If you spend just one hour in Washington this season, for the love of art spend it at the Renwick Gallery.

The gallery, part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will reopen Nov. 13 following a two-year total renovation.

“This building has been opened as an art museum three times in three centuries,” Museum Director Elizabeth Broun said at a press preview Tuesday morning. She was referencing its original opening in 1874 housing the Corcoran Gallery, its 1972 reopening as part of SAAM and this week’s event.

It was the first building in the United States specifically intended to be an art museum, Broun said. Hailed as an “American Louvre,” the gallery was to curate and develop an American artistic tradition that its benefactors deemed necessary for the nation.

 “The building,” Renwick Curator-in-Charge Nicholas Bell said, “is the museum’s most precious object.”

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With the gallery will open a magnificent, museum-wide show called “WONDER” featuring newly commissioned site-specific works by nine contemporary artists.

“These had to be people who would make you aware of your surroundings,” said Bell, who organized “WONDER.” “I wanted them to be people that … were passionate about making and materials.”

“I wanted them to be people that made things specifically that would create a sense of wonder,” he said, “that would amaze you, that would provoke awe.”

Gabriel Dawe’s utterly beautiful Plexus A1 fits that bill. Each new angle on this prism-like spectrum of shimmering string provides a new warmth and luxuriant gorgeousness. It has a heavenly lightness, with interacting strands coming to a fuzzy but rationally defined crux in a weaving of sun-like brilliance. It’s like a rainbow built for the room, casting its cheery light upon all who enter.

But it is not simply to be looked at — it is to be encountered, walked among and loved.

So it is with many of the works on view.

A “stickwork” by Patrick Dougherty — undulating woven willow forms that suggest natural hovels or swaying nests — seems odd without the outdoor landscapes that the sculptures often complement. Upon further reflection, though, it seems to bring a dose of the natural into the human, not the other way around as usual.

His nature-borne art seems untamable but is, in reality, manually wrangled into the pseudo-natural forms created. Aptly titled for this gala-heavy opening, Shindig is pleasantly more abstract than some other Dougherty creations and fits Bell’s “making” criterion snugly.

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The hanging fiber work by Janet Echelman in the gallery’s grand salon — similar to one that hung over the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston this summer — is a bulbous mass of deceptive lightness. It is a woven, color-shifting net of fibers hanging delicately to create a fluid, cloudlike work fitting for such a grand ceiling.

Similarly delicate is Folding the Chesapeake by Maya Lin, a map of the Chesapeake Bay made from pale, shimmering green glass marbles that drip over the walls and floor from radiator grates to the vaulted ceiling.

Jennifer Angus’ wall pattern of about 5,000 dead insects will give you a new lease on beauty. There are insects that look like leaves, insects of a shining turquoise and insects that will make you wonder — half amazed, half terrified — how a bug could be so enormous.

The room, titled In The Midnight Garden, features vaguely Mexican patterns, including geometric rosettes, striped paneling and pixel-like skulls. Every so often a creature will seem to break free from the pattern, reinforcing the theme of formation flight and flight to freedom.

Angus’ background is in textiles, and the colorful insects are woven into a tense beauty: It’s a room full of corpses, ultimately, but it’s a room full of captivating beauty.

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SAAM has outdone itself thrice over this year, proving it is as much a keystone of the United States’ national art scene as the blocks-away National Gallery.

SAAM’s latest treatment of the space — which was originally built to hold the now-closed “Corcoran Gallery” before its move to the Flagg Building — has this critic asking, “Corcoran? What Corcoran?”

Of course, the Corcoran affair is still the uncomfortable wrinkle on the already craggy mainstream Washington art scene. A year after it closed, its first home is set to reopen, arguably looking nicer than it ever has before. Ornamental Cs still adorn molding and doorframes, but the gallery’s famous engraved stone “Dedicated to Art” motto has been corrupted with a tacky new adornment, luckily temporary according to the Washington City Paper.

And while the sign’s execution might be misguided, its point is clear: This is not Corcoran’s Renwick anymore. It isn’t even the building Jackie Kennedy fought to save from demolition.

It’s something entirely new, unfailingly special and freshly rededicated to art.