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.
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.
Book Event & Signing
HEMPHILL Artworks
November 23, 2024
11 am
HEMPHILL is pleased to announce Julie Wolfe's newest publication in collaboration with Pan & The Dream, The Beholder. Please join us on Saturday, November 23, 2024, for the book event & signing with artist, Julie Wolfe.
HEMPHILL will be closed Thursday, November 28 - Saturday, November 30, 2024 in observance of the Thanksgiving Holiday. We wish you all safe and restful time with family and friends!
October 30, 2024
Artist, Tim Doud has installed a new artwork at Washington Union Station in the Metropolitan Lounge. This is a continuation of Doud's A Great Public Walk project with Art at Amtrak which began in September of 2023.
With sweeping strokes, Sophia Belkin's fabric art flows in unexpected directions
Tina Coplan for Home & Design Magazine
November/December 2024 Issue
Tina Coplan interviewed artist, Sophia Belkin, for FIBER OPTICS in Home & Design Magazine's November / December 2024 Issue.
"My inspiration has always come from nature," says Belkin. Dressed in a white top and verdigris-turquoise jeans that echo the smokey palette of her compositions, she explains the specialized nature of her art: "I like that contrast between the fluidity of the water elements of painting that are unpredictable, and the tight, controlled embroidery parts..."
Sophia Belkin will have a solo exhibition at HEMPHILL in January of 2025. Stay tuned for more information.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum | Andrew and Louise Carnegie Mansion
through August 10, 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Renée Stout's inclusion in Making Home - Smithsonian Design Triennial on view at Cooper Hewitt through August 10, 2025.
Artist Renée Stout describes this intricately adorned space as “a magical thing you can’t quite get inside of,” inviting visitors to linger at the threshold and share in her moment of longing.
The Kreeger Museum
On view October 26, 2024 - February 1, 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share The Collaborative | The DMV Collects the DMV on view at The Kreeger Museum through February 1, 2025.
This exhibition is presented under The Collaborative, a program developed by The Kreeger Museum in 2021 to support Washington-area artists.
HEMPHILL Artists Featured:
Rush Baker IV, Leon Berkowitz, William Christenberry, Steven Cushner, Gene Davis, Mary Early, Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Jacob Kainen, Kevin MacDonald, Renée Stout, Julie Wolfe
Cosmos Club
January 13, 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share FRANZ JANTZEN opening at the Cosmos Club on January 13, 2025. More details coming soon...
With an eye for recording how we travel through structured spaces, Franz Jantzen (American, born 1964) draws our attention to our own impact upon architecture and the environment.
ART TALKS - Panel Discussion
HEMPHILL Artworks
December 14, 2024
Please join us on December 14, 2024 during our group exhibition, TWO X for an ART TALKS Panel Discussion. More details coming soon...
Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
October 16, 2024
Rush Baker IV has been included in Maxwell Rabb's 10 Innovative Contemporary Landscape Painters for Artsy. Here, we highlight 10 contemporary artists whose practices are innovating landscape painting...
As the son of a Washington, D.C.–area politician and a delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Rush Baker IV wants his paintings to generate political discourse. In his exhibition at Hemphill Artworks in Washington, D.C., “Landscapes,” a selection of abstract works that use archival photographs and visual ephemerafrom the Civil War era comments on sociopolitical turmoil in the United States.
October 26, 2024
11 am
Please join us on Saturday, October 26, 2024, the final day of RUSH BAKER IV: Landscapes, for a gallery Q&A with the artist, Rush Baker IV and curator, Camille Brown.
This talk coincides with the exhibition, RUSH BAKER IV: Landscapes, on view at HEMPHILL through October 26, 2024. Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included educational lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
Seating is Limited. Doors open at 10:30 am, Talk begins at 11 am.
"Verdant Orb" is a sculpture by John Ruppert who creates works "inspired by the landscape, the processes that have formed it, and humanity’s relationship to it." Verdant Orb is made out of coated chain-link fence and invites the viewer to "reimagine where things begin and where they end."
We invite you to check it out for yourself, and plan to stop by the official ribbon cutting on Friday, September 27.
Verdant Orb was funded through DC Office of Planning's "Streets for People" grant program and was sponsored by Mount Vernon Triangle CID in collaboration with HEMPHILL Artworks, The Wilkes Company & Quadrangle Development Corporation.
Image: John Ruppert, Verdant Orb, 2024, Green vinyl powder coated chain-link fabric, 60 x 96 inches diameter
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
September 7 - December 8, 2024
Opening Reception: September 7, 2024 | 6 - 9 pm
MARK KELNER’S exhibition New American Landscapes explores a broader argument for understanding what nature, environment, and landscape are in contemporary art right now. As an artist who identifies as “writerly” in his approach to all things visual, who is to say that Kelner’s paintings, sourced from artifice, are any less earnest than what we consider to be still lifes or traditional landscapes? Above all, how do we define what a landscape is in the digital age, an era of forever text enabled by our smartphones? What is “art” supposed to look like in the time of alternative facts? And who, in reality, is the audience for this socially impactful work that engages viewers conceptually, emotionally, and physically?
Imagine walking into Times Square, but instead of neon lights and videos thrust upon you, a viewer is immersed in 26 painterly recreations of strip mall signs with thick impasto, saturated colors, bold lettering, and unintentional graphic design, remade as purposeful and highly stylized works of art. The idea here is a simple one: in the suburbs he grew up in, these signs are for Kelner, the equivalent of trees, if not markers of time...
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday | 11 am - 4 pm
Artist Talk: September 21, 2024 | 2 pm
by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post
August 9, 2024
The three-artist show at Hemphill Artworks features several things associated with the decorative arts: flowers, butterflies and embroidery. Another essential element, however, is decay, which makes “Belkin Caldwell Shull” a bit edgier than its nature motifs might suggest.
Sophia Belkin is a Baltimore artist who prints wetlands-inspired compositions on fabric, outlining certain portions with stitching. A former local resident and a longtime Hemphill artist, North Carolina’s Colby Caldwell makes camera-less woodland photographs directly with a digital scanner. Randy Shull, who divides his time between North Carolina and Mexico, hints at butterflies (“mariposa” in his Spanish-language titles) with sections of partly unraveled hammocks painted in vivid hues.
The last day to see BELKIN · CALDWELL · SHULL at HEMPHILL is Saturday, August 24, 2024. Please stop by the gallery to see the exhibition before it closes.
By Louis Jacobson for Washington City Paper
August 14, 2024
A three-artist exhibit is an atypical format for Hemphill Artworks, but you can see how it came to be. Textile artists Sophia Belkin and Randy Shull and digital photographer Colby Caldwell share a large format and an appreciation for abstraction. Of the three, Shull’s work is the most different. He creates hammocks like those typical of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where he spends much of the year; he then paints the hammocks and lets them “cure” in the sun...
The last day to see BELKIN · CALDWELL · SHULL at HEMPHILL is Saturday, August 24, 2024. Please stop by the gallery to see the exhibition before it closes.
Rush Baker IV: Phillips Collection Acquisition
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the recent acquisition of Rush Baker IV's painting, View From Charleston Harbor by the Phillips Collection. The painting is now a part of their permanent collection and is currently on view in Gallery 204.
Thank you to everyone who joined Rush at the Contemporaries Soirée at the Phillips Collection on Thursday, July 25, 2024 to celebrate the acquisition.
University of Iowa
2024 - 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share that Rush Baker IV has been announced as the Painting & Drawing Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa for the 2024-2025 academic year.
The Grant Wood Fellowship program currently provides three one-year fellowships in painting & drawing, printmaking, and interdisciplinary performance. Fellows are selected through a national competition and provided with furnished living quarters at the Grant Wood Art Colony. The application process is open in January of each year, with selections made in April.
Tracey Morgan Gallery
August 9 - September 21, 2024
Randy Shull: Black & White is on view at Tracey Morgan Gallery through September 21, 2024.
Shull has the unique ability to evoke both gravity and weightlessness within a single artwork, pouring thick layers of paint around the loose weave of handmade hammocks, a material that he has been incorporating in his work for several years. Hammocks are core to life in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico where Shull has lived part-time for the past 18 years, and where he maintains a studio in the historic center of Mérida. If art and hammocks are the vehicles of dreams, Shull’s work carves a path into the subconscious.
Click here to learn more about the exhibition.
Tracey Morgan Gallery
22 London Road
Asheville, NC 28803
Shull is featured in HEMPHILL's current exhibition, BELKIN · CALDWELL · SHULL, on view through August 24, 2024.
“I try to kind of have both of those things visible at once…in a single piece there’s some kind of sense of the duality and unity between growth and decay.”
When you venture into nature, you probably find yourself thinking about how naturally beautiful the environment looks. Artists strive to capture that beauty, and Tanya Marcuse does this by foraging and recreating natural scenes in her photography.
Directed and filmed by Mia Allen and Christopher Eadicicco.
Edited by Mia Allen.
Artwork by Tanya Marcuse, Book of Miracles.
Coley Gray for 730 DC | July 29, 2024
The studio of the late Jacob Kainen is located in a slightly run-down, light industrial area of Kensington, Maryland. It houses hundreds of his paintings, prints, and drawings, testimony to Kainen’s extraordinary career spanning from the 1930s until his death in 2001.
As accomplished a curator, scholar, champion and connector of fellow artists as he was a painter and printmaker, Kainen indelibly shaped DC’s postwar art scene through both his long-term post in the Smithsonian and his own oeuvre. Without Kainen, our art scene wouldn’t be what it is today.
But if you haven’t heard of him, you’re not alone. The director of one of DC’s leading contemporary art spaces admitted, when asked recently, she hadn’t either. No leading regional or national museums have done a major Kainen exhibit in more than a decade (though his longtime gallery Hemphill Artworks put up a show of his paintings and works on paper in late 2023), nor have prominent individual or institutional collectors made notable recent acquisitions of his works.
Now, a documentary film crew is trying to ensure he gets his due.
Click here to read the full article.
Please consider an IRS-approved tax-deductible donation to the project through our fiscal sponsor Women in Film & Video: Click on the Donate Now button at www.jacobkainen.com/donate
Occurring between full night and sunrise or between sunset and full night, twilight is the soft glow from the sky when the sun is below the horizon. This phenomenon is caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere.
Twilight 1, captures this moment with lines of radiating color that appear to be floating in the heavens. It is also reminiscent of the Magnitude of Equality series with rays of color that serve as systems of equal representation.
~Julie Wolfe
Please stop by the gallery to see Twilight 1 hanging in the front office.
JULIE WOLFE
Twilight 1, 2020
acrylic on canvas
36 x 48 inches
HEMPHILL is pleased to share HOW TANYA MARCUSE CAME TO CREATE AN EPICPHOTOGRAPHIC TRIPTYCH written for about photography.
Have you ever encountered a photography series that feels more like a poetic journey through time and nature? That’s precisely what Tanya Marcuse offers with her stunning triptych, “Fruitless | Fallen | Woven.” Her work is a mesmerizing exploration of growth, decay, and the intertwining of life and death. In this casual yet enlightening interview, Tanya opens up about her artistic evolution, the personal experiences that shaped her projects, and the intricate process behind her breathtaking tableaux.
Review by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post
June 14, 2024
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the latest review of FRANZ JANTZEN by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post.
As a photographer, Franz Jantzen can depict only visible phenomena. But that doesn’t mean the images in his Hemphill Artworks show are easily recognizable. Some of the pictures’ titles accurately convey their subjects, as in two details of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. But impressionistic techniques — thermal imaging, disorienting perspectives and digital image-stitching — present viewers a scene as only the D.C. artist can see it.
Thank you to everyone who joined us to celebrate the recent publication of JANET FRIES.
For those who were unable to attend our event on May 21, 2024, the book is available for purchase for $50.00 including shipping. Please contact us with the number of copies you would like to purchase along with your mailing address.
JANET FRIES includes 54 portraits including photographs of Marion Barry, President Joe Biden, former Senator John McCain, Angela Davis, Joan Didion, Maureen Dowd, Jane Fonda, Jerry Garcia and Harvey Milk among others.
Janet Fries | Portraits
126 pages with 44 black and white and 10 full color reproductions, with an introduction essay by the publisher.
Published by HEMPHILL Artworks.
9" x 12" soft-bound with foiled cover.
ISBN 978-0-9725406-3-6
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the review of FRANZ JANTZEN in Washington City Paper by Louis Jacobson.
[Franz Jantzen's] latest exhibition at Hemphill Artworks, Jantzen delves headlong into a new realm: abstraction. He begins with high-resolution digital images of paving stones in Pompeii or ancient architecture in the Sicilian town of Cefalù, then modifies their colors digitally, usually producing sequences of works that offer variations on a theme. Jantzen’s current approach is an extension of previous projects in which he’s taken overlapping images of a subject and then digitally stitched the pieces together. But in his new work, the object he documents is no longer the destination; rather, it’s a starting point for an intensely personal, and often obscure, journey of the mind.
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Julie Wolfe's most recent D&AD Pencil Award for her publication, Apophenia.
The book design for Julie Wolfe's "Apophenia" enhances content through layout and typography. Placing images side by side facilitates the emergence of patterns, unlocking apophenia—finding meaning in randomness. Featuring diverse subjects, from dreamy visuals to unknown species, presented as collaged images, it prompts fresh perceptions. Typeset in Genalth & Theinhardt for historical significance, it achieves a balance between extravagance and legibility. During printing, the substitution of magenta ink with fluorescent pink creates a dreamy color scape, adding a surreal quality to the design.
FRANZ JANTZEN is on view at HEMPHILL from May 18 - June 29, 2024.
A professional archivist is tasked with assessing materials of value, preserving them to the best of their ability with the technology available, and maintaining these collections so that the information can have an enduring impact on the communities and institutions that enshrine them. Franz Jantzen understands the responsibility implicitly, both professionally and in his artistic practice.
The exhibition of digital photography in FRANZ JANTZEN employs a systematic documentation process of image making that the artist has honed over decades.
Please enjoy these process-oriented videos of the work in this exhibition.
Please join us on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, for a book signing with photographer, Janet Fries.
Janet Fries' photographic portraits, shot on assignment for printed magazine publications between 1973 and 1991, were part of a swelling information wave just before the flood of shared cell phone photos, blog postings, text messages, influencers, and social media stills and reels of today's world. The nostalgic sensation of viewing the once fabulous and notorious captured by Fries kindles a fondness for the humanity of those pictured. Their visages are the content from a time before content would be entirely overwhelmed by the new speed and energy of today's frenzied media.
Many of Fries' subjects have passed on; some are still alive. Collectively, they hold a place in time, as they are of an era before the peculiarities of the current information landscape. They possess personality, regardless of their accomplishments. Together, Fries' portraits give us insight into how we defined a particular period and raise questions about how the current portrayal of the famous has changed us.
This event coincides with the exhibition, FRANZ JANTZEN, on view at HEMPHILL through June 29, 2024.
Gallery Talk at HEMPHILL Artworks
April 27, 2024
11 am - 12:30 pm
Please join us on Saturday, April 27, 2024, the final day of STEVEN CUSHNER, for a gallery talk with the artist and painting conservator, Jay Krueger.
The discussion between Cushner and Krueger is sure to attract a working artist-audience. If you are not an artist, you will find the insider conversation fascinating. Space is limited.
This talk coincides with the exhibition, STEVEN CUSHNER, on view at HEMPHILL through April 27, 2024. Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included educational lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
Willem de Looper paintings are being presented by the de Looper Foundation for the Arts @ EXPO Chicago 2024. The fair takes place from April 11 - 14, 2024.
Stacy J. Platt
March 13, 2024
HEMPHILL is pleased to share that Tanya Marcuse's exhibition, Laws of Nature, has been reviewed by Stacy J. Platt for Hyperallergic. The exhibition is on view at the Denver Botanical Gardens through March 31, 2024.
DENVER — “Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype?”
This utterance from the Reeve in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) is most often re-translated as “Until we are rotten, we cannot be ripe.” The quote is apt to Tanya Marcuse’s photography, as seen in Laws of Nature, on display at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Inspired by various imaginings of what the untended paradise of Eden became in a Postlapsarian world, the exhibition consists of a video and 11 photographs, eight of which are mural-sized, eye-popping prints of immersive breadth and detail.
By Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post
February 23, 2024
Many color-field abstractionists have rejected the notion that their pictures look like landscapes, but sometimes the resemblance is hard to deny. Most of the vivid canvases in Hemphill Artworks’ “Willem de Looper: Paintings 1972-1975” were made soon after the Dutch-born D.C. artist’s 1973 trip to the American Southwest. The large pictures sweep horizontally and are usually in the colors of stone, sand and clay. (There are also three heavily blue ones, at least one of which predates the excursion.) The paintings are not literal landscapes, but the inspiration is palpable.
by Isis Davis-Marks for Artsy
February 15, 2024
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Rush Baker IV's inclusion in 29 Emerging Black Artists to Discover This Black History Month by Isis Davis-Marks for Artsy.
Using acrylic, resin, and found photography, Rush Baker IV uses different materials to create images that reflect the chaotic and quick-changing nature of our current era. Baker draws from diverse source material, ranging from the novelist Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to the abstract painter Sam Gilliam’s dynamic pieces, to create compelling commentary about the environment and current events.
by Phil Hutinet for HillRag
February 13, 2023
In contrast to the exhibition “Willem de Looper: Paintings 1968 – 1972,” presented two years ago at HEMPHILL, “Paintings 1972 – 1975” marks a notable evolution in de Looper’s artistic approach. This transformation sets him apart from his Washington Color School peers, a group largely known for maintaining consistent painting methods throughout their careers.
In 1973, post initial acclaim, de Looper and his wife Frauke embarked on a cross-country journey across the United States. The expansive deserts and towering mountains of the American Southwest profoundly impacted the artist, proving a revelation for him as a DC resident who emigrated from Europe.
“Paintings 1972 – 1975,” stands as a distinct phase in the artist’s career or what the HEMPHILL calls “a second act,” affirming the artist’s enduring commitment to innovation and depth.
Hershberger Art Gallery at Goshen College
January 21, 2024 - March 14, 2024
HEMPHILL is pleased to share that artist, Tom Ashcraft is serving as the 2023-2024 Eric Yake Kenagy Visiting Artist at Goshen College in Goshen, IN. Ashcraft's collaborative exhibition, Du Quoditien is on view in the Hershberger Art Gallery at Goshen College through March 14, 2024. There will be an evening artist talk on March 12 at 7 pm in the Music Center’s Rieth Recital Hall on “Navigating a Public Practice,” followed by an exhibition reception.
Saturday, February 3, 2024
11am
Meet at Gate A
RSVP to gallery@hemphillartworks.com
The artwork commissioned for Union Station by the Art at Amtrak program, A Great Public Walk, considers the local, national and international spectrum of those who pass through the station, as well as the historical significance of Washington DC.
DC based artist Tim Doud took into consideration French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant's plan for our nation’s capital. The centerpiece of L’Enfant’s plan was a great “public walk” in the form of wide avenues, public squares and inspiring buildings. Doud took that template and then inserted cropped images of clothing patterns, logos and textiles that were worn by people he observed moving through Union Station and throughout the city.
By Kriston Capps, The Washington Post
December 13, 2023
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi might be two painters.
One is the hand behind the gorgeous tazhib: intricate patterns of illumination borrowed from Islamic art forms. In her paintings, Ilchi designs floral and lattice motifs based on Persian crafts, drawing on her experience growing up in Tehran.
The other painter is experimental: an abstract-oriented artist looking at new ways to build up surfaces. This painter produces clouds and stains in a toxic palette, making bold textured works that look almost hazardous to the touch.
On Ilchi’s surfaces, violent abstraction and delicate illumination jockey for significance. Her perfectly hyphenated paintings take the form of surreal landscapes. The stars in her skies peek through arabesque ornamentation. The mountains on her horizons rise over luminous veils.
Click here to read the full review.
November 13, 2023
Author Rosana Lukauskaitė
Published in Review from Lithuania
Meanwhile the exhibition ‘The Glow’, curated by Agnė Jonkutė and shown at the Pamėnkalnio galerija until November 4, delves into the essence of colour within minimalist art... Julie Wolfe’s Summary of Evidence transforms pages from William Matthews’ 1939 book Climate and Evolution into a visual study of change and endurance. By treating the pages with chlorophyll and subjecting them to sunlight, Wolfe creates a natural gradation of green hues, an artistic commentary perhaps on the interplay between knowledge and the inexorable forces of nature.
November 16th, 2023
Artist Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi investigates invasion and equilibrium, weaving harmony through tension, nature in celestial experiences, and dreams into reality in her newest exhibition on display at HEMPHILL. Ilchi’s paintings merge seemingly contrasting spaces as a commentary on sociopolitical landscapes, drawing inspiration from her own Iranian American heritage.
November 10, 2023
Massive curving forms, abstract but suggestive of nature, link the styles of sculptor Rachel Rotenberg and painter Steven Cushner. The concurrent surveys of the two veteran artists’ work at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center are extensive, but not career spanning. Both exhibitions focus on pieces made in the past few years.
By Murat Cem Mengüç, Hyperallergic
October 10, 2023
The last retrospective of Jacob Kainen’s work took place in 1993, during which he was interviewed by the Washington Post and referred to himself as a “fatalist.” He expressed indifference towards the prospect of dying as a relatively unknown painter, despite leaving behind a substantial body of work that many knew of. In that same interview, he predicted that his work would be discovered in the 2020s. Hemphill Artworks, which represents Kainen’s estate, periodically showcases his work in solo exhibitions, contributing to the realization of that prediction...The exhibition primarily features his large abstract paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to a few smaller pieces from the 1950s.
By Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
October 13, 2023
The Jacob Kainen paintings now on view at Hemphill Artworks date from 1952 to 1988, yet altogether skip the 1960s. The Washington artist (1909-2001) is known as an abstractionist, but he devoted much of that decade to representational work. Only hints of that interest are visible in this selection, which consists principally of 1980s color-field paintings. Their forms can be either loose or precisely geometric, but their colors are always softly layered and seemingly weathered.
Click here to read the full review.
By Phil Hutinet, HillRag
October 3, 2023
The exhibition [at Hemphill] commences with a selection of paintings from 1951 and 1953, accompanied by a series of paintings on paper that illuminate the rapid evolution of Kainen’s innovative abstract style. Notably the masterpiece “Mr. Kafka” (1970) draws its creative impulse from suspended clothing, crafting a compelling representation of the human form. This composition became a recurring motif, revisited by Kainen in various sketches and etchings. Throughout the ensuing decades, particularly the 1970s and 1980s, Kainen navigated between periods of lyrical and geometric abstraction, employing meticulous layering techniques to craft compositions that evoke ethereal, floating elements.
Join us on Saturday, October 28th on the final day of the exhibition Jacob Kainen for a first-hand look at selections of prints spanning Kainen’s career. Prints from the 1940s to the 1990s will be presented in the gallery space in the midst of the exhibition. Enjoy the exuberance of Kainen’s etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and silkscreens.
September 14 - November 11, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Gallery Associate, Nicole Maloof's inclusion in (Not) Strictly Painting 14 at McLean Project for the Arts on view through November 11, 2023.
(Not) Strictly Painting is a juried biennial exhibition celebrating the depth and breadth of paintings–or works related in some way to painting–from artists throughout the mid-Atlantic area. Now in its 14th iteration, Strictly Painting is one of the region’s most important painting exhibitions. (Not) Strictly Painting will be juried by Tim Brown, Director of IA&A at Hillyer.
October 7 – October 29, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share The Oracle Said, "Be Still," curated by artist Renée Stout at IA&A at Hillyer, on view through October 29, 2023.
During the height of Covid, I created a print that featured a disembodied head (the ‘oracle’), in which it suggested in a speech bubble that we should ‘be still.’ In that stillness I had hoped that we would all take the time to care for ourselves, reassess our lives and re-focus on the things that are most important...
~ Renée Stout
Featured Artists: Cheryl Edwards, Sharon Farmer, Cianne Fragione, Adrienne Gaither, Elaine Qiu, Ellyn Weiss, Joyce Wellman, Trevor Young
November 19, 2023 - March 31, 2024
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the exhibition, Tanya Marcuse: Laws of Nature at the Denver Botanic Gardens, on view from November 19, 2023 through March 31, 2024.
Tanya Marcuse’s large-scale photographs evoke awe and wonder for the natural world.
American University's Studio Art MFA program presents an artist talk with Steven Cushner in Katzen 201
Steven and Stan are childhood friends. They studied art together as high school students and went off to art school. Steven has lived in Washington DC for 45 years. After earning his MFA, Steven spent 10 years as an art handler, then began a long teaching career. He has lived and worked in the same house and studio for close to 40 years. Stan has worked as a framer, museum exhibition specialist, studio assistant, gallery owner, and usher at Wrigley Field. Between them, they have 90 years of living and working experience in the art world and have many stories to share.
Presented in conjunction with CUSHNER on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center through December 10.
October 6 - November 4, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Julie Wolfe's inclusion in LACONICA: THE GLOW at Pamėnkalnio Galerija in Lithuania. The exhibition was curated by Agnė Jonkutė and is on view from October 6 - November 4, 2023.
The idea for the exhibition came from a rethinking of the strict black/white monochrome of the 2021 Laconica Biennial exhibitions, which led to the contrasting choice to reflect on the meaning of colourfulness in the language of minimalist art...
The Glow is one of the events of the Laconica biennial of visual art. The Biennial was conceived as a space and a platform for artists who develop minimal/minimalist ways of thinking, using such keywords as reduction of form, reserved narrative, abstractness, aesthetics of silence, etc. The events of the 2021 Laconica Biennial were interested in the links between monochrome and minimalist poetry. This year's exhibitions focus on the field of phenomena of colour and olfactory (scents) art.
October 7, 2023
2 - 3 pm
Is it the fight of the century, a marriage of convenience, or the complete happiness package? The relationship between architecture and art, or better said, the conflict that can arise between the ambitions of the artist and those of the architect, can work to create a sublime or less than excellent experience. We've all seen it go wrong — "Oh look, the pillows on the sofa match the curtains," and felt embarrassed. Join us for a conversation between two creators at the height of their careers as they speak on integrating art and architecture...
This talk coincides with the exhibition, CUSHNER, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center through December 10, 2023.
Mount Vernon CID is proud to partner with Exposed DC to curate a photo exhibit with four local photographers titled, "24 Hours of #LifeInMVT". Get the first look at the new MVT Photo Walk on Thursday, September 7 and hear directly from the photographers about their work and process.
Attendees are encouraged to gather at HEMPHILL Artworks prior to the tour to take a look at their current exhibits and enjoy complimentary iced tea and lemonade before heading outside to tour the photo walk.
The MVT Photo Walk was made possible through the Office of Planning Streets for People Grant Program.
Art at Amtrak Program to Debut at Washington Union Station in September
August 16, 2023
New initiative commissions regional artists to create large-scale artwork
WASHINGTON – Amtrak is expanding its celebrated year-round, public-art program to Washington Union Station with work from multidisciplinary visual artist, Tim Doud. Art at Amtrak will offer a variety of visual works through rotating exhibitions at the transportation hub.
Doud, a District resident and professor at American University, will create the first site-specific installation titled, “A Great Public Walk,” to transform the wall along the station’s customer waiting areas between Gates A and L, and on the 30 windows in the hallway leading to the lower-level section of station. More information on Doud can be found here.
The art installation will open in September and remain on display until winter 2024. Art at Amtrak is among several near-term projects underway at Washington Union Station...
More information about Art at Amtrak can be found here.
Click here to read Amtrak's press release.
August 11, 2023
Hemphill Artworks organized a summer group show titled “Jump, Twist, Flow … ” The selection features some of the gallery’s current artists, but most of the highlights are by painters and sculptors, primarily local, who emerged in the 1950s or ’60s.
All but one of the pieces hang on a wall, but many of them curve forcefully away from that surface. The show begins with a Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi triptych that contrasts mosaic-like patterns with watery areas. Equally aquatic, yet fully abstract, is Willem de Looper’s “Trough Blues,” which glows as if sunlight is penetrating its azure currents.
Click here to read the full review.
Jump, Twist, Flow... closes at HEMPHILL this Saturday, August 19, 2023.
Special Collections Gallery, Charles Marvin Fairchild Memorial Gallery
July 17 - October 13, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Julie Wolfe's inclusion in Scientific Illustration: Sampling Across the Collections at the Special Collections Gallery in the Georgetown University Library.
This exhibition brings together some of the most magnificent examples of scientific illustration in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections, as well as some of the more curious and most speculative. Works of art, influenced by and influencing the sciences, share space with the illustrations throughout the exhibition.
August 12 - September 24, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Tanya Marcuse's inclusion in Here Now: Contemporary Photographers of the Hudson Valley at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. The exhibition is on view through September 24, 2023.
An exhibition of acclaimed Hudson Valley photo-based contemporary artists who each employ various approaches and techniques to relay stories — primarily of differing cultural backgrounds, identity issues, and a relationship to nature. Their works vary in terms of aesthetics — ranging from highly refined formalism, to capturing candid moments of current societal mores. The collective works present a compelling and insightful reflection into this present moment.
American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
September 9 - December 10, 2023
CUSHNER refers to and builds upon a solidly stylistic through-line from Steven Cushner’s past work to present work. More importantly, through the conscious manipulation of an array of subtlety, color choices and scale, Cushner pulls new experiences from his established style of painting. This is not a retrospective of the artist’s forty-plus year career; it’s a selection of what is happening in his studio today. The pieces range from small scale works on paper and wood cut prints to large scale paintings. The exhibition presents a mature artist at a powerful moment in his career.
AU Museum partnered with HEMPHILL Artworks to develop this showing of Cushner’s more recent works in one of the largest exhibitions of his work to date. CUSHNER will give viewers a rare chance to view some of the artist’s monumental paintings up close.
May 13 - November 12, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the inclusion of Renée Stout's, Red Room at Five (A), in The Performative Self Portrait at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI.
This exhibition explores the work of photographers who turn the camera back upon themselves. From capturing themselves in shadows and reflections to trying on alternative or speculative identities, The Performative Self-Portrait explores the body as material and medium and photography as vehicle to consider ways artists use self-portraiture to enact the self, question history, and articulate identity. Made between 1930 and the present, works in the exhibition range from new acquisitions to older works on view for the first time.
Steven Cushner was commissioned to create a monumental canvas for the entrance hall of the new United States Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, designed by Ennead Architects. "Endless Fountain," completed in 2020, in dialogue with the new Embassy's vast public-facing space, is an endlessly flowing composition influenced by concepts of moving waves, cascading water, landscape forms, and the horizon where water may meet both land and sky.
Thursday, July 27, 2023
5 - 7 PM
Open to the public
Please join us in the gallery for the launch of Show & Tell Volume 2. Meet the creators and the artists featured in this issue.
Mary Early
Howie Lee Weiss
Akemi Maegawa
Kyrae Dawaun
Thomas Bunnell
Collectors Philip Barlow and Lisa Gilotty
studio visits, conversation, photo shoots, and fun
Published by
Steven Cushner and Dan Treado
By Louis Jacobson
June 22, 2023
Anne Rowland works from Northern Virginia, but her latest creations span the globe, thanks to the explosion of satellite and aerial images available to those who wish to look. Rowland uses these as grist for works as large as 74 inches x 56 inches, first putting the raw images through an almost literal blender of Photoshop-type software. The resulting works look different up close and afar; seen from inches away, details like stands of trees, suburban housing developments, and even location tags are visible, but from a distance, they offer a patchwork of circular forms.
Please join us in the gallery for a Book Event with Pete Voelker to celebrate his project, Time Elapsed Time Remaining.
Time Elapsed Time Remaining is a Limited Edition book featuring photographs taken by the artist over the course of multiple trips to the border of EU and Russia.
Please join us in the gallery for a Book Signing Event to celebrate Julie Wolfe's newest launch, Apophenia.
The forthcomimg book, Apophenia taps into the optical unconscious to reveal something essential about perception.
Through juxtaposing images across the pages, patterns emerge through free association, unleashing apophenia—the process by which humans make meaning out of incidental images.
There will be a limited number of books available for purchase at the event on June 15, 2023.
June 7 - August 28, 2023
Presented in collaboration with Hemphill Artworks, Checkin' Out Mingering Mike: D.C.'s Imaginary Soul Superstar features hand-drawn album covers, drawings, and song lyrics by self-taught Washington, D.C. artist known only by his alter-ego, Mingering Mike. On view at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library are fine art prints of thirteen albums, all originally drawn between 1968 and 1975, as well as a selection of original albums and handmade cabaret posters.
A Conversation with Wayson R. Jones & Client Raiser at HEMPHILL Artworks.
Join us in the gallery for a discussion with artist Wayson R. Jones about the evolution of his art practice and a viewing of select paintings in the Viewing Room.
Open to the public
Join us at HEMPHILL for an informal gallery tour with artist, Anne Rowland to discuss her current exhibition, Pictures.
Exhibition on view May 20 - July 1, 2023
Presented by HEMPHILL Artworks & Washington, DC History & Culture
Meet at HEMPHILL 434 K Street NW, the tour will depart promptly at 2:15 pm and proceed East on K Street.
Cultures are structures. Materials. Words. Actions. Habits. Cultures absorb memory as stones absorb heat. Cultures have a gravitational weight, and history casts shadows. We walk in patterned light and dark.
Edward Ingebretsen holds advanced degrees in theology, philosophy, and education, and a PhD from Duke University in American literature and culture. He teaches philosophy, and ethics, and focuses particularly on animal justice issues. He has lived in DC since he began teaching at Georgetown University in 1986.
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY
May 6 - October 29, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Tanya Marcuse's Inclusion in Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstoe & Her Circle / Contemporary Practices at The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY.
Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle/ Contemporary Practices is a two-part exhibition and accompanying publication illuminating the artistic contributions and perspectives of women. The project will reinsert the accomplished 19th-century American artist Susie Barstow (1836-1923) into the history of the Hudson River School of landscape painting and present work by contemporary artists who expand and challenge how we think about “land” and “landscape” today.
May 25, 2023
6 - 8 PM
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the launch of Julie Wolfe's newest book, Apophenia. Printed Matter, Chelsea will hold an event on May 25, 2023 from 6 - 8 pm to celebrate the launch.
Join us for the launch of Julie Wolfe’s Apophenia at Printed Matter Chelsea. Wolfe’s book taps into the optical unconscious to reveal something essential about perception. Through juxtaposing images across the pages, patterns emerge through free association, unleashing apophenia—the process by which humans make meaning out of incidental images.
March 23, 2023 - October 8, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Renée Stout's inclusion in Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at The African American Museum in Philadelphia on view through October 8, 2023.
The African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts have invited 20 artists to join in a bold collaboration and create new works that respond to the critical question: Is the sun rising or setting on the experiment of American democracy?
Mar 24 – Aug 13, 2023
Main Building
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the inclusion of William Christenberry's, Fruit Stand Sidewalk, Memphis, Tennessee, 1962, in The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hoppson view at The Menil Collection through August 13, 2023.
Artists, Curators and Friends Reflect on Life and Work of Master Printer Lou Stovall: An 'Outstanding Fine Artist' and 'Heartbeat of Washington, D.C., Art Scene'
Victoria L. Valentine for Culture Type
April 7, 2023
Please click here to read the full article.
February 17, 2023
The capsule-shaped forms in Ruri Yi’s hard-edge abstractions are arranged so methodically that the occasional deviation can appear dramatic — or comic. In her Hemphill Artworks show, the Korea-born Baltimore artist stacks or lines up identically shaped tablets of various flat, bright colors on white backgrounds with machine-like precision.
February 20, 2023
NASHVILLE — Like nearly all the hurry-past places in this vast country, the Alabama most people experience is only what can be glimpsed from the window of a car on the way to somewhere else. Hale County is a little different. For nearly 90 years, this county in the Alabama Black Belt has been chronicled in the work of some of this country’s most celebrated artists.
“Desire Paths: William Christenberry & RaMell Ross” brings together two of them in an exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York City through Saturday. Mr. Ross, an interdisciplinary artist, moved to Hale County in 2009. His transcendent 2018 documentary film, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was nominated for an Academy Award. He counts Mr. Christenberry as a major influence.
Mr. Christenberry, who grew up in Alabama and died in 2016, felt the same way about the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee. Their staggeringly original book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” emerged from a three-week visit to Hale County in 1936.
February 4 - May 21, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the exhibition, The Barlow Gilotty Collection at the American University Museum, on view February 4, 2023 through May 21, 2023. Please find more information below.
Barlow and Gilotty celebrate the connection between collector and artist and community. This is a deeply considered collection that includes data points which highlight its organization and thoughtful structure. Their dedicated support of local artists is reflected in their deliberate inclusion of younger and diverse artists, which has resulted in an important overview during this time period in our cultural history. The breadth of their enthusiasm and love of art in its many forms celebrates our artistic community.
On view through March 19, 2023
Carolyn Small Alper (1927 - 2020) served as a trustee of The Phillips Collection from 2009-2020. She contributed her insights and experience as an artist and interior designer through her participation as a member of the Arts Committee. Carolyn studied art history and painting under the guidance of Washington Color School artists Morris Louis and Gene Davis. In 1971, Carolyn founded and supported the Alper Initiative for Washington Art at American University.
Carolyn was an astute art collector and a generous philanthropist, supporting the Phillips' Centennial Campaign with a major endowment gift establishing the Carolyn Alper Fund for Contemporary Art.
This gallery presents a selection of works Carolyn gifted and bequeathed to the museum over the past decade.
Please visit The Phillips Collection before March 19, 2023 to see Celebrating Carolyn Alper.
February 20 - June 11, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Joseph Shetler's solo exhibition at The Silva Gallery with Latela Curatorial, In Consideration. The exhibition is on view from February 20 - June 11, 2023.
Primarily recognized for his monochromatic drawings and paintings, Joe Shetler introduces color in a new body of work for In Consideration. Shetler’s signature linework, delicate and precise in its formulation of abstract planes and grids, seemed to simultaneously float above and ground into its canvases. Introducing color as a participative subject in his work, Shetler presents a stark contrast between the color-filled backgrounds and white surfaces allocated for linework. The color fields are strong and attention-calling, yet they seem to elevate the drawing surface of each painting. Which field is more present? Or, can we consider how they exist together?
February 11 - March 25, 2023
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Tim Doud's inclusion in INTERLUDE at The Kreeger Museum on view through March 25, 2023.
INTERLUDE features fifteen artists of the STABLE studios - Nancy Daly, Leigh Davis, Rex Delafkaran, Tim Doud, Adrienne Gaither, Aziza Gibson-Hunter, K. Lorraine Graham, Jean Kim, Leah Lewis, Matthew Mann, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Gail Shaw-Clemons, Molly Springfield, Andy Yoder, and Ying Zhu. These artists meet through their approaches and applications to mirror, respond to, and complement each other. This interlude is the moment in-between collective past and future and the present moment of the artist's practice. Working across mediums, the artists present new work and previously created work to be in conversation with the museum's permanent collection. This exhibition is presented under The Collaborative, a program developed by The Kreeger Museum in 2021 to support Washington-area artists.
The exhibition was curated by Maleke Glee.
WETA Arts celebrates Black History Month with a special episode about Alma Thomas, the remarkable Black artist and educator who helped shape the Washington, D.C. arts scene in the 20th century. Thomas’ art provided her nationwide acclaim. Yet even as her national recognition continues, it’s in her hometown where her impact as an educator, pioneer, advocate and role model can be felt daily.
Five top American artists were commissioned to capture their impressions of President Jimmy Carter's inauguration January 20, 1977.
The 1977 Presidential Inaugural Committee commissioned Jacob Lawrence, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth to capture the event for a boxed portfolio of signed prints which were limited to an edition of 100.
The committee used the proceeds to keep museums open later and to help pay for many free cultural events in Washington during the inaugural festival, January 18-22, 1977.
By Siddhartha Mitter
January 12, 2023
[Hale County] is where William Christenberry, who grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa with roots in the county, returned each summer for four decades, beginning in the 1960s, making quiet images of desolate buildings in landscape that have become photography canon.
RaMell Ross is Hale County’s latest visual chronicler and, as he puts it, “liberated documentarian.” He moved to Greensboro, Ala., in 2009 and lived there continuously for three years, teaching in a G.E.D. program, coaching basketball and photographing. Though now a professor at Brown University, he has made the county a long-term home and the fulcrum of his art projects.
Join us on Saturday, January 28, 2023 | 3-5pm to meet Patricia Z. Smith and view prints from her recent publication:
Photoscapes And The Egg
Published 2022
104 pages, 86 color plates, Hardbound cloth cover, 7.7” x 9.25”
RSVP to gallery@hemphillartworks.com
Current exhibitions, OTHO D. BRANSON: Paintings and TIM DOUD: Prolepsis, are reviewed by Mark Jenkins in The Washington Post SUNDAY ARTS section on December 18, 2022.
Mingering Mike was recently featured in an article written by Liam Ward for Messy Nessy that details the artist's "legendary" catalogue of handmade record covers.
HEMPHILL is pleased to announce its representation of Ruri Yi.
Join us in the gallery for a conversation between artist Tim Doud and curator Milena Kalinovska on the occasion of Doud's Exhibition "Prolepsis," on view November 14 - December 23, 2022.
Seating is limited and reservations are required.
In the spring of 2017, Anne Rowland documented Arlington’s waterfront beginning with the County line at Chain Bridge all the way to Four Mile Run. Comprised of multiple images digitally assembled from both an iPhone and a remotely-triggered point-and-shoot camera attached to a 20-foot-tall bamboo pole, Rowland’s photographs capture the diversity of Arlington’s Potomac River waterfront from bucolic forests to urban parks. The boundary defined by the Potomac is part of Arlington’s network of public spaces and a future potential focus area for public art. View North from Chain Bridge was acquired by Arlington Public Art’s Portable Works Collection and can be viewed in the County Board Room at the Bozman Government Center, 2100 Clarendon Boulevard.
HEMPHILL is pleased to announce that a limited number of the inaugural issue of SHOW and TELL are available for purchase in the gallery.
Published by artists Steven Cushner and Dan Treado, SHOW and TELL is a zine that details artists, artists's studios, and the spaces where creative people make work. Issue No. 1 features artists Rush Baker IV, Robin Rose, Kate Samworth, Robert Yi, and Heide Trepanier.
This beautiful and informative volume illustrates the vitality and importance of North Carolina's contemporary art scene, showcasing the creation, collection, and celebration of art in all its richness and diversity. Featuring profiles of individual artists, compelling interviews, and beautiful full-color photography, this book tells the story of the state's evolution through the lens of its art world and some of its most compelling figures.
Current exhibition, JULIE WOLFE: Opposing Forces, is reviewed by Mark Jenkins in The Washington Post SUNDAY ARTS section on October 16, 2022.
Special Event & Fundraiser with artist Steven Cushner at
Art Enables
2204 Rhode Island Avenue NW
Washington DC 20018
Join us in the gallery for a conversation between artists Julie Wolfe and Tim Doud on the occasion of Wolfe's Exhibition "Opposing Forces," on view September 10 - October 29, 2022. Wolfe and Doud will walk visitors through the gallery to discuss the conception of Wolfe's newest body of work and the sequencing of the artworks in this exhibition.
Doors will open at 10am and the program will begin promptly at 10:15. Please note there will be no seating provided, the speakers will move throughout the gallery during the talk. Attendance is limited and reservations are required.
Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included educational lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
HEMPHILL is pleased to announce its representation of Tim Doud.
Through its Contemporaries Acquisition Fund, The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC recently acquired an artwork by Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi. This mixed media artwork incorporates ornamentations of Tazhib and abstract floods of color, fusing both Western and Persian art traditions. Plan a visit to experience the artist's newest work in person.
Local non-profit, District Bridges Cleveland Park is hosting a fundrasing event featuring a chance to win the rare opportunity for a guided tour of Bill Christenberry’s Cleveland Park studio.
The Washington Post Sunday Arts, Gallery Reviews
August 7, 2022
The paintings in the Robert Novel retrospective at Hemphill Artworks are austere and geometric, yet also playful. Nearly all the untitled abstracts are black and white, but they’re in multiple shades of those hues, and occasionally include planks of gray. And though the forms are simple, straightedge and mostly quadrilateral, they’re handled in ways that hint at 3D perspective. The paintings were made between 2015 and 2020 by Novel, a longtime Washingtonian who died in 2021.
This exhibition unites almost a century of work by 49 women and nonbinary artists in a range of media drawn exclusively from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. Washington, DC artists Alma Thomas and Anne Truitt are among the diverse group being exhibited, some for the first time, in this full floor presentation.
Join us in the gallery to view and discuss Julie Wolfe's recent limited edition artist books and folios incorporating silkscreen, digital printing and collage. Recent publications include Cradling the Singing Bird (2022), Wonderland: The Optical Unconscious (2022), Completing the Bestiary (2022), Travelogue (2021), and Wildfires & Dreamfields (2020).
Roberta Smith for The New York Times
Sam Gilliam, a pioneering abstract painter best known for his lusciously stained Drape paintings, which took his medium more fully into three-dimensions than any other artist of his generation, died on Saturday at his home in Washington. He was 88.
Click here for the full obituary.
Michael O'Sullivan for The Washington Post
Sam Gilliam, a Washington artist who helped redefine abstract painting by liberating canvas from its traditional framework and shaking it loose in lavish, paint-spattered folds cascading from ceilings, stairwells and other architectural elements, died June 25 at his home in the District. He was 88.
Click here for the full obituary.
"Now, What is Photography?" a panel discussion conducted on June 8, 2022, brought together three viewpoints from the art world, journalism, and academia. The participants addressed the subtle and dramatic changes in photography brought about by digital technology and social media. The panelists included Vesna Pavlović, a fine art photographer, educator, and recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award; Lucian Perkins, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist; and Colby Caldwell, whose current exhibition was created with the radical use of standard office digital scanners in place of a camera.
Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included educational lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
Click here to view (approximate running time: 1 hour 12 minutes)
By Mark Jenkins
Experimental photographer Colby Caldwell has two interests that might seem incompatible: nature and digital distortion. For his Hemphill Artworks show, “over & under,” Caldwell hauled flatbed scanners into the woods to grab close-ups of the forest floor or, less often, panoramas of sky framed by treetops. The bulk of these wax-coated pictures are crisp and detailed, but they’re partly tinted in electric shades of red and pink and punctuated by swipes and swooshes of random pixels. Here and there, traditional nature imagery melts into computer-generated incoherence.
By Louis Jacobson
Caldwell’s forest floor images live up to their early promise, depicting natural elements within wavy glitches, unreal pink-hued distortions, and adventures in broken vertical hold settings. One work, “otff_(23),” includes a spectrum-like pattern that could be a crypto-homage to the Washington Color School, while another, “otff_(12),” suggests a Robert Motherwell abstract expressionist canvas limned in shades of brown and pink. But Caldwell’s photographs of the forest canopy and the sky more than hold their own. The skyward images are more conventional—essentially free of the digital glitchiness seen in the forest-floor works; as such, they offer a respite from the dizzying brambles below.
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the acquisition of William Christenberry's Memory Form II by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
William Christenberry (1936–2016) is best known for his artistic exploration of place, in particular the Black Belt region of Alabama, where he spent his childhood in Hale County. Working in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and assemblage, Christenberry focused on architecture, abandoned structures, and nature, and he studied the psychology and effects of place and memory. The National Gallery of Art has acquired the sculpture Memory Form II (1997–1998), a gift from Stephen Bennett Phillips in honor of Sandra Deane Christenberry, the artist’s widow.
Open to the public
Join us for a walk-through and discussion of the exhibition over & under with artist, Colby Caldwell. Complimentary coffee from our neighbors at Brew'd.
Exhibition on view May 14 - June 25, 2022
Seating is Limited, Registration Required.This event is currently at capacity, please register for the waiting list. In the event a ticket becomes available we will notify you by June 7.
"Now, What is Photography?" a panel discussion, brings together three viewpoints from the art world, journalism, and academia. The participants will address the subtle and dramatic changes in photography brought about by digital technology and social media. The panelists include Vesna Pavlović, a fine art photographer, educator, and recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award; Lucian Perkins, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist; and Colby Caldwell, whose current exhibition was created with the radical use of standard office digital scanners in place of a camera.
"Now, What is Photography?" is presented in conjunction with Colby Caldwell: over & under.
Since 1998, the ART TALKS series at Hemphill has included educational lectures on topics such as collecting for beginners, artist talks, and panel discussions on issues in contemporary art.
You might know what Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: Winter sounds like—but what does it look like? The KIA’s Chief Curator, Rehema Barber, will join artist Linling Lu for an in-depth conversation about her artistic practice, which gives color, shape, and form to the music that plays in her studio while she works. Vivaldi is just one of her many musical muses.
Linling Lu: Musical Meditations, on view through June 5, 2022, contains a series of paintings created from 2019 to the present, many of which were composed during the two-year period of the ongoing pandemic.
Click here to reserve a ticket.
Photo Credit: Colleen Woolpert, Courtesy of Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
HEMPHILL is pleased to share an interview with Tanya Marcuse conducted by Truth in Photography. Please find an excerpt below.
Truth in Photography: When you're making photographs, what are you trying to do? What's your goal? What do you look for?
Marcuse: In my recent projects giving the viewer an immersive sense of wonder is paramount. My goal is for the pieces to work as allover compositions from afar, but also as luscious still-lives when drawn in close. I want to invite a viewer into the world in the photograph where they can have their own passage between belief and doubt –a seduction side by side with skepticism about that relationship between the constructed and the natural. However fabled, the scene is still real and factual, presented across the picture plane –like a platter– to the viewer.
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Mingering Mike's inclusion in the online group exhibition, The Rogues Gallery, curated by @mepaintsme.
Developed in 1855 by Inspector Allan Pinkerton, The Rogues Gallery established a uniform compilation of photographs, names, and descriptions of criminals meant for quick and accurate identification.
Mingering Mike created a soulful alternate universe in which he was able to express himself in the only way he knew how: through art and music, in fake intricately handcrafted albums complete with gatefold interiors, extensive liner notes, and grooves drawn onto "vinyl." The album covers offer a glimpse into Mingering Mike’s fascinating and awe-inspiring career.
~@mepaintsme
April 15, 2022
History is mostly submerged, but occasionally visible, in Rush Baker IV’s recent paintings. “American Sunset,” the Hyattsville painter’s show at Hemphill Artworks, was partly inspired by Tony Horwitz’s book “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.” The results include three canvases titled “Harpers Ferry” and one called “John Brown.”
Baker paints with acrylics, augmenting the brightly hued pigment with plaster and resin, and sometimes paper and spray paint. He layers the materials, sands the surface and then repeats the process multiple times. “It’s a matter of adding and subtracting compositional elements until the painting reveals itself to me,” the artist says in an interview published by the gallery.
Click here to read more.
Exhibition on view March 19 - April 30, 2022
HEMPHILL is pleased to share an interview with Rush Baker IV conducted by George Hemphill on the occasion of the exhibition American Sunset. Please find an excerpt below.
George Hemphill: Often, the organization of the picture plane in your paintings has circular movement, a spinning, a feeling of centrifuge, of things coming apart?
Rush Baker IV: Yes and no. It’s more of a reorganization of elements. It’s organized chaos. The collaged elements usually give the works a certain compositional structure. The initial layering of paint and plaster act as a disruption of that language, and then it’s a matter of revealing what the painting really wants to be. The gestures, especially in the larger works, mimic the movement of my physical range of motion.
MONO PRACTICE presents “Order and Uncertainty: Five Abstract Painters," a group exhibition curated by Timothy App, featuring the work of Power Boothe, Julie Karabenick, Patsy Krebs, Linling Lu, and W.C. Richardson.
February 7, 2022
As we walked into Hemphill gallery’s elegant white spaces, a friend commented “it’s like a chapel”; an especially apt description of the sensation that emerges from this group of eleven paintings by Willem de Looper on exhibit here for the first time in many years. My friend was referring to the sense of calm, a meditative sensibility that one feels in seeing these luminous works together in an otherwise empty space.
February 5, 2022
Made over just four years, the luminous Willem de Looper abstractions in “Paintings, 1968-1972” demonstrate a subtle but significant transition. The 11 pictures at Hemphill Artworks, unexhibited for many years, shift from allover compositions to ones in which the watery colors are stacked horizontally, although still lushly blended.
WILLEM de LOOPER: Paintings 1968-1972 is on view at HEMPHILL through February 26, 2022.
February 19 - June 5, 2022
Linling Lu: Musical Meditations is an exhibition of recent and new works that continues the artist’s investigations and responses to sound and color. Inspired by various musical genres, such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suites and Japanese Taiko master Eitetsu Hayashi’s drum piece, Fertility of the Sea, Lu channels these musical encounters, creating circular compositions that become physical manifestations of the music playing in her studio.
January 28 - April 24, 2022
Renée Stout has been included in Visible Man: Art and Black Male Subjectivity, a show organized by Bowling Green State University Fine Arts Center Galleries and curated by Michael D. Harris, PhD. The exhibition offers a creative look at the complexity of African-American males through cultural, racialized, and personal lenses.
January 28 - May 2, 2022
Image makers of every kind, from fine artists to advertisers, have explored the strange magic that happens when the photograph becomes an uncanny double for the world it depicts. Works by Jeff Wall, Ace Lehner, Laura Letinsky, Kija Lucas, Aspen Mays, Tanya Marcuse, and others share the walls with anonymous posters, magazine spreads, and book covers.
WILLEM de LOOPER: Paintings 1968 – 1972, is on view at HEMPHILL through February 26, 2022.
HEMPHILL has partnered with the Frauke and Willem de Looper Foundation to showcase eleven paintings created between 1968 and 1972. Largely pulled from storage, and unseen by the public for many years, these works must be experienced in person to fully appreciate their immersive effect on the viewer.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, 40 pages with 11 full color reproductions, published by HEMPHILL Artworks and the Frauke and Willem de Looper Foundation.
Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful will move to the Frist Art Museum on February 25, 2022. The exhibition provides a fresh perspective on the artist’s long, dynamic life (1891–1978) and multifaceted career that was defined by constant creativity.
Culture House
January 22 - May 5, 2022
In collaboration with Culture House, Caitlin Berry presents Joseph Shetler: In Pursuit of Nothing, featuring paintings on panel. The exhibition is viewable through March 5, 2022, on Saturdays from 11 am – 2 pm and by appointment.
Radford University Art Museum
February 9 - April 30, 2022
There is a shifting dialogue between the seemingly static nature of what the land holds, and how the land evolves as humans live off of it, appropriate it, fight over it, and remake it. Although we humans move with our own histories within us, the land we’ve lived on stays, holding what occurs upon it as another kind of history—both exploitative and generative—waiting to be explored, questioned, and shared.
~Colby Caldwell
The Kreeger Museum
February 1 - April 30, 2022
Lou Stovall: On Inventions and Color is a survey of works by Lou Stovall, the master printmaker who has transformed the field of printmaking in Washington, DC since the 1960s. The exhibition includes works from across Stovall’s career, giving insight into the artist’s innovative approach to screenprinting and his decades-long study of color.
The show was curated by Danielle O'Steen, Ph.D.
Organized by curator, Kristen Hileman, Fields and Formations brings together approximately 70 works by 12 distinguished women and non-binary artists from the Mid-Atlantic region who infuse abstract paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture with emotional and metaphorical content.
Featuring artists: Natessa Amin, Arden Bendler Browning, Carol Brown Goldberg, Alex Ebstein, Alexis Granwell, Jesse Harrod, Maren Hassinger, Jae Ko, Linling Lu, linn meyers, Maggie Michael, and Jo Smail.
This exhibition was on view at The Delaware Contemporary in fall 2021.
Linling Lu's artwork has been featured in the December 2021 issue of DC Modern Luxury Magazine.
'I hope to exercise and expand the feelings of color from physical, temporary encounters to metaphysical, timeless experiences that nurture a solitary indivudla and heal the damages from the chaos and uncertainty of life.'
The Washington Post
By Phillip Kennicott
November 3, 2021.
By the end of her career, Alma Thomas enjoyed considerable critical and popular success. She was the first African American female artist to be given a solo show at the Whitney Museum, in 1972. Her works were accessioned by major museums across the country, and featured prominently in key exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. But it is unlikely Thomas could have imagined how her reputation would continue to grow after her death at 86 in 1978, so much that she is now one of the most beloved abstract painters of the past century.
The adulation is deserved, but can make it difficult to see her work clearly, a challenge the curators of “Alma Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful” confront directly in a major retrospective at the Phillips Collection in Washington.
Hyperallergic
By Kriston Capps
November 11, 2021.
For Open on K, Hemphill asked artists to bring their biggest ideas. That’s a promising gallery provocation for this moment of return to not-quite-normalcy. Rush Baker appears to have found urgent inspiration in the Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice in the summer of 2020, but his paintings also point indirectly to the inchoate rage of the January 6 insurrection, with which the United States has yet to reckon. Many other artists — and many of the rest of us — spent months looking inward. Stepping back into the gallery after so many months of not seeing or showing or socializing marks an important moment, one in which we may see what’s changed.
George Hemphill is thought of as the au courant art dealer in DC. His journey over 40 years, from teaching to the founding of a radical non-profit art organization, to being a force in the development of the fine art photography market, to his work at the influential art gallery Hemphill Artworks, placed him in the front row of an ever-evolving art world. Hemphill typically steps into the background, placing the gallery’s artists in the foreground. But, for the first time, he has agreed to be interviewed.
Interior designer, Mary Douglas Drysdale, has included a piece by Linling Lu in a 1920s home in Bethesda, MD, which was recently reviewed by Annapolis Home Magazine.
[Period details are] countered by bright orange modern prints by Donald Judd from the 1980s and a stunning recent work of concentric circles by Baltimore artist Linling Lu. “They work together because they are both about the line,” says Douglas. Lu’s giant circles are exciting and unusual yet adhere to a severe order due to the perfection of the circle’s unyielding form. Judd’s lines dare to be casual, to undulate ever so slightly. The circle closes the line into a contained form. It is subtle tensions such as these that Drysdale employs.
HEMPHILL is pleased to announce Linling Lu's inclusion in Fields and Formations at The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE.
Organized by The Delaware Contemporary’s inaugural Curator-in-Residence Kristen Hileman, Fields and Formations brings together approximately 70 works by 12 distinguished women and non-binary artists from the Mid-Atlantic region who infuse abstract paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture with emotional and metaphorical content. The artists, who span five decades in age, share interests in luminous color, repeated forms, the power of materials, and the meditative aspects of making labor-intensive works.
Robin Rose's encaustic paintings were reviewed in the September/October 2021 issue of Home and Design Magazine. The feature discusses Rose's approach to painting with encaustic, how music influences his work, and the word associations that lead his practice during the pandemic.
Like an alchemist at work, artist Robin Rose stirs a cauldron of hot beeswax in his inner sanctum beside Washington’s Rock Creek Park. He mixes in damar crystals derived from natural tree resin, adds carnauba wax made from the leaves of a Brazilian palm, then blends in powdered pigment of a soft rose-madder hue. “One thousand one, one thousand two,” Rose intones, expressing the brieftime it takes for the hot wax to harden.
A traveling show brings together over 150 objects to explore the vibrant abstract work of the Washington painter who developed her iconic style in her 60s.
Alma Thomas developed her unique abstract painting style only after retiring at age 68, in 1960, as a Washington, D.C., junior-high-school teacher. She called her forms “Alma’s Stripes” for their tessellated brushstrokes. Bold, rainbow daubs of paint weave together patterns of stripes and circles on canvas. Colors swirl and shimmer in these dazzling compositions. Vibrant hues react against one another. Active brush marks play off a tension between figure and ground.
HEMPHILL is pleased to announce Renée Stout's inclusion in Visible Man: Art and Black Male Subjectivity, at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery at Bolling Green State University in Bolling Green, Ohio.
A premier exhibition of contemporary African-American artists will be the cornerstone of Visible Man: Art and Black Male Subjectivity, hosted in the BGSU School of Art Galleries in fall 2021. Curated by respected art expert Michael Harris, an Emory University art history professor and a 1971 BGSU School of Art graduate, the exhibition will present a creative look at the complexity of Black males through cultural, racial and personal lenses as expressed by women and men of color.
The Color of Light: Utopian Abstractions is on view at L’ancien Eveche (The Ancient Bishop’s Palace) in Uzés, France. After a successful opening at the Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia (birthplace of the artist), where the show was created to respond to the abstract, meditative, empty spaces of Rothko’s paintings, the exhibition continues its journey through the south of France, under this very special light, and with the support of The Association of Art, Architecture and Territory.
To honor Rothko and his legacy as a “colorist," curator Dianne Beal, selected an international roster of five artists - a native of Uzés, Pascal Fancony, a Belgian, Yves Ullens, a Japanese, Go Segawa, and two Americans, Anton Ginzburg and Julie Wolfe.
"Throughout the exhibit, dynamic lines and colors create a motion eager for release. Visuals of silhouettes, local blocks, and community articles, such as bicycles and trees, are paired with intentionally placed letters. The words may provide the information, but they are devoted to design."
"The title of Hemphill Artworks’ “What’s Going Around: Lou Stovall & the Community Poster” gives the longtime D.C. printmaker top billing. But the show includes pieces by other notables who squeegeed ink across silk-screens at Workshop Inc., the studio Stovall founded in 1968. These include Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis and Paul Reed, as well as Stovall’s frequent collaborator, artist-musician Lloyd McNeill, and his spouse, artist Di Stovall."
"Through his iconic posters that represent a pivotal time in DC Home Rule, artist Lou Stovall captured the hues and spirit of an era. Posters have often reflected a collective zeitgeist and call to action, and DC artist Lou Stovall—via The Workshop, which he founded in 1968—used this medium to express a transformative era in the nation’s capital."
The Color of Light: Utopian Abstractions displays five artists’ investigations into the color of light. Whether expressed through painting, drawing, photography, video, installation or sculpture, the effects of light, materials, color intensity and hue, subject matter, inspiration, latitude and climate all affect the outcome of the abstract images presented. The artists are united by their dedication to abstraction, pure color and form...
Julie Wolfe (Washington, DC, USA) investigates color and form, the beauty of nature and its destruction in her paintings, prints, drawings, sculptural objects and installations. Wolfe works with a myriad of materials including water, light, chemical and organic compounds, photographs, salvaged books and other found objects and explores patterns of light and intricacies of color.
"The best direction one could give to someone interested in expanding their knowledge of contemporary art is to pay attention to what artists are paying attention to; artists always know before everyone else does...
Sean Scully: Renée Stout, 63
Renée is a wonderful artist and a very good friend of mine. She had a show a few years ago in my space [Sean Scully Studio]. Her work can be categorized somewhere between baroque, mystical and confessional painting. I’ve got one piece of hers that depicts a ball of fire in the night sky. It’s very beautiful. She is influenced by the idea of Fluxus — objects that have a memory attached to them. Her work is very emotional and not particularly in tune with what’s fashionable, though of course now that’s changing so fast, and who even knows what it is anymore. Renée has a kind of tender stoicism. I’m very fond of her."
"Marley Dawson and the Phillips Collection operate on different planes. The museum is known for paintings that are hushed, serene and even transcendental; Dawson makes metal sculptures that spin, pivot and occasionally spit fire. But the Australian conceptual sculptor and the Washington museum meet in midair, like high-wire acrobats from disparate troupes, for “Ghosts.” It’s the latest installment in “Intersections,” a series in which contemporary artists respond to the Phillips’s art."
"As a painter, Robin Rose has often followed musical cues, naming his abstractions after songs that prompted them. He works in encaustic, a mix of pigment and hot wax that requires a quick hand and whose immediacy has “a sonic quality,” he told a recent visitor to Hemphill Artworks. Yet the veteran local artist’s new “19 Paintings” hatched from text."
"Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi’s richly colored abstract landscapes in acrylic and watercolor seem the absolute opposite of Rose’s apparently minimalist encaustics, but there are connections. The lyrical title of Ilchi’s show, Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow, and the poetry of the titles of each of her paintings enhance their equally poetic imagery. All painted in the past few months, they speak to each other in a voice that is tender, but aching with longing. Similarly, Rose’s 19 Paintings, all made between March 2020 and January 2021, were each inspired by a word that the artist woke up with in the middle of the night, as he explains in a video interview made in connection with this show"
Read, "Poetry and Word Pictures: Ilchi and Rose at Hemphill," here.
Film Trailer
"Alma W. Thomas was an overnight success — 80 years in the making.
Born a generation after slavery, Alma Woodsey Thomas grew up in the South, in a home where education was a priority. At 16, with racial tensions high and no further schooling options, her family moved to Washington, DC, where she started her incredible life of firsts: the first Fine Arts graduate from Howard University (1924), the first African-American Woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972), and the first African-American woman to exhibit her paintings in the White House (2009). All the while, she taught art at Shaw Jr. High for 36 years, pioneered educational techniques, traveled the world, and crossed racial barriers. Yet she did not receive national attention until six years before she passed.
Thomas’ paintings grab the viewer’s attention and form an instant connection to their emotions and mood. While her work is easy to appreciate and quick to understand, her life and struggles are not. Through her passion, she persevered through racism and sexism in the art world to achieve a level of prominence, still rare among African-American artists today.
“Miss Alma Thomas” is the first documentary film that explores Thomas’ incredible life. Released in conjunction with a major four-city museum retrospective, thousands will have the opportunity to learn of her life, work, and continuing influence.
Until now, no film has ever been produced to tell her important story."
CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS
April 15, 6:30-8:00PM
University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection
"Robin Rose (b. Ocala, Florida; lives and works in Washington, DC) creates works in encaustic mixed with pigment and wax using subtle hues to produce his abstractions. His so-called “Scriptronics” are drawings created on brown paper with a black marker connected by wire to a CD recorder. As he draws on the paper, sounds emanate from speakers. The texture of the paper and the amount of pressure applied while drawing determine the sound being recorded and played back. Rose sees his Scriptronics not only as a means of expression for artists but also as a potential therapeutic tool for those with autism or dementia.
He will be joined in conversation by Vesela Sretenović, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Phillips Collection."
Conversation with Collector Laura Roulet featuring Nekisha Durrett and Julie Wolfe
May 26 | 11am-12pm EST
Collector Laura Roulet will lead us on a virtual slide tour of her collection of works on paper. Joining her in conversation will be DC-area artists Nekisha Durrett and Julie Wolfe.
"Robin Rose is an adroit artist of his generation with a unique art form. His work is the essence of a cosmic curiosity and his profound observation of nature, as he constantly discovers the riches of nature around him. His muse is the bountiful domain of rocks and pebbles, rivers and springs that inspires him to create. Robin applies a specific technique to each paintings, that he prepares with patience as he does on a journey to an unknown destination. His untamed approach provides him an unlimited scope of imagination and desire for discovery that not only transcends his art beyond the ordinary, but it also demands a deeper appreciation and interpretation from his audience."
Curated by Jack Rasmussen
American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center, Washington DC
February 16 – August 9, 2021
"The American University Museum recently acquired 9,000 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Washington institution that closed its doors to the public in 2014. Together with our Watkins Collection we have an especially strong cache of works by Washington regional artists. While curating a show of Washington paintings drawn from our growing collections, I became interested in how my memories of a formative time in my life might be affecting my choice of artwork for this exhibition.
Every exhibition is an opportunity to address what we can see of the past from our contemporary perspective. My perspective includes the acknowledgement of persistent, systemic gender and racial injustice, bias, and violence that was present in the fifties, laid bare in the sixties, and continues to the present day. It is clear to me that the defining characteristic of most White mainstream art made between 1957 and 1982 in Washington was an adherence to aesthetic and commercial constraints that encouraged artists to remain silent when their voices are most needed. What pushback there was against this tendency was led by Black and women artists, whose work has been systematically underrepresented in the collections of Washington museums."
– Jack Rasmussen, Curator
Featuring Artists: Cynthia Bickley-Green, Lisa Montag Brotman, Allen Carter, Michael Clark, Manon Cleary, Robert D’Arista, Rebecca Davenport, Gene Davis, Willem de Looper, Jeff Donaldson, Thomas Downing, William S. Dutterer, Alan Feltus, Fred Folsom, Robert Franklin Gates, Sam Gilliam, Carol Brown Goldberg, Tom Green, Helene McKinsey Herzbrun, Michal Hunter, Val Lewton, Howard Mehring, William Newman, Kenneth Noland, Robin Rose, Joseph Shannon, Frank Anthony Smith, Carroll Sockwell, Alma Thomas, Franklin White, William Woodward, and Kenneth Victor Young.
View the exhibition and catalogue online in Museum@Home.
Created in conjunction with "Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow", on view at HEMPHILL April 1 - May 28, this video features an exclusive look at the artist's process and a selection of paintings included in the exhibition.
Floyd W. Coleman Sr. Distinguished Lecture
Renée Stout, Washington, DC
Thank You for Talking to Me Africa: Trusting the Voice Within
Renée Stout is a painter and sculptor based in Washington, DC. Her work is in the collections of many museums across the country, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is the recipient of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art, the 2020 Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation Award, and the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award.
Created in conjunction with Robin Rose: 19 Paintings, on view at HEMPHILL April 1 - May 28, this video features interviews Robin Rose and an exclusive look at the 19 paintings in the series.
Stretched presents an expanded perspective on contemporary painting, featuring nine artists whose work is rooted in but transcends the medium. Ranging from work on canvas to large-scale installation, the exhibition emphasizes the expansive and multi-faceted approach taken by contemporary artists who work with paint as part of their practice.
Featured Artists: Amna Asghar, Rushern Baker IV, Erick Antonio Benitez, Mark Joshua Epstein, Saskia Fleishman, Jen Noone, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Madeline A. Stratton, and Rives Wiley
Featuring cover artwork by Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi.
"Cloud, mirror, stone, thunder, eyelid, desert, sea. Through a dead or dying land, Mihyar walks: a figure of heroic individualism and dissent, part-Orpheus, part-Zarathustra. Where he goes, the austere building-blocks of his world become the expressions of passionate emotion, of visionary exaltation and despairing melancholy. The traditions of the Ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Quran flow about and through him."
'The greatest living poet of the Arab world' Guardian
“This show is also connecting Alabama artists to our global collection. William Christenberry is a perfect example of that. ‘Ways of Seeing: Buildings and Monuments’ shows his work alongside the work of a number of other artists who aren’t as connected to Alabama.
In that sculpture, Christenberry is expressing his feelings about Alabama and Hale County in general. I think this show is an interesting place to think about our very local context in Birmingham and our local context in the state of Alabama right now, through art which is exciting.”
– Kate Crawford, Curator of American Art, Birmingham Museum of Art
Read "Ways of Seeing" connects Alabama + worldwide artists — why we're drawn to it here.
Click here to learn more about Ways of Seeing: Buildings and Monuments.
The three solo shows at Hemphill Artworks don’t add up to an overview of the evolution of abstract painting, and aren’t meant to. Still, the progression from Leon Berkowitz’s luminous austerity to Steven Cushner’s totemic imagery to E.E. Ikeler’s mixed-media intricacy does demonstrate intriguing generational shifts. Over a half-century of this trio’s nonrepresentational art, things get funkier and funkier.
Thursday, February 25, 2021 | 6:00pm-8:00 pm
"Join curators Will Stovall and Marya McQuirter for a discussion about art and activism in Washington, DC in the late 1960s."
A selection of community posters from The Columbus Museum’s current exhibition, What’s Going Around: Lou Stovall and the Community Poster 1967-1976, will be paired with black & white photography to highlight the artists and activists who worked toward black liberation. Stovall and McQuirter will be joined by special guest Ibrahim Mumin, who will share his experiences as a Howard University student and community leader during this time period."
Written by Darla Harper for Artsy.
"The story of abstraction in America has long featured an overwhelmingly white cast of characters, but in recent decades, that has finally started to change...Recent years have seen swelling recognition for important Black Abstract Expressionists like Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney, and subsequent generations of artists including Edward Clark, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Stanley Whitney, and Jack Whitten."
Max Hirshfeld & Stuart Eizenstat
March 5, 2021 | 8:30pm EST | Zoom Event
"The Holocaust remains a subject difficult to grasp and almost impossible to document. Award-winning photographer Max Hirshfeld searched for decades for the right way to share his Auschwitz survivor parents’ story of love and perseverance before, during and after. He is joined here by Stuart E. Eizenstat, special adviser for Holocaust issues to President Obama and former US Ambassador to the EU, who contributed an essay to the book."
"The Asheville Art Museum is grateful for the contributions of Kevin Click and April Liou for the recent purchase of Dragon, an abstract oil painting created around 1957 by African American artist Hale Woodruff."
Created in conjunction with E.E. Ikeler, on view at HEMPHILL January 23 - March 20, 2021, this video focuses on one piece included in the exhibition; Reap What You Sow / Glitter + Gold. This short Spotlight video is the first in a series produced to provide a closer look at one of the works currently on display.
February 5 - March 27, 2021
Caitlin Berry Fine Art
"In the past twelve months, Joseph Shetler found centeredness in striving toward objectivity. However, it is the persistent labor, not pure objectivity, to which Shetler is devoted. His linear and monochrome abstractions manifested through the droning malaise of the past year and its history defining slew of events. Acts of listening and practicing empathy defined his response as he examined his own privilege and role within societal disparities."
CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS
April 15, 6:30-8 PM
University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection
"Robin Rose (b. Ocala, Florida; lives and works in Washington, DC) creates works in encaustic mixed with pigment and wax using subtle hues to produce his abstractions...He will be joined in conversation by Vesela Sretenović, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Phillips Collection.
The Conversations with Artists series provides an opportunity for the DC community and University of Maryland students to hear from leading and emerging artists in an informal setting."
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va. July 9, 2021 - October 3, 2021
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC: Fall 2021
The Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN: Spring 2022
The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA: Summer 2022
Learn more about the work of Lou Stovall in "An Act of Nature Brought Down Lou Stovall’s Backyard Studio. Now What?" published in the Washington Citypaper.
"Artwork from Lou Stovall’s print studio, Workshop, Inc., is ubiquitous in local galleries and museums. Pieces populate institutions like the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the American University Museum, D.C.’s Art Bank, the Phillips Collection, and Addison/Ripley Gallery. But unlike many of the artists he created prints for and with, including Sam Gilliam, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Gene Davis, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, and Jacob Lawrence, Stovall’s name has yet to seep into the mainstream."
Lou Stovall will be on view at HEMPHILL June 12 - July 17, 2021.
Created in conjunction with the Leon Berkowitz exhibition at HEMPHILL, this video features interviews with Mark Kelner and Robin Rose and an exclusive look at Leon Berkowitz, on view through March 20.
Artist: Leon Berkowitz
Copyright: HEMPHILL Artworks
Interviews: Interviews with Mark Kelner, Artist and Robin Rose, Artist by George Hemphill
Video Footage & Editing: Hannah Davis
Music: Oleao Strut was composed by Steve Drews and was performed by Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company from the album Like A Duck To Water
www.cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com
Special Thanks to Steve Feigenbaum
© Cuneiform Records
The Phillips Collection is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment with an online viewing of artwork from the permanent collection.
The exhibition will include works from seven women artists and recipients of the Anonymous Was a Woman (AWAW) Award, including Renée Stout.
Read "Celebrating Women Artists in the Phillips Collection" here.
William Christenberry's 2020 exhibition at HEMPHILL was reviewed by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post.
"Like Warhol, Christenberry pondered consumer products, although with an emphasis on regional brands. A battered sign for Tops Snuff is the subject of three silk-screens, their printing roughened with sand and coffee grounds."
Read "In the Galleries: Perspectives on blending culture and identity" here.
Julie Wolfe's 2020 Exhibition at HEMPHILL was reviewed by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post.
"If such references suggest quaint nostalgia, that's not all that flourishes in Wolfe's dreamfields. These visual pileups also convey a sense of anxiety that's altogether up to date."
Read "In the Galleries: The Washington colorists and the CIA" here.
Created in conjunction with the Romare Bearden exhibition, this video surveys two works on view; Green Times Remembered - Recollection Pool and Indigo Snake.
Artist: Romare Bearden
Artwork: © 2020 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Copyright: HEMPHILL Artworks
Video Editing: Hannah Davis
Music: Longdown Hill by Samuel Sharp
Created in conjunction with the William Christenberry exhibition at HEMPHILL, this video surveys the three sculptures featured in the show; "Night Spot," "Roadside Tableaux," and "Southern Monument XXII."
Artist: William Christenberry
Copyright: HEMPHILL Artworks
Photography & Video Editing: Hannah Davis
Music: As I Am - composed and performed by Kate Amrine on flugelhorn
Elegy - composed by Jessica Rudman, performed by Kate Amrine on trumpet
Both pieces are featured on Kate's first album As I Am
For more information about the composers please visit jessicarudman.com/ and kateamrine.com/
Photo by Jerry Siegel (jerry@jerrysiegel.com)
"What’s Going Around" traces the early development of master printmaker, Lou Stovall, and his process. It also trains the spotlight on a turbulent era of U.S. history not unlike the contemporary moment. This selection of early silkscreen posters provides insight into how one artist engaged art and history in service to the community, offering an exemplary—and inspiring—model for our own tumultuous times.
Learn more about the upcoming exhibition "What's Going Around: Lou Stovall and the Community Poster, 1967–1976" at the Columbus Museum here.
Learn more about Sam Gilliam's work in How to Read Sam Gilliam's Formalism in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl.
"For decades, the artist has made meltingly beautiful paintings that appeared to make no clear point about identity, but the scholar Fred Moten teases out inconspicuous themes of Blackness."
Read "How to read Sam Gilliam's Formalism" here.
Ryan Crotty’s 2020 exhibition at HEMPHILL was reviewed by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post.
"Glowing on the walls of Hemphill Artworks’s new location, Ryan Crotty’s complex abstractions look as if they’ve come home."
Read "In the galleries: Referencing the revered Washington colorists and beyond" here.
Linling Lu’s 2020 exhibition at HEMPHILL was reviewed by Timothy App for BmoreArt Magazine.
“It was refreshing, and also enlightening, to view the colorful abstract paintings of Linling Lu in her solo show, One Hundred Melodies of Solitude, at Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington, DC. What seemed at first to be formal abstractions expanded into spiritual, cultural, and personal visions”
Read "Concentricities of Color: Linling Lu’s One Hundred Melodies of Solitude at Hemphill" here.
HEMPHILL worked with designer Nestor Santa-Cruz and architect Anne Decker to select artworks by Linling Lu, Steven Cushner, and Amy Pleasants for an interior design project in Washington DC. The pool house was recently featured in Elle Decor Spain.
Read more here.
Created in conjunction with the Julie Wolfe exhibition at HEMPHILL, this video surveys the suite of five prints on display in the gallery and explores the artist's process of creating the limited edition Artist Book, Wildfires and Dreamfields.
Artist: Julie Wolfe
Copyright: Visual: HEMPHILL Artworks, Music: Ledah Finck 2020
Photography & Video Footage: Julie Wolfe
Video Editing: Hannah Davis
Music: The Hands & Cambium Composed by Ledah Finck
Performed by Ledah Finck and Nick Saia
"I have a sense of being in control, yet the painting can never be perfect. It is the imperfections that give the work its mystery."
- Ryan Crotty, 2020
by Gabriela Capestany, Charleston City Paper
by Jennifer Anne Mitchell
by Sherry Moeller
by Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
This coloring book was created during the shelter-in-place period of 2020. Thanks to the artists for their participation and inspiration. Art endures and so will we. Be well and thank you for continued support.
Please enjoy this short video detailing the conception and evolution of Julie Wolfe's new series, Opposing Forces. Created during the isolation period of COVID-19, Opposing Forces asks questions without fixed answers. Wolfe reassembles the building blocks of geometry, mathematics, color theory and perception to probe us, provoke us, and propose that images can teach us about ourselves in ways that words cannot. How do we un-think color or form? What compels us, chaos or order? Are we innately drawn to one or the other and, if so, what does that say about us as we chart our experiences and reactions in the face of uncertainty?
JULIE WOLFE
Opposing Forces
2020
acrylic and ink on found book page
13 1/4" x 19 1/2" each
Steven Cushner is known for experimenting with motifs across all mediums, including drawings, paintings, and prints. Please enjoy this short video detailing the conception and evolution of a single motif in many forms, Fan.
Enjoy a behind the scenes look into the making of Linling Lu's 2020 exhibition at HEMPHILL, from the schematics and paint mixing to the final installation.
"My work is nurtured by my Chinese heritage but is also inspired by many artists from all over the world. The work has become more universal vs. from a single perspective. I envision it being accompanied by drum-heavy music because the music is very abstract and the instrument is circular; without looking at the performance, there are many similarities to drum pieces from Africa, Native America and West Asia - it is a universal instrument and universal music.” - Linling Lu, 2020
by Kenneth Dickerson, The Washington Post
by Zachary Fine, Art in America
by Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
by Ian Bourland, Washingtonian
by Editorial Team, East City Art
by Editorial Team, East City Art
by Haley McKey, On Tap Magazine
by Mark Jenkins, Washington Post
by Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
by Tina Coplan, Home & Design Magazine
by Sheila Wickouski, Ms. Magazine
by Mark Jenkins, Washington Post
by Michael Shoeffel, Asheville Made
Julie Wolfe’s newest publication, Dream Sequel Series: Under Their Gaze We Become Creatures will be available for purchase on August 1, 2019. Recent prints, paintings and drawings are juxtaposed with images from the artist’s collection of second-hand books based on outdated psychoanalysis theories, art history and natural science. The photographic images are reordered, distorted, merged and arranged into the book in a way that stages random associations between facing pages that might be in dialogue and taking on new meanings.
by Ashley Shah, East City Art
by Mark Jenkins, Washington Post
By Katie White, artnet news
By Victoria L. Valentine, Culture Type
Phil Hutinet, East City Art
Join artists Tom Ashcraft and Max Hirshfeld and Art in Embassies Curator Sarah Tanguy to explore collaboration, cultural diplomacy and “Du Quotidien,” an in-progress commission for the new U.S. Embassy complex in Niamey, Niger.
The Phillips Collection has acquired three significant works by Renée Stout.
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
For a limited time, a curated selection of new paintings, drawings, book pages and prints by Julie Wolfe will be installed in the gallery's viewing room. Email us at gallery@hemphillfinearts.com to schedule an appointment.
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
On the occasion of her exhibition "When 6 is 9: Visions of a Parallel Universe" Renée Stout engages in conversation with art collector and patron, Henry Thaggert.
Lyric Prince, Sugarcane Magazine
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
Claudia Rousseau, PhD, East City Art
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic
Ashley Shah, East City Art
Hemphill challenges Hopps’ suggestion that the style was already past in the late 70s, and instead focuses on the evident continuum of Abstract Expressionism in today’s art landscape.
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
Please join us for a viewing of Landview Effect, a new series of art books and print portfolios by Julie Wolfe, on Saturday, April 21 from 11:00am - 1:00pm.
John Anderson, Washington City Paper
The recent exhibitions at Hemphill Fine Art are about putting in the time. It is likely most people don’t consider artists as ones who punch clocks to produce work. This is an exhibition that dispels the myth that an artist must be moved by some unforeseen “inspiration” as the modus operandi behind how an abstract artwork gets made.
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
We are pleased to announce that the Women's Caucus for Art (WCA) is presenting the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award to Lee Bontecou, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gloria Orenstein, and Renée Stout.
Alice Cisterino and Michael McCarthy, DC Modern Luxury
"Whether it's a team of digital-art visionaries or a national showcase of Asian art, DC's art scene is as innovative and intellectually challenging as ever. Enjoy the wild ride this winter."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
Two of the area’s best art photographers have made striking vistas of the county’s suburban landscape.
John Anderson, Washington City Paper
"Sure: We can compare her vibrating stripes to those of Davis. Yes: The circle recalls Noland. But neither of those artists were capable of capturing a deep space within their best known paintings."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"'Mysterious' and 'endless' are words that suit Lu’s pictures, which seem to offer an infinite variety of colors, widths and arrangements."
Tina Coplan, Home & Design
Linling Lu bridges boundaries, from the Washington Color School to her own cultural heritage.
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
35 Days is "a museum-worthy survey of D.C. art."
Stephanie Rudig, Washington City Paper
"This isn’t just a Color School roundup, however: The show includes artists deploying color to completely different ends, like the trippy pattern-based work of Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, as well as some varying landscape photography artists like Anne Rowland and William Christenberry."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Even at their most geometric, the paintings in 'Jacob Kainen' have a beguiling softness."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"With society’s essential structure called into question by the carnage of World War I, Dadaists began cutting and pasting at random. That project has been revived, 24/7, at 17th and L streets NW, where James Huckenpahler’s “Desktop” summons, overlaps and disperses words and pictures across two video screens."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The third paradise the D.C. artist seeks is one in which nature, technology and humanity all flourish. She evokes this in pictures that suggest both organic and electronic systems, or by juxtaposing black-and-white photos with areas of pure color."
Claire Voon, Hyperallergic
"Julie Wolfe tries to make sense of the natural world by gathering and categorizing all kinds of sights and objects that offer no scientific information but inspire search for meaning, like puzzles."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"It's a Washington Color School resurgence with new exhibitions featuring the work of Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, Paul Reed, and Alma Thomas."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The Washington Color School is still much discussed in the D.C. art world — some might say too much so — and the artists are enjoying a posthumous commercial boom at galleries here and elsewhere."
Kathlene Fox-Davies, The Monocle Arts Review
Kriston Capps, Hyperallergic
"Everything became nearness and all the nearness turned to stone, the lyrical title for Ilchi’s first show at Hemphill Fine Arts, is full of graphical contradictions and circular motions."
Isabella Mason, Blouin Artinfo
"The exhibition marks the debut of Iranian artist Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi at the gallery, with her works which majorly reflect an interest in the fusion of visual conventions of Western abstraction and Persian Art, evoking allegories of intrusion and invasion, that moves beyond the personal and take references of historical and contemporary socio-political conflicts."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Rivulets of abstract color, often vivid blues and greens, are punctuated by precise imagery in Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi’s painting and mixed-media work."
Erin Devine, Washington City Paper
"The paintings of Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi immediately materialize before the viewer as something fresh and consuming."
Holly Mazar-Fox, DC Modern Luxury
"Seeking inspiration from the rich traditions of both Eastern and Western art practices, Javanshir Ilchi's alluring work speaks to her soul as an artist and her creative genius as weaving complex concepts together with visual fluidly."
Victoria L. Valentine, Culture Type
"Whether you were lucky enough to get an early preview or you are awaiting the appointed day when your timed pass will allow you to gain entry into the nation’s much-anticipated African American museum, to complement your experience, there are more than 10 African American art exhibitions in Washington worth visiting now and in the weeks and months to come."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"A photography exhibit about a politically contentious topic can easily turn into agitprop. But thanks to careful curation and wise use of the medium, Carroll Square Gallery’s exhibit about climate change serves as an understated and eloquent meditation on its subject."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Rainbow fiber bridges have been erected at Hemphill Fine Art’s storefront location at 1700 L St. NW, but they divide rather than connect."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"There are only four pieces in Carroll Square Gallery’s 'Pathways,' but each suggests a passage that stretches beyond the room. The three artists also use outlines and gestures in ways that suggest built (or buildable) forms."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The deft juxtaposition of soft-edged color and hard-edged form links the artists in Hemphill Fine Art’s 'Kainen, Scully, Nozkowski.'"
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"As a painter, Julie Wolfe doesn’t rely on any single visual system. Light and color are abundant in “Language of the Birds,” Wolfe’s solo show at Hemphill Fine Arts, her third, but those qualities are sometimes all that carries over from one work to the next. If Wolfe were a bird, she would be a hummingbird, moving from flower to flower in a way that looks frenetic but betrays precision."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"They’re most evocative of Krebs’s larger project: to make something lasting out of the most transient materials."
Paul Shortt, Bmore Art
"We want our work to be fun and colorful and while the space can be viewed all day long it really comes into it’s own at night. The light and the color jumps out into the street and mixes with everything else happening in that part of town."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"More of a set of experiments than a fully articulated series, “The Smoke Drawings” comprises untitled paper works that the artist made using airbrush and candle smoke."
Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D., East City Art
"In 1972 Krebs won a Guggenheim Foundation grant to pursue his experimental light works. However the grant allowed him time to create a series of works on paper that aimed at expressing the atmospheric and ephemeral qualities of his light works. These are the Smoke Drawings now on exhibit."
Bronwen Latimer, The Washington Post
"These are photographs, Caldwell insists, because they have all the elements of a modern photograph: light, time, a capturing tool, and a subject."
Kate Oczypok, The Washington Diplomat
"The show includes intriguing, ethereal objects and tools of the trade for a high priestess."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Although Stout’s African heritage is central to her artistic vision, 'Tales of the Conjure Woman' also invokes the power of women’s traditional roles: maker, healer, counselor, seductress."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Separating the large and small galleries at Hemphill Fine Arts is a room so tiny that it might be better called a niche. Sometimes it’s empty, but at the moment it holds a small 1999 print titled 'How to Survive Your Own Death (Whole).' Colby Caldwell made this array of random pixels, but not on purpose. It was an accident — one he has been exploiting for almost two decades."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"'Tales of the Conjure Woman,' a sprawling survey of new work by the artist, marries the rootworker’s art with modernism."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"The exhibit is split between Caldwell’s surveys—prints from his dives into the abstract depths of corrupted digital interference—alongside more traditional still-life photos. Together, these series tease out what it means to construct photos. One series is no more natural than the other."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The lights are low at Hemphill Fine Arts, as if in preparation for a seance. What sort of creature Renee Stout’s eerie 'Wild World' might summon from the darkness, though, is impossible to predict."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Housed in some 500 glass bottles stacked on metal shelves, the water, sediment and vegetation samples on display in the window of 1700 L St. NW look like a science project. But the contents of the jars, illuminated from behind, also glow with vivid reds, purples and blues, resembling a color-field painting that has been disassembled and liquefied."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Neon tubes or LEDs illuminate most of the work in Carroll Square Gallery’s 'This Is Light,' a show of four East Coast artists, but the most intriguing piece features an old-fashioned slide projector."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
Louis Jacobson addresses each work by artists Lisa Dillin, Esther Ruiz, Pamela Gwaltney, and Tommy Bobo featured in this is light.
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"'Wild World,' the artist’s fifth solo show at Hemphill, envisions a steampunk universe that—bear with me—has nothing to do with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, polished brass, or even Europe for that matter. Stout’s found a portal to a place that blends hoodoo and Santería with gadgets and gizmos.
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The local collaborative-art group, whose core members are Tom Ashcraft and Peter Winant, began constructing an oversize wooden model of Intelsat I in April. The sculpture will be on display in a vacant storefront at 17th and L streets NW until the end of the month, when it will literally disappear. Because the doors are too small to accommodate the mock satellite, the artists must disassemble it to remove it."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"Grace and rot are twinned in Christenberry’s photos."
Clarissa Wittenberg, District Journal
"This is not really an art review; this is a reverence, an adoration."
Caroline Jones, Washington City Paper
"In his latest show at Hemphill, viewers will be able to see the South as its cities have evolved from quiet streets dotted with retro cars to major urban centers over the course of Christenberry’s career."
Neely Tucker, The Washington Post
"The show features 26 pieces, from his iconic large-format photographs of fading Southern buildings to the smaller snapshots made with his legendary Kodak Brownie."
Victoria L. Valentine, Culture Type
"The instantly recognizable work of Alma W. Thomas (1891-1978) graces the Old Family Dining Room at the White House."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The work in 'Linear Function,' a three-artist show at Carroll Square Gallery, is stronger on line than functionality."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The Hemphill Fine Arts show starts with two tentative works from 1964: The Dutch-bred D.C. painter (and onetime Phillips Collection curator) sketched acrylic pigment on the raw canvas for which Washington Color School innovators Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were known. By 1967, de Looper was filling the frame, at least in the works on paper included here."
Maura Judkis, The Washington Post
"'I wanted to do a painting that I didn’t know how to do,' he says. He didn’t know how to paint big."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Photos don’t merely document the world; they become part of it."
John Anderson, The Washington Post
"From a distance, the work appears to be nothing more than a sequence of paint splotches, varied in hue, in only a couple of discrete widths, arranged into haphazard columns across the paper: It’s Gene Davis meets Clyfford Still distilled into overgrown patches of color, like Seurat stipples on an American (read: McDonalds) diet."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Made between 1958 and 1986, these 19 works constitute an impressive sampler of Washington color painting, although they include one by an artist who never lived in the District, Karl Stanley Benjamin, and one by a representational artist, Michael Clark (whose 'Lincoln Memorial' features bars of luminous color)."
Dana Lehmer, American Society of Interior Designers Washington Metro
"Martin's landscapes of Washington, DC define the enigma of our ever-changing panorama. I encourage you to take the time to see Washington through this lens."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The artist depicts everyday aspects of the city where he has worked for more than three decades, so more dramatic angles would be unseemly."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"If you’re looking to reconcile representation and abstraction, as the exhibit appears to want to do, then Bisson’s bravura canvas is about as appropriate a bridge as can be imagined."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Everything you need to know may be digitized these days, yet paper and books have a tactile appeal that can’t be replaced."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"What’s left for viewers who weren’t present for the big bang? In the case of Marley Dawson, the forensic evidence is a series of smudgy black circles or arcs burned into the white walls of Hemphill."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"The material for this exhibit is no Dunder-Mifflin overstock product; when the paper in “Paper Paradox” is handmade, even “flat” isn’t flat."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"The fact that the 5-billion-year clock has been invented—and is doomed to obsolescence—makes it easy to see why Dawson, an Australian, seems so drawn to old-fashioned machines that are crafted by hand and designed to be experienced, even doted on, by the user."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Several mini-shows nestle within “Represent,” Hemphill Fine Arts’s 20th-anniversary exhibition."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The five artists in 'Raising Dust,' at Carroll Square Gallery, all work with earth."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"If the personal is political, these grandiose, dysfunctional structures are calling artist-citizens to take to the streets (or, more likely, cul-de-sacs)."
Matthew Smith, Washington City Paper
"The show focuses on artistic civic engagement—artists that are out of their studios and walking the streets. Mostly culled from the gallery’s stable of artists, 'Artist-Citizen' presents works that speak through the city itself."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"For millennia, pigments were derived directly from plants, metals and gems. More recently, synthetic dyes were developed, and human-made contaminants began discoloring the natural world. These are among the motifs of 'Rewilding,' Julie Wolfe’s show at Hemphill Fine Arts."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"'Rewilding,' a solo show by Julie Wolfe at Hemphill Fine Arts, gestures at an ambivalent state between nature and civilization: reclamation, either in terms of preservation or, perhaps, something darker and more apocalyptic.
Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
"With this title, the Washington-based painter of nature-themed abstraction questions our disconnection with nature, inviting us to reevaluate our place in it."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"This year marks the 20th anniversary of George Hemphill’s gallery, Hemphill Fine Arts. And it’s been two decades since Steven Cushner stopped making rounded-edge canvases. Those two histories overlap in 'Steven Cushner: The Shaped Paintings, 1991-1993,' a Hemphill show that doesn’t seem backward-gazing."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"Twenty years later, Cushner’s work still needs time—but then, his paintings have always demanded first, second, and third looks from viewers."
Cara Ober, Bmore Art
"Examining the images for this exhibit I am struck by how au courant these twenty-year-old paintings feel, in an age where droves of young, Stockholder-influenced painters break the flat cube in all manner of ways."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"However the paintings are organized, their most impressive aspects are their purity and precision."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"Washington has for too long grappled with the legacy of the city’s brief moment in the art world’s spotlight; why shouldn’t a recently arrived painter from Guizhou Province, China?"
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"William Christenberry has lived in Washington for more than 40 years, but he still regularly sifts the soil of his childhood home, rural Alabama. The South nurtures, inspires and probably terrifies him, as it has other noted artists and writers from the region."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"Models of humble buildings covered in a layer of creamy white? Got ‘em. Ridiculously rusted road signs? Yep. Detailed images of KKK hoods? They’re here, too."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Either way, the two men’s art is quite compatible. Both employ muted yet complex palettes and simple, even primal, forms."
John Anderson, Washington City Paper
"The large, jagged forms and muted, achromatic palettes of William Willis' current exhibition at Hemphill Fine Arts are what can be expected from the 70-year-old artist."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"One wonders if the conceit behind Carroll Square Gallery’s 'Space Is the Place' is meant half-jokingly."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"'Washington Realism' bills itself, accurately, as an exhibit in which the artists ignore the 'glitz and glam' of Washington’s political culture."
Danielle O'Steen, The Washington Post
"Caldwell’s subject matter, as it turns out, is only the vehicle for his greater dialogue with the history of his medium. He questions what fits into the definition of photography. Does a scanned object count? Must photographers use a camera? Must prints offer a certain truth, in the spirit of a documentary?"
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"In the tradition of pre-digital photography, Jantzen sometimes considers ordinary things: a ragged storefront, a tree stump or his hand holding a book. But digital imagery, for Jantzen at least, leads to large and often architectural subjects."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"By the late 1960s, he was employing the techniques pioneered by Morris Louis (who died in 1962), using multiple washes of thin acrylic pigment to produce rich tints and billowing forms. Louis called one of his series 'Veils,' and 'Purple Veil' is among the four large de Looper canvases in Hemphill Fine Arts’ 'Paintings 1968-72.'"
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"Franz Jantzen's aerial rites."
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"The titles of his abstract paintings reference Jimi Hendrix, Tom Waits, John McLaughlin, and others, all of them gods of rock, jazz, soul, or their fusions. With the paintings themselves, however, Rose is working more angularly, summoning—to my mind, anyway—deliberate art-punk acts like Slint, Shellac, and Fugazi."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Circa 1979, Washington’s artists and punk rockers were spending a lot of time at each other’s places."
Anne Reeve, Art in America
"The artworks on display (all 2011) are invitations."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The exhibition features pleasant drawings and simple messages, as well as a nook with a mattress where a child might curl up to nap, watched over by 3D illustrations mounted low on the wall."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The congenial, if slightly odd, event was rendered a little stranger by its setting: an elegantly constructed cherry-wood picnic table with a built-in loop of elevated model-railroad track. A three-car G-scale train trundled a few feet above the lunchers’ heads, as Ashcraft and Winant discussed Heidegger, ideation, go-go music and a project they’re planning for Haitian orphanages."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"'Pattern' addresses the link between ’60s abstraction and its present-day descendants by placing a 1967 work at the show’s center."
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Working primarily in western Loudoun County, not far from her childhood home in Great Falls, Rowland began by photographing simple rural scenes."
John Anderson, Washington City Paper
"The only trouble with Anne Rowland’s exhibit at Hemphill is that you may find yourself fighting between looking at her images and looking at how they were made."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"The exhibit is variegated, but like any good combine painting (and those are included too) it coheres pretty well despite itself, as giants like Robert Rauschenberg mix with such local figures as Joseph Mills, Mingering Mike and Colby Caldwell."
Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post
"Here hang big, striking works by Tom Downing and Jacob Kainen. Here, too, are precious works on paper by Al Jensen and Alma Thomas. That Eugene Atget picture of the taxidermist's vitrine? I'll take it."
Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
"If it sounds like a straightforward, if slightly poetic, definition of the human subconscious, that's pretty much what it is. The architectural structure Stout refers to is a metaphor taken from an old, recurring dream of hers, in which the artist would find herself wandering through a familiar-looking house whose inner doors opened onto rooms she never knew existed."
Kriston Capps, Artforum
"That Mary Early’s work qualifies as post-Minimalist is plain. By first building components and then balancing them against one another in roughly circular structures that have not been mapped out in advance, she largely allows early decisions in her process regarding the form of her pieces to dictate the final shapes of her assembled work."
Maura Judkis, Washington City Paper
"Unlike some of his predecessors, though, Cushner does not strive for flawlessness, and the drips and imperfections of his paintings make them more hospitable."
Blake Gopnik, The Washington Post
"In the photos at Hemphill, you can almost feel the moment when Christenberry, on yet another trip home, spots a church or a Coke sign or a car that interests him, squares it up in his Brownie and snaps a record of it."
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"Is there any visual artist whose work is shown more often in Washington galleries than William Christenberry’s? Probably not, yet seeing his 13-image exhibit at Hemphill Fine Arts, one has to admit his work usually merits another look."
Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post
"And so, thanks to Dreyfuss, the art world enters the theater of war."
Maura Judkis, Washington City Paper
"John Dreyfuss’ latest installation, of a deconstructed submarine rising to the shallows, is deep."
Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
"'Cypher' is sly proof that you can teach an old dog new -- and, in this case, fascinating -- tricks."
Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
"Robin Rose isn't just a painter. He's also a collector of modernist furniture, several examples of which appear throughout 'Robin Rose: Cypher': a dining room set, metal patio furniture, etc."
Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post
"'Mingering Mike' is the alias of a 56-year-old District man who, as a teen growing up in the late '60s and early '70s, imagined soul music stardom to the tune of 52 albums and twenty 45s. Each one of which he drew himself -- yes, drew -- in pen and ink on drugstore-bought construction paper. The records inside? Cardboard painted with grooves."