Newly Selected Artists-Lee Nowell-Wilson

Newly Selected Artists-Lee Nowell-Wilson

Lee Nowell-Wilson
House Under the Table
Saturday, February 4–Sunday, February 26, 2023

House Under the Table is a new body of work that illustrates a wrestling between the commonplace and the divine in the arena of one’s soul. With mothering as the lens, I examine my tendency to resent the mundane, along with the needed reconciliation I gain through the sacrifice of novelty. As I feel relegated to the floor as a parent to play house, pour fake tea and climb under tables repeatedly, it highlights my inability to truly sit. I question, why am I dismissive of this boredom?

The pieces of this exhibition employ an exaggeration of light and pattern to heighten the urgency of this question. In contrast to past work, I introduce an element of interior space, nostalgia and a use of paint to document the slow caricature of time. In the end, House Under the Table is my first exposure of an unreconciled heart expecting fulfillment from the wrong metaphorical laundry basket, mistaking material as debris and finding it again in the slow, monotony of mothering.

About the artist:

Lee Nowell-Wilson (b. Easton, MD 1989) is an American figurative artist creating large scale paintings and works on paper. She earned her BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011, and currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Nowell-Wilson has participated in artist residencies with Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, CO, Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN, Creative Paradox in Annapolis, MD, and the Street Art School in Lyon, France. In 2019, she founded MILKED, an arts publication, and within the last year her own work has featured in the Northwest Review, Our Rhythms Our Blues online zine, and Stay Home Gallery’s first publication. In 2021, her work was exhibited with Latela Curatorial and Plain Sight Gallery in Washington, D.C, and reviewed in The Washington Post. to learn more about the artist, visit her website.

Newly Selected Artists-Yasmine Dabbous

Yasmine Dabbous
If You Leave Under Fire, What Would You Take with You?
Saturday, February 4–Sunday, February 26, 2023

Amputated from their former lives, refugees find themselves—to borrow from Albert Camus—diverted from their selfness. They leave the territories of their ancestors, in hope to find safety in new and unknown destinations. On these assiduous journeys, they cling to material objects they carry with them all the way from home.

These foundation objects acquire a practical and conceptual importance larger than life. They promote survival and livelihood. They defy loss to preserve the refugee’s identity as well as their humanity. Remnants of a former reality, objects create critical connections between past and future, in an elusive present.

In this exhibition, artist Yasmine Dabbous uses fiber arts and jewelry design to celebrate these consequential objects. Her hand-embroidered miniature mattresses project actual objects grabbed by refugees in twelve countries across four continents. The mattresses themselves hail yet another rooted mast for these tired lives on the move.

Underlying this celebration, where home becomes a trivial object, is a commentary about the collapse of humanity. Despite massive strides in cybernetics and genetics, civilization faces moral defeat when it fails to avert conflict, multiple refugee crises and millions of lives shattered.

 

About the artist:

Yasmine Dabbous, PhD, is a visual culture artist and researcher from Beirut, Lebanon.

Dabbous chiefly uses fiber arts and jewelry design to comment on contemporary socio-cultural issues, of pertinence to our globalized communities. Dabbous is influenced by her upbringing in a tumultuous region, her academic interests rooted in interdisciplinary methodologies, and a solid training in storytelling.

After a long career in journalism and journalism education, Dabbous left her professorial position at the Lebanese American University to study textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Today, her portfolio includes gallery and museum exhibitions in New York City, Washington DC, London and Beirut.

Dabbous is the founder of Kinship Stories, a line of tribal art necklaces that celebrate cultures. She is also the co-founder of Espace Fann, a Beirut-based creative space teaching formal art and design.

Dabbous has widely lectured and written about the healing impact of textile art and its role in building bridges across communities.

Pulse 2023

Pulse 2023
Saturday, January 7 – Sunday, January 29, 2023

IA&A at Hillyer presents Pulse 2023, an exhibition that recognizes the role of Hillyer’s Advisory Committee in identifying artists for solo and group exhibitions at Hillyer’s renowned contemporary art space. The exhibition features work by some of Hillyer’s past notable members such as Helen Frederick, Renée Stout, and Tom Wolff, and current members, Joan Belmar, Nikki Brugnoli, Anna U Davis, Elsabe Dixon, Cianne Fragione, Pat Goslee, Laurel Lukaszewski, Cory Oberndorfer, John Paradiso, and Amber Robles-Gordon.

David Furchgott, the founder of International Arts and Artists, who opened Hillyer in April 2006, formed the Advisory Committee to establish roots in the art community early on, turning to renowned artists and scholars like Bill Christenberry, Renée Stout, David Driskell, and Sam Gilliam, among others, to get the project underway. From 2006 to the present, Hillyer has featured over 350 exhibitions and roughly 1,325 artists in solo and group shows.

Below is a list of members who have served since the beginning – a list that is certainly a Who’s Who of the visual arts in our Washington community for the last sixteen years:

Maria Barbosa
Joan Belmar
Margaret Boozer
John Blee
Nikki Brugnoli
Judy Byron
Chan Chao
Zoë Charlton
Bill Christenberry
Rebecca Clark
Manon Cleary
Billy Colbert
Anna U Davis
Elsabe Dixon
John Dreyfuss

David Driskell
Jarvis DuBois
Pattie Porter Firestone
Cianne Fragione
Helen Frederick
Sam Gilliam
Carol Brown Goldberg
Pat Goslee
Rebecca Kamen
Barbara Liotta
Laurel Lukaszewski
Diedre Ehlen MacWilliams
Quentin Mosely
Cory Oberndorfer
John Paradiso

Lorelle Rau
Frank Right
Ellington Robinson
Amber Robles-Gordon
Wendy Ross
John Ruppert
Foon Sham
Judy Southerland
Renée Stout
Lou Stovall
Duncan Tebow
Ben Tolman
Mindy Weisel
Tom Wolff

Pulse 2023 celebrates the legacy and contributions of the Advisory Committee, while serving as a catalyst for future exhibitions in 2023 that resulted from the committee’s recent selections from Hillyer’s annual Call for Proposals.

This exhibition and its related programs are sponsored by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.