Reviews

Strictly Painting 12, the title of McLean Project for the Art’s current exhibition is something of a misnomer. A more apt title for the 63-work exhibition might well be Strictly Color 12. Jurist Adah Rose Bitterbaum has selected 56 artists whose approach to color (or even its creative absence) defines the visual forms displayed on canvas and paper. Read More

At HEMPHILL Fine Arts, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi examines the complexities of cultures clashing through her vibrant works, incorporating both Persian and American influences. Read More

Through innovative cross-disciplinary gallery programming at the Greater Reston Art Center, the playfully compelling objects made by Stephanie Williams are visually engaging on a personal and a metaphorical level. The artist investigates themes of identity through individual objects hung on the wall in a collective grouping that may look like specimens in a lab. Working with throwaway objects and remnants, Williams’ objects are unsettling and sensually alluring. Read More

Gallery B in downtown Bethesda is hosting the finalists of the annual Bethesda Painting Awards competition. This year’s selection exhibits a pronounced showing of painting, in the traditional sense, both figurative and abstract. It’s been some time since we’ve seen such a strong feeling of hand is in the works represented, that is, of paint on surface, made into recognizable or abstract imagery. Read More

The retrospective exhibition of the work of Venetian artist Jacopo Robusti, known as Il Tintoretto, is still on view at the National Gallery. Although Tintoretto was enormously successful in his own time and place, he remains relatively unknown to the general public. The reasons for this are many. Not least among them are the many myths that stubbornly follow the artist’s reputation portraying him as an outsider, a rebel, a difficult and bizarre personality, and perhaps most problematically: a Mannerist. Read More

The exhibition Underlying Borders aims to address the psychological impact of living between two places. The work of five artists explores identity, gender and nationality as they relate to geographical distances and the sense that one’s body and memory can become zones of transition. Read More

Through their experimental, colorful, and dynamic works, Steve Wanna and Marcel Taylor aim to address the process and effects of D.C.’s changing landscape – an occurrence that is prevalent and continuous in Historic Anacostia. Read More

Arlington Art Center’s exhibition Spring SOLOS 2019 presents the unexpected artistic perspectives of seven artists from the Mid-Atlantic region, including an art teacher-Marine veteran and a photographer-butcher. Together, they challenge viewers to reflect on their surrounding natural, institutional, and political environments. Read More

Indelible: That Which Cannot Be Erased examines the toll racial animus has taken on this country, adding to the voices and experiences that have given rise to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. What seems to set Indelible apart from other exhibitions is its desire to ground contemporary injustices within an historical framework. Read More

For thirty years, the District of Columbia Arts Center has weathered the changing vagaries of the DC’s artistic landscape; few local arts organizations can lay claim to such an extensive history of showcasing visual and performing arts.  Then/Again: A Gallery Exhibition 30 Years Later marks this noteworthy anniversary, inviting artists who participated in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition to display works that document their current interests. Read More

A remarkable two-part exhibition of recent work by Washington DC artist Alonzo Davis is currently in the art galleries of the Rachel Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center of the Northern Virginia Community College Alexandria campus. Comprised of Davis’ Navigation and Migrant series, the underlying and unifying theme of the exhibition is travel, of “finding one’s way in unfamiliar territory,” whether that territory is in the vastness of the sea, the fearful emptiness of the desert, or in the changes in one’s life. Read More

A brief art-note disusing the small encaustic paintings by Angela White Read More

Illustrating the great moral aims of the American Ideal was no small task. Norman Rockwell gave America four iconic paintings during the Second World War to symbolize those aims, suggesting that they were universal human rights, and reflect back to the American public their role in achieving them. Enduring Ideals asks: what has become of these symbols? Read More