The Brand Story
The club's 1916 founding mission names nine arts. Each cycle the scholarship honors one of them: the crest stays, and that year's emblem — a period silhouette in its own heritage color — takes the frame. A tradition, drawn to rotate.
Colors of the age
Every emblem is drawn to the crest's own measurements and set in a color from the world of 1916 — slate of drafting rooms, sepia of the darkroom, gold of gilt frames. Together they make one family; each year, one steps forward. The mark's story is here.
This cycle
Documentary film — a subgenre of cinematography, one of the club's nine founding art forms. The 2026–27 competition is in Documentary Filmmaking — read the competition brief.
2026–27 · this year's art form
charcoal plum
The youngest art on the 1916 list — cinema was barely two decades old when the club named it beside painting and sculpture. The emblem is a hand-cranked camera on wooden sticks, the machine of the silent era. This cycle the scholarship returns to it through documentary film: find a true story and tell it well.
slate blue
Washington in 1916 was a city being drawn: Beaux-Arts fronts along the avenues, the McMillan Plan still fresh on the drafting tables. The club's architects belonged to that drawing — its emblem is a columned elevation, the working language of the T-square era.
dusty rose
The 1910s were the years dance broke from the ballroom — Isadora Duncan's generation made movement itself an art of ideas. The emblem holds a dancer mid-phrase, drawn in the poster silhouette of that decade.
oxblood
Before microphones, an actor's instrument was the whole hall. The club's stage tradition runs back to parlor theatricals and little theaters of the teens — the emblem carries the twin masks that have signed the theater since antiquity.
forest green
A club founded by writers as much as painters: readings in the parlor, magazines on the hall table, the capital's men and women of letters at one long table. The emblem is an open book with an inkwell and pen — the desk of 1916.
antique gold
Evenings at the club meant live performance — parlor recitals, chamber programs, songs at the piano. The emblem sets a lyre, music's oldest signature, in the gold of gilt frames and brass instruments.
terracotta
The gallery walls came first: the club was built around exhibiting painters, and the Monroe Gallery still hangs working artists today. The emblem is palette and brushes, in the earth red of studio clay and sienna.
sepia brown
In 1916 photography was still arguing its way into the fine arts — the club took its side early by naming it a founding form. The emblem is a bellows camera on a tripod, in the sepia of the darkroom print.
stone teal
Washington was a sculptor's city — memorial commissions, federal pediments, studios full of clay and stone. The emblem is the carver's mallet and chisel at the block, in the patina teal of weathered bronze.
The other eight wait their turn. When the cycle changes, the crest stays — only the emblem, the color, and the call for entries rotate.
