Ask a McLean resident where you go to see art in this town, and until this spring almost everyone gave you the same answer: the community center on Ingleside Avenue. That answer is now out of date.
This past spring, the McLean Project for the Arts opened a second campus in downtown McLean, inside a commercial condo that had sat empty for years. The move splits the nonprofit's programming across two buildings for the first time in its history, and it lands right as the Alden Theatre rolls out its fall lineup and the annual arts festival in McLean Central Park prepares for its 19th year. None of that happened by accident, and none of it looks like the McLean arts calendar most residents grew up with.
The Space Nobody Could Fill
The building at 6910 Fleetwood Road, inside The Signet, was built with a restaurant or retail tenant in mind. It never found one. The ground-floor commercial condo sat vacant long enough that McLean Project for the Arts, after first scouting a possible location at Clemyjontri Park, decided to buy it outright rather than keep waiting for a private tenant to materialize.
The nonprofit opened the space on April 30 as the MPA Berlage Arts and Education Center, a 6,100-square-foot facility with three galleries, a ceramics studio, and teaching and meeting rooms. A week later, on May 6, the ground floor added the piece The Signet's original developers were actually looking for: a restaurant. Café Monet, run by Knead Hospitality and Design, now serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a full bar in a spot that spent years as an empty storefront.
What's inside the Berlage center now:
- Three exhibition galleries, including a space named for the late artist Yasmine C. Iskander
- The Natasha and Mae Iskander Ceramics Studio, offering classes and open studio memberships
- Café Monet, a pan-European-inspired restaurant with a full bar
- Meeting and teaching space MPA didn't previously have room for at its original location
What Actually Moved In
The inaugural exhibit, "Life Through the Power of Color," headlines the work of Yasmine C. Iskander, an abstract painter who died in April 2024 at 26. She had been a devoted supporter of MPA since her work was selected for the organization's annual festival in 2017, and her paintings have since shown in galleries across the D.C. region, including the Kennedy Center. Opening the new building with her work was a deliberate choice, not a scheduling convenience.
The original location, at 1234 Ingleside Avenue inside the McLean Community Center, hasn't gone quiet. Its Emerson and Atrium Galleries remain free and open Mondays through Saturdays, and this fall they're hosting "(Not) Strictly Painting," a juried show running September 10 through November 17. The juror is Michael O'Sullivan, who covered visual art and film for The Washington Post from 1993 to 2023. That's the version of MPA most McLean residents already know: free, drop-in, tucked inside the same building as the theater. The Berlage center is the version they don't know yet: ticketed talks, a full-service restaurant, and a ceramics studio you can join like a gym.
The Alden's Fall Season Reads Differently This Year
The theater at 1234 Ingleside Avenue, the same building as MPA's original galleries, has its own fall calendar worth planning around.
| Date | Event | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, Oct. 2, 7 p.m. | Ballet Hispánico's "MUJERES: Women in Motion" | $35 / $30 / $25 |
| Tuesday, Oct. 13, 7 p.m. | Stage adaptation of "Treasure Island," family-friendly | $30 / $25 / $20 |
| Sunday, Oct. 25, 2 p.m. | Chamber music with pianist Margarita Loukachkina and violinist Nikita Borisevich, joined by their son | $20 / $15 / $10 |
The spread is intentional. October opens with a touring dance company, moves through a live-action graphic novel aimed at families, and closes the month with an intimate chamber recital built around a real family of musicians rather than a touring act. If you've only ever thought of the Alden as the venue for the outdoor concert series that wraps up every August, this is the season that argues otherwise. The 383-seat theater has hosted John Lithgow, Lesley Gore, and Sandra Day O'Connor over its history, and this fall's booking reads like an attempt to keep that range going rather than settle into one genre.
The Park Still Belongs To Everyone
McLean Central Park hosts its own piece of this expansion on Sunday, October 4, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., when McLean Artfest returns for its 19th year. The festival was known as MPAartfest until this year, when the McLean Community Center took over as producer while MPA continues to jury the artists and manage exhibitor relations. It's a small governance shift, but the timing lines up with everything else on this list: the same year MPA opened a second campus is the year it handed the park festival's production duties to the Community Center.
More than 30 juried artists applied by the July 31 deadline, and this year's exhibitors found out whether they made the cut on August 14, just a few days before this was written. Booth fees are due by September 1. For residents, none of that paperwork matters. What matters is that the festival stays free, features a Children's Art Walk, food trucks, a beer and wine garden, and live local music, and requires nothing more than a walk to Dolley Madison Boulevard.
What A Saturday Looks Like Now
Before this spring, a full day of McLean arts programming meant one building and one parking lot. Now it can mean breakfast at Café Monet, an hour in the Berlage galleries, a walk or short drive to Ingleside Avenue for the Emerson Gallery's current juried show, and an evening at the Alden before the night ends. Add the first Sunday in October and that same stretch of downtown hosts a park full of working artists selling directly out of their tents.
That's a genuinely different rhythm than the one long-time residents are used to, and it didn't happen because McLean suddenly discovered an appetite for art it didn't have before. It happened because one nonprofit ran out of room, found a vacant storefront nobody else wanted, and turned it into a second front door.
If you've lived here long enough to remember when Ingleside Avenue was the only address that mattered for a night out, this fall is worth walking through with fresh eyes. Keep an eye on the McLean neighborhood guide for how these kinds of local shifts tend to ripple outward, and if a season like this ever gets you thinking about what else is changing block by block in this town, Maria Park is always glad to talk it through over coffee, not a contract.
