Ebony G. Patterson . . . while the dew is still on the roses . . . presents the work of artist Ebony G. Patterson, born in Jamaica in 1981. This is the most significant exhibition of the artist’s work to date, presented within a new installation environment that evokes a night garden.

Patterson is known for drawings, tapestries, videos, sculptures and installations that involve surfaces layered with flowers, glitter, lace and beads. Her work investigates forms of embellishment as they relate to youth culture within disenfranchised communities. Her neo-baroque works address violence, masculinity, “bling,” visibility and invisibility within the post-colonial context of her native Kingston and within black youth culture globally. This exhibition focuses on the role that gardens have played in her practice, referenced as spaces of both beauty and burial, environments filled with fleeting aesthetics and mourning.

Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection will feature the recent gift of over fifty major historical artworks, including more than thirty-five seminal works by Marcel Duchamp, promised to the museum by Washington, D.C., collectors Barbara and Aaron Levine. The exhibition comprises an unparalleled selection of artworks, thoughtfully acquired over the course of two decades and offering a rarely seen view of the entire arc of Duchamp’s career.

Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) is an internationally acclaimed Cuban artist collective best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing. From the outset in the early 1990s, Los Carpinteros’s work has reflected on social transformations in post-revolutionary, socialist Cuba, offering critical commentary of dominant ideologies and power structures with humor and artistry. Mixing aesthetic execution with political underpinning, and a sense of irony with nostalgia, the subversive artworks of Los Carpinteros remain equivocal and open-ended. Los Carpinteros’s Intersections project will feature two videos from 2018—Comodato and Retráctil—and a group of LED sculptural portraits. The films and portraits produce a social landscape of Cuba’s modern history that has been at once utopian and dystopian, idealist and brutalist, promising and devastating. Cuba Va! will be Los Carpinteros’s first museum project as a collective since their separation in summer 2018, continuing the Phillips’s tradition of "firsts" by staging a new beginning of the long celebrated Cuban collective.

Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) is an internationally acclaimed Cuban artist collective best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing. From the outset in the early 1990s, Los Carpinteros’s work has reflected on social transformations in post-revolutionary, socialist Cuba, offering critical commentary of dominant ideologies and power structures with humor and artistry. Mixing aesthetic execution with political underpinning, and a sense of irony with nostalgia, the subversive artworks of Los Carpinteros remain equivocal and open-ended. Los Carpinteros’s Intersections project will feature two videos from 2018—Comodato and Retráctil—and a group of LED sculptural portraits. The films and portraits produce a social landscape of Cuba’s modern history that has been at once utopian and dystopian, idealist and brutalist, promising and devastating. Cuba Va! will be Los Carpinteros’s first museum project as a collective since their separation in summer 2018, continuing the Phillips’s tradition of "firsts" by staging a new beginning of the long celebrated Cuban collective.

Sanda Iliescu’s practice spans the media of painting, drawing, and collage. Outside the studio, she makes murals and installations, some with students at the University of Virginia, where she is Associate Professor of Art and Design.

Born in Romania, Iliescu received her BSE in Civil Engineering and M.Arch in Architecture, both from Princeton University. Her professional awards include The Rome Prize, a McDowell fellowship in painting and The Distinguished Artist Award of the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. Scholarly writing on Iliescu’s artwork include essays by Carmen Bambach, Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia.

The Barbershop Project is a multidisciplinary arts activation inspired by the performance of styling, art of hair and shop culture. The project is centered around Mighty Mighty: an immersive art installation and fully-functional, fantastical barbershop in CulturalDC’s Mobile Art Gallery. Mighty Mighty is created by artist Devan Shimoyama, barber Kelly Gorsuch and furniture-maker Caleb Woodard.

The site is open Tuesday-Friday from 11am-7pm, and Saturdays from 10am-6pm through August 24th, 2019.

The period around 1960 was one of great artistic evolution in the United States. The long-standing influence exerted by Abstract Expressionism, a gestural type of painting and sculpture that emerged after World War II, was dwindling. Artists coming of age at this time perceived the style as mannered and academic and sought to distance themselves from its pervasive legacy. This resulted in a gradual shift in artistic approaches and philosophical attitudes. The works in this installation demonstrate both the lingering hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism and the precursors to these new artistic directions.

The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement presents 75 historical and contemporary artists—from the United States as well as Algeria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Iraq, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Syria, Turkey, UK, Vietnam, and more—whose work poses urgent questions around the experiences and perceptions of migration and the current global refugee crisis.

Through installations, videos, paintings, and documentary images, The Warmth of Other Suns  explores both real and imaginary geographies, reconstructing personal and collective tales of migration. Overlaying historical experiences of migration to and within the United States with the current plight of refugees around the world, the exhibition brings together a multitude of voices and exposes the universality of migration as an experience shared by many. The exhibition also focuses on how artists bear witness to both historical events and more subtle shifts in cultural landscapes.

Borrowing a line from author Richard Wright (1908–1960), and sharing its title with Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning book on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns is anchored by an important reference to the decades-long exodus of over six million African Americans from the brutality and discrimination that ruled the American South. Selections from Jacob Lawrence’s powerful Migration Series (1940-41), a cornerstone of The Phillips Collection, will be among the historical works featured in the show.

Guided by the personal vision of its founders, Glenstone assembles post-World War II artworks of the highest quality that trace the greatest historical shifts in the way people experience and understand art of the 20th and 21st centuries. These works are presented in a series of refined indoor and outdoor spaces designed to facilitate meaningful encounters for visitors.

Vanessa German is a visual and performance artist based in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood. Homewood is the community that is the driving force behind German’s powerful performance work, and whose cast-off relics form the language of her copiously embellished sculptures. As a citizen artist, German explores the power of art and love as a transformative force in the dynamic cultural ecosystem of communities and neighborhoods. She is the founder of Love Front Porch and the ARThouse, a community arts initiative for the children of Homewood.

sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies. is an immersive installation of sculpture and sound that originated at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, in 2017, and is being reimagined in The Fralin. In the artist’s own words, “this work is a dimensional living reckoning. the living reckoning is bold,erruptive,disruptive work against systems & pathologies that oppress & subvert overt & covert violence onto & into the lives & humanity of marginalized people on this land.” 

Despite the wide appeal of Pop art’s engaging imagery, the broader public remains unaware of the participation and significant contribution of Latin American and Latino/a artists working at the same time and alongside their U.S. and European counterparts. The Nasher Museum presents Pop América, 1965-1975, the first exhibition with a hemispheric vision of Pop. The exhibition will make a timely and critical contribution to a more complete understanding of this artistic period.

Drifter History is an immersive installation in which the artist transforms the gallery into a field of walking staffs. Guests are invited to meander and experience connections between walking and anxieties of environmental change, departures and arrivals, and mixing identities and origins.

Paul Ryan writes about his 33-year survey, dual venue exhibition on view at Mary Baldwin’s Hunt Gallery and at the Staunton Augusta Art Center galleries in the Smith Center: “The work in this exhibition represents five series of paintings completed between 1987 and 2018. Additionally, two paintings from my graduate school years are included — one from 1985 and the other from 1986 — as this time was vital to my development as an artist interested in aesthetics and art’s conceptual capacity. The title of the show, In Dialogue, refers to my belief that art is always engaged in conversation — with the artist, the viewer, with other art, the art world, and with the larger world. I decided on a synchronous installation rather than a chronological one for two reasons: the exhibition is at two different venues, and a chronological installation would have perhaps suggested too much of a divide, possibly implying a significant break where there is none; and a synchronous installation offers more playful and surprising juxtapositions, though at the risk of the installation looking like a group show.”

Drawing primarily from the National Portrait Gallery’s vast collection of self-portraits, this exhibition will explore how American artists have chosen to portray themselves since the beginning of the last century. As people are confronted each day with “selfies” via social media and as they continue to examine the fluidity of contemporary identity, this is an opportune time to reassess the significance of self-portraiture in relation to the country’s history and culture. The exhibition will feature more than 75 works by artists such as Josef Albers, Patricia Cronin, Imogen Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Joan Jonas, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Diego Rivera, Lucas Samaras, Fritz Scholder, Roger Shimomura, Shahzia Sikander and Martin Wong. “Eye to I: Self-Portraits from 1900 to Today” is curated by Brandon Brame Fortune, chief curator, National Portrait Gallery.

During the 1940s American photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Vogue, Fortune, and Life. For the first time, the formative decade of Parks’s 60-year career is the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 150 photographs and ephemera—including magazines, books, letters, and family pictures. The exhibition will illustrate how Parks’s early experiences at the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Standard Oil (New Jersey) as well as his close relationships with Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, helped shape his groundbreaking style.

In the Hirshhorn’s largest interactive technology exhibition to date, three major installations from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse series will come together for the artist’s DC debut. A Mexican Canadian artist known for straddling the line between art, technology, and design, Lozano-Hemmer will fill the Museum’s entire Second Level with immersive environments that use heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences from visitors’ own biometric data. Over the course of six months, Pulse will animate the vital signs of hundreds of thousands of participants.

This rare exhibition explores Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolor studies produced during her time at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the summers from 1912 to 1916, and will include several key sketches and paintings as well as other works demonstrating her developing style. This is the first time the watercolors have been on view outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

This exhibitions features works from the collection of Heywood and Cynthia Fralin, major collectors of 19th- and early 20th-century American art, donated to the University of Virginia is 2012. The collection includes works by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Robert Henri, Reginald Marsh and many other notable artists of the period. The couple initially responded to the work by the artists of the Ashcan School, who sought to capture gritty urban scenes to document modern times, but their collection expanded to incorporate a range of artists with diverse stories to tell about the American experience. This installation of highlights from The Fralin family’s collection will round out an exhibition season celebrating American art, a particular strength of the Museum.

Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence features the ndwango (“cloth”), a new form of bead art that has been developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The artists use colored Czech glass beads to transform the flat black cloth into a contemporary art form of remarkable visual depth. Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul,” the Ubuhle Women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos. Twenty individual ndwangos and one monumental artwork will be on view, as well as photographs of the Ubuhle artists taken by renowned South African photographer Zanele Muholi.

The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art brings together a significant group of O’Keeffe’s works as the centerpiece of an exploration of her continued force as a touchstone for contemporary art. Viewers encounter paintings and sculpture by this founder of American modernism alongside works by emerging artists that evoke and expand upon O’Keeffe’s enchanting artistic language.  The Beyond introduces audiences to a new generation of American artists, providing a fresh look at O’Keeffe through the lens of contemporary art.

Nordic Impressions is a major survey of Nordic art spanning nearly 200 years and presenting 53 artists from Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the self-governing islands of Åland, Faroe, and Greenland. The exhibition celebrates the incredible artistic diversity of Nordic art, from idealized paintings of the distinctive Nordic light and untouched landscape to melancholic portraits in quiet interiors and mesmerizing video works that explore the human condition. While the question of what constitutes a distinctively Nordic art has been a constant debate, the art in the exhibition retains a certain mystique and focus on themes that have held a special place in Nordic culture for centuries: light and darkness, inner life and exterior space, the coalescence of nature and folklore, and women’s rights and social liberalism.

Exhibition of new paintings by John Borden Evans.

“These paintings grow out of the painting process. When I begin, I have no idea what the finished painting will look like. Lately my paintings have transformed themselves into imaginary views of the world around our house in North Garden, Virginia. These paintings are like memories that I have uncovered hidden in the many layers of acrylic paint.”

Celebrating the Freer|Sackler’s recent acquisition of a major Japanese photography collection, this exhibition features a selection of works by groundbreaking twentieth-century photographers. Whether capturing evocative landscapes or the gritty realities of postwar Japan, this presentation focuses on Japanese artists’ search for a sense of place in a rapidly changing country. The images highlight destinations both rural and urban, in styles ranging from powerful social documentary to intensely personal. A selection of photobooks and experimental films adds to this multifaceted exploration. 

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylorsituates Traylor as the only known artist enslaved at birth to make a significant body of drawn and painted work. His compelling imagery charts the crossroads of radically different worlds—rural and urban, black and white, old and new—and reveals how one man’s visual record of African American life gives larger meaning to the story of his nation.

Julie Heffernan’s recent paintings create alternative habitats in response to environmental disaster and planetary excess. With rising waters, she imagines worlds in trees or on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree boughs, and road signs guide the journey. Construction cones interrupt the landscape signaling places to stop, enter tiny interior worlds, and reflect on the human condition—its feckless activity, violence, failure, and redemption. Heffernan tends these alternative environments to safeguard bounties we cannot live without. In other moments, she names names and points fingers to those people and activities implicated in recent calamities of both the physical and socio-political environment. Intricately wrought, Heffernan’s paintings evoke the fantastical allegory of Hieronymus Bosch and the sublime of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt.

Julie Heffernan received her MFA in Painting from Yale and a BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Heffernan has received numerous grants including an NEA, NYFA, and Fullbright Fellowship and is in the collection of major museums including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She is represented by P.P.O.W  in New York and Catharine Clark in San Francisco. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University.

Adams’ stunning black and white photographs of the Yosemite Valley and other dramatic Western sites are renowned for their unprecedented luminosity and tonal range, refinements Adams perfected through cutting edge photographic techniques and materials.The landscapes that commanded Adams’ interest have also inspired a new generation of artists, and the show will explore Adams’ legacy by including works by contemporary photographers who investigate his photographic ideals, including Abelardo Morell, Matthew Brandt, and David Benjamin Sherry.