HEMPHILL is pleased to share a recent interview with Melvin Nesbitt Jr. through Canvas Rebel.  Melvin's solo exhibition will open at HEMPHILL is September 2025.

Melvin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

For years, I’d been taking painting classes and painting, with very little success. In an attempt to improve my paintings, I began making small collages of them first, to work out color and compositional issues, before painting on the canvas. I enjoyed the process and results of my collages more than painting. When I was invited to participate in a group show at DC Arts Center, my sister-in-law (and close friend) had just passed away. I was grief stricken and could not focus on painting so I decided to try to make a big collage instead. The process of collaging felt right for this moment in my life because I was hurting, feeling broken and fragmented.

I cut all of the pieces really small then meticulously placed them until I’d finished this meditative process or way of working. It was the first collage piece I’d shared publicly and, to my surprise, it sold on opening night! This gave me a huge confidence boost and I realized I had found my “Lane.”

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December 11, 2024

HEMPHILL presents “TWO X”, a group exhibition exploring the interconnectedness of art across generations. Running through December 21, this show invites viewers to reflect on how the dialogue between works by artists from different times can illuminate the shared essence of artistic expression.

Instead of adhering to conventional categorizations like period or style, “TWO X” focuses on pairings that highlight the personal and communal resonance of art, asking visitors to consider the broader narrative of creativity that connects us through time and across cultures. The exhibition aims to foster an appreciation for art’s enduring role in human experience, regardless of its context or origins.

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Mark Jenkins | December 10, 2024

The math is a bit more complicated in "Two X" than the Hemphill Artworks group show's title suggests. The selection presents 14 artists (six of them deceased) paired as seven duos. Several of the contributors, however, are represented by multiple works. Also, some of the pieces -- all made between 1960 and 2024 -- speak articulately to ones to which they're not officially linked.

Wayson R. Jones's "Kinshasa," for example, is an abstract 3D painting, rendered in two tones of blue, that's offered in dialogue with an untitled Leon Berkowitz picture whose soft, flat hues flow from blue to red to yellow. But the craggy relief forms in Jones's painting suggest the wave and criss-cross patterns in two white-on-white Robin Rose sculptural pictures. And Rose's icy palette harmonizes with the minimalism of a Ruri Yi painting that neatly arrays 12 lozenges in close shades of white and off-white.

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