Reviews

By Eric Celarier on August 2, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Hamiltonian Artists Unexpected Occurrences at The Kreeger Museum

Through the Kreeger Museum’s Collaborative program, Director Helen Chason has partnered with local collectives like the Nicholson Project and currently with Hamiltonian Artists to commingle new art with the museum’s celebrated precursors. Curated by Tomora Wright, Fellowship Director of Hamiltonian Artists the most recent iteration of this initiative, titled Unexpected Occurrences, integrates the Kreeger’s panoply of historical treasures with works from a new generation of ambitious practitioners.

By Eric Celarier on July 18, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Charma Le Edmonds Untold Stories

Untold Stories, on view at Popcorn Gallery in Glen Echo Park, features a group of paintings by Charma Le Edmonds, the final output of an esteemed figure in the Washington DC area art scene. Tragically taken from us in a car accident a little over a year ago, Edmonds’ was...

By Guest Author on July 18, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Blu Murphy Le Drip: Uncontainable Sauce of Black Essence

By Monty Eaton | Washington DC-based artist Blu Murphy’s Le Drip: Uncontainable Sauce of Black Essence at Torpedo Factory Art Center’s Target Gallery consisted of a series portraits created as a tribute to the Black community to celebrate its essence or “sauce” as the artist calls it.

By Sarah Kate Jorgensen on July 12, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Wesley Clark Are We There Yet

Are We There Yet by Wesley Clark at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center demonstrates a fresh take on drawing by an artist who has a conceptual underpinning but is also exploring the formal qualities and materiality of graphite.

By Hamiltonian Artists on July 11, 2022

Essays on Art—Amber Eve Anderson Something Worth Doing

By Mark Anthony Hernández Motaghy | Why do we buy certain things? Why do we save certain things? Amber Eve Anderson asked me these questions during our first conversation, leading us to further inquiries about commodity logistics and how we ascribe value to objects once we acquire them.

By Guest Author on July 11, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Julio Valdez Mapping the Layers

By Marco Polo Juarez Cruz | Like other artists, cartographers, and humans immersed in a world of change, artist Julio Valdez attempts to understand the positions that he occupies through his diverse roles and identities through Mapping the Layers, a mid-career retrospective exhibition organized by the Art Museum of the Americas from April 21 through July 12, 2022.

By Guest Author on June 14, 2022

SUSTAIN: Monica Jahan Bose Celebrates a Decade of Storytelling with Saris

By Sarah Tanguy | In June 2012, in collaboration with women from her ancestral village on the remote island of Barobaishdia off Bangladesh’s endangered coast, artist and activist Monica Jahan Bose launched Storytelling with Saris, a cross-generational and women-driven art project that engages not only with words but also with actions to address climate change.

By Eric Celarier on June 2, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Mary Early Līnea Studies

Mary Early’s exhibition Līnea Studies asks viewers to reconsider the front interior of the Dupont Circle row house that comprises Gallery 2112. The highlight of the show is Early’s sculpture of suspended beeswax rods, Līnea XII, which not only commands interest unto itself, but also opens up many possibilities for the Victorian parlor in which it is placed.

By Eric Celarier on May 10, 2022

East City Art Reviews— Sarah J. Hull Taxonomy of Evanescence

Taxonomy of Evanescence presents different layers of an artist’s life for us to explore. Emanating from her internal sense of how the world is organized, Sarah Hull reveals her intentions with clarity, while reserving enough latitude for the observer to make personal connections to them.

By Eric Celarier on April 25, 2022

East City Art Reviews—SUSPENDED INTER-SPACES at VisArts

SUSPENDED INTERS-SPACES is an exhibition about the artistic process. Though originally developed to examine these practices generically, as artists found themselves isolated and enveloped in the sorrow and social unrest of the pandemic, they reacted to the context in which they were creating to reflect what they were perceiving the state of the world to be. Instead of business as usual, they inevitably gravitated to larger questions of existential importance, reporting their findings through repetition, myth, ritual, intuition, and metaphor.

By Jan Aucker on April 14, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Mary Annella Frank Creature Comforts

A creature comfort is defined as ‘something (such as food, warmth, or special accommodations) that gives bodily comfort’.[1] Mary Annella “Mimi” Frank has embodied this meaning with a group of her steel sculptures at Fred Schnider Gallery of Art in Arlington, VA. The artist previews some recent and past works...

By Eric Celarier on April 3, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Resilience and Uncertainty

Resilience and Uncertainty gives voice to messages of uneasiness, hope, and survival. As curator, Valdez sees these artists finding ways to use adversity to their advantage. Locating truths in the chaos of the psychological and social disaster brought about by the pandemic, this group has been able to work through and even discover hidden meaning in the unpredictability of the world; a world that is far less stable than we once thought.

By Hamiltonian Artists on March 16, 2022

Essays on Art—The Heightened Sense of Belonging: Madeline Stratton We Were Here

By Danielle O’Steen, Ph.D. | There is an odd familiarity in the objects that Washington-based artist Madeline Stratton uses in her sculptures and reliefs. Items like a door knocker, a hinge, a bracket, or a screen door all appear as components in the abstract artworks that populate her exhibition at Hamiltonian Artists titled We Were Here. Stratton has given these old objects a new life, covering them with Day Glo colors and shiny, bedazzled surfaces.

By Phil Hutinet on February 22, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Breathe: Embracing the Uncertainties of the Human Condition

Curator Cheryl D. Edwards selected work from seven artists including Jase Clark, Tim DeVenney, Nestor Gil, Mary Welch Higgins, Curlee Raven Holton, Faith Ringgold, Lisa K. Rosenstein and Michelle Talibah for an exhibition titled Breathe: Embracing the Uncertainties of the Human Condition at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts gallery. Edwards intentionally brought together a diverse group of artists working in a wide range of mediums to demonstrate that despite their differences, each artist has experienced the pandemic in very similar ways. Each touches on universal themes such as loss and isolation. Edward’s curatorial goal was to reveal these common threads which bind us as human beings during this time of unprecedented upheaval.

By Eric Celarier on February 15, 2022

East City Art Reviews—Joseph Shetler In Pursuit of Nothing

If you quickly go through Joseph Shetler’s show, In Pursuit of Nothing, at southwest Washington’s Culture House DC, you will miss what it achieves. His latest installment of arrangements of horizontal and vertical lines appears so simple that their underlying complexity could easily be missed by a casual viewer.