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