Photos: Georgetown ARTS Opening Packs House of Sweden

The House of Sweden, 2900 K St. NW, was full of neighbors, artists and artist who are neighbors for the opening reception of the fourth annual Georgetown ARTS exhibit organized by the Citizens Association of Georgetown (CAG).

"It always amazes me...the fabulous quality and the variety of art in Georgetown," Betsy Cooley, a contributing artist and the executive director of CAG, told a crowd gathered in the lobby.

Artist Bear Miller has done the CAG exhibit for the past several years. He was impressed by the venue and the crowd. He said this is just the kind of clientele he wants to cultivate.

Bear has several paintings on display featuring Rock Creek. He said he thought it was fitting to exhibit those works given the embassy's location along Rock Creek and on the Potomac River waterfront.

Laura-Anne Tiscornia, a contributing artist and the event organizer, said she first got involved with the CAG event last year after seeing an email about it on the community listserv.

"I wanted to be part of my community," she said.

She lives in Georgetown and studied art history in college. She has since brought in a few friends to help with marketing and even managed to get Jennie Buehler, who recently received her masters in exhibition design from the Corcoran College of Art + Design, to help.

Buehler spent an entire day with the art and the artists, helping to figure out how to arrange the vast variety of works in the exhibit space.

Artist Sidney Lawrence had three pieces on exhibit, but his line drawing was on an entirely different sign of the room from his mix-media paintings.

Lawrence said he appreciated having someone like Buehler to separate out the works so "they have space to be themselves."

The Georgetown ARTS exhibit runs daily 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Sunday. It is free and open to the public.