Alice Denney

Mrs. Denney’s most enduring creation was the Washington Project for the Arts, an organization that she founded in 1975 to provide workshop, exhibition and performance space for experimental artists.

Initially functioning from a condemned storefront space downtown that charged $1 a year in rent, the initiative received funding from the Cafritz Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and remains in operation today.

Mrs. Denney stepped down as director in 1979 to become board chairman. The WPA, as the project is known, rose to national attention in 1989 when it presented a retrospective exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, many of them sexually explicit, that had been canceled by the Corcoran amid a political furor over the exhibit’s partial federal funding.

“Imagine what we would have missed, imagine how much duller the art scene here would be,” Post art critic Paul Richard once wrote, “had there never been a WPA.”