Counterspace brings together two interconnected bodies of work that examine the space between public narrative and private experience. 

At the center of the exhibition are six double-sided banners inspired by Washington, DC landmarks associated with power, justice, faith, identity, mobility, and knowledge. One side reflects the collective ideals embedded within these institutions; the reverse reimagines them through a personal lens, revealing emotional and psychological responses that may affirm, complicate, or challenge their public significance. Together, the banners suggest that shared symbols rarely produce shared meanings.

Complementing the banners are paintings from the Architectures of Passage series, inspired by bridges, railway hubs, and other spaces of transit. These environments – designed for circulation rather than dwelling — become metaphors for contemporary life marked by mobility, uncertainty, displacement, and transformation.

Through painting, collage, textiles, and stitching, Counterspace explores how individuals navigate the physical and symbolic structures that shape collective experience, while remaining connected to one another.

Elizabeth Casqueiro is a Portuguese-American, DC-based, mixed-media painter and multi-media artist whose work engages architecture as a symbolic and emotional language through which to explore memory, identity, and human experience. 

She has shown her work in diverse solo and group shows in the United States and in Europe, and is a recipient of multiple art awards from, among others, the London Art Biennial, DC Arts and Humanities, and the Maryland State Arts Council.  

Casqueiro holds graduate degrees in architecture and fine arts and teaches at Georgetown University.  Her art practice takes place in two studios – at the Jackson Art Center in Washington DC and in Easton, Maryland – and her work is in private and corporate collections, including the World Bank Group. 

My art practice explores personal and collective perceptions through the symbolism embedded in architecture and nature. Trained as an architect, I understand space as both physical reality and metaphorical construct, a perspective further shaped by my experience as an immigrant, where movement between places—and the disruption and possibility it entails—becomes a continual search for belonging and meaning and ground that holds.

Layered patterns and unresolved forms resist fixed order, evoking memory, time, and the accumulation of lived experience. Labor-intensive processes such as hand-stitching function as acts of slow mark-making, restoration, and continuity. My luminous palette draws from a sun-soaked Portuguese childhood shaped by wonder and a deep connection to place.

By dismantling the conventions of painting, I also dissolve the rigidity associated with the built environment, transforming it into something deeply human and almost intangible: vulnerable, shifting, permeable, and alive – a vehicle for exploring identity, memory, displacement, and emotional experience.

A Conversation with Elizabeth Casqueiro
Saturday, August 22, 1 pm

Our featured solo artist, Elizabeth Casquiero, will be joined by Reem Bassous, Director of the Washington Studio School, to discuss her exhibition Counterspace, inspired by DC landmarks and how they evoke power, identity, justice, connection, and knowledge.

Admission is free (a $10 donation is suggested)