WASHINGTON, DC.- This week the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery moved to its new home in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design’s Flagg Building on the campus of the George Washington University. Since opening more than 15 years ago in the university’s Media and Public Affairs Building, the Brady Art Gallery raised the profile of the arts on the GW campus, hosting exhibitions that feature the work of renowned artists such as Howard Hodgkin, Jules Olitski and Utagawa Hiroshige.

The Brady Art Gallery commemorates its move to the Corcoran School with an inaugural exhibition, “Full Circle: Hue and Saturation in the Washington Color School.” The new exhibition opened today and closes on October 26. “Full Circle” joins two exhibitions, “Lone Prairie” and “Bridging Boundaries,” and other exhibitions to debut later this summer, to celebrate gallery founder William Wilson Corcoran’s vision to create a place “dedicated to art and used solely for the purpose of encouraging American genius.”

Since its founding, the Brady Art Gallery’s mission has been to care for the university’s permanent GW Collection of more than 4,000 artifacts which includes paintings, sculptures, graphics, textiles, ceramics, historic furnishings and photographs, and to present educational exhibitions. Through its varied schedule of exhibits and special events, the gallery has become a contributor to the cultural life of Foggy Bottom.

The Washington Color School was a visual arts movement that spanned the late 1950s through the late 1960s and was centered in Washington. Artists associated with this movement painted nonrepresentational works and were central to the larger color-field movement. Many of the artists who were part of the Washington Color School were linked, in their early days, to the Corcoran College of Arts & Design and the Corcoran Museum.

In the Brady Art Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its new home, curator Lenore Miller draws parallels between the collection and exhibition histories of both GW and the Corcoran that support the theme, “Full Circle.” The exhibition includes more than 30 works by notable Washington Color School and color-field artists and those who follow in that legacy, including Blair Apperson, Leon Berkowitz, Renee Butler, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Sam Gilliam, Gay Glading, Carol Brown Goldberg, Cynthia Bickley Green, James Hilleary, Darryl Hughto, Jacob Kainen, Daniel Yellow Kuhne, Mokha Laget, Morris Louis, Willem de Looper, Howard Mehring, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Ann Purcell, Paul Reed, Alma Thomas, Anne Truitt and Ken Young.

“We inaugurate the Brady Art Gallery’s new location in the Flagg Building with a high quality exhibition indicative of the many major ones staged at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery over the past 15 years,” Ms. Miller, director of GW’s art galleries and chief curator, said. “For this exhibition, we aspire to showcase the grand nature of this historic building with its rich history of teaching and exhibitions.”

To complement works from the GW collection for this exhibition and bring many of the artists back together in the same place, the gallery borrowed works from artists, private collections, other galleries and museums including the Reading Public Museum, Bethesda Fine Art and Yares Art, New York.

“The homecoming is making me teary already," artist Ann Purcell said. Purcell taught painting, drawing and art history for many years at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.

The Luther W. Brady Art Gallery is named after benefactor Luther W. Brady, a world-renowned oncologist who earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from GW. He also received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from GW in May 2004, has served as a member of the university's board of trustees and received GW’s President’s Medal in 2015.

With the addition of this gallery at the Corcoran School, the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at the GW Corcoran School of Arts and Design will collaborate with the school to present ongoing exhibitions of contemporary art that bring national recognition to the GW Collection through critical review, quality, name recognition and above all, education.