A Memorial Site
James D. Dean
1931 – 2024
Artist · Administrator · Champion of Art in the Space Age
Old Town Alexandria · 1980–2020
The Torpedo Factory
When James Dean left the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in 1980, he did not leave the Washington area — and he did not stop working. He moved his practice to Studio #306 at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Old Town Alexandria, where he would paint for forty years. It was, in a sense, the third chapter of a life spent in the arts: first as an administrator building the NASA Fine Arts Program, then as the National Air & Space Museum's first Curator of Art, and finally as a working artist answerable only to his own eye and the view from his studio window over the Potomac River.
The Torpedo Factory was a fitting home. Built in 1918 as a U.S. Naval munitions plant and converted to artists' studios in 1974, it became — under the direction of Marian Van Landingham and her successor Margaret Alderson — the nation's largest concentration of publicly accessible working artists' studios under one roof. Artists earned their spaces through a competitive jury process and were required to work in their studios and engage with the public. For Dean, who had spent his career championing the idea that art belonged in the same room as the rest of American life, it was the right place to be.
"There is a beautiful symbiosis here between the artist and the public. We aren't in a sterile gallery; we are in a place where things were once made for war. When an artist turns a workplace like this into a work of art in itself, it validates the creative spirit of the entire community. It says that making art is just as essential to the city's life as the industry that came before it."
— James Dean, "A Space for Art." Alexandria Gazette Packet, 19 Mar. 2014,
From his Torpedo Factory studio he painted the American scene in the classical watercolor tradition he had practiced his whole adult life: the New England coast, the light on the Potomac, the churches of Santa Fe. His favorite subject for landscape painting was Monhegan Island, Maine — a remote island ten miles off the coast that has drawn painters since Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent first summered there. He ran marathons — the Marine Corps, Boston, and New York — and returned to the studio. He also painted the Torpedo Factory building itself, one of the relatively few works in which his subject and his workplace were one and the same.
The studio was where he received visitors, sold work directly without a gallery intermediary, and did what the Torpedo Factory asked all its artists to do: let the public in. Hundreds of thousands of people passed through the building each year. Some stopped. Some bought. He also served at one point as President of the Torpedo Factory Artists Association, helping to lead the community he had joined as an ordinary working member. For a man who had spent twenty years insisting that artists should be present at the most significant moments in American life, spending forty years accessible to anyone who wandered through an open door on the Alexandria waterfront had its own logic.
The U.S. Navy begins construction of the Naval Torpedo Station on the Alexandria waterfront. The factory produces torpedoes through World War I and into the early 1920s, then serves as munitions storage. During World War II it manufactures Mark III and Mark XIV torpedoes. After 1945 it becomes government storage — housing congressional documents, Smithsonian artifacts, and records from the Nuremberg trials.
Marian Van Landingham, president of The Art League, proposes converting the derelict building into artists' studios as part of Alexandria's Bicentennial project. The City of Alexandria approves. The Torpedo Factory Art Center opens — originally pitched as a three-year experiment.
James Dean leaves the National Air and Space Museum after six years as its first Curator of Art. He takes Studio #306 at the Torpedo Factory and begins his life as a full-time working artist.
Following a major renovation, the Torpedo Factory reopens with 225 artists working in its studios. It has by now established itself as one of the most visited art destinations in the Washington region, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
Working from his Torpedo Factory studio, Dean completes the poinsettia watercolor that becomes the U.S. Postal Service's 1985 Christmas stamp — reproduced 750 million times. The Washington Post interviews him in his studio, overlooking the Potomac.
Tenure
Dean serves as President of the Torpedo Factory Artists Association, the organization that represents the working artists of the building and helps govern its standards and community.
The COVID-19 pandemic forces the Torpedo Factory to close its doors. Dean, at 88, does not reopen his studio when the building eventually reopens. After forty years in Studio #306, his tenure at the Torpedo Factory comes to an end — not by choice, but by circumstance.
The Torpedo Factory Art Center
105 N. Union Street, Old Town Alexandria, Virginia — on the Potomac River waterfront, just south of Washington, DC.
Founded in 1974 in a converted World War I munitions plant, it is home to the nation's largest number of publicly accessible working artists' studios under one roof. More than 500,000 visitors pass through annually. Artists are selected through a competitive jury process and are required to work in and open their studios to the public.
The Torpedo Factory Art Center is managed by the City of Alexandria. torpedofactory.org
