Reviews

The concept of acceptance, or more precisely “to accept” and continue to live the immigrant dilemma of separateness and inclusion is the theme of an exhibition now on view at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery at the Smith Center. Read More

The annual painting competition, the Bethesda Painting Awards, sponsored by the Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation was postponed from its usual spring date, and the work of the eight finalists is now on view at Gallery B in Bethesda through the end of October 2020. Read More

Trevor Young’s current exhibition, Seeing in the Dark, on view at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, updates his series of dark, dusk, and dawn vignettes of seemingly abandoned landscapes. Unpretentious in its delivery and its subject matter, Young presents us with gas stations, overpasses, and billboards that appear in the still night air, reminding us of the constructed world we live in. Read More

With summer winding down, and leaves beginning to fall, Carol Barsha’s solo exhibit at gallery neptune & brown may feel nostalgic for spring—a spring we largely lost this year because of the pandemic. Nevertheless, while viewing the show in person, surrounded by these works in the small but bright gallery space, the words that came to me were “uplifting” and “refreshing”. Read More

If you’re up for a ride in the Virginia countryside, you can just catch a small but fascinating exhibit at the Middle Street Gallery in Washington, VA of new work by Washington DC artist Wayne Paige. Not Out of the Woods is a series of ink drawings made this year in response to recent events, and the artist’s own experiences during these dark and uncertain times. Read More

If you google the phrase “what is art” or “what is the purpose of art” you get a plethora of responses. The work of the winners and finalists of this year’s Trawick Contemporary Art Awards competition generated these questions in my mind as fairly all of the work in the exhibition, now at Gallery B in Bethesda until the end of the month, expresses political opinions and social themes with varying degrees of aesthetic interest. Read More

An exhibit of the work of Andrew Sovjani is on view at Calloway Fine Art in Georgetown and online. Sovjani is a magician, using his knowledge of physics and chemistry to create unique manipulated prints that incorporate painting and performative practices in their production. The results are both aesthetically remarkable and visually compelling. Read More

Degas at the Opéra is an exhibition produced collaboratively by the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Given its particular emphases, this broadly aimed exhibit will provide viewers with a yet fuller understanding of Degas’ artistic relation to the theater, and in particular to the ballet. After the long closure of the museum, the exhibit has been extended at the NGA, and is viewable through October 12, 2020 by reservation. Read More

An exciting group of recent paintings by W.C. Richardson opened in early March of this year at Addison/Ripley Fine Art. Not long thereafter, the gallery was forced to close, but has reopened by appointment. These works represent the artist’s most recent stage in a 40 year interaction with abstraction that has formed a remarkable trajectory. Read More

The massive toll that the current pandemic is wreaking is already affecting the art world. We thought it would be both interesting and appropriate to take a look back at the artistic response to widespread pestilences of the past. A simple look at art made during and after outbreaks of the plague in western Europe alone produces a huge and fascinating inventory. Read More

Freya Grand does large scale landscape paintings. The key to understanding her work is to realize that her paintings are not so much descriptive of the places she visited to make them, but are about the experiences of being there. This exhibit pairs her work with abstract paintings by Latin American artists in the OAS/AMA collection. Read More

Dialogues, the inaugural exhibition in the gallery of STABLE, the new art studio space in northeast Washington, opened last fall. Featuring the work of 32 artists working there, it is slated to be the first and last of its kind there as the organizers plan never to repeat this group show idea. Read More

Curated by Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, the Betty Mae Kramer Gallery & Music Room of downtown Silver Spring hosts artists who describe the metaphysical with paint. Though ineffable and intangible, Judith Benderson, J. Jordan Bruns, Kelly Posey, and Terry Sitz bring various visions of those things that might only be felt. With bright colors and subtle textures, these artists seek to describe the indefinable nature of human experience through abstraction. Read More