Exploring Sabiha Iqbal's Artistic Evolution Through Recent Exhibitions

Itayecxi Alvarez

April 10, 2026

Sabiha Iqbal is a remarkably versatile artist whose work has been presented across a range of galleries and cultural spaces. Each of her exhibitions offers a distinct experience, revealing the breadth of her styles and mediums as she conveys both hopeful and darker, more introspective themes.  

Time in this Scribblings of The Times feels layered and cyclical, where memory is something inherited, intimate, and continuously unfolding through feeling rather than documentation. In contrast, The World as We Open Our Eyes engages with the immediacy of the present moment. Together, these exhibitions show an evolution in Iqbal’s practice from poetic introspection to global engagement. While both bodies of work emphasize movement, emotion, and interconnectedness, they differ in how they situate the viewer: one invites reflection inward through memory and poetry, and the other pushes outward toward awareness of contemporary realities.

Itayecxi: You talk about constant movement and change, and I can see that in your artwork, can you tell me about the ways Scribblings of The Time and this exhibition, The World as We Open Our Eyes, each reflect a different relationship to time and memory?

Sabiha Iqbal: In Scribblings of the Time, my relationship to time and memory is deeply reflective and rooted in poetry, especially the work of my mother, Ada Jafarey, whose words shape the emotional and visual language of the paintings. In The World as We Open Our Eyes, time is not reflective but urgent, unfolding through the incorporation of newspaper clippings, text, and references to current events.

Itayecxi: How are human figures treated differently in each body of work?

Sabiha: The human figures in these works are expressive but softened, almost poetic themselves, functioning less as specific individuals and more as embodiments of emotion and rhythm. The figures in The World ad We Open Our Eyes become more fragmented and layered, embedded within a broader social and political context, suggesting that identity is shaped by collective experience and global realities.

Itayecxi: How does the depiction of interconnectedness between humans and nature evolve between the two shows?

Sabiha: Similarly, the natural elements, such as flowers, skies, and organic forms become symbolic, reflecting an inner world where humans and nature exist in harmony. In this exhibition Scribblings of The Time, the “world” is constructed as something internal and imagined, shaped by memory, language, and introspection. In contrast, with The World as We Open Our Eyes, the relationship between humans and nature also shifts. No longer just symbolic, it becomes more direct and ecological, addressing issues like climate change and interconnected systems of impact.

Itayecxi: How does each exhibition construct a sense of the world, is it internal, imagined, or externally observed?

Sabiha: In this exhibition Scribblings of The Time, the “world” is constructed as something internal and imagined, shaped by memory, language, and introspection. But in The World as We Open Our Eyes, the “world” is externally observed and mediated through information, creating a sense of witnessing rather than remembering. Together, these two bodies of work reflect my movement from an introspective, poetic exploration of memory toward a more outward engagement with the complexities of the contemporary world.

In DisCerning Eye: Irene Pantelis

“Statements of Nature

Pondering the planet at Glen Echo. Also: Vicky Perry’s flowers, Winston W. Harris’s cutouts, Irene Pantelis’s bark, Rob Pruitt’s pandas, Rick Ruggles’s closeups, and Michèle Colburn’s reprise

Mark Jenkins

Mar 18, 2026

Esperanza Alzona, “Complacency” (Washington Sculptors Group)

ONLY FOUR OF THE 27 PIECES in “Critical Ground: Art and Environmental Justice” are outdoors, but all the entries in this Washington Sculptors Group show offer some perspective on the world outside manmade culture. This is reflected both in the subject matter and the materials of the exhibition, which is mostly in Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. Many of the artworks are triumphs of recycling, whether the repurposed objects are the old instrument enclosure of Chris Combs’s tribute to Nevada’s near-extinct Pahrump poolfish or the colorful cardboard of “Octopus,” Joanathan Bessaci’s exuberant leap beyond his usual map-derived style.

The exemplary work is Esperanza Alzona’s “Complacency,” whose vision of a person almost contained by earth may be a little obvious conceptually, but is striking visually. Few of the pieces explicitly depict people, although a human torso lurks within Ira Tattelman’s found-object assemblage and small persons observe the black gush -- oil? -- at the center of Samuel Miller’s sculptural painting. Humanity is portrayed pungently, if less directly, in Sally Canzoneri’s paper model of D.C.’s main sewage pumping station, an ironic monument to civilization.

Among the elegantly stark offerings are Nicholas Femia’s steel “Legs,” which suggests a bodiless spider; Heidi Lippman’s formed-glass sculpture, charred to warn of global warming yet shimmeringly beautiful; Xiang Gu’s thicket of wooden stakes, which despite its denseness gives a pleasantly disorienting illusion of being weightless; and Miller’s “Funeral Urn for Planet Earth,” which conceals a twinkling night sky inside a giant ceramic vessel. Billy Friebele methodically arrays 3D prints of arrowheads to represent the erasure of local Native American culture, while David Whitmore conjures a sense of ancientness by contrasting mussel shells with fragments of industrial materials.

Joanathan Bessaci, “Octopus” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

Nature feeds on human detritus in Radhakund Ramnarine’s evocative sculptural collage, in which actual live plants grow from a spiral of deformed chairs. Birds flock to feeders in Marcie Wolf-Hubbard’s bas relief, made of paper mache and defined with charcoal and encaustic paint. In the context of this show, one of Jean Kim’s twisted-aluminum towers, sleekly machined, takes on an organic connotation.

Of the many entries that pit natural versus manufactured materials, the most urgent is McCleary Gallagher’s “Unsustainable”: A eight-foot-high metal spike impales a globe made of concentric wooden rings. As an environmental communique, this totem could hardly be more direct. Yet, like so many of the works in “Critical Ground,” it packs both complex resonance and visual grace.

At Glen Echo’s other galleries, Vicky Perry is showing photorealist floral paintings infiltrated by abstract touches, and Winston W. Harris is exhibiting color prints that often feature cutouts.

In her Stone Tower Gallery show, Perry foregrounds bright, precisely rendered blooms before complex, half-hidden backdrops. Flowers may dance across the sky in front of a massive waterfall, or rest next to a culture on which floral motifs are carved in stone. These playful juxtapositions are meant, according to the artist’s statement, to yield “a comprehensive unity.”

Harris’s prints, at Park View Gallery, are lively and colorful, with an art nouveau feel. Many of them are two-ply, with carved paper lattices mounted over the main image, but the most compelling depart the frame together. The artist’s set of twinned cutout horses, basically flat but bent to provide depth, is at once delicate and muscular.

Irene Pantelis, “Protective Sheath” (Studio Gallery)

AT FIRST GLANCE, IRENE PANTELIS’S STUDIO GALLERY SHOW looks anything but autobiographical. The inspiration for her “Bitter Bark” seems to be botanical, but the mixed-media paintings appear more concerned with color, form, and texture than with representation. Made on non-absorbent Yupo paper, the pictures revel in how the ink, watercolor, and natural dyes pool, meld, and drip. The plant-like compositions, with leafy growth at top and cross-hatched roots below, could just be a way of complementing the pigments’s spontaneous movement.

In fact, the series stems from Pantelis’s unearthing of a photograph of her late father’s hometown in Bolivia. The tree in the picture is a cinchona, whose bark -- yes, it’s bitter -- yields quinine. As a treatment for malaria, quinine was once crucial for European colonizers in tropical climes. Pantelis conceived these fluid paintings to express “the circulation of bodies, plants, and medicines across geographies,” notes the show’s wall text.

The plant dyes, derived from cinchona trees, combine with the other pigments in color schemes that are often heavy on green and black, but sometimes feature intense pinks. The shrub-like trees do sometimes bear pink or red flowers, vivid plumage captured by such pictures as “Jesuit’s Bank” (a term for cinchona that recalls its colonial heritage). Positioned on empty white grounds so they look a bit like miniature planets, Pantelis’s cinchona trees blossom with an abundance that seems both earthy and other-worldly.

Installation shot of Rob Pruitt’s “Rob Wants to Make People Happy; He Aims to Please” (Von Ammon Co.)

ROB PRUITT IS PROBABLY BEST-KNOWN for “Cocaine Buffet,” a 1998 installation that offered a nearly 16-foot-long line of real coke to gallery goers. Just three years later, the Maryland-native New Yorker began painting glittery pandas, inspired in part by childhood trips to the National Zoo. The charismatic Chinese mammals are still among Pruitt’s subjects, as is demonstrated by his Von Ammon Co. show, “Rob Wants to Make People Happy; He Aims to Please.” This title, if not purely ironic, is certainly equivocal.

With one exception, the 28 panda vignettes in this set are monochromatic, like the creatures themselves. Rendered with black-acrylic outlines on white paper, the pictures look more like prints than paintings. They all seem of a piece, but the compositions were generated by AI, which “has been fed the seminal works of various high-achievers of art history and contemporary art ... to be mutated crudely into Panda scenes,” according to the gallery’s essay. This provenance is not obvious from the results, which are quite similar in style.

Pandas, of course, are not really as cuddly as they appear. Yet Pruitt doesn’t give his animals a sense of menace, even though threatening demeanors are quite common in Von Ammon shows. In the most provocative picture, two pandas carry placards, as if involved in some sort of protest. But the signboards are blank, so the mammals’s stance is unclear. Are they MAGA? Antifa? Or commercial pitch-bears? That ambiguity is crucial. Pandas are almost universally beloved. But they don’t exist to make people happy, any more than any natural phenomena does.

Rick Ruggles, “Pending” (courtesy of the artist)

RICK RUGGLES CLEARLY LOVES METAL, so it’s no great surprise to learn that the photographer was “a metalsmith for many years,” according to the bio for his Artists & Makers exhibition. The pictures in “Focus Pocus: Macrophotography” include several views of voluptuously oxidized surfaces. One ruggedly lovely photo depicts rust-tinged yellow and orange drips etched on bluish metal, a visual essay on elegant deterioration. Even a closeup of a leaf is primarily in metallic yellow and brown hues, with just a tinge of green along the veins.

All the pictures in this selection are square, and some may have been made with a macro lens. But some clearly weren’t. Amid the tightly framed photos of tiny found patterns, mostly unrecognizable but pictorially irrefutable, are such playful non-macro vignettes as a street divided by a painted yellow line in which one segment, painted on a manhole cover, has become misaligned. The world Ruggles observes can appear perfect, or comically off-kilter.

Lest the photographer’s eye for beautifully battered colors completely upstage his compositional flair, the show includes five black-and-white pictures. Seemingly depicting the play of light on hair, “White Tornado” offers an epic contrast between shadow and illumination. It’s a reminder that Ruggles, like all photographers, is on a quest for immaculate light.

AT THE ARTS CLUB OF WASHINGTON, Michèle Colburn is showing many of pigment-and-gunpowder pictures she recently exhibited at George Mason University’s Arlington campus. For a review of that show, see discerningeye.substack.com/p/a-forest-of-details

Washington Sculptors Group: Critical Ground: Art and Environmental Justice

Through March 22 at Popcorn Gallery and outdoors.

Vicky Perry: Secret Life of Flowers

Through March 22 at Stone Tower Gallery.

Winston W. Harris: New Everything, New

Through March 21 at Park View Gallery.

All at Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Irene Pantelis: Bitter Bark

Through March 21 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.

Rob Pruitt: Rob Wants to Make People Happy; He Aims to Please

Through March 23 at Von Ammon Co., 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.

Rick Ruggles: Focus Pocus: Macrophotography

Through March 25 at Artists & Makers, 11810 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. artistsandmakersstudios.com. 240-437-9573.

Michèle Colburn

Through March 28 at the Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St. NW. artsclubofwashington.org. 202-331-7282.”

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Beverly Logan & Andrea Kraus

“Soft Feelings

Nathan Mullins and Marsha Goldberg’s blurred lines, Pat Goslee’s flowery instincts, Beverly Logan’s repurposed houses, & Andrea Kraus’s suicidal closeups

MARK JENKINS

FEB 11

Marsha Goldberg, “Campo XLV” (Adah Rose Gallery)

THE WORLD IS SOFT, STILL, AND A LITTLE BLURRY in the paintings of Nathan Mullins and Marsha Goldberg, currently co-billed in Adah Rose Gallery’s “A Small Moment of Amazement.” Mullins is a representational but impressionistic oil painter whose recent works include numerous still lifes of books grouped by topic or author. His other pictures, all small and hushed, depict domestic scenes populated by cats and women who are reading, sleeping, or talking.

The last is the occasion for one of the Mississippi artist’s gentle formal experiments: four paintings of the same pair of conversationalists at the same small-town location, but at different times of day. The quartet demonstrates Mullins’s careful rendering of light and shadow, but also his bent for distilling real-world objects to their geometric fundamentals. Buildings and books become rectangles, simple and direct yet far from hard-edged in the artist’s cottony style.

Disruptive events, when they occur, are merely suggested. “Sunburn” ponders the partly red back of a partly naked woman, whose discomfort is apparently not severe: a cat curls up on her covered legs. The artist also offers a diptych that is, playfully, vertical rather than horizontal. The action, such as it is, of “K Revises the Novel” is wholly in the lower panel; above are just shelves, plants, and the top of a lamp-shade. The top half reveals the part of Mullins’s domain that is nothing but color and shape.

That’s where Mullins’s approach overlaps that of Goldberg, whose pictures are purely abstract but equally attuned to illumination and elemental form. The New Jersey artist paints fields of closely abutting dots whose colors are complexly layered and edges are softly defined. She applies acrylic ink on synthetic Yupo paper, whose non-absorbent surface allows the pigment to pool and meld. The small circles are positioned regularly, but rendered freehand and with several coats in different but complementary hues. The process yields dots that appear to glisten and twinkle, and sometimes seemingly to undulate across the compositions.

The artist’s recent works include several in the “Campo” series, inspired by the light of Venice. (”Campo” is Italian for “field,” and is also applied to urban squares.) These are rectangular and covered with dots that subtly shift color. Other paintings use blocs of small, similarly-hued circles to define two or more eccentric shapes that are placed in opposition to each other. The sense of contrast and motion is stronger in these pictures, but all of them pulse and glimmer. The multiple levels of color in each dot generate a force that crackles outward, energizing the entire field.

Pat Goslee, “Sensing Rain” (Popcorn Gallery)

PAT GOSLEE IS AN ABSTRACTIONIST, but she sometimes incorporates recognizable images into her richly tangled paintings. Those visual allusions have changed over time, and so have the prevailing color schemes. Or at least that’s the case with the recent pictures in “As Syllable from Sound,” the D.C. artist’s show at Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. The representational glimmers, which in the past could suggest viscera, are currently trending toward the floral. And many of these paintings are keyed to the contrast between pinks and greens, hues that suggest gardens.

Little if any of this is intentional, according to the artist’s statement. She constructs her dense compositions “instinctively,” she writes, “placing pattern atop pattern.” There’s a liquid quality to some of these pictures -- one includes a spilled-coffee stain -- that occasionally recalls Maggie Michael’s sloshed-color style. But there are also repeated decorative elements produced by stenciling, which yields small squares, ribbon-like vertical lines, and lacy filigree. The last may be the result of actual lace, since Goslee employs secondhand fabrics as one of her form-generating devices. A sense of remaking or reclaiming animates these pictures, some of which are on canvases made from recycled plastic bottles.

The show’s centerpiece is a large triptych whose soft shapes and blurry gestures coalesce into something epic. Tellingly, the painting is called “Muscle Memory.” That title suggests that the act of making such an artwork -- layering, constructing, establishing rhythms of soft and hard, free and stenciled -- is what defines it. The artist herself may ultimately see rain, flowers, and other phenomena in the finished picture. But serendipity, not overall design, is what summons such associations.

Beverly Logan, “Blank Building” (Studio Gallery)

THE SIMPLEST OF BUILDINGS BECOME PORTALS into alternate universes in Beverly Logan’s photo-collages, each centered on a house, barn, or elementary industrial structure. These everyday edifices give a sense of ordinariness to the pictures in “Everything Is in Order,” the local artist’s Studio Gallery show. But Logan gently subverts her collages’s naturalism with bright colors and unexpected details. Not everything is orderly in pictures that place buildings in water, towering over roads, or floating in a cloud bank.

Logan takes a newly streamlined approach in this show, curated by Adah Rose Gallery’s namesake, Adah Rose Bitterbaum. Most of the imagery appears commonplace, and the transformations are often executed simply with color shifts. In “Greenhouse,” the title structure seems to be siphoning its strong hue from the adjacent grass, which has turned orange as a result. Red or orange buildings clash vibrantly with electric-blue skies, and puffy white clouds bid to shroud everything. Indeed, “White House with Window” appears to have been rendered as flat as a sheet of paper, to serve as a stage set for the blue-and-white firmament behind, around, and within it. Solid as they may seem, the structures in Logan’s alchemical collages are no more substantial than water vapor.

“Suicide printing” is the attention-getting term Andrea Kraus uses to describe the process by which she made the linocuts in “Layer Perfect,” also at Studio (and also curated by Bitterbaum). More commonly termed “reduction printing,” the technique involves applying one color of ink and then recarving the same matrix for each subsequent impression. (This is “suicide” because the earlier versions of the block can’t be brought back to life.) The local artist uses the strategy to produce pictures in which vivid and evocatively smeary colors are contained, sometimes just barely, by bold black forms.

These prints mostly explore Asian motifs, usually in tight closeups that banish the wider world. Parasols, marionettes, and swimming koi are presented from an immersive, nose-against-the-glass perspective. Sometimes Kraus takes a few steps back, notably for two fanciful pictures in which a woman defies real-world scale by reclining under a bonsai tree. This figure can be seen as a stand-in for the spectator. She’s been allowed to infiltrate an emblematic Asian scene, much the way Kraus invites the viewer’s eye to enter her iconic vignettes.

Nathan Mullins & Marsha Goldberg: A Small Moment of Amazement

Through Feb. 20 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington. adahrosegallery.com. (301) 922-0162.

Pat Goslee: As Syllable from Sound

Through Feb. 15 at Popcorn Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Beverly Logan: Everything Is in Order

Andrea Kraus: Layer Perfect

Through Feb. 21 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202- 232-8734”

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Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Christoper Corson & Greenbelt Ceramics

“Lands, Scapes

World views, actual and imagined, by Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, William Demaria, Multiple Exposures photographers, and botanical artists. Also: ceramics from Greenbelt

MARK JENKINS

JAN 21, 2026

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, “This time merciful nature saved us from ourselves” (photo by Ulf Wallin/Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington)

ABSTRACTIONS THAT SPIRAL INTO LANDSCAPES and much more, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi’s mixed-media paintings have been widely exhibited in the Washington area. But the museum of Contemporary Art Arlington’s retrospective reveals something new, in part by showing us things that are older. Striking pictures made in 2008-2009, vividly and unexpectedly evoking the Iran-Iraq War, begin the artist’s “Here the waving flag. Here the other world.” (The artist is known for long titles, often derived from poetry.) In these paintings, explosions and photo-derived images of urban buildings are juxtaposed with areas of fluid color.

Organized by MOCA’s Blair Murphy, the exhibition is an unusual one for the venue, which customarily doesn’t allot so much space to a single artist. Ilchi was a good choice for more extensive treatment, and not just because she’s long been associated with MOCA and its predecessor, the Arlington Arts Center (where she had a studio for six years beginning in 2012). The 30 works on display give a good account of both the growth and the continuity in Ilchi’s style.

Born in Iran in 1981, Ilchi moved to the Washington area to marry when she was 18. As it happens, the artist’s technique echoes that of innnovative Washington colorist Morris Louis. But where Louis poured pigment onto untreated canvas that absorbed it, Ilchi flows paint onto nonporous material, usually Mylar or dibond. This allows the pigments to swirl freely, intermingle unpredictably, and dry more slowly, ultimately yielding brighter colors. The interplay of such vivid hues is the principal attraction of some Ilchi paintings.

However compelling the abstract liquid patterning, the artist always adds other elements, usually from three categories: small human figures, Iranian decorative motifs, and landscapes, the latter sometimes so elaborate as to dominate the composition. These ingredients usually contrast each other, but sometimes merge. In the earlier pictures, women’s tresses twirl long and free -- forbidden, of course, under Iran’s strict Islamic regime -- until they nearly become one with the rivulets of aleatory paint. In later paintings such as “This time merciful nature saved us from ourselves,” tree branches play a similar role, twisting to mirror the sinuous play of the poured pigment.

The appearance of traditional Persian design elements, often embellished tiles or golden portals, can appear incongruous. But such motifs are becoming more common, and the show’s most recent work is an upright 3D painting on individual panels, which combines decorative gold filigree with free-form blues. It stands near another sculptural work, from 2016, that’s a heap of disassembled tiles. The latter is an interesting experiment whose implicit violence links to the war imagery of the artist’s early work. Most often, though, the disparate parts of Ilchi’s art represent not conflict but an attempt to reach a synthesis that’s as universal as it is personal.

Keith Krueger, “Live at the Witch Trials” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

MIST AND VAPOR FEATURE PROMINENTLY -- or as prominently as such substances can feature -- in Multiple Exposures Gallery’s “Ephemeral.” Juried by Touchstone Gallery Executive Director Abbey Alison McClain, the exhibition offers one or two photographs by each of the gallery’s 13 members. Most of the pictures are nature scenes, often closeups, whose subjects appear fragile and softly defined. Exemplary of the selection are Guillermo Olaizola’s blue-heavy photo of a single, nearly transparent leaf and Irina Lawton’s of a “broken” bridge, its gap-toothed span set off by satiny clouds and sun-dappled water.

Not all the pictures are so gauzy. Fred Zafran offers two that depict solid structures, one an exterior and the other interior. But both compositions focus on shadow and light, the most mutable aspects of the otherwise substantial scenes. Another piquant contrast to the overall tone comes from Russell Barajas’s witty study of flood-damaged old records, objects that are doubly impermanent. The discs, which include one by Pat Boone, would have little resale value even if they hadn’t been deformed by water.

Among the transient phenomena memorialized here are vapor trails (by Tom Sliter), dandelions (by Barajas and Maureen Minehan), and reflections in windows (by Soomin Ham and David Myers). Several participants photographed denuded trees in gray mists, but Sarah Hood Salomon went further by scratching swirling lines into her image of a single tree. To express fully the vulnerability of our forests, her picture had to be put to the blade.

William Demaria, “Morning Mist” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

ROCKY VIGNETTES EMERGE FROM WHITENESS in William Demaria’s recent intaglio prints, now on exhibit at Washington Printmakers Gallery. The show’s title, “Moments/Memories,” suggests that the partial images are meant to hover on the paper the way half-remembered instants float in the brain. But the icy blank expanses have another significance to the Baltimore artist: They recall the glaciers that carved many of the Earth’s contours.

The show’s introductory text notes that these slow-traveling ice walls were “as tall as skyscrapers,” a link that may explain the selection’s one outlier: a partly green-tinted urban scene that contains highrise buildings. The other pictures are all black-and-white landscapes rendered with a mix of fine lines and wash-like black and gray gestures. Some of the vistas, reportedly, depict Chinese scenery. If so, it’s apt that the printmaker’s technique evokes the softness and fluidity of traditional Chinese ink paintings.

Demaria’s precision is evident in such prints as “Ghost River,” in which a downed tree trunk parallels the oblique course of a stream. The water is represented simply by white paper, but that emptiness appears to glisten between the dark forms of bank and shadow that define the creek. As this picture demonstrates, the artist’s printmaking skills are equaled by his compositional flair. Highlighted natural forms, notably the rugged tops of mountain, cut dynamically across the paper like jagged lines. It turns that glaciers, as least as their handiwork is distilled by Demaria, really knew how to draw.

Chris Corson, “Our Survival Is Yours” (Studio Gallery)

AN IMPRESSIVE SURVEY OF AN OUTSTANDING PROGRAM, “Spirit of Community: Ceramics in Greenbelt, MD” presents 43 pieces by 33 artists associated with the New Deal-founded town’s ceramics group. The selection was curated by Mary Welch Higgins, and the show was organized by Christopher Corson. The latter is a member of Studio Gallery, which hosts the show, and he made one of the highlights, “Our Survival Is Yours.” This pit-fired monument to endangered nature entwines the heads of several animals atop a stele engraved with the piece’s title.

Corson’s shrine represents the more thematically ambitious side of the selection, which is heavy on such traditional ceramic objects as bowls, jars, vases, plates, and flasks. These entries are uniformly well crafted, and are not necessarily traditional in form and embellishment. Karen Arrington’s salt shaker takes the form of a shimmering pear, while bowls by Amy Karlsson and Xiaodan Yan feature, respectively, an undulating profile and a metallic-rainbow interior. Julie Boynton’s elegant “Carved Bottle” has incised circular patterns that recall the cord-made marks of ancient Japanese Jomon pottery.

Arrington reaches to North Africa for her ceramic doumbek, a goblet-shaped ceramic drum with a goat-skin drumhead. Meshian Lehmann echoes the nature theme of Corson’s contribution with “The Great Leviathan,” a miniature whale whose bubble glaze resembles the mottled skin of an actual cetacean. Of the many pieces made of multiple parts, perhaps the most intriguing is Diane Elliott’s “Love Your Crown,” an assemblage of broken crockery that also incorporates stone, bone, and small shells. Craggy and yet graceful, the piece makes destruction an integral part of creation.

Elena Maza-Borkland,”North Mountain Patch” (The Athenaeum)

THE NATURAL WORLD CATALOGED as a series of crisp closeups, “A Winter’s Walk” focuses with exquisite precision on berries, leaves, cones, pods, and branches. This Athenaeum show presents the work of 17 members of the Botanical Art Society of the National Capital Region, all of them highly skilled in their chosen media: watercolor, pencil, and colored pencil.

None of the artists excels far above the others in technique, but a few pictures do stand out for other reasons. Margaret Farr’s “Multiflora Rose” benefits from a dramatic black backdrop. An unusually complex composition, Elena Maza-Borkland’s “North Mountain Patch” is a microcosm of dry, brown, and mostly inert objects grouped around a few lush and fuzzy green sprigs. Even more wintry is Ann Lesciotto’s “Redbud Branch,” whose leaves and pods are all in shades of brown. All three artists render their subjects with such vitality that their pictures remind the viewer that winter will soon yield to spring.

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: Here the waving flag. Here the other world.

Through Jan. 25 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. 703-248-6800.

Ephemeral

Through Jan. 25 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

William Demaria: Moments/Memories

Through Jan. 25 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Spirit of Community: Ceramics in Greenbelt, MD

Through Jan. 24 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734

A Winter’s Walk

Through Jan. 25 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In Greenbelt News: Greenbelt Ceramic Artists Featured in D.C. Juried Exhibit

“Greenbelt Ceramic Artists Featured in D.C. Juried Exhibit

by Anna Bedford-Dillow

January 8, 2026

Photo by Chris Corson

The works of 33 participants in the Greenbelt Recreation Department’s Ceramics Program will be shown at the Studio Gallery in Washington, D.C., through January 24. The juried outreach exhibit, “In the Spirit of Community: Ceramics in Greenbelt, MD” includes 43 pieces ‒ wheel-made, hand-built, tile, mosaic, functional and sculptural ‒ and calls attention to the city’s founding ethos of a commitment to community. Greenbelter and current artist in residence, sculptor Christopher Corson, who also sits on the Studio Gallery Board, pitched the idea for the show in late 2024.

The gallery, which is the longest running artist-owned gallery in Washington, D.C., reaches out each January to groups who do not normally show in venues like theirs. Corson told the gallery about the incredible community ceramics program in Greenbelt and asked if they’d consider an exhibit of some of the great pieces created by Greenbelt residents, for whom ceramics is a passion but not a profession. Says Corson, “I am so happy that the world will see how remarkable the Greenbelt community program is.”

It is significant that this is a juried event, said Julie Boynton, one of the participants, who submitted several pieces for consideration in the show of which one was selected. She is excited to be part of the exclusive show and to receive feedback on her work from someone who is not a family member or friend. Another Greenbelt ceramicist, Lola Skolnik agreed. “It’s an honor to be included,” said Skolnik. Corson helped guide the Greenbelt ceramicists who wished to apply to the show, helping them submit professional photos of their pieces. Juror and Curator Mary Welch Higgins did a great job, says Boynton.

Higgins will give a Juror/Curator talk during the opening reception this weekend. The Greenbelt exhibit will run until January 24 and ceramicists will have the opportunity to share their work with the public. Though some of the pieces will be for sale, “this is not necessarily about selling for many of the artists, it is about being selected and included in a real gallery show,” Boynton told the News Review. The experience of walking through the gallery and being alongside so many great pieces is really meaningful for her.

The show’s Opening Reception is on Saturday, January 10, from 4 to 6 p.m. The Juror/ Curator’s talk by Higgins will be at 4:30 p.m. All are welcome to visit the Studio Gallery at 2108 R St. NW, Washington, D.C., which is open Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 1 to 6 p.m. and Saturdays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. One can see all the pieces included in the Greenbelt show on the gallery’s website at studiogallerydc.com/in-the-spirit-of community-ceramics-in-greenbelt-md-catalogue.

Lola Skolnik and Julie Boynton assisted with the preparation of this article.”

The works of Greenbelt ceramicists are displayed in Studio Gallery's premier exhibit space.

Photos by Chris Corson

Photos by Chris Corson

This article is reprinted with permission from the Greenbelt News Review, where it first appeared (www.greenbeltnewsreview.com). Thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Chernow, Curren, & Jakes

“Shredded Art

Tory Cowles dances between painting and sculpture & Rosa Inés Vera turns folkloric. Also: Five under 35 & Keith Krueger; Chris Chernow, Elizabeth Curren, & Carolee Jakes; & nearly 100 photographers

MARK JENKINS

DEC 31

Tory Cowles, “Explosion on the Cabin John Bridge” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE NARROW THREAD THAT LINKS THE WORK OF Tory Cowles and Rosa Inés Vera is a shared interest in decorative traditions. The two local artists, who have adjacent shows at Touchstone Gallery, mostly explore territories that are far distant from each other’s. The former’s “Serendipity: A Dance Between Painting and Sculpture” juxtaposes neo-abstract-expressionist canvases with found-object assemblages, while the latter’s “Resilencia” consists of portraits, generally archetypal rather than specific, of Latin-American women.

The most prominent pieces in Cowles’s show are four large abstract paintings that are multi-colored but dominated by the hues of sunlight and night: yellow and black. These pictures aren’t exactly sculptural, but they do have abundant 3D features: thick impasto, heavily worked surfaces, craggy textures, and collaged bits. So it seems apt that the artist would deconstruct other of her paintings into mobiles, folded eccentrically and suspended in midair.

Perhaps the most successful of Cowles’s hybrids is “Explosion on the Cabin John Bridge,” a shredded black truck tire that’s painted yellow and orange and hung on the wall. Roughly circular, “Explosion” is a particularly dynamic sort of action painting, and echoes the color schemes of the other pictures.

Several of the found-object collages arrange, in clear plastic boxes, such lifeless natural objects as dried flowers and dead insects, as well as a shard of snakeskin and the desiccated remains of a frog. Near these haphazard memento mori are three wall pieces based on pressed-tin ceiling tiles, whose embossed patterns the artist partly obscures with fabric and beads. While Cowles’s approach is anything but tidy, in appropriating such objects she winks appreciatively at the decorative arts.

Vera’s relationship to ornamentation is simpler. Floral motifs and fabric-style designs appear both on and around the women she paints in a flat, vividly colorful style. Several paintings, notably “Unidad (Retablo),” emulate the look and design of textiles. (A retablo, by the way, is a devotional painting that usually draws from Roman Catholic imagery and is executed in a folkloric style.)

Many of the other figures are faceless, loosely rendered, and seemingly in motion. As suggested by the six different versions of “Las Comrades,” the women are frequently grouped together, as if engaged in some kind of collective action. Even when their faces have no features, Vera’s subjects conjure a sense of community.

Keith Krueger, “Live at the Witch Trials” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A STRONG PHYSICAL PRESENCE, WHETHER ACTUAL OR SIMULATED, characterizes much of the work in “Hits Different: 5 Under 35,” a Brentwood Arts Exchange showcase of emerging local artists. Several of the contributors, all selected by curator Emily Fussner, blur the border between two- and three-dimensional media. Even MK Bailey, a nearly traditional painter, contrasts flatness and depth in such sweeping pictures as “Dark Woods II,” in which the style becomes more abstract in the composition’s hindmost regions.

Where Bailey draws from centuries-old landscape and mythological canvases, Marisa Stratton takes her subjects from smartphone snapshots. Yet her paintings and drawings are anything but photorealist; they’re loosely rendered, as if in an attempt to undermine machine-generated regularity with free gestures. Bodies feature messily in Madyha Leghari’s drypoint etchings, which include images of childbirth and torsos connected by umbilical cords. The artist underscores the corporeality of her pictures by rendering them not on paper but on chunky slabs of pink rock salt whose color hints at skin.

Milan Warner also evokes the body with unsettling pieces like “Soft Horde,” a large wall sculpture made of intestine-like lengths of stuffed pantyhose punctuated by tufts of fake hair. Her work is harder edged, but ceramicist Ara Koh also summons thoughts of mutability with piles of stoneware strands, coiled like ribbons or tendrils, and craggy “paintings” of poured clay. They’re clearly solid, but what they freeze is a vision of liquidity and flux.

The materials lumped into Keith Krueger’s combines are familiar, but the suburban-Maryland artist clearly intends for them to fuse into something both more and other than the sum of their parts. One way he does this to title the 3D collages in his “What You See Is What You Get,” also at Brentwood Arts Exchange, after songs by rock performers -- whether as mainstream as the Rolling Stones (”She’s a Rainbow”) or as cultic as the Fall (”Live at the Witch Trials”). The suggestion is that these sculptures are as shapely as a tune, and have been transformed from their components into something altogether different.

The artist employs salvaged materials, most often wooden, from the insides and outsides of houses and other vintage buildings. Toys, product lids, and beverage crates are fitted neatly together, and the presence of furniture legs and house numbers accentuates the sense of domesticity. Krueger’s assemblages are idiosyncratic, but not alienating. From the remnants of yesterday’s suburban life, he’s constructed something homey.

Elizabeth Curren, “Under the Full Moon” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE AFFINITY OF THE THREE ARTISTS now exhibiting at Gallery B may be more personal than aesthetic, but Chris Chernow, Elizabeth Curren, and Carolee Jakes did make two collaborative pieces for their diverse yet cohesive show, “What Lies Beneath.” The local artists, all members of D.C.’s Studio Gallery and fellow alumni of the Corcoran College of Art + Design, worked together on abstract painting-drawings whose swirling forms hint at organic phenomenon.

This is hardly surprising, since nature imagery is common to the other work. Curren’s creations, which range from intricate artists’s books to sculptures made largely of paper and flax, depict threatened natural wonders like glaciers and horseshoe crabs. The representations burrow through pages and scurry up walls, demonstrating how paper-based lifeforms can come very nearly to life.

If Curren’s work is the most dynamically sculptural, the artist is not the only one of the trio who expands 2D works into an additional dimension. Jakes affixes woodblock prints she deemed “imperfect” to globes hung together in a miniature solar system, and incorporates electronic parts and other manufactured items into collage-paintings. There’s an echo of Curren’s excavated tomes in a Jakes picture that’s cut open to reveal a black metal sculpture in the shape of a rooster -- a reminder of the venerable human impulse to invoke nature in technology.

While Curren and Jakes literally break through the surface, Chernow gently conjures depths with flat, earth-toned paintings. One of these portrays a blue pitcher, but Chernow’s still lifes are usually portraits of a sort. They depict near-faceless women in abstracted environments, often soft and streaky and rendered with multiple overlapping veils of similar colors. The distinction between subject and backdrop is slight and seemingly unstable. Unlike the show’s other two participants, Chernow allows only the tiniest of distances between front and back.

Mia Feuer, “Exhaust (Shabbat Candles)” (Transformer)

MAKING A PHOTOGRAPH THAT NO ONE’S MADE BEFORE was a challenge even before smartphones transformed just about everyone into a daily street photographer. So the number of striking pictures in “Photography 2025” is impressive, even if many of the entries are merely good. Juried by Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott, the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital exhibition includes more than a dozen exceptional images.

Of the approximately 90 contributors, a few offer neatly twinned sets. David Moss pairs two photos in which a man conveys beverage containers -- one guy more successfully than the other -- in contrasting directions. Less compositionally aligned but just as complementary are Michael Horsley’s two vintage black-and-white vistas of neglected buildings, one evocatively festooned with a large graffito of the word “crime.”

There are many local views, often of (or shot from) highly recognizable sites. Most involve exceptional circumstances or unusual angles, but the resulting pictures are still generally less interesting than those that portray funkier locations, notably John Valenti’s vertiginously framed, sepia-toned gaze down Georgetown’s “Exorcist steps.” Of the many out-of-town scenes, the most potent is Nan Raphael’s photo of a Guatemalan volcano whose fire smears a nearly monochromatic sky with plumes of orange.

Many of the other nature studies are more tightly focused. In two standouts, Richard Weiblinger locates stands of vibrant green grass amid a watery gray morass, and Steven Marks discerns a black cat largely hidden by colorful soft-focus foliage. Even more intimate are Paige Billin Frye’s pulpy yet precise inspections of dried flowers, Julius Kassovic’s autopsy of fallen leaves in brown and green, and Megan O’Bierne’s zoom in on the spiky landscape of starfish. (More playfully, Dan Hildt offers almost 250 cut-together closeups of tiny sidewalk splats, mostly chewed gum.)

One nature vignette, Todd Franson’s contemplation of a seed pod, can be seen as a unifying gesture. The pod’s elegant spiral complements the curved forms of the many neoclassical buildings pictured in this selection. If “Photo 2025” has a visual theme, it’s the synchronicity of manmade and natural architecture.

Tory Cowles: Serendipity: A Dance Between Painting and Sculpture

Rosa Inés Vera: Resilencia

Through Jan. 11 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.

Hits Different: 5 Under 35

Keith Krueger: What You See Is What You Get

Both through Jan. 3 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. pgparks.com/facilities/brentwood-arts-exchange. 301-277-2863.

What Lies Beneath: Chris Chernow, Elizabeth Curren, Carolee Jakes

Through Jan. 4 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. #E, Bethesda. bethesda.org/bethesda/gallery-b-exhibitions. 301-215-7990.

Photography 2025

Through Jan. 10 at Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital, 921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. 202-549-4172.”

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In Washington City Paper: Jo Levine

“Easy on the Eyes: The Best in Local Photography Exhibits for 2025

City Paper’s longtime photography critic rounds up his seven favorite shows of the year, from Jo Levine’s seamless presentation of overlapping layers to Colin Winterbottom’s mix of old-school black and white, sepia toning, and color UV pigment on aluminum.

LOUIS JACOBSON
DECEMBER 9TH, 2025

“Clam Digger,” Courtesy of Vincent Ricardel and gallery neptune & brown

In the quarter-century-plus that I’ve been a City Paper photography critic, my year-end list of the best photography exhibits in the D.C. area has usually included a couple of nods to larger museums. Not this year. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but in 2025, each of the seven exhibits on my list were held in spaces where it would be only a modest exaggeration to say you could reach your arms out and touch two opposing walls at once.

Since 2001, I have assembled a list of the top exhibits in the D.C. area on a (mostly) annual basis. This year, I’ve selected—and ranked—seven exhibits that merit a place on the list of best local photography exhibits of 2025. I also offer shout-outs to three visual arts exhibits beyond the bounds of photography.

This year’s list of best D.C.-area photography exhibits is dominated by such cozy confines as gallery neptune & brown, Alexandria’s Multiple Exposures Gallery, Studio Gallery, the Byrne Gallery’s temporary D.C. outpost, Photoworks, Foundry Gallery, and Georgetown University’s Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo Art Gallery.

Here’s the rundown: 

1. Vincent Ricardel: Chasing Light at gallery neptune & brown

Vincent Ricardel’s 15 images may have been largely observational photographs in urban and natural areas, but stylistically (and geographically) they were all over the map. Alternating between black and white and color, Ricardel channeled Karl Blossfeldt’s botanicals, Harry Callahan’s ultra-high contrast of snow and sand, Eugène Atget’s Parisian streetscapes, Andy Warhol’s matrices of muddily rendered faces, and Henri Cartier–Bresson’s “decisive moment”—in Ricardel’s case, an image featuring a girl, a cat, and more than a dozen pigeons, each in motion. Ricardel even hat-tipped Katsushika Hokusai’s famous wave with a dark moodiness, seemingly threatening a mostly submerged figure nearby. Ricardel’s work often involved partial or bent legs—one foot emerging from a building window, several belonging to ballerinas, one belonging to the girl with the pigeons, one from a cross-legged man partially obscured by a tree, one sticking out of the water in East Hampton, New York, and a pair belonging to schoolgirls on a sidewalk, captured as they’re walking out of the frame. For a photographer with such divergent styles and methods, this habit counted as the one unifying theme of his work.

“Legs with Glove,” courtesy of Vincent Ricardel and gallery neptune & brown

2. Chiseled by Time at Multiple Exposures Gallery

“Yucca Rocks No. 2” by Tom Sliter

Rarely has a photographer’s choice of using sepia toning instead of standard black and white made as much of a difference as it did with Tom Sliter in Chiseled by Time: Sculptures of the Mojave Desert, Sliter, a D.C.-area photographer, parked himself in California’s desolate Mojave Desert, capturing a mix of landscapes and close-ups of boulders and desert flora. In the desert’s overwhelmingly beige environment, Sliter’s sepia palette worked better than either color or black and white would have. His fine-grained digital images paid off the closer the viewer got to the photograph, revealing mottled, dimpled, and crevassed rock surfaces and the delicate spikes of yucca fronds. One image gainfully paired rough rock surfaces with an angular, starburst-shaped portrayal of the sun; other photographs portrayed smoothly weathered boulders as if they were fleshy skin pics. Sliter’s standout image was “Joshua Tree Boulders,” a sharply horizontal landscape that combined gently undulating layers of sky, mountains, boulders, and shrubbery and offered enough detail to somehow show every individual clod of earth.

3. Jo Levine: Real and Surreal: Coordinated Shows at Studio Gallery

“Sky Lights #1” by Jo Levine on View at Studio Gallery

Jo Levine, whose past work at Studio Gallery and elsewhere has often beenimpressive, outdid herself in this four-person exhibit, documenting an array of locations in D.C. and elsewhere. What tied Levine’s works together was a seamless presentation of overlapping layers. In one photograph, Levine captured the crisp reflection of the Empire State Building off the smooth hood of a black car. In another, Levine documented a flurry of hanging light bulbs reflected in a window, cheekily suggesting a UFO invasion above an ordinary-looking street scene. In a third image, Levine presented an almost literal kaleidoscopic view of reflections on the mirrored exterior of a building. While Levine structured many of her photographs around the rigorous lines of modernist architecture, many of them included unexpected buckling, as if the lines were being shaped by some unseen magnetic force. Levine’s two finest images may have been her most abstract. One depicted the organic, gently undulating surface rivulets of water in pleasing shades of olive and gray. The second captured a view of the Kennedy Center’s REACH, bringing together a satisfying mix of straight and curved geometric lines, appealing shades of Hopperian blue and gray, and a dreamy, watercolor-like texture that came from gentle disturbances in reflected water. 

4. Colin Winterbottom: Iconic Washington at the Byrne Gallery D.C.

Credit: Colin Winterbottom

Iconic Washington was a two-person photography exhibit, but the standout was Colin Winterbottom. His works included several large-scale images from his ongoing series documenting Washington’s National Cathedral, notably his time-lapsed “Apse with Star Trails,” which smartly paired the solid stone of the cathedral’s facade with the fleeting, semicircular flickers of stars moving through the night, and his “Apse from Tower,” which featured a soaring cathedral spire shown off-kilter and amid murky lighting, as if it were an extrusion from an underwater shipwreck. Winterbottom’s works used a mix of old-school black and white, sepia toning, and color UV pigment on aluminum. He leveraged the last of these methods to perfection in an image in which the Lincoln Memorial was mostly obscured by a series of broad steps; the dreamy, wintry setting clashed fruitfully with the sharply minimalist aggregation of narrow, parallel stairs.

5. Timeless 2025: Handmade Photography in the Digital Age at Photoworks

Photoworks’ Handmade Photo Group exists to produce imagery from gloriously archaic techniques, and once a year, they mount their bounty. As usual, this year’s exhibit was satisfying. Mari Calai’s subject matter was straightforward—a carpet of spiky leaves, a high-contrast portrayal of a V-shaped valley and sky, and a promontory topped by a bent tree—but her platinum-palladium process on vellum, highlighted with touches of gold leaf, elevated her scenes into something winningly out of our era. David Frey, one of several artists who worked with the cyanotype (blueprint) method, toned his works with ingredients ranging from avocado or black tea; his method worked best with a subtle, purple-hued botanical image and an orange-toned photograph of a lotus pod. Christopher Gumm used the gum bichromate process to produce a dreamy, pictorialist rendering of water lazily traversing littoral greenery. Two artists went a step further by experimenting not only with the photographic process but also with the surface they were printing on. Zoe Kosmidou turned paper bags into canvases for printing, then decorated her works with mixed media. Even more inventive was Mac Cosgrove-Davies, who made wet-plate collodion images of trees and people that he applied to crushed beer cans. The images themselves were worthwhile, but with a substrate as creative as that, it almost didn’t matter what he was photographing.

6. Aftertime at Foundry Gallery

Gordana Geršković, “THE CONVERSATION or DOG meets FISH,” Photography, 11×14

Shaw’s Foundry Gallery mounted another exhibit by photographerGordana Geršković in 2025, and while her style hasn’t changed a whit since her first in 2019, she’s managed to keep her photographs compelling and fresh. Geršković, whose works were paired in the gallery for the second time with paintings by Deb Furey, created her photographs by walking around in search of city facades with accidentally compelling designs caused by weathering and decay. Some of the resulting images were unfussy, such as the paired images that featured Mark Rothko-style color fields in shades of blueberry, raspberry, and cherry. More often, Geršković found her target in complexity: white drips on red that approximated the shape of a tree standing on a hillock; an image that looked like a cross section of beige-and-ocher sedimentary layers; a “storm” made of blue marks seemingly in wavelike motion; a riot of splotches that suggested a Jackson Pollock painting; and a pink and dark blue-green melange that called to mind a late Willem de Kooning.

7. & Loving at Georgetown University

In most photographic exhibits, the stars are the photographs, or perhaps the photographer. In & Loving, however, the focus was—refreshingly—the curators. Six Georgetown University students—Ella Boasberg, Madeleine Callender, Caroline McCann, Amelia Myre,Khaki Sawyer,and Tess Whitman—assembled a 13-image exhibit from a 4,000-photograph archive at the university. The theme was a “sense of love,” and the curators nailed it—not just in their choices of images (a Larry Fink photograph of a beaming high school graduate, Ken Heyman’s photograph of an ecstatic crowd at a 1968 Beatles concert, Erika Stone’s photograph of two older women chatting on a park bench, surrounded by pigeons in flight), but also in their smart, yet brief, captions. Visitors learned how the smiling woman in a Donna Ferrato photograph was at peace because she had escaped domestic abuse; they also came to understand how Earl Hines, shown exuberantly mid-performance during a 1958 concert in San Francisco, shaped the practice of jazz piano during his career. The exhibit included a contact sheet of surprisingly sprightly, medium-format black-and-white photographs from a 1960s basketball game between Georgetown and the University of Miami, marked up with an orange grease pencil. This work may not have fit the theme of “loving,” but in this company, it was charming nonetheless.

Courtesy of Spagnuolo Gallery

Three notable 2025 exhibits in painting:

Wayson R. Jones with some of his art at Hemphill Artworks. Credit: Louis Jacobson

Wayson R. Jones at HEMPHILL Artworks

Wayson R. Jones’ works on display at HEMPHILL were inventive both in their colors and their method. He laid down pumice gel, mostly of the “extra coarse” variety, then used repurposed tools to shape the drying gel into patterns that tiptoed between organic and orderly. After letting those sit for a few weeks, he used Flashe, a vinyl-based paint, to turn his surfaces into bold, candy-colored works that wrapped around the frame and up into three dimensions. The result was often the texture of volcanic rock. One series of smaller works suggested wavelets of sea-foam coming ashore on a beach, except that the “beach,” if that’s what it was, was ocean-like blue, and the wavelets ranged from purple to orange. A trio of larger works featured roughly parallel, but wriggly, crests that were painted, respectively, in Wayne Thiebaud yellow, Frango mint blue green, and two shades of red. Other works were made with a rake-like tool to create semicircular forms that suggest 1970s-style mod artworks. One piece, “Hot Stepper,” harnessed the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos aesthetic, with raised, bumpy portions painted in spicy red and the anarchic voids in a slightly greenish yellow. The gallery paired Jones’ canvases with those of Leon Berkowitz (1911-1987), a key member of the abstract-oriented Washington Color School. In the works on view, Berkowitz turned orange imperceptibly into blue, and red slowly into green.

Radiant Detritus at Addison/Ripley

Trevor Young’s latest show at Addison/Ripley echoed many of his previous exhibits, including such recurring themes as ugly-beautiful power lines, highway flyovers, empty billboards, and artificially lit industrial nocturnes. But he also added some twists. An unusually large number of the four dozen paintings on display were rendered in a moody shade of blue; occasionally, Young toyed with an odd black shadow encroaching on the main portion of his landscape. One monumental, starkly horizontal work depicted a sprawling gas field limned with rusty amber lighting that felt like something out of Edward Burtynsky’s catalog; another painting featured an unsettling, unfinished, multistory metal structure crisscrossed by stairs and illuminated by multiple, diaphanous showers of light. Young’s most satisfying work may have been “Tolls,” which looked out over four parallel barriers (highways, maybe?) plunged into dark blue purple yet sitting beneath a creamy white sky—a mutually reinforcing mix of color and geometry in a tiny 12-by-12-inch package.

Amy Schissel at HEMPHILL Artworks

Amy Schissel’s exhibit included both monumental, mostly monochromatic canvases, some just shy of 19 feet wide and some as tall as 8 feet, as well as smaller, brightly colored abstractions. The process of making the largest works was laborious, sometimes taking as long as 300 hours; they involved multiple coats of paint, often massaged into organic highlights, followed by painstakingly detailed patterns drawn in ink—radiating straight lines; geometrical shapes; loops and whorls; and the occasional spirograph form. In their entirety, the large canvases suggested a frenzied, wide-screen digital universe, with touches of steampunk, topographical maps, neural networks, and surreal dreamscapes. Schissel’s intensely colored abstractions were smaller and not as stunning in sweep, but their contents were noteworthy—forms that were alternately angular and landscape-like, in bright, LeRoy Nieman-esque shades of blue, green, pink, and beige. Schissel explained that she creates the color canvases in order to get those colors out of her system as she creates the all-enveloping grayscapes. One can see why.”

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Written by Louis Jacobson in the Washington City Paper, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Chernow, Curren, West, & Levine

“African Americana

Before the Americas” is a powerful overview of Black, Latino, and Afro-Latino experience. Also: Chernow, Curren, West, & Levine at Studio; “Painting Interrupted” at Otis St.; Feuer at Transformer

MARK JENKINS
Nov 11

Sam Gilliam, “Ain’t More Than Music” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

IF “BEFORE THE AMERICAS” LOOKS LIKE A MUSEUM-QUALITY SHOW, that might be because it was planned for the Organization of American States’s Art Museum of the Americas. Developed over several years by the venue and its curator, local artist Cheryl D. Edwards, the exhibition was cancelled this spring after the Trump administration began its anti-diversity offensive. The 39-artist show was moved to George Mason University’s Gillespie Gallery of Art, which it fills spectacularly with work by Black, Latino, and Afro-Latino artists.

The show illustrates four themes: ancestral memory, migration, invisibility, and interconnectivity. But the art can be seen essentially as personal, historical, or some mingling of the two. The centerpiece is Sam Gilliam’s “Ain’t More Than Music,” an abstract 1989 sculptural painting that revels in its bold colors and forms while invoking the sustaining power of music for Africa-rooted communities. Yet there are also pieces that explicitly depict those communities’s histories of oppression and exploitation. A fine example of the latter is Manuel Mendive’s “Barco Negrero,” a silkscreen of a slave ship that’s heavily stylized but no less harrowing for its simplification.

Mendive is Cuban, and one of more than a dozen Caribbean contributors to the show. The majority of the artists, however, are or were Washingtonians. These include such recently departed artists, in addition to Gilliam, as Alonzo Davis, John Beadle, Samella Lewis, Lou Stovall, and Nelson Stevens. As might be expected, there are works by Alma Thomas -- her usual format, but with an unusually muted palette -- and Elizabeth Catlett. The latter, a D.C. native who became a Mexican citizen, used traditional techniques to portray people, often Black women, who traditionally had not been represented.

As depicted here, personal identity is both complex and elementary. Renée Stout dangles an assemblage of talismanic found objects, including a bell and mysterious blue bottle, and titles it “Self-Portrait.” Martin Puryear, a D.C.-rooted Chicagoan, reduces the self-portrait to a single hand, rendered in his usual wood. African sculptures, dancers, and masks represent both cultural pride and a sense of loss in works by Beadle, Lois Mailou Jones, and E.J. Montgomery.

Davis reconstructs his heritage from lengths of bamboo, arranged to suggest both rafts and African folk instruments. Ethiopia-born Washingtonian Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian depicts his legacy as a sort of dark carpet of memories, punctuated by crosses. Among the most striking works is “Unmasked,” by Wilfredo Valladares, a Honduras-born D.C. area resident. His sculpture is a cast-iron oblong of several relief faces, stacked vertically, that sits on a deck of rough wooden slats. It speaks to both humanity and myth.

Several of the pieces in the show are from the OAS collection, and the Thomas canvas belongs to American University. The Gilliam artwork was recently donated to George Mason, which plans to place it in a campus museum once it’s established. Perhaps by the time that happens, the U.S. will again have a president who accepts that the first amendment guarantees freedom of expression.

Chris Chernow, “Quietude” (Studio Gallery)

HUSHED PICTURES BY CHRIS CHERNOW SET THE TONE for most, but not all, of the exhibitions now at Studio Gallery. The local artist’s “Stillness in the Noise” is a series of soft renderings of women -- sometimes nude, usually alone, and in a serene mood. Similarly tranquil are Cristy West’s mixed-media abstractions, Jo Levine’s closeup nature photos, and a few elegant, earth-toned ceramics by Lisa Battle. Elizabeth Curren disrupts the consensus, however, with topical commentaries made of cut paper and lots of words.

Chernow’s show, curated by Adah Rose Bitterbaum, is divided between paintings and drawings. The former are gauzy oils while the latter employ some mix of charcoal, pencil, acrylic ink, watercolor, and water-soluble graphite. The two series are equally deft and entirely compatible, linked by subject matter as well as style. The effect of the thinned oil paint is quite similar to that of the streaky pigments that turn the drawings into almost-paintings. Both varieties are also linked by a similar palette, heavy on brown, grayish green, and peachy flesh tones.

The women in these pictures are solitary, save for three groupings of three each, two sets of which depict poses that suggest dancing. Aside from one picture with a near-black backdrop, the subjects and their surroundings are so similarly hued that boundaries between them blur. These women are alone, but not alienated. Indeed, Chernow’s color schemes suggest that fitting into your environment is essential to finding moments of peace.

Downstairs at Studio, West is exhibiting layered abstractions that combine painting, drawing, and collage. Often made with a meld of oil paint and cold wax, the pictures -- curated by Gaby Mizes -- suggest weathered walls and buildings and geological strata, and sometimes recall Cianne Fragione’s style. The local artist’s eclectic technique also has a calligraphic element, evoking brazen graffiti and delicate palimpsests. West’s strategy is intuitive, but it hints at multifold historical tiers beneath the heavily worked surfaces.

Nearby is Levine’s “Garden of Wonders,” a selection of crisp, vivid photos made at the U.S. Botanical Garden and curated by Iza Thomas and Robert Cwiok. One picture depicts a single vine curved on a marble wall, locating the sprig of greenery in ceremonial Washington. But the other photos peer so closely at their subjects that they lose their context, and sometimes even their identity as flora. The local artist has given a few of these images titles such as “Medusas” and “Tentacles,” highlighting the similarity of leaves and fronds to aquatic creatures. Viewed this intimately, botanical wonders can look like anything and everything.

Between West and Levine’s shows is the stark contrast of Curren’s “Red/White/Blue,” a current-events primer rendered in what the local artist calls the “weaponized colors” of the U.S. flag and election-night results maps. The silhouetted stars of this selection, which was curated by Judy Southerland, are a regretful Joe Biden and an oblivious Donald Trump. The former and current president are not accorded equal respect, but then how could they be? A smiling Biden muses while a demonic Trump blathers, prattling words and phrases that one title characterizes as “Barf.” Most effective is an artist’s book whose dozens of red tags list terms banned or limited by Trump administration edicts. As the Trump cabal pushes euphemisms, circumlocutions, and outright lies, Curren cuts to reality.

Sean Sweeney, “BYOB” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AT THE ENTRANCE OF OTIS ARTS PROJECT’S “PAINTING INTERRUPTED” is a white plastic chair, tipped over on a square of turf. This tableaux is fixed in place, yet its individual elements could be altered or disturbed. Thus the installation is unlike the small painting of the same scene mounted on a nearby wall, whose parts can’t be moved, or the video of the chair, in which a hand trims the grass, a basic gesture that loops perpetually. Artist Kate Fleming, an Arlingtonian, uses a simple setup to illustrate different states of being and motion.

Fleming’s triple-media embodiment of the same scenario is the conceptual centerpiece of the four-artist show, which was curated by Stephanie Cobb. Fleming’s concerns are similar to those of Marisa Stratton, who paints small portraits derived from photographic Internet images. The D.C. artist’s style is realistic but loose, and her pictures in this selection have a further impetus toward impressionism: They’re painted on wooden cylinders that can rotate so the faces blur as they move. When in action, the paintings are not so much interrupted as spun into infinity.

The other two contributors are sculptors, although one of them does employ paint. D.C. artist Mary Ratcliff offers small bronzes whose cast tendrils seem to be derived from vines and stalks, but which turn decorative when they meld into the pieces’s attached frames. Sean Sweeney uses concrete, supplemented by wood or wire, to simulate paper. His “BYOB” assumes the shape of a shopping bag, yet it’s made of red-painted concrete and its handles are burly sticks. The cracked surface of the simulated bag adds to a sense of impermanence, but these sleek sacks are clearly a lot more durable than paper. Sweeney, who’s based in Baltimore but has a Washington museum job, subverts familiar forms with incongruous materials, interrupting not painting but expectation.

Mia Feuer, “Exhaust (Shabbat Candles)” (Transformer)

THERE’S A LOT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MIA FEUER’S Transformer show, and if that’s not immediately obvious, the obstacle might be that the Canadian artist’s roots are intriguingly tangled. Hockey is a big part of the story, although Feuer is perhaps not the typical north-of-the-border sportswoman. The artist’s notes to “A Tender Sieve” identify her as a member of “a working class Ashkenazi family” raised on “Cree, Ojibwe, and Métis land, colonially known as Winnipeg, Manitoba.” Also, she was and is a hockey goalie, now in Oakland, near where she teaches sculpture at the California College of the Arts. In hockey lore, a “sieve” is a derogatory term for a goalie who lets the puck through.

Feuer has filled Transformer’s small space with hanging assemblages made of hockey goalie pads. The forms of these objects immediately evoke chrysalises, about to yield butterflies. This seemed the proper interpretation even before it was attested by the series title, “Learning to Butterfly.” Alternately, the suspended objects could be seen as animal carcasses, a resemblance suggested not only by their bulk but also by their gristly patterns. So the cut-together synthetic materials evoke organic phenomena, whether ephemeral or meaty.

Two wall-mounted entries play, at least partially, on Feuer’s religious heritage. “My Dad’s 10 Commandments of Goaltending,” rendered in metallic watercolor and ink, takes the popularly accepted shape of the tablets supposedly given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Equally playful is a large pair of Shabbat candles made of red wax and mounted on candlesticks fashioned from rusted exhaust intake-manifold pipes from a car or truck. Like a caterpillar, but knowingly rather than instinctively, Feuer seeks transfiguration.

Before the Americas

Through Nov. 15 at Gillespie Gallery of Art, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax. www.masonexhibitions.org

Chris Chernow: Stillness in the Noise

Cristy West: In the Moment

Jo Levine: Garden of Wonders

Elizabeth Curren: Red/White/Blue

Through Nov. 22 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734

Painting Interrupted

Through Nov. 15 at Otis Street Art Project, 3706 Otis St., Mount Rainier. otisstreetarts.org.

Mia Feuer: A Tender Sieve

Through Nov. 21 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. transformerdc.org. 202-483-1102.”

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: The Written Woman

“The Written Woman

Words mark bodies in a show of Korean women’s art. Also: two more installments of “Women Artists of the DMV”; duo shows of Joanne Kent & Richard Tinkler; & Deb Furey & Gordana Geršković

MARK JENKINS

Yoon Jeongmee, “Red Face” (Trio & Beats Curatorial Collective)

OCT 27, 2025

A KEY WORK IN THE CURRENT THREE-VENUE SHOWCASE of Korean and Korean-American women artists is Hong Lee Hyunsook’s video, “Menopause 1 & 2,” in which a woman at a public bath writes an auspicious message on another woman’s back. But inscribing text on female flesh is just one of four themes of “Ecriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women Artists,” an ambitious exhibition at IA&A at Hillyer, the Korean Cultural Center, and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University.

The 18-artist array, which was curated by Dr. Jung-Sil Lee and Dr. Koh Dong-Yeon, also has three other motifs: challenges to traditional literati painting, Korean women’s poetry, and the legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In addition, many of the pieces reflect on aspects of women’s reproductive biology -- miscarriage, pregnancy, and mothering as well as menopause.

The exhibition is haunted by the presence -- and absence -- of Cha, a Busan-born writer, filmmaker, and performance artist who emigrated to the U.S. at 12 and who was raped and murdered in New York City at 31. Several contributors employ excerpts from Cha’s Dictée, a posthumous poetic novel that’s one of the threads connecting the diverse work in this selection of art that’s mostly conceptual and often takes the form of photos and videos.

Thus Jean Jinho Kim, a D.C.-area artist known for sleek aluminum sculptures, enters the spirit of the show by incorporating Cha’s text into her customarily wordless work. At the Corcoran, two pieces in mirrored negative and positive forms are linked by text. At IA&A, a trio of Kim’s fabrications, leg-like forms with booted feet, have lines from Dictée projected behind them.

The words are written in lipstick in the video and photos, at the Korean Cultural Center, of Yoon Jeongmee’s performance, “Red Face.” She covers herself with such defining labels as “mother” and “woman” until her flesh is almost entirely scarlet. Seongmin Ahn renders blunt English phrases, hostile and often profane, in a traditional Korean style of elaborately ornamental script; her sardonically flowery placards are at the Corcoran and the Korean Cultural Center. At the latter are photos of a Cha performance in which she covered her face in fabric strips that read “voix aveugele,” French for “blind voice.” (Ironically, “voix” blocked her eyes and “aveugele” her mouth.)

Blindness also serves as a metaphor in the work of one of the D.C.-area participants, Hyun Jung Kim, who makes metal crowns and finger and toe covers embellished with patterns in Braille. These objects, on exhibit at IA&A and the Corcoran, are used in performances and audience-participation selfies and refer to what Kim calls the “cultural blindness” she experienced upon moving to the U.S.

Korean text adorns Minsun Oh Mun’s playfully update of a Joseon Dynasty landscape painting. In the picture, at the Corcoran, lurking monks use cellphones to photograph women who are bathing in a stream. Also at the Corcoran are Jean Shin’s wall sculptures made of computer keyboard keys, grouped into repeated readings of such multiple-meaning words as “home” and “enter.” Jung Jungyeob’s paintings and assemblages often feature Korean words spelled out in red beans. The beans represent women’s labor in Jungyeob’s work, at IA&A and the Corcoran.

American viewers may not understand the significance of some references, notably the Jeju Island palm trees photographed by Kim Oksun (KCC); the semi-traditional, semi-farcical sun-worship ritual staged for video by Yeesookyung (Corcoran); or the gloomy old ballad (helpfully subtitled) that plays in Jaye Rhee’s video (KCC). But East can meet West evocatively, as in Kim Jipyeong’s tribute to difficult women, “Rebecca, Bertha, Carmilla, Audley” (Corcoran). Named after troubled heroines of 19th and 20th century English-language novels, the piece consists of four damaged hanging scrolls that the artist likens to female bodies. The words here are less important than the scrolls themselves, precarious yet enduring.

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Joyce Zipperer, “Hell on Wheels” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

SOME OF THE AREA’S BEST-KNOWN WOMEN ARTISTS are among the nearly 75 included in exhibitions at the Athenaeum and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. Both shows are, of course, installments of “Women Artists of the DMV,” the 18-venue extravaganza arranged by curator Florencio Lennox (Lenny) Campello. The Pyramid selection is more diverse in media and slightly bigger than the Athenaeum one. It’s also more political.

Stars and barbed wire, both made of glass, overlay a U.S. flag in Trish Kent’s “The Divided States of America,” a suitably prickly statement for immigrant rights. An eloquent memorial for a victim of police violence, Janathel Shaw’s “Grief for Philandro Castile” is a stoneware bust of a male angel with Castile’s head embedded in his chest, framed by two bullet shells. Also fashioned deftly of ceramic and metal, Jennifer Hayes’s “Armor Eaters” is a set of women’s underwear being eaten by cast-bronze moths who represent the undermining of women’s autonomy. Amity Chan, a Hong Kong native, protests the crackdown on dissent in her homeland with a high-contrast rendering of a set of handcuffs in red and yellow, the colors of the Chinese flag.

Pyramid usually exhibits prints and other works on paper, a category that encompasses some of the most striking pieces in this show. Courtney Applequist’s “So You Say” is a self-described “doodled self-portrait” stretched across 60 pages from a right-wing Christian book the artist terms misogynistic. Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s partly abstract collage-painting fits her trademark swirling elements into an uncharacteristically tidy rectangle. Among the traditional realist prints are two that are intriguingly dark and shadowy: Ellen Verdon Winkler’s mezzotint of a gabled house and Jenny Freestone’s meditative etching-engraving of a bird’s disembodied head.

Some of the three-dimensional entries play with formats that are customarily flat. Joan Konkel’s “Bent Out of Shape” in a purple-and-black hanging banner made of canvas that’s slit into bands and woven. Margaret Boozer’s ceramic relief map is made partly from soil from her yard in nearby Brentwood. Also ceramic, Catherine Satterlee’s “Scully Square vii” is a color field painting rendered with stoneware in shades of bronze. More fully sculptural is Joyce Zipperer’s playful “Hell on Wheels,” a metallic mashup of high-heel and rollerblade. Placed across from Hayes’s “Armor Eaters,” it’s an aptly mobile symbol of female autonomy.

The Athenaeum array is heavy on abstract and near-abstract paintings, many of them with a liquid quality. Anne Marchand’s exuberant “Mirabilia” is a mixed-media montage that features thick pigment, fluid pours, and stubbled textures. Sparked by an aerial view of a salt bath, Anne Cherubim’s immersive “Inspired by Salt II” depicts a series of turquoise pools separated by undulating bands of metallic silver. Suzanne Yurdin’s luminous “Upwelling” is a mostly blue, seemingly aquatic scene with sunlit white highlights; it complements Susan Shalowitz’s dynamic “Sonata,” a detailed realistic painting of surf.

Somewhat more linear is Carol Brown Goldberg’s elegant “2:00 p.m. at Hanlon Park,” whose gridded dots fade from blue to white atop a field of splashed, dripped colors with touches of glitter. The picture’s backdrop is akin to the heavily worked surface of Cianne Fragione’s “Workers Wearing Toe Shoes,” a collage-painting that suggests strata of history. The rough layers of these compositions are very different from the overlapping color blocks of Adi Segal’s “8 Block Quilt Variation,” whose translucent forms are deployed high above the gallery on a horizontal window.

The representational works include pictures by Anna U. Davis and Helen Zughaib in their familiar stylized modes. Both depict women, but where the former’s “Crying Girl” renders isolation in shades of black and gray, the latter’s “The Long Wait” portrays a queue of closely grouped women whose presence is defined entirely by their colorfully patterned robes. The first seems stuck and the others are on the move, but each circumstance is equally urgent.

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Joanna Kent, “Speechless” (PFA Gallery)

BRUSHSTROKES ARE ARCHITECTURAL OR EPHEMERAL, respectively, in the work of Joanna Kent and Richard Tinkler. The two artists, showing together in PFA Gallery’s “Vibrations,” both use oil paint to make vivid abstractions. Kent’s sculptural paintings cover cubes or vertical panels with dried plumes of a heathered single hue. Tinkler’s multi-color pictures appear to be blurred, but close inspection reveals the illusion of softness is created by thousands of tightly fitted small gestures.

Kent is a veteran D.C. artist who melds sculpture and painting somewhat in the manner of Anne Truitt, but Kent’s work is as craggy as Truitt’s is sleek. The 11 pieces in this show, made between 1998 and 2002, cover flat surfaces with tufts of pigment, so that the blocky ones resemble carefully pruned shrubs. The wall-mounted vertical panels are bisected by narrow gaps in the paint, a breach that’s most conspicuous in the all-black “Eclipse.” These subtly drawn lines offer the eye a passage into the object, but then the artist’s creations are riddled with small inlets. That Kent’s 3D paintings appear simultaneously solid and airy is their essential mystery.

Where Kent retains something of the fluidity of pigment, Tinkler relies on its liquid qualities. He applies layers of paint while the lower level is still wet, so that different colors partly meld into each other. The resulting images are soft yet organized into overall patterns such as multiple diamonds or rows of lozenges. These paintings, from 2024-25, are fundamentally orderly. Yet they have an oasis-like shimmer that suggests that at any second they could transmute, or even vanish altogether.

Gordana Geršković, “ Jiyūgaoka” (Foundry Gallery)

THE TWO ARTISTS OF “AFTERTIME” STRETCH A BIT in this Foundry Gallery show, but the best work is in familiar modes: Deb Furey’s bold charcoal drawings of costumed people, and Gordana Geršković’s photographs of battered walls and other surfaces, rendered in closeup so they appear abstract.

To these, Furey adds some brightly hued paintings that portray her usual subjects in looser forms, while Geršković emulates her own small photos with a larger mixed-media painting of what appears to be a grainy, pitted surface. None of these are highlights of the show.

Instead, viewers are likely to be drawn to Furey’s pictures of kings, queens, jesters, and mythic trans-species creatures, all packed into crowded, dynamic compositions. Sometimes interrupted by insets or overlaid with primary colors, these drawings evoke the roles we all play, or wish we could assume.

While impossible to place in their original contexts, Geršković’s images work as pure patterns and sometimes as accidentally representational shapes. The artist titles a few of her pictures after places, presumably where the photo was made, although knowing that Jiyūgaoka is an upscale Tokyo neighborhood doesn’t help in identifying the field of black cracks on gold as part of recognizable location. Where Furey’s symbolic scenarios have a universal quality, Geršković’s photos are highly individualistic: She reveals tiny aspects of reality that no one else might have seen.

Ecriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women Artists

Through Nov. 2 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680; and Nov. 12 at the Korean Cultural Center, 2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW. washingtondc.korean-culture.org/en. 202-939-5688; and Nov. 15 at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University, 500 17th St. NW. corcoran.gwu.edu/corcoran-exhibitions

Women Artists of the DMV

Through Nov. 2 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035; and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. 301-608-9101.

Joanne Kent and Richard Tinkler: Vibrations

Through Nov. 1 at PFA Gallery, 1932 9th St. NW (entrance at 1917 9 1/2 St. NW). pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.

Aftertime: Deb Furey & Gordana Geršković

Through Nov. 2 at Foundry Gallery, 2118 8th St. NW. foundrygallery.org. 202- 232-0203.”

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Langley Spurlock, John Martin Tarrat, Chris Corson, Freda Lee-McCann, and Beth Curren

“Past Masters

Spurlock and Tarrat oil history’s hinges. Also: Corson sculptures, Lee-McCann calligraphy, Ashton Reeder photography, Steven Ferri video, and more DMV Women

MARK JENKINS

OCT 13, 2025

Langley Spurlock & John Martin Tarrat, “Yucatán” (Studio Gallery)

THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD as told by “S*** Happens” runs approximately from 66 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Yucatán Peninsula and ended the era of dinosaurs, to 1945, when a U.S. A-bomb devastated Nagasaki. But the creators of this Studio Gallery show, artist Langley Spurlock and wordsmith John Martin Tarrat, don’t recount only cataclysms. Attention is also paid to breakthroughs in art and communication: the 15th-century invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet; the 16th-century synthesis of red dye from cochineal insects in Mexico and the pigment’s exportation by the Spanish invaders; and the 1971 arrival of blue acrylic paint in the Australian outback, where it was integrated into the previously earth-toned paintings of Aboriginal artists.

European colonization is crucial to the histories of Mexico and Australia, and “S*** Happens,” which was curated by William Carroll, also memorializes other interplay between new and old worlds. In 1804, enslaved Haitians defeat imperial France to make their nation “the first Black republic.” A decade later, the brand new United States confronts the Barbary pirates. There’s also a less direct link to Europe’s subjugation of just about everywhere else: the bloodline of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, whose great-grandfather was a kidnapped African servant given in chattel slavery to Peter the Great.

The breadth of Spurlock and Tarrat’s research is impressive, but what really distinguishes the D.C.-area collaborators’s projects is the cleverness of the presentation. Pushkin, for example, is visualized as a stop on a rail system whose other stations are each named for one of the author’s writings. Tarrat’s text is deftly integrated into the artworks, most of which are computer-generated prints on aluminum panels. (The notable exception is the stark “Nagasaki,” a ravaged wooden spike slammed off-kilter into shards of broken glass, some of which are engraved with such words as “plutonium” and “second sun burns even shadows.”)

Indian or Arabic script float through “Goa” and “Barbary Coast,” respectively, and English words spin toward the bottom of “North Sea,” as if caught in a whirlpool. In “Yucatán,” words and phrases take the place of cosmic debris, crashing to earth past a clueless dinosaur. At what the artists call “hinges” of history, contemporary observers rarely have a clue what’s going on.

AT THE CENTER OF CHRISTOPHER CORSON’S “MY CUP RUNNETH OVER,” also at Studio, is a ceramic sculpture of a kneeling man who’s holding a small bowl. The figure in “The Bowl” is painted gold, which in Buddhism signifies enlightenment. Does the gilded, physically intact figure represent a breakthrough for the local artist? Maybe not, but the 2025 sculpture is a significant contrast to the show’s earlier ones, which were made over the last 15 years.

This retrospective, which was curated by Mary Welch Higgins, consists mostly of sculptures in Corson’s usual mode. The nude figures, often unmistakably male, are typically pit-fired to give them partly charred patinas that are striking and slightly eerie. The blackened bodies are usually partial, often headless, and sometimes heart-less as well. The subject of “Chapel” holds open his chest to reveal a void, and the man in “As Was Done to Her” has a torn-open chest and a crow-like bird, perched on one shoulder, who reaches into the neck cavity to gnaw on an internal organ. He suggests Prometheus, punished for giving fire to humans by having an eagle feast daily on his regenerating liver.

The mythic struggles Corson symbolizes are more likely psychological than physical, and some cases are clearly political. The shackled hand of “Be the Voice” evokes the struggle for liberty and free speech. Overcoming is arduous, but perhaps possible. According to his statement, Corson has traveled a “path from difficult places to joy and gratitude.” Perhaps that’s why “The Bowl” has an unexpected luster.

INSPIRED BY A 500-YEAR-OLD CHINESE POEM that she writes is about “renewal and hope,” Freda Lee-McCann undertook a series of purely calligraphic pictures. These became her latest Studio Gallery exhibition, which was also curated by Carroll. The show is titled “Without Words,” which may seem odd for an array of what appear to be Chinese characters. But the painter traveled farther into illegibility than most artistic East Asian calligraphers, whose output can verge on unreadable. The characters she wrote “no longer have meaning,” she recently told a gallery visitor.

Lee-McCann has made purely calligraphic works before, but she’s known mostly for variations on classical shan-shui (”mountain-water”) ink paintings. There’s not a hint of that tradition in these elegant works, although sometimes the gestures are so tightly clustered that their totality suggests forests. Also adding to a sense of depth is the way the artist layers gray and black brushstrokes. (Two of the pictures also incorporate pink and brown.) The lighter strokes sometimes look like shadows of the darker ones, or appear to indicate that the brushwork is fading into oblivion. This sense of ephemerality adds to the pictures’s vibrant spontaneity. Lee-McCann’s wordless gestures can be read as flickers of mortality.

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Ashton Reeder, from “Surveilling the Surveillers - Tech” (Photoworks)

THE INTERNET BEGAN AS A ROUTE FOR IDEAS, but it’s increasingly become a conduit for stuff. And as the worldwide web was commercialized, the existing computer networks that were originally sufficient had to be supplemented by lots of new gear, and ultimately whole neighborhoods of data farms. Many of the last are in northern Virginia, which is one of three areas scrutinized by Ashton Reeder’s “Planetary Computation.” The show is at Photoworks, where the D.C.-based photographer-technologist is artist-in-residence.

In addition to data centers in Ashburn, Dulles, Sterling, and Manassas, Reeder documents Silicon Valley as well as areas of Nevada that are being excavated for minerals used in high-tech devices. The photographer is particularly interested in AI, both as a technology and as a cause of frenzied speculative expansion of Internet capacity. Among Reeder’s subjects are homes owned by AI moguls Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman.

Reeder didn’t just point a camera at mansions and industrial buildings. The show includes straightforward photos of Nevada mining sites and AI-touting billboards along California’s 101 highway, but most of the other pictures are pixelated or collaged. The artist photographed data centers with a low-resolution thermal camera that registers the hottest areas -- up to 130 degrees -- as white rectangles. He also produced layered “image net hallucinations” from leaked AI training data. The simple photos of Nevada mining towns offer a striking contrast to the AI-generated images. “Planetary Computation” travels from a brick-and-mortar world to a universe that threatens to become entirely chimerical.

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Steven Ferri, “100% Pure Peace” (Transformer)

THE VIDEO IN TRANSFORMER’S WINDOW involves only three concrete ingredients: a toy soldier, a Mason jar, and some honey. But Steven Ferri’s brief art flick, which loops 24 hours a day, also features an intangible element: light.

That illumination might be termed “honeyed,” since Amish honey is the catalyst for the symbolic scenario of the local artist’s “100% Pure Peace.” The thick amber liquid is poured into the vessel that contains the silhouetted plastic figure until the fluid overflows and pools on the adjacent white surface. Then the action reverses so that the honey ascends from the jar until it entirely vanishes. In between the flowing and the unflowing is a moment when the soldier is hit by what appears to be a strobe light, whose intense flashes makes the toy appear to be yellow and then red.

Light also turns the honey red, so the video recalls Andres Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss Christ),” another luminous photographic rendering of a small object submerged in yellow liquid. That’s probably unintentional, and it’s possible that Ferri’s concern is the metaphorical overwhelming of war by sweetness. But surely he’s aware that his photography transformed the bit of pure honey into a sea of sumptuous complexity.

Becky McFall, “Volume 3: The Lure of Exploration - All Those Ones and Zeroes” (Zenith Gallery)

MOST SHOWS IN THE 18-VENUE “WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE DMV” project offer a single piece by multiple artists working in various media. Two exceptions to this approach are exhibitions at Zenith Gallery and the Portico Room of University of Maryland’s McKeldin Library. The first contains several works each by seven artists chosen by Zenith proprietor Margery Goldberg and the series’s overall organizer, Florencio Lennox (Lenny) Campello. The second consists of artists’s books, one each by six contributors.

Collages and wall sculptures dominate the Zenith show, although it does include Tracy Griffith Tso’s functional yet whimsical ceramics -- cups, flasks, and a teapot embellished with 3D rabbits and pandas. Two of the artists have shown recently at Zenith: Mitzi Bernard, whose pictures of women are assembled from hundreds of tiny female figures, often nude pinups; and Ashley Joi, whose collage-paintings often conjure women from snips of flowers and plants. One of Mentwab Easwaran’s sculptural paintings portrays a woman who’s part tree, but her work more often turns on colorful fabric patterns, presumably of Ethiopian origin.

The other artists also piece their works together. Jennifer Wagner’s glass mosaics build trees, waves, and a cat from simmering shards, while Margaret Polcawich combines abstract forms, made of wood and polymer clay, in shades of blue, green, and copper. Most energetic are Becky McFall’s abstract sculpture-paintings, most of which are topped with coiled strips of paper tinted with metallic inks. These ribbons pieces weave together sympathetically even as they project assertively from the surface.

Among the books at the McKeldin Library is Kanika Sircar’s multi-layered “Barthes,” made of paper on ceramic plates and recently shown at Washington Printmakers Gallery. Other highlights are Elizabeth Curren’s “The Paradise Fire,” a pop-up book with several layers of trees in flaming colors, and Kerry McAleer-Keeler’s “Skeleton in the Closet,” a boxed history of Prohibition written in corks, bottle caps, vintage prescriptions for whiskey, and other pertinent objects. Tina Huduk’s fold-out beach book, which contains short poems and small abstract pictures that suggest nature, is placed amid scattered sand and shells, as if the book had somehow summoned the environment that inspired it. Even the gentlest musings can be too vivid to stay on the page.

Langley Spurlock with John Martin Tarrat: S*** Happens

Christopher Corson: My Cup Runneth Over

Freda Lee-McCann: Without Words

Through Oct. 25 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.

Ashton Reeder: Planetary Computation

Through Oct. 19 at Photoworks, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo. glenechophotoworks.org. 301-634-2274.

Steven Ferri: 100% Pure Peace

Through Oct. 20 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. transformerdc.org. 202-483-1102.

Women Artists of the DMV

Through Oct. 18 at Zenith Gallery, 1429 Iris St. NW. zenithgallery.com. 202- 783-2963 and Oct. 23 at Portico Room, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, 7649 Library Lane, College Park. 301-405-0800.”

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Lisa Battle.

“A partial tour of “Women Artists of the DMV,” with stops at five of the 18 venues

MARK JENKINS

Sondra Arkin, “Structure XXIV” (courtesy of the artist)

AN EXPANSIVE CELEBRATION, “WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE DMV” spans 18 venues and three months. Some of the shows arranged by curator Florencio Lennox (Lenny) Campello have yet to open, and some are already about to close. (My review of the project’s American University Museum flagship exhibition is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/10/women-artists-dmv-american-university-museum/, behind a paywall.) Under the circumstances, a comprehensive overview is impossible. The only alternative, frustrating as it may be, is simply to identify some highlights.

Frida Kahlo is the patron saint of the selection at Adah Rose Gallery, where the cherished Mexican artist appears both in Lian Sever’s painted portrait and Leslie Holt’s mostly abstract stained-color picture with a small embroidered image. The former is realistic but with fabulist touches; the latter suggests a partly decayed yet still powerful memory.

Works by Molly Springfield and Sondra Arkin are as stark as Sever’s picture is lush. Springfield’s drawing is one of her exquisitely literal pencil-rendered enlargements of a scrap of a Xeroxed text, while Arkin’s watercolor consists mostly of branching gray lines that suggest branches and twigs. But some of those gray lines have turned gold, a gentle but eloquent touch of alchemy.

At Adah Rose, as at most of the venues, wall sculptures are among the most distinctive entries. Lisa Hill’s dynamic all-white assemblage hints at the legacies of both Constructivism and Futurism. Betsy Packard’s collage is made mostly of green-glass shards, whose color suggests a nature scene. But across the landscape is an array of shattered blue-and-white ceramics that almost seem to spell out a word or two. The sense of language almost, but not quite, emerging from chaos is powerfully intriguing.

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Alison Sigethey , “Awakening World” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AT JOAN HISAOKA HEALING ARTS GALLERY, Jeanie Sausele-Knodt’s white ceramic multi-part sculpture looks like a distant cousin of Lisa Hill’s piece. Its craggy textures complement the mottled colors and perforated surface of Alison Sigethy’s lovely “Awakening World,” a wall-mounted glass half-dome that gleams like metal.

The eclectic array includes an elegant Jun Lee animal woodcut, dominated by red that’s underscored by orange, and Bobbi Kittner’s painting of color patterns on rounded rock-like shapes, a picture that neatly balances abstract and realist techniques. The latter fits well with Randa Fakes LoGerfo’s “Expectations,” a painting whose geometric arrangement of an orange bar on a blue field is simple, but complicated by painted blotches and illusory indentations. Although flat, the work appears as arrestingly irregular as Sausele-Knodt and Sigethy’s contributions.

AT THE WRITER’S CENTER, the standouts are mostly representational, although the selection features a few pieces in which the imagery bends toward abstraction. That’s literally true of Jessica von Brakle’s twisting collage-painting, whose central staircase spirals into a splatter of black ink. The hazy form of a flamingo emerges from, or fades into, soft colored-pencil gestures in Beverly Ress’s drawing. Eve Stockton’s woodcut is a series of cresting waves -- their hues naturalistic aqua and unexpected purple -- that fill the frame in the manner of oceanic wallpaper.

Color is a secondary attraction of works by photographer Pamela H. Viola and sculptor Carol G. Levin. In the former’s vignette of a muted, rustic Ireland, a horse stands between two stone structures, a wall and a ruined building; the animal’s white and gray coat neatly echoes the shades of the stone. Two tones of bronze serve to energize Levin’s small sculpture of a bent figure with its arms over its head. Although the piece couldn’t be more solid, its subject’s pose appears as kinetic as von Brakle’s mutating stairway.

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Elzbieta Sikorska, “Ashes” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AT ARTIST & MAKERS, the survey claims two exhibition spaces to display work by 44 artists. Here is another “Frida,” portrayed realistically in painted wood by Sheri Youens-Un. Other portraits include Leslie Nolan’s expressionist rendering of a red-faced “Alexander”; Linda Lowrey’s realistic and highly vertical depiction of woman who appears both pensive and fierce; and Maremi Andreozzi’s picture of a female tailor from colonial-era Massachusetts -- featureless and silhouetted, as is customary in the painter’s work, and surrounded by her tools.

One of these is a pair of scissors, also central to Ruth Lozner’s evocative self-portrait made of 3D wooden pieces, a metaphorical representation in which a human hand and various implements stand for the artist. The woman in Jenny Davis’s striking symbolist watercolor is not faceless, but she’s turned away from the viewer and toward a glass globe that signifies the wider world. Also rooted in realism, but fluid in form, is Susan Hostetler’s ceramic sculpture of birds that are melting into each other, and cocooned in a black box.

Standouts among the purely abstract pieces are Lisa Battle’s “Flow,” a riverine bend consisting of six close-fitting pieces, and Elzbieta Sikorska’s “Ashes,” a rough-edged, earth-toned collage whose submerged text teases the observer. In a show with more than a few hidden faces, this picture’s reticence seems entirely apt.

Joan Danziger, “Green Mist Beetle” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AT MCLEAN PROJECT FOR THE ARTS is one of the largest arrays, with work by 53 contributors. These include three that are very different in form yet still exhibit visual affinities. Janis Goodman’s circular neoclassical painting is a skyscape-like composition in black, gray, and white. The only new-media piece is Jackie Hoysted’s generative computer-video drawing of curving white lines on a blue field, where they pirouette until they come to resemble a butterfly. Circles are also integral to Jacqui Crocetta’s blue-and-gray aquatic painting, but to suggest pebbles and bubbles seen in and through water.

Among the free-standing sculptures are one of Donna McCullough’s dresses made of metal, an essay in hard and soft, familiar and strange; Kristin Bohlander’s earthy “Breathe,” made of wood, wax, and natural fiber, which can be seen as a shell, a small boat, or a set of lungs; and Melissa Burley’s “The War Within,” a mysterious cabinet that glows from within, evoking buildings as well as bodies. It’s a portal that both beckons and hinders, proffers and forbids.

As elsewhere, the selection includes a lot of superb wall sculptures. Even Kyujin Lee, whose paintings depict classic fairy-tale characters, takes a tentative move into the third dimension by cutting out a little red riding hood so she’s literally outside the main image. Sheila Crider offers an abstract canvas, but a 3D one that’s draped and partly cut into slits so it appears fragile and changeable.

Also on the wall are several triumphs of form and reclaimed material, including Joan Danziger’s glistening “Green Mist Beetle,” its reflective shards of glass and metal held together by wire; and Lori Katz’s untitled assemblage of rusted springs that pop from a blue stoneware tile in a compelling contrast of serenity and tumult. Taina Litwak’s “Plastic Tsunami - Drift I” is a pileup that includes toys, bottles, and a Spiderman mask, all painted gray and stuffed inside a box to provide a sense of order such throwaways lack when cast into the ocean.

Among the other wall pieces that elicit aspects of nature are Liz Lescault’s elegant “Sun Stroke,” a sunflower-like flattened orb of ceramic, polymer clay, and encircling tufts of natural fiber; and April Shelford’s “Fossil,” a fused glass piece that’s sleek yet has a sense of ancientness. It calls attention to the fact that many of the show’s entries feel archetypal: newly made yet embodying timeless forms and forces.”

Women Artists of the DMV

Through Sept. 28 at Adah Rose Gallery, 12115 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. adahrosegallery.com. 301-922-0162; and at Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, 1632 U St. NW. 202-483-8600. joanhisaokagallery.org. Open by appointment.

Through Oct. 29 at Artists & Makers, 11810 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. artistsandmakersstudios.com. 240-437-9573.

Through Nov. 1 at McLean Project for the Arts, 1234 Ingleside Ave., McLean. mpaart.org. 703-790-1953.

Through Dec. 5 at the Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. writer.org. 301-654-8664.

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In PTSD and Art: "Keeping Art Alive” by James John Magner

“Making art is not the route to fame and fortune. If you are a serious artist with an innate passion to be creative, you try to be represented by a gallery and get a show once in a while.

Here are three artists in gallery shows now. The artwork may rotate, but you can find more information on the gallery website, or the artist website.

Thierry Guillemin slips through time, searching, questioning…exploring. His images emit light—the light that emanates from nature. His work reaches from abstract to landscape to figurative but always has depth; it plays with reality. He has a tryptic with much personal meaning now hanging in the Studio Gallery in Washington, DC.

Fiddlers Hill Road by Thierry Guillemin

David Amaroso paints the intricacies as well as the major influences that shape culture. Latino identity is more than language or a coincidence of backgrounds; there is a palpable joy of belonging—being a member of the group. He is currently among ten Latino artists in a show titled “Identidad” in Manassas, VA. The reception is September 20, 6-8 PM. The show runs to October 4, 2025.

https://insidenovatix.com/events/identidad-artist-reception

www.amorosoart.wixsite.com.

J. Chris Morel paints mostly in the Taos, New Mexico region. He also travels the world looking. Always looking. It may be the mountains, or a stream or a church covered with snow, but it is really about movement and a restrained color composition. And something else—something that runs deep in the human soul: our primitive connection to the land. He often hangs in Santa Fe galleries, but he has also created his own galleries.

Morelart.com

PTSD can come from personal trauma, or from a larger experience of human discord. It can be an attack on your physical being, or a rejection of your essential beliefs. You can give in, or you can fight through it to look for the light you didn’t notice before. It’s not suddenly there; it was always there. You can find the light in the work of a artist who has an innate passion to be creative—to climb above the human turmoil to supernatural art.

If you are a paid subscriber and have a show coming up, let me know. Or, if you would just like to share your work, send me an image.”

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Written by James John Magner, thank you!

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In DisCerning Eye: Thierry Guillemin, Leslie Kiefer, & Deborah Addison Coburn.

“Into the Misty

Thierry Guillemin's landscapes, Leslie Kiefer's photocollages, & Deborah Addison Coburn's gouaches. Also: group shows, tactile or historical, and work by Pedro Ledesma III & Mak Dehejia

Mark Jenkins

SEP 18, 2025

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Thierry Guillemin, “Tuscan Staircase” (Studio Gallery)

PHOTOREALIST AND PASTORAL AT THE SAME TIME, Thierry Guillemin's paintings are precise yet atmospheric. The French-born local artist's latest Studio Gallery show, "Portrait of Ré as a Bird Photographer and other paintings" is titled after an atypical triptych. The selection, curated by Gaby Mizes, also includes one picture that's abstract but whose smudgy greens and blues suggest an out-of-focus landscape. The other five paintings observe heavily wooded parks, a light-dappled pond, or rustic roads and trails. All the scenes are enchanted by soft light and hazy air.

The title piece uses two paintings of birds to flank a woman (identified by Guillemin as "my muse, my love") who holds a telephoto-lensed camera. All three subjects are positioned dramatically on black backdrops, and the photographer is half-vanished into shadow. This is not the artist's usual approach. The other realist canvases feature near-photographic backgrounds and just a hint of human presence, usually offered by furniture or architectural details.

It's noteworthy that the artist continues his imagery onto the edges of his unframed paintings. This sense of continuation is significant to his pictures, in which everyday details center beguilingly long vistas. Often the compositions include passageways of a sort -- as tangible as a path or an outdoor staircase, or as ephemeral as a ribbon of low-lying mist. Guillemin's scenarios are tranquil and still, but they lead the eye on a journey.

THE NATURAL WORLD IS THE LITERAL SUBJECT of Leslie Kiefer's "Circe's Cavern: The Jewel in the Abyss," which hangs next to Guillemin's show. But the D.C. digital photographer's delicate images, which are composited in various ways, aren't simply observational. The pictures in this selection, also curated by Mizes, represent what the artist's statement calls "loss without the finality of death or closure."

Sometimes Kiefer locates an artifact that appears to illustrate the ability of Circe, the mythic Greek enchantress, to transform people into animals. A shed snakeskin, artfully draped, is a found metaphor for transmutation. The photographer often depicts flowers, but also a couple of shells -- only one contains a pearl -- and a pair of pumpkins, one vegetable and the other seemingly made of fabric. Kiefer occasionally interjects other manmade objects, notably a pink shoe from which a flower, also pink, seems to grow.

The wispy look of these pictures complements their pictorial themes. Multiple images are evocatively overlapped, soft hues suggest watercolor, and black and dark-green backdrops are layered and smeary. Everything appears fragile, yearning, and susceptible to change.

DEBORAH ADDISON COBURN IS KNOWN FOR WORKS, usually somber, that draw on her family's history. The local artist's "Divertimento," also at Studio and curated by Adah Rose Bitterbaum, has a similar origin but a very different vibe. These collage-paintings are bright and kinetic, full of figures in motion. Viewers will likely not be surprised to learn that the pictures were inspired by Coburn's own childhood drawings.

While the subjects are simple and the compositions naive, the use of color is more sophisticated. Experimenting with gouache for the first time, Coburn pits vivid colors against softer, more watery hues that flow and blend. Also more grownup, if in a playful way, are the transfigurative motifs of such pictures as "Swan Lake" and "Single Cat Ladies." In these Circe-like scenarios, women cavort with animals and sometimes become partly avian or feline. It's an intriguing parallel that Coburn's humans and animals mingle much as her colors meld.

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Robert Johnson, “Potbelly Owl” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE FIRST CLUE THAT "ORDER AND CHAOS" IS AN UNUSUAL ART SHOW is the supply of blindfolds at the entrance. The U.S. debut of a Portuguese series, the pop-up exhibition is designed for visually impaired visitors -- and those who mask their eyes for a purely tactile experience. Most of the 12 participating artists, largely selected by local co-curator Elizabeth Casqueiro, are from the D.C. region.

Casqueiro has contributed two new pieces whose compositions resemble those of her collage-like, mostly representational paintings. But these artworks translate the paintings's style into three dimensions by adding such fingerable elements as pegboard. Other artists who often make sculptural work offer pieces in their usual modes, but these aren't meant just to be seen. Gallery goers can touch Susan Hostetler's ceramic birds, Kristina Penhoet's knotted-felt curtain, Robert Johnson's "ball" of orbiting plywood strips, and Wilfredo Valladares's rough-edged bowl filled with chunky, nut-like orbs.

Many pieces are constructed of found objects, which provide a range of intriguing textures. At the risk of betraying the spirit of the show, the assemblages are also appealing visually. Such fanciful creatures as Johnson's "Potbelly Owl" or Chinedu Felix Osuchukwu's "Chiquita" -- made largely of feathers or scrap metal, respectively -- are more than the sum of their motley parts. But those parts can also be examined one by one, feel by feel.

Deborah Schindler, “Vaulting” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

FOUR DECADES OF A GALLERY'S LEGACY ARE CONDENSED into a few more than 40 prints and photographs in "Then & Now: Celebrating 40 Years of Washington Printmakers Gallery." The 24 participants, eight of them WPG founding members, are exhibiting two works each, one from "then" and one from "now." The route from one era to the other is not always straightforward.

Among the highlights are Deborah Schindler's elegant etching and aquatint, "Vaulting," in which two queues of exceptionally agile gymnasts project their legs skyward in emulation of the arched cathedral-like space in which they're lined up. The picture's sense of structure and perspective is echoed in a very different scene, Bob Burgess's "Sprayers," a photograph of agricultural workers in a field whose parallel furrows have a geometric exactness. In Kristine DeNinno's intriguing aquatint etching, the mostly orderly rows are partly slipped and blurred, perhaps to represent the effects of its title subject, "Fog."

Rosemary Cooley neatly contrasts a precise Renaissance-style architectural rendering with a looser rendering of a flower in her two-part intaglio print, "Individuation." Nina Muys's two monoprints both depict sunflowers, but the older picture is soft and subdued, while the newer one is harder-edged and, well, sunnier. Susan Pearcy's poignant "Sunflower Leaf #8" is sort of vegetative memento mori, a drypoint print finished with pastel that adds just the most desiccated shades of yellow and tan.

Perhaps it's a coincidence, but there's a wistfulness to many of these pieces that befits a retrospective show. Yet the pensiveness can be infused with drama, as in William Demaria's "Ghost River." This stark monoprint engraving depicts a stream with dark banks and a branch that casts a unifying shadow from one black shore to the other. The scene is set on a white field, as if to suggest that the moment is emerging from or receding from time. The vignette could be coming or going, then or now.

Pedro Ledesma III, “Mr. Julian Green, Jr.” (courtesy of the artist)

VENERABLE FIGURES ARE PORTRAYED WITH GREAT DIGNITY in "Our Rich (African) American History," photographer Pedro Ledesma III's show at the Arts Club of Washington. Many of the portraits were made in churches, and their subjects pose with suitable dignity and solemnity. Somberly, Ledesma has covered with black veils the pictures of two people who have since died.

Photographed in Petersburg, Va. in 2023, the pictures mostly depict older people whose formality is both a declaration of self-respect and a means of self-defense. If many of the subjects recall the besuited activists of the early-1960s civil rights movement, Ledesma's style evokes an even earlier time. Expertly lighted, the portraits suggest the Dutch Golden Age painters who highlighted faces amid lush black shadows. In Ledesma's photo of Julian Green, Jr., both the man's face and the large book in front of him are immaculately haloed.

The photographer did memorialize a few funkier figures, including a younger man who sits in a bar, wearing a pink cowboy hat. Central to Ledesma's project is the late Richard Stewart, who collected thousands of items for his one-man archive, the Black History Museum of Pocahontas Island. He's pictured surrounded by photos, artifacts, and hand-lettered signs. Ledesma's picture of Stewart is a superb example of environmental portraiture, but it's also an expression of affinity between two historians of the Black experience.

MARYLAND ARTIST MAK DEHEJIA USES WATERCOLOR TO CONVEY the liquidity of lakes, rivers, and misty air. So it's a bit surprising to learn that his late-in-life artistic career is rooted in his experience, as a child in rural India, of colorful sunsets caused by dust storms. Less perplexing is a boyhood attraction to "streams and ponds" that "provided relief from the hot sun," according to his statement about his Park View Gallery show, "Tranquil Vistas."

There's little sense of heat in Dehejia's small impressionist landscapes, but lots of light. Orange, pink, and areas of unpainted white convey the effects of sunlight, whether filtered through clouds or reflected on rippling surfaces. The places where sky meets water hint that each is boundless, and very nearly capable of flowing into each other. These serenely fluid locations seem to exist outside the influence of people, of which there is almost no evidence in the paintings.

Luminous color and satiny forms are what is immediately striking about Dehejia's work. Just as impressive, though, is the way the artist juxtaposes flat and modeled forms. He conveys trees, for example, with just a few green blotches. But he's also capable of layering multiple colors to conjure depth and distance. Dehejia's pictures appear as moist as his medium, but perhaps they do carry some memory of the vast skies that nature painted above decades ago.

Thierry Guillemin: Portrait of Ré as a Bird Photographer and other paintings

Leslie Kiefer: Circe's Cavern: The Jewel in the Abyss

Deborah Addison Coburn: Divertimento
Through Sept. 27 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734

Order and Chaos
Through Sept. 27 at Realces pop-up gallery, 3307 M St. NW. realces.pt/order-and-chaos. Open by appointment: ecasq@realces.pt

Then & Now: Celebrating 40 Years of Washington Printmakers Gallery

Through Sept. 28 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Pedro Ledesma III: Our Rich (African) American History

Through Sept. 26 at the Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St. NW. artsclubofwashington.org. 202-331-7282.

Mak Dehejia: Tranquil Vistas

Through Sept. 28 at Park View Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. 301-634-2274.”

Written by Mark Jenkins in DisCerning Eye, thank you!

In DisCerning Eye: Jo Levine and Leslie Kiefer

“Eye Witnessed

Photographic group shows at Gallery B and Multiple Exposures focus on looking and telling, while Photoworks remembers co-founder Frank "Tico" Herrera

Mark Jenkins

Jul 30, 2025

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Tana Ebbole, “Dew Drops” (Creative Platform)

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS FRAME THEIR SUBJECTS, but some images feel more enclosed than others. Most of the 10 contributors to "Through the Looking Glass," Creative Platform’s local photographers's showcase at Gallery B, depict things or people that are tightly contained. But only about half of them depict literal interiors.

One of the most striking examples is "Roundabout," a high-contrast black-and-white picture by Van Pulley (who's also in the current Multiple Exposures Gallery show). A silhouetted pedestrian moves through a walkway covered by an arched lattice, past a foregrounded puddle that reflects both the person and the framework. The effect is to transform the half-curved space into one that appears fully circular, and nearly kaleidoscopic.

Among the other pictures made within actual walls are Jim Coates's evocative interiors of an abandoned, deteriorated house, rendered in shades of cream (lost affluence) and brown (decay). People either contemplate or ignore art -- in separate pictures -- in Susan Sanders's moody black-and-white studies of a museum and its visitors. Also monochromatic are Leslie Kiefer's eerie closeups of masks and figurines, sometimes doubled in mirrors; and Leslie Landerkin's environmental portraits, in which small people can be upstaged by big shadows.

Jo Levine steps outside to observe distorted and fractured reflections on mirrored building facades, a phenomenon often documented at Multiple Exposures (and in Levine's recent Studio Gallery show). While Levine's pictures are in color, Barry Dunn's uses black-and-white for his deconstructions of modern design, such as the front of a battered but still partly glossy automobile.

The sense of closeness is visually different but psychologically similar in Tana Ebbole's watery nature scenes, which are enveloped by mist. These elegant pictures feature muted colors that are suffused with gray yet punctuated by glimmers of golden sunlight. Ebbole's photos fit well with Barbara Southworth's sweeping horizontals of rocky landscapes, one of which observes the vivid contrast -- philosophical as well as pictorial -- of red plants flowering on granite.

The persistence of vegetation is also the theme of Kevin Duncan's closeups of twigs and branches that jut from water or ice, environments that register as expanses of blue or -- in the extraordinary "Lost Breath 2" -- electric green. The composition is carefully confined, but the color bids to bust it open.

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Eric Johnson, “945 North Washington Street” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

THE CLOSEST THING TO DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY IN "SMALL STORIES," Multiple Exposures Gallery's conceptual group exhibition, is by none other than Van Pulley, who demonstrates his flair for formalism in the Gallery B show. Here he offers pictures of Cubans in artistic or athletic motion, grouped in a battered metal frame to signify their country's deprivation. The photographic suite is one of the few to depict humans, but the effects of their actions -- mostly destructive -- are well-represented.

Eric Johnson observes the gradual disappearance of houses on the Baltimore block where his grandmother once lived, a microcosm of the city's decline. Human neglect and natural atrophy collaborated to tumble the rustic wooden structure Tom Sliter glimpses in mid-collapse. Sepia adds to the sense of age in Irina Lawton's blurry interiors of an old Maine schoolhouse, made with a low-resolution plastic camera. Everyone knows the story Alan Sislen tells with three shots of lower Manhattan taken from Jersey City between 1999 and 2014.

The fracturing is purely pictorial in Maureen Minehan's dissection of the Jefferson Memorial, rendered in harsh color to amplify the sense of violence in this visual metaphor for political polarization. The victims of human brutality are arboreal in Sarah Hood Salomon's pictures of decapitated heritage trees, framed in actual sawdust.

A lone person, perhaps a train buff, stalks Fred Zafran's shadowy photo essay on the Point of Rocks MARC station in what appears to be early morning. Much more exuberant are Stacy Smith Evans's pictures of bright orange facades of houses in Capetown, repainted from the white that was required when their occupants were enslaved.

Russell Creger Barajas reduces the human presence to three hands, sculpted in stone, wood, or plastic. This series of evocatively stark closeups is related in form, if not content, to sets of images of rusted metal links by Gullermo Olizola; rocks and piles of soil by David Myers; and aircraft details by Francine B. Livaditis. The story, whatever it may be, is in the details.

The one participant who utterly flouted the rules is Soomin Ham, who contributed a single picture of a flower. Many narratives are suggested by the photos in "Small Stories," but Ham's enigmatic picture demands that the viewer also be the storyteller.

“Mapplethorpe,” Frank “Tico” Herrera (Photoworks)

TO JUDGE BY HIS MEMORIAL EXHIBITION, FRANK "TICO" HERRERA was primarily a photographer of rustic landscapes, whether in Ireland, Costa Rica, or his native West Virginia. But the 30-photo retrospective at Photoworks, which he co-founded, touches on multiple subjects and themes. Herrera (1940-2021) photographed everything from a lone cow and the main building at Glen Echo -- two dramatically upward shots that are among the few in color -- to an art-world protest: the demonstration against the Corcoran Gallery's decision to cancel its 1989 Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition.

The protesters projected Mapplethorpe photos on the Corcoran facade, so Herrera was able to capture a ghostly image that flickers above the crowd. That sort of light play is unusual in this selection, although the photographer did use long exposures to make it appear as if low-speed freight trains are rocketing through West Virginia hamlets. The trains's temporary presence registers simply as a blur, accentuating the towns's sense of being left behind. Like the sepia tones of Herrera's Ireland studies, the smeared trains evoke the past in instants of the present.

Most whimsical and least characteristic is "Barbie Queue," a posed scenario populated by nearly a dozen Barbies and a single Ken. (He's at the grill, of course.) More typical are scenes where old buildings or cloud-stuffed skies are just permeable enough to yield splashes or patches of illumination. Light is essential to all photographers, of course, but Herrera was especially attuned to it.

Through the Looking Glass

Through Aug. 3 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. #E, Bethesda. bethesda.org/bethesda/gallery-b-exhibitions. 301-215-7990.

Small Stories

Through Aug. 3 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

Frank "Tico" Herrera Memorial Exhibition

Through Aug. 3 at Photoworks, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo. glenechophotoworks.org. 301-634-2274."

Written by Mark Jenkins, thank you!

Reflection on Uncanny at the NMWA, and other recent Smithsonian shows

I was born and raised in DC and the Smithsonian museums have always been a second home for me. They are where I spend my days off, walking alone through crowds of tourists, absorbing work from artists I learn about later in art history classes. Over the past month, I have visited several major DC museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), the National Gallery/National Portrait Gallery, the Hirshorn, and the Renwick, to name a few. I want to discuss a few works in particular that I was especially excited about, and maybe draw some connections between them. 

The show that I saw at the NMWA is titled Uncanny. Many pieces included in the Uncanny exhibition are predicated on some distortion of the physical body, often the female body in particular, whether that be through abstraction, reimagination of form, or some experimental use of medium. Distortion of the body is one surefire way to provoke unease in a viewer, as the audience will identify viscerally with the subject. 

Some of the artists in this show are prominent figures in feminist art history, including Judy Chicago, who created the Dinner Party sculptural installation (permanent collection at the Brooklyn Museum) which was made up of 39 place-setting sculptures dedicated to significant women throughout history, forming a massive triangular table. Many of the place settings are sculpted to look like female genitalia, which for some may provoke discomfort, but were intended as a celebration of the female body and experience. 

Judy Chicago (American, born 1939). The Dinner Party, 1974–79. Ceramic, porcelain, textile, 576 × 576 in. (1463 × 1463 cm). Brooklyn Museum; Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. (Photo: Donald Woodman)

Her work for the NMWA is a series of paintings on glass and porcelain that explore the grief of climate change and extinction. This existential interpretation of ‘uncanny’ broadens the scope of the exhibition from experiences of the body to wider connectivity with the natural world, which can be just as disconcerting. 

Judy Chicago, Stranded, from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, 2016; Kiln-fired glass paint on black glass, 12 x 18 in.; Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY

Another artist I was particularly excited to see was Louise Bourgeois, whose work is renowned for its disturbing and emotionally affecting subject matter, and, well, its uncanniness. Her work for this show is Untitled (with foot), “carved from pink marble, depicts a baby’s foot sticking out from beneath a perfect sphere. Sculpted to allude to smooth, tender flesh under a heavy globe-like object, the work is equally alluring and alarming. Bourgeois evokes the unresolved tension of the universal trauma of birth, a recurrent theme in her art.” (Orin Zahra, associate curator NMWA) This disembodied limb fused to the smooth, fleshy sphere suggests a monstrous, inhuman child, lacking most identifying human features, but still heartbreakingly vulnerable to the dangers of the world around it. This vulnerability is contrasted with the rough hewn surface the figure is placed on top of, suggesting a cruel and unwelcoming world. This piece reminds me a bit of the Eraserhead baby from the David Lynch movie, iykyk.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (with foot), 1989; Pink marble, 30 x 26 x 21 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Roger S. Firestone Foundation Fund, the FRIENDS of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, William A. Clark Fund, the gift of William E. Share (by exchange), The Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Carolyn Alper); © The Easton Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Eraserhead baby, from the movie Eraserhead, directed by David Lynch RIP

I was also struck by Felix Gonzales Torres’s approach to portraiture, which feels in line with the work of the Uncanny show, as his candy works are direct representations of a human body, that can in turn be consumed and continuously altered by the audience. This action of eating the candy that is the body of some specific person feels like a violation, and yet the candy is inviting and innocuous without its context. The constant turnover and reinvention of the portrait through the removal and replacement of pieces of candy reminds me of a thought I have had many times before, which is ‘the only constant is change’ or something to that effect, which I suppose is cheap buddhism for coping with the terrifying uncertainty of life. This work also reminds me of the blessed sacrament, i.e, the ‘blood and body of christ’ that catholics consume when they take communion, which provokes questions in my mind about how portraiture can be a portal to eternal life, especially when the portrait is meant to be consumed/integrated into the being of the audience. Gonzales-Torres’s work has a way of sticking with you, and this endlessly thought-spiralling effect that his candy works in particular have on me make me fascinated to learn more about him and his influences.  

"Untitled" (Portrait of Dad), 1991

White mint candies in clear wrappers, endless supply
Overall dimensions vary with installation
Ideal weight: 175 lb.
© Estate Felix Gonzalez-Torres Courtesy Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
Photo: Matailong Du

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Written by Zora Pauk
Gallery Associate

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In DisCerning Eye: Cheryl Ann Bearss, Pam Frederick, Harriet Lesser, and Veronica Szalus

“Letter Perfect

Letterpress artists revitalize the almost-obsolete process at Pyramid Atlantic. Also: Work by Cheryl Ann Bearss, Pam Frederick, Harriet Lesser, Veronica Szalus, Dee Levinson, and Monica Jahan Bose

MARK JENKINS

JULY 2ND, 2025

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David Wolske, “Polysynthesis” (Pyramid Atlantic)

"FREEDOM OF THE PRESS is guaranteed only to those who own one," wrote A.J. Liebling in 1960, before not just the Internet but also the widespread adoption of offset printing. Liebling's words would originally have been promulgated by letterpress, a once-dominant industrial process that now survives as the artisanal craft showcased in Pyramid Atlantic's "Press On." Fittingly, this large and impressive exhibition includes Khoa Nguyen's elegant poster of Liebling's maxim, the sentence neatly choreographed in highly compressed orange sans serif text.

Letters and words are central to the show, which was juried by Celene Aubry of Tennessee's Hatch Show Print and Allison Tipton, manager of the Globe Collection and Press at the Maryland Institute College of Art. There are images in many of the works made by the nearly 100 contributors (some working as members of teams), and a few contain not a single letter. But several of the most inventive pieces demonstrate how just color, layout, and type are sufficient to build an effective composition.

Words and names, especially when they're well-known, can be read even in daringly unexpected configurations. So Scott Fisk tightly overlaps the letters in "home" and "joy," emphasizing color but not entirely forgoing legibility. And Virginia Green flips sideways and breaks into two lines the longest name in this familiar lineup: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Similar tactics, with the additional complication of multiple typefaces, enliven Frank Baseman's bold poster of the NATO phonetic alphabet, all the way from "alpha" to "zulu."

More minimalist but just as astute are E Bond's sculptural arrangement of industrial-looking "E's" in corroded shades of black; Steven Stichter's punning waves of rising blue "C's"; and Richard Kegler's duo of superimposed ampersands, one upside down. David Wolske abstracts letters by trimming them merely to such features are bowls and serifs, printed in vivid hues and partly overlaid. Carlos Hernandez uses mostly letters and punctuation -- but also silhouetted guns -- to depict cowboys identified as good, bad, and ugly. Jon Drew's gentle landscapes position black trees in front of terrain built mostly of letters.

As might be expected, there are numerous artist's books and other 3D items. Cynthia Connolly's sewn grab bag contains 15 postcards, mostly of her photographs. Andre Lee Bassuet demonstrates the letterpress-worthiness of the Korean Hangeul alphabet in a tiny book printed with Legos. Richard Zeid imprints the word "fractured" atop a black-and-white photograph that's been torn into four irregular quadrants. Elinor Swanson prints blue-on-white patterns that suggest Dutch ceramics and presents them both flat and folded into the shapes of a cup and a pitcher.

Among the most powerful entries, both in theme and form, is Sarah Matthews's "Outrage," a flag book that stands like a poster and conveys the artist's response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. "My uterus is none of your business" proclaim black-on-pink letters that stutter across repeated unfurled pages. Matthews's broadside -- and all of "Press On" -- certifies that letterpress is anything but quaint.

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Cheryl Ann Bearrs, “Great Falls November” (Studio Gallery)

THE NATURAL WORLD IS THE INSPIRATION for Cheryl Ann Bearss's Studio Gallery show, as it was for her previous one. But the focus of "Fleeting Moments of Nature" has expanded from closeups of individual trees to wider views of forests, skies, and rivers -- notably the Potomac at Great Falls, a turbulent contrast to the Northern Virginia painter's serene pictures of flowering bushes and trees.

Her style has also shifted toward a more detailed and realistic approach, although some of her oils are looser than others. This can be seen even in pictures of the same essential subject. "Great Falls November" is tighter than "Stormy Skies over Great Falls," although both depict rock and water, sunlight and mist.

Bearrs hasn't abandoned renderings of single trees, including one viewed from a craned-neck perspective. All black and gray, "Snow Tree" is among the show's most elegantly stylized pictures, and such stark, leafless studies as "Twisted Trunks" have an almost-sculptural quality. Removed from their natural environs, such gnarled wooden spires have a totemic quality.

Also at Studio is "At This Time," billed as three "coordinated shows" by Pam Frederick, Harriet Lesser, and Veronica Szalus. Least like the other entries are Lesser's pictures of rumpled bedclothes, manipulated photographs that incorporate drawing and painting. Meditations on "waking up," the mixed-media pictures contrast soft and hard by mounting images of twisted fabric atop steel panels.

Both Frederick and Szalus use recycled materials. The former's installation employs found cardboard in a rhythmic composition that was inspired by a Herbie Hancock track and visually suggests Matisse, Mondrian, and Russian Constructivism. The latter's 3D assemblages appear more ominous: What appear to be toilet-paper rolls, often painted and sometimes singed, are held in place by a slice of a pipe or a ragged chicken-wire tower. Where Frederick's collage has a funky equanimity, Szalus's constructions conjure a universe that's haphazard, damaged, and dangerously unstable.

Dee Levinson, “Egyptian Woman” (Touchstone Gallery)

ANCIENT EGYPT AND ITS ENVIRONS ARE THE WELLSPRINGS of Dee Levinson's "Egypt Revisited," but the Northern Virginia artist doesn't imagine her subjects as they might have been. Instead, she models most of the oil paintings in her Touchstone Gallery show on her photographs of historical sculptures. The resulting images have a strong sense of physical presence, but they seem as much stone as flesh.

Levinson worked for more than two decades as a graphic designer for the Washington Post, and her commercial-art background is evident in her meticulous illustrative style. Unlike some artists with a similar history -- Andy Warhol, notably -- Levinson doesn't contrast hard lines with areas of looser, freer color. But she does subtly mottle the primarily single-hue backdrops, and employ boldly unnaturalistic color schemes. Earthy tans and browns are set off by vivid red, blues, and purples, and gold and copper tones evoke the riches of Pharoanic Egypt.

The artist primarily depicts historical Egyptians and their vestiges, including masks and mummies, as well as the occasional goddess (Isis) or out-of-towner (Persian emperor Darius, who ruled Egypt long after the best-known pharaohs). Ramses II is portrayed in three separate color schemes, although the hues aren't the only differences between the renderings. Each seated figure is placed inside a different painted border, the use of which is another Levinson trademark. The artist presents ancient Egyptian history as tidy and contained, ready for the viewer to unbox.

Monica Jahan Bose, “Freedom (Blue)” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

HANGING CURTAINS MADE FROM SARIS mark the entrance to Gallery Y's "Take Me to the Water," a flourish that comes as no surprise. Repurposed saris are among the customary elements in Monica Jahan Bose's work, which is often collaborative. The Bangladeshi-American local artist enlists contributions from women in her ancestral village on the Bay of Bengal -- an area especially vulnerable to rising sea levels -- but also from people who live near the notoriously polluted Anacostia River. Among the results was "Swimming," last year's public installation near another body of water, D.C.'s Marie Reed Aquatic Center.

Some pieces from "Swimming" surface in Bose's current exhibition, but this show is smaller and focused mostly on woodblock and relief prints. Some of these incorporate painting and drawing, and several include small scraps of saris. Of these, the most striking is "Rising (with Sari)," which is all green except for a slash of magenta cloth. The strip offers a strong color contrast while evoking the fluidity of both water and fabric.

Bose's eclectic art is held together by its themes, even as multiple hands and voices pull it in various directions. Phrases in English and Bengali punctuate the imagery, and one sari is bordered again and again by "1.5°C" -- the amount of global warming that's estimated to be sustainable. But the most universal emblems are simple renderings of water and fish, traditional symbols of purity and abundance that have come to represent the opposites or their longtime meanings.

Press On

Through July 13 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. 301-608-9101.

Cheryl Ann Bearss: Fleeting Moments of Nature

Pam Frederick, Harriet Lesser, and Veronica Szalus: At This Time

Through July 12 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202- 232-8734.

Dee Levinson: Egypt Revisited

Through July 6 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.

Monica Jahan Bose: Take Me to the Water

Through July 11 at Gallery Y, YMCA Anthony Bowen, 1325 W St. NW. www.ymcaanthonyboweneventspacedc.com/galleryy. 202-232-6936.”

Review by Mark Jenkins, DisCerning Eye, July 2025. Thank you!

In the Washington City Paper: Jo Levine, Judy Bonderman, Beverly Logan, and Suliman Abdullah

“On Camera: Four Local Artists on View at Studio Gallery

Jo Levine, Judy Bonderman, Beverly Logan, and Suliman Abdullah bring unique and interesting photography—and photography-adjacent art—to the Dupont gallery.

LOUIS JACOBSON

JUNE 9TH, 2025

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“Sky Lights #1” by Jo Levine on View at Studio Gallery

Kudos to Studio Gallery for squeezing a wide range of interesting photography—and photography-adjacent art—into its modestly sized lower gallery space, with four simultaneous, loosely linked exhibits by D.C.-area artists. 

One, Suliman Abdullah, offers photography and collage that harnesses “intentional color manipulation,” often through circular abstractions that layer grainy hues over one another.

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“Essence of Place: Tuscany” by Beverly Logan

Another artist, Beverly Logan, seeks to share what she calls the “Essence of Place”—digital collages saturated with hyperreal colors, notably an image set in Buenos Aires that features a vintage station wagon wedged into a weathered alley, in a setting captured by shades of tomato red, mustard yellow, and inky blue. A more obviously manufactured tableau by Logan, but that still offers intrigue, depicts a view from an Amtrak passenger-car window, featuring parallel, receding layers of track, water, a row of yellow-painted homes, a factory wall and a carefree sky. 

Like Abdullah and Logan, Judy Bonderman uses photographic manipulation; Bonderman leverages the technique to freeze moments from walks she’s made through the Tregaron Conservancy, an urban green space in Cleveland Park. She acknowledges that her images of aquatic plants, frogs, water snakes, and fish aren’t literal; her approach, she says, “exaggerates and romanticizes” what she sees. While many of Logan’s works are dominated by calming shades of green, her most compelling piece may actually be the opposite: “Rolling,” an abstraction with a blend of deep red hues that suggests the fires of hell.

“Transitions” by Judy Bonderman

The most consistently successful of the four artists is Jo Levine, whose past work at the gallery and elsewhere hasbeen similarly impressive. In the current exhibit, Levine documents a wide array of locations in D.C.; few of the more than a dozen images she contributes are squandered. What ties Levine’s works together is a seamless presentation of overlapping layers. In one photograph, for instance, Levine captures the crisp reflection of the Empire State Building off the smooth hood of a black car. In another, Levine documents a flurry of hanging light bulbs reflected in a window, cheekily suggesting a UFO invasion above an ordinary-looking street scene. In a third image, Levine presents an almost literal kaleidoscopic view of reflections on the mirrored exterior of a building.

While Levine structures many of her photographs around the rigorous lines of modernist architecture, many of them include unexpected buckling, as if the lines were being shaped by some unseen magnetic force. In one image, linear reflections bend into something resembling genitalia; in another, the lines of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building resolve into an hourglass or infinity symbol. In one photograph captured off an exterior window of the Hirshhorn Museum, the viewer simultaneously sees reflections of Henry Moore’s “King and Queen,” a portion of the U.S. Capitol dome, and the winningest portrayal of a brutalist D.C. edifice in recent memory. 

Ultimately, Levine’s two finest works may be her most abstract. One of these images depicts the organic, gently undulating surface rivulets of water in pleasing shades of olive and gray. The second captures a view of the Kennedy Center’s REACH; the portrayal brings together a satisfying mix of straight and curved geometric lines, appealing shades of Hopperian blue and gray, and a dreamy, watercolor-like texture that comes from gentle disturbances in reflected water. 

Real and Surreal: Coordinated Shows by Judy Bonderman and Jo Levine; Beverly Logan’s Essence of Place; and Suliman Abdullah’s Global Empathy run through June 14 at Studio Gallery. Wednesday through Friday, 1 to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. studiogallerydc.com. Free.”

Review by Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper, June 2025. Thank you!