If you found yourself stuck at home this spring break instead of an orphanage in Thailand or a dancehall in Dubai and have a serious case of wanderlust, look no further than your local art galleries. Many of the photography exhibitions running this spring travel far and wide, from the Grand Canyon to the Ganges. And the best part is, admission to all these exhibitions is free — no passport required.

March 16 to 28 marks the 18th annual D.C. Environmental Film Festival. The festival displays 155 feature, animated, documentary, archival, experimental and children’s films from 31 different countries at 56 venues throughout the city including the Carnegie Institute, The Corcoran, the National Gallery, The Phillips Collection, the World Bank and Georgetown’s own Intercultural Center. The festival is the largest of its kind in the country.

For those of you who like theater, but would prefer it without the lengthy time commitment, then Mask & Bauble’s Don B. Murphy One Acts Festival is for you. The show kicks off each night with a nearly 20 minute-long one-act play called “The Hypothetical Detective.” The comedic send-up of ’40s detective noir was written by Tom Carroll (COL ’09), after winning the annual playwriting contest put on by Mask & Bauble for the 2008-2009 school year. The short piece presents an interesting dual reality in which everyman Jack reimagines his humdrum existence as a murder mystery. His nagging wife becom

The former comic book, graffiti and tattoo artists of the world are uniting in “G-40: The Summit,” which is sure to be “not your typical, staid, museum exhibition,” according to Alexandra Crane (COL ’12), president of Georgetown’s Art Aficionados (GUAA).

“G-40: The Summit” is a warehouse art exhibition that showcases the works of 500 artists, hailing from over 100 countries that adds up to 75,000 square feet of visual exploration. That’s a lot of numbers for an art show.

As you walk into the Phillips Collection, an expanded late 19th-century mansion on the corner of 21st and U Streets, NW, you can’t help but be intrigued. It holds the title of the United States’ first museum of modern art, and the works that it possesses are exceedingly rare and beautiful. The entryway, coat check, separation of the museum from the foyer by large doors and general ambience create that necessary tranquility that allows you to really consider the pieces of art that you’re looking at.

On loan from the National Museum of Wales, “Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection” features the donated collection of two Welsh sisters. The exhibit largely consists of European Impressionist, pre-Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. But the charming thing about this exhibit is its slight inconsistencies, its surprises. The fact that these paintings come from the collection of two amateur collectors means that the exhibit is unexpectedly personal, full of the tastes and whims of two very particular people.

Washington, D.C: The name resonates with a kind of weight and expectation that anybody should apprehend from a capital city. Yet this is also the capital of one of the most advanced countries in the world — the United States.

For college students, February is a memorable month for many reasons. First of all, Valentine’s day finally makes its appearance (or rears its ugly head, as the case may be), which can either lead to a romantic night out or to a group of friends eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cake and watching The Notebook and Love Actually in a townhouse living room. It also marks the beginning of the countdown to spring break and often to the first sights of spring itself. This year, February marks the opening of a few highly-anticipated exhibitions at several of D.C.’s famous art galleries

Consider January’s reputation: It’s certainly a poor one, what with all the wading through gray slush on the way to early morning class and bundling up for the trek to Lau for the day, without even the slightest hope of springtime in the air. Campus seems barren and frozen, and hibernation suddenly becomes a serious consideration. But in Paris, January holds something lovely: the spring couture season. After a winter’s worth of painstaking work, the biggest names in fashion showcase their most stunning creations. Everything is made by hand from the most sumptuous (and sometimes strangest)

Hundreds of sparse line drawings dot an expanse of graph paper in the Flashpoint Gallery in Chinatown. Each subject is a pencil-drawn face — androgynous, hairless and cold. In dispassionate rows and columns running the length of the room, they contort their mouths into one of a thousand expressions — grim, grotesque or angry — as if the artist had wanted to catalogue the range of human expression in some strange anthropological study. The Baltimore-based artist behind this solo exhibit, Jackie Milad, called her work “a reference library for gestural language.”