As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States in 2026, my exhibition would revolve around the importance of the horse to our country incorporating materials that are quintessentially American – aluminum (Alcoa), steel (what was U.S. Steel) and fire. The horse is a symbol of strength, and I will explore deeply rooted connections between it and American industry and culture i.e.automobiles/Detroit/horsepower/identity. I will create a trio of large 9’-11’ foot high steel sculptures placed in a circle with smaller steel totems inside. Additionally, I will create steel and wood collages mounted to grids of aluminum canvases as well as smaller steel sculptures on pedestals.

Born in 1961 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Rick Bach is an artist who prefers to work in steel. His style has been influenced from his early days working alongside his father in an auto-body shop to graduating with a degree in commercial art from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. As a sculptor, his work ranges from architectural to figurative, including 18-feet-high Trojan horses and Bovine Mariachi’s. Since 1996, Bach has been the resident artist for the Mad Mex restaurant chain owned by the Big Burrito Group. He was commissioned by the Office of Cultural Heritage at the State Department in 2023, to create a mural for the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.Bach currently resides in Arlington, VA, and has studios in Bladensburg, Maryland, and Pittsburgh. He is represented by Zynka Gallery in Pittsburgh, and Studio A Global in Washington, DC.

My installations, video, and electronic and interactive artworks are rooted in questions of how our technological processes reflect human experience. I am using technology to respond to ideas around specific sites, and the ways that physical and digital worlds interact and overlay. There is a common tendency to use data and artificial intelligence in order to describe a pure, objective truth. However, the data we collect and tools we use to interpret information are all subjective, and true knowing is subjective. These installations make an attempt to know a site or piece of technology, but intentionally fall short and hold us back.

Tara Youngborg is a Maryland-based artist, educator, curator, and arts administrator. She has a BA in Art and Art History from St Mary’s College of Maryland and an MFA in Studio Art from Towson University. Her work uses digital technologies to create video and audio compositions that are combined into immersive installations that explore place, memory, and technology. Youngborg is a 2025-2026 Jack Straw New Media Gallery resident, 2025-2027 Hamiltonian Fellow, was awarded second place for the 2025 Trawick prize, and has been Artist-in-Residence at the St Mary’s College Artist House and the Torpedo Factory Art Center. She has presented her work in exhibitions at the George Washington Carver Center for the Arts, the University of Mary Washington Media wall, and The Delaware Contemporary, and in exhibitions across the United States and abroad.

My latest work explores the intersections of material, culture, and identity through textiles, ceramics, and collage. I am interested in how Black women’s craft and beauty traditions, particularly hairstyling, function as sites of knowledge, care, and cultural expression. By highlighting hair as fiber, I challenge conventional distinctions between adornment, craft, and fine art, positioning braiding, weaving, and repetition as both process and language. Working across what I describe as water, fiber, and form, I use material to examine transformation and continuity. Water acts as a catalyst, shaping and softening, while fiber carries lineage and connection. Form emerges through gestures of weaving, coiling, and layering, translating intimate acts into sculptural presence. Through this work, I seek to honor the labor and innovation embedded in everyday practices, creating space for new understandings of craft that are rooted in Black cultural traditions and lived experience.

Ashley White is a Richmond, Virginia–based artist working across textiles, ceramics, and collage. Her practice explores the intersections of craft, culture, and identity, with a focus on Black material traditions and the narratives embedded within them. Through her ongoing body of work, Water, Fiber, Form, she reimagines hair as a fiber art, drawing connections between hairstyling practices, weaving, and vessel-making. White has participated in residencies at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Gracia in Guatemala, where she deepened her research through engagement with Indigenous textile practices and material traditions. These experiences inform her approach to fiber as a site of cultural knowledge, exchange, and continuity. Her work centers material as a form of storytelling, inviting viewers to consider how process, tradition, and labor shape identity, memory, and contemporary expressions of craft.