art movements, Revolutions is arranged mostly chronologically. The first room nods to the dawn of modern art and all that came before it, and serves as something of a thesis statement for the Hirshhorn’s point of view. Busts by Auguste Rodin sit beside more minimalist sculptures, and one wall is arrayed with salon-style hangings of portraits done to various degrees of realism. Moving through the galleries is a bit of a fast-forwarding through artistic innovation, as well as flash points in U.S. and global history. It gives way to explosions of color brought on by breakthroughs in paint pigments, the progression of abstraction and stylistic movements, self-taught American artists, postwar European experimentations, and the obliteration and subsequent return of representational subject matter.

Throughout, pieces are intentionally placed in conversation with each other, showing connections both thematic and cosmetic. The section “Vital Forms” covers the rise of Surrealism and abstraction. “Untitled (Red and Orange)” is contemporary work in this section by Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, and the accompanying wall text notes that Native use of abstraction has long been ignored by Western scholars, despite the fact that it “influenced the work of several artists in this exhibition.” Many museums, including the Hirshhorn, are attempting to rectify the exclusion of wide swaths of people from the art world and update the artistic canon to expand beyond old white men. Revolutions still features plenty of the traditional canon, but this show aims to put lesser-known and contemporary artists on equal footing with those legends. As the focus is the Hirshhorn’s legacy, it’s worth thinking about the brutalist donut of the building itself and how that space anchors its art. In shows that feature a particular artist, movement, or theme, walking through the round gallery to be spat back out at the entrance of the exhibit creates a literal “full circle” moment. In Revolutions, the flow is interrupted by Laurie Anderson’s Four Talks, though it recovers nicely by depositing viewers in a dimly lit hallway that marks the onset of World War II and postwar art movements. For the sake of fitting as many works as possible, Revolutions seems to have more partitions in and more paintings slotted into the exhibit than usual. Leaving this circular exhibit of information overload, viewers might find their heads spinning, but there are so many treasures there’s certain to be something for everyone to enjoy. Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960 opens March 22 and runs through April 20, 2025, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue and 7th Street SW. hirshhorn.si.edu. Free. —Stephanie Rudig