Exhibitions

The exhibition program at the AAC consists of juried group shows and solo exhibitions. The year is divided into six slots, each six to nine weeks long. The AAC issues an annual call for solo exhibitions proposals for the subsequent season. Proposals are reviewed by a rotating Exhibitions Committee, which includes members of staff and Board, as well as outside curators, artists, and other arts professionals. Calls for entry for group shows are issued intermittently and juried by an AAC designated curator. Occasional invitational exhibitions take place, with the AAC curator or a guest curator making the selections. The AAC continues to pursue artistic excellence and to facilitate bringing emerging and under-represented artists into contact with the public as well as museum and gallery professionals. The AAC serves as a focal point for the ongoing exchange of ideas and images between artists and the public and as a doorway to the arts for the local and Mid-Atlantic regional community.

SPRING SOLOS 2008

Our 2008 installment of SPRING SOLOS once again surveys the best in contemporary art from across the Mid-Atlantic region--providing six separate solo exhibitions together under one roof.

• Jacklyn Brickman makes installations that resemble science museum displays and illustrate relationships between people, food, corporations, and chemistry. Here the Newark, Delaware-based artist focuses her attention on corn, a crop that’s been redesigned by scientists into a super-starchy alien foodstuff.
• Laure Drogoul, a Sondheim Prize winner, orchestrates all sorts of curious happenings and installations—from performances with amplified knitting orchestras, to devices with which to sing to—and possibly charm—vitrines full of earthworms, to a traveling museum of smells called The Olfactory Factory. For this show, the Baltimore artist conducts a video séance, calling out to the civil war dead in nearby Arlington Cemetery.
• Jeremy Drummond, a Richmond-based, Canadian-born artist, illustrates the unlikely intersection of the dreams of developers and those of the people who eventually occupy their pre-planned communities—through video portraits, lists of accepted and rejected street name proposals, and aluminum panels painted in colors from the Martha Stewart living collection.
• Jennifer Fleming’s Poems: Public Places series examines roadside developments along interstate highways. The Baltimore artist takes 4 X 6 photos of chain restaurants, convenience stores, and other signs of workaday ugliness along Route 1, then cuts these pictures and assembles them by hand into long, panoramic collages. These “poems” are also offered for sale—as refrigerator magnets, postcards, and other ironic souvenirs commemorating sprawl.
• Jennifer Mattingly, a Kensington, Maryland artist, meticulously constructs tiny playful dioramas out of matchboxes—often recalling early modernist work by Joseph Cornell, or collage novels by Max Ernst. Both the matchboxes themselves and large photographic prints of them will be on display.
• Erin Williams, a Philadelphia artist, creates faux museum displays for the fictitious creations of her great-grandmother, Minnie Eureka Young—who, according to Williams, invented large, fantastic Victorian-era medical devices made of brass, copper, and wood.

On view in the WYATT GALLERY:

AAC RESIDENT ARTISTS GROUP SHOW

Featuring pieces by six of Arlington Arts Center’s resident artists, working in a variety of styles and media:

• See abstract paintings by Sabyna Sterrett and Monica Stroik, and delicate drawings on translucent paper by Jill Romanoke
• Edith Heins shows both her fauvist-inspired representational paintings and some new decorative abstract paper pieces
• 3-D work on view: Wooden sculpture by Evan Reed; clothing in silk and cotton gauze by Paula Bryan
  

And in the JENKINS COMMUNITY GALLERY:

GLOBAL TREE PROJECT: SEEDING

Shinji Turner-Yamamoto shows the fruits—literally—of his collaboration with Barrett Elementary School science students, who were asked to sprout seeds derived from the food they eat every day. Installation includes live plants and drawings of what the students imagined those plants would eventually look like.

SHE’S SO ARTICULATE:
Black Women Artists Reclaim the Narrative
A show of work by emerging and established artists that challenges assumptions about black narrative-based art

Reception:                 Friday, June 13^th, 6:00 – 9:00pm
Show Dates:              June 10^th – July 19^th, 2008

SHE’S SO ARTICULATE sets out to expand how gallery-goers think about the relation of narrative to contemporary art by African-American women.  The show includes selected works and room-filling installations by 11 artists: Maya Asante, Renee Cox, Stephanie Dinkins, Djakarta, Nekisha Durrett, Torkwase Dyson, Faith Ringgold, Erika Ranee, Nadine Robinson, Renee Stout, and Lauren Woods.

Local collector and curator Henry Thaggert drew his inspiration for assembling these artists in part from the furor surrounding African-American artist Kara Walker—a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant winner who recently had a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  (Walker creates larger-than-life tableaus that refer to slave testimonials, historical novels and minstrelsy with caricatured silhouettes of antebellum slaves and their white masters.) 

“She’s So Articulate” attempts to expand the discussion beyond Walker’s concerns about slavery’s traumatic impact on its victims.  A series of bold photographs by Renee Cox strike a markedly different tone, depicting the artist’s super-heroine alter ego as she not only survives but thrives—and avenges subjugated brand icons Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.  Other artists use culturally cross-pollinated imagery and unconventional strategies for storytelling: Nekisha Durett’s multi-paneled installation invokes manga-styled protagonists to tell a Japanese-inspired, supernatural fairy tale; Lauren Woods’s The Teenth of June combines footage of the crowning of the first African-American Miss Texas with a ‘70s sci-fi movie soundtrack to create an oddly tense vignette.

The exhibition features both the traditional (such as story quilts and paintings inspired by African American history) as well as more novel new-media work (such as a Powerpoint presentation by Renee Stout).   Sound-based art and videos toy with the conventions of storytelling in pop music and cinema.

The show is co-curated by local collector Henry L. Thaggert and Arlington Art Center’s Director of Exhibitions, Jeffry Cudlin.  This is Thaggert’s second curatorial effort.  In February 2008, Thaggert was one of six notable D.C. collectors invited to participate in Collectors Select at the AAC.

IN THE WYATT GALLERY:

Scott Hutchison and Evan Reed

New works by resident painter/new media artist Scott Hutchison and wood sculptor and Georgetown art professor Evan Reed will be on view.

IN THE JENKINS COMMUNITY GALLERY:

Flat Mates: Transformer’s Flat Files at Arlington Arts Center

Featuring selected unframed works on paper by emerging artists participating in Transformer’s Flat File program.  Transformer is a Washington, DC non-profit contemporary arts organization: www.transformergallery.org