Michael Kirby and three other paint-spattered artists sat cross-legged in an iron-fenced parking lot next to the old intelligence agency building, the drab almost windowless walls of the former high-security site behind them.
Two outside walls were no longer blank: On one side, artists on this recent day had dumped more than 100 gallons of bright paint — SPLAT! — down the front of the building.
On another, there was a five-story-tall mural, with two figures in lederhosen grappling, little cartoon lightning bolts coming out of one of their mouths. One had a gleaming gold dinosaur skull for its head. The other might be a sock monkey, or, possibly, a gray, heavily tattooed, mustachioed little man in a ski mask.
So, yeah: It’s no longer part of what used to house the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Now it’s art.
The building, once home to top-secret CIA programs, is empty, except for cables hanging from the ceiling. “Zombie paradise,” said Kirby, who peeked through a doorway as demolition workers came out.
A public art project kicked off recently in the area around the Navy Yard in Southeast Washington, which is in the midst of a massive redevelopment — from a place by turns seedy, industrial and forbidding into a beautiful waterfront neighborhood.
The Defense Mapping Agency moved to a secure location on a military base. The Navy shuttered the buildings where it made boilers and anchors. The strip clubs buttoned up and left.
New apartment towers, the U.S. Transportation Department and Nationals Park rose up. Now about one-third built out, with construction cranes all about, it’s a funny place, with bleak vacant lots, mountains of dirt and a water treatment plant, as well as lovely parks, expensive homes and unexpected bright spots: a skating rink glowing at night, bright kayaks bobbing along the river, a trapeze school and one of the city’s buzziest bars.
Forest City Washington, the massive real estate company that owns 42 acres and will be building here for many years, commissioned artists to help fill in some of the blanks.
Art Yards, an “evolving canvas” of a project that will stretch to mid-December, happened kind of by chance, with D.C. street artist Kelly Towles pitching an ambitious plan that included inviting artists from across the country to try to shake things up. Both the developer and the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District have been interested in promoting “temporary urbanism,” with pop-ups like the makeshift bar area outside the ballpark to fill in empty spaces.
On a recent weekend, DJs spun at a silent disco inside one soon-to-be-filled space, with dancers choosing channels on their headphones.
The Art Yards project is focused on the building across from the ballpark, a monolithic, chalky grayish block that artists decided was a perfect blank canvas. Dabs Myla, the combined name used by two Australian artists,who create a world full of fat, doughy letters, wide-eyed and cheeky spray-paint cans, hot dogs, foxes and other cheerful characters, painted a giant bat on the south wall.
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