The Oracle Said “Be Still,” curated by Renée Stout, and Newly Selected Artist, Shamila Chaudhary
October 7–October 29, 2023
The Oracle Said, “Be Still.”
Renée Stout, curator
“During the height of Covid, I created a print that featured a disembodied head (the ‘oracle’), in which it suggested in a speech bubble that we should ‘be still.’ In that stillness I had hoped that we would all take the time to care for ourselves, reassess our lives and re-focus on the things that are most important.” — Renée Stout
Sharon Farmer, Beatrice Fergerson 1, 1991, silver gelatin print
Following the premonition of the “oracle,” Stout chose not to place importance on showcasing the featured artists’ most recent works. Instead, she selected works by the artists that collectively evoke a variety of thoughts, moods, and feelings that can be articulated with words like reflective, wistful, introspective, pensive, playful, forlorn, spiritual, and joyful.
Pondering the works, Stout experienced moments of reverie, solace, escape, and a deep sense of longing for something undefinable. In many instances, the titles of the works offer portals into their own narratives and trajectories. It’s that quiet, undefinable, and elusive thing, simultaneously serendipitous and melancholy, to the point of bittersweetness that Stout was aiming to present to the viewer to muse upon in their own way, to hopefully find some peace within the stillness.
Curator Statement
When I was invited to curate this exhibition, my immediate thought was to organize a show in which selected DMV artists would have an opportunity to express their thoughts and frustrations about the current state of our local and national political landscape and the discordant effects the “noise” and mayhem of the past seven years has had on each of our daily lives. But then I worried that the resulting “collective venting” would only serve to add to the decibels.
Instead, I took an opposite but no less therapeutic approach, in the hopes of helping to dial back some of the noise and offer the viewer a space of respite to quiet their minds and take the time to ponder and reflect on simple, joyful moments, as well as the fragility of nature, the fragility of democracy, and the fragility of life itself.
— Renée Stout
About the Curator
Renée Stout received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. Based in Washington, DC, she is the recipient of awards from several institutions, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and was awarded the Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art. She was a 2018 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. Stout has shown throughout the US, and her work is in several national and international museums and private collections. She is an avid roller skater and perfume collector with over 300 bottles of contemporary and vintage scents.
Featured Artists
Cheryl Edwards
Sharon Farmer
Cianne Fragione
Adrienne Gaither
Elaine Qiu
Ellyn Weiss
Joyce Wellman
Trevor Young
About the Artists
Adrienne Gaither
Adrienne Gaither is a visual artist, whose abstract paintings explore a variety of topics including race, familial ties, emotional health, class, and the politics of geometric abstraction. She has held solo exhibitions at Transformer in Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, and Union Arts in Washington D.C. Her work has been exhibited in a host of group exhibitions at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York, DeNovo Gallery in Washington D.C., and Prizm Art Fair, among others. She has been commissioned by the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and PepsiCo. In 2018, she was awarded a fellowship from the D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities, a position in which she continues to hold. Adrienne holds a Master of Fine Arts from Howard University. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.
http://www.adriennegaither.com
Cheryl Edwards
Cheryl Edwards was born in 1954 in Miami Beach, Florida. She went to college at Boston University where she was a MA candidate in the Black Studies program. During that time, she was assigned to shadow Alan Crite for a year and documented his oral history as a project for graduate school. She ended up in New York City where she began to practice law and worked as an Administrative Law Judge. She attended school at night at the Art Student League and studied under Ernest Crichlow. Edwards has traveled around the world, including Africa, South America, Europe, the Carribean, Cuba and Canada.
Cianne Fragione
Over four decades, Cianne Fragione has developed process-oriented work that crosses boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, object, and image. Her works are held in a variety of public collections; she has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in national and international venues; and she is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies, including the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Fellowship and the Studio dei Nipoti artist residency in Monasterace, Italy, among others;
Fragione received her BFA from Goddard College in 1981, Plainfield, VT, and her MFA in 1987 in Painting/Mixed Media from John F. Kennedy University Fiberworks Center for the Arts, Berkeley, CA. During this time, she was a guest graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a fellowship that enabled her to work with a number of artists associated with the beat and funk movements in the San Francisco Bay Area.
https://www.ciannefragione.com
Elaine Qiu
Elaine Qiu is a multidisciplinary artist who works in painting, printmaking, installation, and video. Hovering between abstraction and representation, her work explores the liminal spaces between reality and fiction, past and present, and physical and psychological, tells stories about memory, time, and change. In her work, Qiu offers a meditation between life’s seen and unseen, drawing attention to the tension and flow between the personal and the public. Qiu holds an MFA from University of Maryland, and a BFA from George Mason University. Qiu had solo, two person and group shows at galleries including Great Reston Art Center, Torpedo Factory Art Center, Riverview Artspace and Brentwood Arts Exchange. Her work is held in public and private collections across the United States.
Ellyn Weiss
Ellyn Weiss is a visual artist in two and three dimensions and an independent curator. She has had over 30 solo or featured shows and has participated in numerous juried and curated exhibitions. Much of her work over the past decade is driven by global climate change. Ellyn works with a wide variety of materials; the materials used in recent shows include wax, oil bar, dry pigment, wire, plastic dip and tar. Ellyn is the co-founder of ArtWatch, a group of DC-area artists committed to using their visual communication skills to assert the best values of democracy: inclusion, openness and tolerance. She led a collaboration of 300 artists on the One House Project, an installation celebrating the unique strength that diversity brings to America. Ellyn serves on the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists, is Co-Chair of the Board of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and was a founding member of the Board of the Touchstone Foundation for the Arts.
Joyce Wellman
Joyce Wellman began her artistic journey in the early seventies in various printmaking studios in New York City. There, Wellman was mentored by a host of artists. By 1981, she had relocated to Washington, DC. Throughout her career, Wellman’s concern has been discovering a means by which to create an art vocabulary and grammar that included vibrant colors, cryptic marks, shapes, and symbols that reference mathematics, anthropomorphic forms, and even text and personal experiences that reference her upbringing in a household where "the numbers" were played. Since 1998, Wellman’s paintings, prints, drawings, and mixed media works have been regularly exhibited, published, and collected in the DC Metro area, nationally, and on several occasions internationally.
Sharon Farmer
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Farmer attended Ohio State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in photography. After graduating, Farmer began a career as a freelance photographer. She worked for the Smithsonian Institution, The Washington Post, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She documented news stories, political campaigns, cultural events, conferences, and portraits. Farmer also lectures extensively on photography and served on the faculty at American University, Mount Vernon College, and Indiana University. Farmer has also presented her work in exhibitions at museums and cultural institutions nationwide, including: Art against AIDS, Gospel in the Projects, Twenty Years on the Mall, Washington, D.C. - Beijing Exchange, and Our Views of Struggle.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/sharon-farmer
Trevor Young
Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. Young has an affinity for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subject is modernism’s footprint on the outposts of Americana, places typified by harsh artificial light and hard shadows on concrete. For Young, despite the contemporary art world’s preferences for irony, disjunction and tongue-in-cheek intellectual gamesmanship, painting is at its best when it attempts to offer an unpretentious accounting of where and how we live our day-to-day lives. Trevor’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, including New York, Washington DC, Maryland, and Michigan, among others.
Shamila Chaudhary
Attention Surplus Disorder
Shamila Chaudhary, The Day of Judgment, Part 2, 2020, water-based paint on gesso board, 6 x 24 in.
The 9/11 attacks gave the US government and Americans a lot to think about. Our government reacted with a forceful response but many citizens did not fully anticipate how a new era of war would reshape what it meant to be an American. Chaudhary saw this up close while working for over a decade in national security jobs in the US government. When she left government in 2011, she created the paintings in this exhibit to explore the impact of two decades of war on America’s sense of self. The exhibit’s title, Attention Surplus Disorder, refers to the disordered state of mind experienced by Americans after 9/11 and the surplus of attention on fear. While Chaudhary has written extensively about these issues, painting offers her a new medium to contemplate them in and presents alternative methods of communicating how war reshapes the way Americans see themselves and others.
Artist Statement
I am interested in the relationship between words and images, specifically how the visual image allows us to experience a more complex version of the written word. Using mixed media involving archival materials, such as images and reports from diplomatic history, family photographs, bold acrylic and water-based paints, and patterns and motifs nodding to my American and South Asian heritage, I create art that tells a story of what it means to be both American and a global citizen. By juxtaposing difficult ideas and iconography against colorful, vibrant, busy, and exaggerated patterns and color palettes, my intention is to show how politics affects our lives in deeply psychological and private ways, often unexplored by mainstream media and unaddressed through acts of civic engagement.
About the Artist
Shamila Chaudhary is a foreign policy professional who worked in the US Department of State, US Agency for International Development, and the White House National Security Council. After working for over a decade in the US government on policy issues related to the 9/11 attacks, Chaudhary began to explore policy issues through the creative process. A mostly self-taught multimedia artist, she studied photography at The George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, co-edited the documentary photography book UnPresidented: The Inauguration of Donald J. Trump and the People’s Response, and served as president of the Board of Directors for “Focus on the Story,” an organization using visual storytelling to highlight critical issues, bridge cultural gaps, and spark social change. At Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, she served as executive director of “The Big Picture,” a forum exploring international affairs through arts and culture.