You should see
We Mend in End Times at The DC Arts Center
Co-Curated by Izy Carney and Lucas J Rougeux We Mend in End Times at The DC Arts Center features woven, quilted, cyanotype-printed, and mixed media fiber art, one even including artist Fatima Janneh’s tooth. Each artwork is an act of repair, reassembling disparate materials, and fraught circumstances, using the meticulous work inherent in sewing, stitching, and weaving.
The works spread on the floor, hang from the ceiling, and drape over the building, demonstrating that while the work is soft, it is not fragile. One piece swirls on the wall, like a denim and safety pin cyclone. Described in the exhibition catalog as a “form of rage practice” the performance and textile artist Grace David writes that by shredding the iconic material and piecing the twisted scraps back together, they are able to see the “beauty that can be discovered in rebuilding.”
Farther on that same wall are quilted t-shirts stretched like a hide. Gold thread opens a red beaded wound. Embroidered text around the wound reads ”put your hand into my Side / through Death and Transformation / I am thus made Divine.” The work, titled Trans Christ Side Wound by Lucas J Rougeux “sees the trans experience as physical, sensual, adorned, and divine.”
Milan Warner’s unsettling woven work If I lay here long enough waits patiently in the corner, beckoning. Eliza Clifford’s dreamlike, patterned screenprints are recollections, attempts to reassemble memories skewed by time and experience. Izy Carney’s Oscillation was collaboratively sewn in the tradition of quilt bees. The work features stop motion stills of two figures taking turns raising each other up as the other slumps. Around it are texts that reaffirm the challenge and gift of being in community.
This show illuminates the possibilities in fabric manipulation and reminds us that doing is undoing, and undoing is doing. As we continue to brace for and navigate blatant attacks, infrastructural failures, and critical fractures in government institutions, We Mend in End Times considers how we face this moment with collective care, resilience, and the ongoing, slow, meticulous work of repair.
See We Mend In End Times through March 13 at The DC Arts Center located at 2438 18th St NW, Washington D.C. 20009. The gallery is open Wednesday - Sunday from 2:00 PM - 7:00 PM.
Recommended reading: Stitches, Scars, and Survival: Mending Takes Center Stage at The DC Arts Center by Maddie Wray and Shy Creeping: Finding comfort in the clumps Milan Warner at MOCA Arlington by Jessica Aguilar
Look Arlington
Surround yourself in a kaleidoscope of butterfly wings, bound a river in one single step, explore a technicolor forest in the night. No, it’s not the raddest dream you’ve ever had, it’s a gutted Walgreens!
Look: An Unexpected Arts Experience has one weekend left filled with free workshops, spanning screenprinting to spice blending, live performances, and artists talks, all in addition to the mini-installations created by over 20 different artists.
Look is both a community art space and a place to showcase work that wrestles with bodily, environmental, and political realities. For example:
A tapestry work by Sophie Bouwsma sprouts with red and green fabric flowers, the vintage floral fabric banner reads: “How can we begin living into our imaginations today?” Several of the works prompt viewers to ground into their own agency and an interactive installation offers a mode to practice doing, rather than watching.
In Austin D. Morris and Beth Hansen’s collaborative installation, scattered multicolored butterfly wings layer and repeat across three walls. The butterflies, a potent symbol for migration, are interrupted by larger graphics: an orange tiger whose face is hybridized with a bright yellow butterfly, an illustration depicting two soldiers in combat, one has an oversized pencil landing an uppercut punch on a gun wielding soldier. There are repeated compositions featuring a portrait of Angela Davis with a quote variation from An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis by James Baldwin. It reads: If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night. While the work is visually captivating, the layered symbols, quotes, and portraits point toward a more critical look at our environment - literally and politically.
Jill Stauffer’s installation mimics a forest. Artificial trees, stones, and greenery glow in a shifting spotlight casting shadows on the black walls around them. Leaves are made psychedelic in blue/purple vinyl. Birds and the surfaces of logs are cut from mirrors etched with diary-like entries on memories of the Everglades and identifying species. The installation is a devotion to the environment and a cautionary mourning of what was missed and what soon will be.
And this is just a few of the art installations to see at Look! Are you into weird, yet functional spoons? What about repurposed tech? Abstract art? Jeans? Then, surely, you’ll find something worth looking at and certainly someone worth talking to. When I went I secured Girl Scout Cookies, lunch from Rossana, and added a square to Bouwsma’s tapestry.
The stakes for participation are high. According to Look, this site is a litmus test. If it goes well, they can increase their initiative to activate underutilized commercial real estate. Organized by the non-profit Langston Boulevard Alliance and funded by an Arlington Arts Creative Placemaking grant, the space can prove that artists really are worth investing in! (Who knew, except all of us?)
And while I will always want more for artists, more than temporarily abandoned commercial spaces, I am also desperate for people to go out, look at art, make art, and think about what it all means - we really can build anything, all of this was made, invented, and implemented by fleshy human people. Take a look and reflect: what do you choose to create?
Adam Chamy’s Body Politic at Glass Class DC
Chamy’s show Body Politic, pairs tattered and melting American flags with nude bodies, each with mostly indiscernible faces. Where many of us would expect to see rage, Chamy peels back to the more vulnerable: fear, shame, disappointment, exhaustion, despair, and the seeds of reckoning. The bodies, ghostlike, are rendered soft and multicolored, the edges of forms are traced with blues, purples, pinks and metallic sheens.
The Palestinian-American artist’s installation also includes work created for the Palestinian relief organization UNRWA-USA. In the four works from this project featured here, a keffiyeh wraps around the head and face of an unseen person (in one the face is a soft outline of a skull). Rather than in its traditional black/white pattern, the fabric is delicately rendered in an array of colors.
According to the exhibition statement, the collection of works “examines nationalist symbols [...] as unstable sites where personal and national identities converge with grief and hope.” The statement continues: “The destabilization of nationalist symbols creates space for something else to emerge: forms of belonging or protest not premised on purity, dominance, or exclusion. Ambiguity, emptiness, and the twisting of bodies operate here not as negation, but as possibility. They allow for multiplicity, refusal, and the imagining of solidarity grounded in shared humanity rather than a shared national myth.”
Seeing the show brought back a memory of my beloved grandfather’s funeral. He was, among many roles, a veteran. I watched as the flag draped over his coffin was ritually folded and handed to my grandmother, crying softly, tissue in hand. He was important to me, to my family, to the community he led as a pastor, and apparently, to his entire country. The enormity of that realization didn’t hit me until I left Chamy’s show. Chamy’s work in combination with this memory challenged me to hold this symbol of abject horror with the death of my grandfather, uncovering a reluctant tenderness. While I can’t dredge up pride, I can be tasked with determining for myself who is important to my communities, my country – and making them so.
Attend the closing reception on March 8th hosted at Glass Class DC. Learn more and find out how to RSVP here. Stick around after the closing for if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry a comedy set, with sliding scale tickets from $10 to $20.
Who Cares LOL
Created by Johnerick Lawson, Who Cares LOL is a zine “of Arlington Virginia’s art history and presentness and other locations in the DMV.” Issue seven is a chaos positive, sincere investment in documenting artists, writers, musicians, comics, and Arlington art history. It’s a total feast and every bite is deeee-lish! Enjoy interactive comics a-la MAD magazine, exhibition and film observations, music recommendations, images worth staring at, Q&A’s and, I’m gonna say it I’m sorry, so much more. You’ll feel ridiculous for missing the first six issues once you pick this one up! (Or is that just me?)
Learn more here and pick up a free copy at Rossana truck or Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington - 3550 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201
You should go
March 7 at 7 PM & March 8 at 4 PM | PRIME: A Tribute to Returning Home | Variable
Dance Place / PRIME stands as a luminous tribute to the visionary women who built the foundation upon which DMV dance thrives today. This special evening honors the pioneering Architects of DMV Dance—Carla Perlo, Deborah Riley, Mama Sylvia Soumah, and Carol Foster—whose creative ingenuity and unwavering tenacity forged new pathways for artists, youths, scholars, and community members to find their way home. PRIME brings together contemporary artists who follow in these trailblazers’ footsteps, creating an evening of tribute performances that celebrate not just individual achievements, but the collective impact of these four remarkable women. Through dance, we explore themes of home, heritage, and the profound connections that bind artistic communities across generations
March 7 drop in between 2 and 4 PM | Collage & Learn at Gallery Y | Free
@ymcabowen / Gallery Y and DC artist, Addie Moore, are hosting a Collage & Learn Workshop in honor of Women’s History Month. This is an accessible art workshop celebrating Women’s History Month by learning about women who influenced and changed Washington, DC. Visitors of all ages will learn about historical figures through printed materials with short historical biographies. Everyone is invited to create a colorful collage that includes cut-out portraits of the women featured.
March 8 at 3 PM | Braids & Threads: Closing Day & Performance | Free
Washington Project for the Arts / To honor International Women’s Day and the conclusion of their project with WPA, collaborating artists Bose and Spears invite audiences to join them for a closing day performance that highlights their heritage and the fiber skills learned from women elders. The artists will lead a procession from WPA’s Project Space to Heurich House Museum in Dupont Circle, guiding the audience through a ritualized performance featuring garments and wearable art made by Bose and Spears during their residency. Audience members are encouraged to join the artists after for a closing celebration in the biergarten at Heurich House Museum.
March 15 at 4 PM | Chilean Wine Club | $5
VisArts / Chilean Wine Club is a book reading and artist talk highlighting stories from Borgsdorf’s field work in Chile, highlighting three recent research trips and collaborations with local activists and researchers. Additionally, Borgsdorf presents a reading that re-introduces anthropological theory on materiality, affect, rubble, and infrastructure. The talk shows how lessons from rubble of the recent past in Chile ultimately teach us important lessons about how we think about political violence and regimes anywhere, exploring how violent regimes emerge and disappear from our physical world. Exploring infrastructure in this way, from Chile’s beachside cabins to the United States’ migrant detention centers, opens a new way of noticing, thinking, and being in our world.