Heurich Happenings

This year each meet-up will focus on a different topic and be hosted by a member of the group! The host will pose a series of discussion questions and share their experience on the topic. Of course, all discussions are welcome and encouraged even if they are not on topic! 

This May, during AAPI Heritage month, artist Xena Ni will transform the Heurich House Museum into a portal to the future with her interactive art installation, Good Fortunes. Travel to the future with visionary Asian Americans and return with reasons for hope in the present. Good Fortunes is the second installment of the We Should Talk series, a participatory installation that invites you to join visionary Asian American womxn in imagining and shaping the future, created by Philippa Pham Hughes, Adele Yiseol Kenworthy, and Xena Ni. 

Exhibits are not stagnant. During an exhibit, collections are sometimes taken off display and replaced with others from the collection’s storage. There are several reasons why museums rotate objects in exhibits, but removing an object from display can feel like the museum is taking away the public’s access, especially for long-running exhibits where it is accepted that you could come back any time to see the same exhibit. But the Heurich House Museum has important reasons why we have rotated objects off display.

 

On Friday, February 2nd from 5:00 - 8:00 pm during First Friday Dupont, join us for the first Heurich (Open) House of 2024 featuring work by graduate architecture students from George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. Connect with the students, who together with the Heurich House Museum’s education and preservation teams, will challenge how we interpret and interact with design.

 

On Saturday, October 21st from 12-4pm join the Heurich House Museum and DC’s Historic Preservation Office (DC HPO) for History in a Bottle: How Historic German Immigrants Used Beer to Claim Citizenship in Washington, DC.

The Heurich House Museum presents it’s 2nd annual Art All Night: Dupont Circle “Mini Markt” on Saturday, September 30, 2023 from 7pm-midnight in the Museum’s biergarten, 1921. Meet and shop from 10 local artisans and makers while exploring turn-of-the-century DC brewing history in our HOME/BREWED exhibit and enjoying a specially curated menu of beers from DC Brewers’ Guild members.

Museums protect, preserve, and interpret their collections for their communities and future generations. In a house museum like ours, the house itself is part of the collection. On Friday, August 25th from 4:00 - 8:00 pm, join our Collections Manager, Kim Totten, and CEO, Kim Bender for an open house and explore our newest acquisitions. 

Many people may not realize that a museum’s collections are always growing. Pieces of family history and breweriana are acquired as the Museum continues to research the people who lived and worked within the house, as well as the Heurich Brewery and its workers.

One of these new pieces of family history are two ledgers from Amelia L. Heurich, Christian Heurich’s third wife and the longest resident of the Heurich House. Amelia’s diaries are a key source of information for our research, so we were delighted to acquire her ledgers, where she tracked monthly spending, meal planning, and salaries of the house staff.

Last week, I had the opportunity to go to an opening preview of the Capital Jewish Museum. Because Stephany Fry, our Director of Public Programs, used to work there, she was able to bring me and Alex (Director of Small Business Development & External Relations) to see the new museum. 

I started the research journey with some foundational goals: our work would be focused on people and their unique life journeys, it would be documented and cited to ensure accuracy, and the process would be ongoing - often including more questions than answers.

On Saturday, June 3rd from 12-2pm, join the Heurich House Museum and founder of local small business Zenit Journals, Alina Liao, for a wellness journaling workshop in the museum’s Castle Garden. Learn how journaling can be a tool to improve your mental health, explore the concept of memory and how you want to be remembered, and explore Amelia’s journals up close in our new exhibit, Working Title. 

The Heurich House Museum will present its first new exhibit since 2018, which its education team developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working Title reframes the Heurich family home as a central juncture for the people who lived and worked there (1894-1956) - men and women, immigrant and natural-born, Black and white, rich and lower-income, examines how they interacted with each other every day, and questions why their histories have not always been given equal weight.