Right on the heels of the NYC-ers’ meet-up at the MOMA, five individuals from the DC region got together at Jaleo, a tapas restaurant in Arlington, VA just outside of our Nation’s Capital. On that rainy afternoon, three new students, Kaitlin, Katherine (Kaitlin and Katherine have already been highlighted earlier in the ARCA Blog), Tanya, a returning student (yours truly) and Marc Masurovsky (last year’s ARCA conference presenter and mentor from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) had lunch and covered a lot of ground.

Everyone was quite animated in the discussions with question and answers, and the sharing of thoughts or observations. Discussions ranged from certain postings on this year’s Google Groups to antidote’s of Marc’s and my own time in Amelia to the latest art-related seminar held in DC earlier this month in which Katherine attended and Marc presented.  The topic of the seminar was on World War II Provenance Research. As a direct result from Katherine’s and Marc’s impression of the conference, the hot topic at lunch was about Provenance -- how it was being taught and how sometimes people thought it was being blatantly obscured by museums. Prime examples included some of the visiting exhibits in DC to some of the art installed in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art.

From our meeting, it seems like these new students for the ARCA Class of 2011 have an insatiable curiosity and a distinct love for the arts -- so do not be surprised to find that their future papers are published soon after Amelia! Don’t get left behind this summer as traveling is another love that these three share so I can assure you that they will be the first to travel outside of Amelia to bask in the wonders of art that can only be found in Italy.