Past Exhibitions

Reset

Barbara Liotta

A Gathering

In this exhibition, A Gathering, Liotta explores how a number of sculptures interact; how they dance together. All of this work is entirely new. The roughly two dozen pieces are smaller than works that have been shown in previous years. Emerging, as if out of a mist, is a congregation of beings. Each column is a singular individual. They convene as a group, but have, for the moment, drifted into smaller conversations. Liotta hopes that you will wander among them, will sense the being in each, and enjoy their dances.

Esha Sadr

Absence of Us

Absence of Us is an interdisciplinary, long-term project that transforms used garments into narratives of memory, identity, and resilience. Esha Sadr reconsiders clothing not merely as a consumer product, but as a second skin—objects that carry personal histories and traces of absent bodies. The exhibition explores her experience as an immigrant, present in the U.S. while absent from her home country.

Adjoa Burrowes

Earth Sanctuary

Earth Sanctuary seeks to celebrate the natural world and the legacy of African American women gardeners in Virginia. In this exhibition of abstract works Burrowes explores vibrant color, texture, and rhythm in recent mixed media paintings on paper referencing botanicals found in local gardens.

Shelby Shadwell

EMERGENCY BLANKETS / VISCERAL

In EMERGENCY BLANKETS, Shadwell makes large scale charcoal and pastel drawings of space blankets (aka solar blankets, emergency blankets, thermal blankets, etc) which are made of a compact lightweight material used to regulate temperatures of things like spacecraft and human bodies in cold circumstances.

Flesh + Bone

Exhibition of Contemporary Figurative Work

Hillyer Art Space presents Flesh & Bone, an exhibition that focuses on contemporary figurative art, pushing boundaries and providing a fresh look at the familiar subject of the human figure. This exhibition was juried by DC-based artist Judy Byron, and will feature thirty-three works by local and regional artists.

Abol Bahadori

Hybrid Baroque

We view the world through our eyes, limited by a narrow color spectrum and depth of vision. But what if we had compound eyes like insects, sonar like dolphins, and used other senses to enhance our vision? In his exhibition Hybrid Baroque, Bahadori explores new sensoria by abstracting and recomposing elements of nature, architectural structures, and human figures.

Te-Mao Lee

In-Between beings

In the exhibition In-Between beings, Te-Mao Lee contemplates the question of existence through a series of video works that gaze toward a future two thousand years from now. Along Taiwan’s east coast, tectonic forces have gradually uplifted ancient coastal settlements to elevated sites—prehistoric traces now suspended above sea level—revealing that ancient peoples once lived by the sea. This vertical dimension of spacetime prompts a descent 20 meters below today’s sea level, where the artist explores a yet-to-arrive mode of being through the materiality of seabed sand.

Taina Litwak

Life in the Anthropocene

Life in the Anthropocene features a room-sized graph of the volume of Global Plastic Production (1950-2040), assembled with discarded plastics collected largely from the artist’s household, her office, and her neighbors.

Calliandra Hermanson

of permutations and patterns

of permutations and patterns draws inspiration from several sources including early modern botanical illustrations; the diagrams of plant circumnutation (the autonomous, cyclical movement of plants in response to environmental stimuli) done by Charles Darwin in the 1880s; and the engravings from Nehemiah Grew’s 1682 “The Anatomy of Plants,” some of the earliest studies of plant morphology through a microscope.