January 16 – February 22, 2025
Winter Exhibitions
Pieced Together, We are Whole
Playing with Shadows: Works by Liz Lescault
The artists featured in Pieced Together We are Whole— Megan Koeppel, Susan J. Lapham, Russ Little, Dominie Nash, John Paradiso, and Imani W. Russell—all work non-traditionally within the quilting medium. Using a variety of approaches, the ideas explored were personal, political, and universal. Built into the making process, which entails the joining together of many parts to create a whole, was also the expression of ideas about communion, cohesion, gathering, blending, and building.
In Playing with Shadows, Liz Lescault’s biomorphic sculptures were constructed primarily with extruded filaments, some sculptures incorporating found objects. The fine filaments create shadows that become part of the piece, sometimes indistinguishable from it. Remnants and relics such as shadows, fossils and residues are a part of an object’s story and can be used in discovery. Scientists use remnants to uncover the nature of objects that may no longer exist in their original form. Remnants can also explain more about the existing nature of an object, as is the case in Playing with Shadows.
November 14, 2024 – January 4, 2025
Amelia Hankin
Vibrant Matter: Works from Wood
Growth Patterns: Works by Amelia Hankin
Vibrant Matter: Works from Wood featured a variety of printmaking techniques that explore the effect of material within creative practices. Pulling impressions from wood, the ten artists showcased in the exhibit examined political theorist Jane Bennet’s theory of “vital materialism”: that matter itself, even inanimate objects, hold life and are active participants in the printing process. Featured artists included Catherine Cole, Cheryl Edwards, Helen Frederick, Jake Lahah, Jun Lee, Ursula W Minervini, Jonathon Poliszuk, Steve Prince, Pat Sargent, and Priscilla Young.
In Growth Patterns: Works by Amelia Hankin, Hankin used the simple tools of the drawing process—graphite, paper, eraser—to create compositions that bring together natural objects and structures to create spaces full of meaning and content. These images refer to the cycles of birth, regeneration and death, in all their nuanced complexity and beauty.
September 12 -October 26, 2024
Sculpture NOW 2024
Presented by MPA and the Washington Sculptors Group, Sculpture NOW 2024 featured non-thematic exhibition of new works, finished within the last two years. Juried by MPA Curator and Artistic Director Nancy Sausser, Sculpture NOW featured the work of more than 60 artists.
April 11 – June 15, 2024
Abol Bahadori, “Revival”
Emerson Gallery
Toys in the Hands of History: Paintings by Osvaldo Mesa
Osvaldo Mesa taps into his hybrid experience as an Afro-Cuban artist to make paintings that combine an exploration of western painting traditions (Medieval, Baroque, Surrealism and Abstraction) with ideas and objects from African spirituality. Born in Cuba, raised in Miami, and a longtime resident of Baltimore, Mesa makes intensely robust paintings full of color, form, pattern and movement. These works conjure a unique and magical energetic vitality, offering a glimpse into a dynamic, multidimensional inner world.
Emerson Gallery
Return to the Library of L.E. Grothaus: Altered Books by Laura Grothaus
Laura Grothaus exhibits a series of altered books that offer the viewer a chance to build their own story from the contents contained. Drawing on the history of the book as an object, ideas about place, personal identity, folklore, nature, and religion, and also her work as an educator and activist, she has created works that spark imagination and connection. Combining found and sculptural objects with painted surfaces, Grothaus’ Magic Books can be arranged and rearranged to honor the possibility inherent in all our tales, personal, communal and infinite.
Atrium Gallery
Inner Gardens: Works by Abol Bahadori
In his Inner Gardens series Abol Bahadori creates layered mixed media works that embrace the dichotomy and contradictions that comprise reality. He prioritizes color over shape and form. Space is also important, skillfully rendered to create a sense of place that can be imaginatively entered by the viewer. Working on a small to medium scale, and through geometric, organic, abstract and recognizable imagery, Bahadori’s dynamic, electric images glow with energy as they highlight inner and outer landscapes that are both recognizable and unfamiliar.
December 7, 2023 – February 17, 2024
Moving Beyond Beauty: Reverence and Reclamation (Emerson Gallery)
Adjoa Jackson Burrowes, Jacqui Crocetta, Maggie Gourlay, June Linowitz, and Elzbieta Sikorska
This exhibit brought together five artists—Adjoa Jackson Burrowes, Jacqui Crocetta, Maggie Gourlay, June Linowitz, and Elzbieta Sikorska—who make work that is at once aesthetically pleasing and philosophically compelling. Visual attractiveness and the expression of deep and sometimes unsettling ideas live together, as each artist feels an urgency to address love, concern and reverence for the natural world. Beauty, created through skillful and inventive use of materials, becomes the doorway through which the viewer enters into a sincere dialogue about our fundamental need to experience and learn from nature and our ever more pressing responsibility to honor and care for it.
To March is to Love: Weavings by Janel Leppin (Atrium Gallery)
Leppin’s whimsical and moving fiber art represents the dichotomy of a wondrous and fragile world, weaving textiles and used clothing to create unexpected textures and patterns. Her work mirrors the struggle between action and complacency, inviting us to engage with and contemplate our humanity.
September 14, 2023 – November 11, 2023
(Not) Strictly Painting 14 (Emerson & Atrium Galleries)
(Not) Strictly Painting is a juried biennial exhibition celebrating the depth and breadth of paintings–or works related in some way to painting–from artists throughout the mid-Atlantic area. Now in its 14th iteration, Strictly Painting is one of the region’s most important painting exhibitions. (Not) Strictly Painting was juried by Tim Brown, Director of IA&A at Hillyer.
April 13, 2023 – June 10, 2023
Industry Standards: Works by Chris Combs (Emerson Gallery)
Concerns: Sculpture by George Lorio (Emerson Gallery)
With My Face Against the Future: Paintings by Josh Whipkey (Emerson Gallery)
Concerns: Sculpture by George Lorio
In George Lorio’s sculptures, tree-like forms are presented as metaphorical references to the possibility of healing and regeneration. Built from a combination of plywood armatures and found bark and twigs, the works exemplify a partnership between human effort and the natural world. Exuding a calm beauty, and both complexity and simplicity, these sculptures inspire a meditation on the necessity of valuing our environment.
Industry Standards: Works by Chris Combs
Chris Combs’ sculptures are made from reclaimed or surplus industrial components. Pulled together to both perform a task (of the artists’ making) and draw the viewer in aesthetically and technically, the pieces seem almost familiar and yet strangely new. While addressing themes of technology, surveillance and the destruction of the environment, Combs creates sculptures which are at once ominous and distinctly playful.
With My Face Against the Future: Paintings by Josh Whipkey
Josh Whipkey’s paintings explore anxiety from physical, experiential, and philosophical perspectives. His smaller abstractions are full of high frequency color and dynamic geometric lines and shapes. Energy is built both within the edges of each individual painting and in each painting’s relationship to another. The exhibit features both smaller works that are more compressed compositions to recent paintings that are larger, more spacious and leave room for thoughtful philosophical contemplation upon the nature of reality itself.
December 9, 2022 – February 18, 2023
In the Round: Dimensional Fiber Works (Emerson Gallery)
Trees on the Edge: Artwork in Layered Paper by Ronni Jolles (Atrium Gallery)
In the Round: Dimensional Fiber Works
This curated exhibit will feature works made primarily from fiber-based materials. In the Round featured artists include YunKyoung Cho, Linda Colsh, Michael Gessner, Sookkyung Park, and Kristina Penhoet.
Utilizing processes and configurations that bring into being works that claim status as objects rather than illusions, the pieces in this exhibit operate in the realm of “thing-ness”. We as viewers co-exist alongside these unique and imaginative objects, understanding innately their weight and size in relation to ourselves, but unsure at times about the material or purpose. Questions arise that fascinate, that keep us looking and wondering, pondering possibilities and stretching the visual and conceptual boundaries of our mutual coexistence.
Trees on the Edge: Artwork in Layered Paper by Ronni Jolles
Jolles creates beautiful paper paintings through a unique process using many different kinds of paper from all over the world. She cuts, tears and layers hundreds of pieces to build each of her images, creating works with active texture, infinite color and distinct presence. Although Jolles works with a variety of subjects, the pieces in the MPA exhibit focus on forms in the landscape as interpreted through trees. These engaging works bring the spirit of the woods alive, celebrating the beauty, strength and importance of this majestic life form.
September 16 – November 10, 2022
Continuum: Artists Teaching Artists
Continuum: Artists Teaching Artists was an invitational exhibition highlighting works by artists who give significant time to teaching, mentoring, and community-building, while continuing to sustain and develop strong and innovative personal bodies of work. Continuum included works from Artist/Educators from most of the area colleges and universities, including George Mason, George Washington, Georgetown, Northern Virginia Community College, University of Maryland, and Maryland Institute College of Art. Also represented were teaching institutes such as the Washington Glass School.
June 23 – August 20, 2022
Atrium Gallery: MPA ClassWorks Exhibition, featuring art produced by participants in the MPA Studio Education Program
April 14 – June 11, 2022
Emerson Gallery & Online: Collide of Scope: Paintings by James Stephen Terrell
Collide of Scope
Paintings by James Stephen Terrell
Springing from a wide array of influences, including quilt design, stained glass techniques and Joseph Albers’ color blocking, James Stephen Terrell’s dynamic and colorful paintings project energy and life. Moving between abstraction and realism, electric color interactions and geometric patterning, Terrell’s aim is to contemplate and document our humanity in these singularly turbulent times.
Matt Pinney
Emerson Gallery & Online: Where Do We Go From Here: New Paintings by Matt Pinney
This recent body of work depicts the artist’s progression and growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning with large, evocative paintings about isolation and escape, Matt Pinney moves to smaller, faster works as a way of “reaching deeper to find a more lasting connection to my place in the world and the experiences that transcend the pandemic”.
Atrium Gallery & Online: Lightboxes by Melanie Kehoss
Melanie Kehoss creates astoundingly detailed lightboxes that tap into historical narratives to explore the origins of cultural phenomena. Specifically, the works in this exhibit depict snapshots from activities that began as work and evolved into recreation. Illuminated and each encompassing their own discrete environment, these intricately composed worlds draw the viewer deep inside, offering a chance to experience the past in a new light. Read The Washington Post Review of Lightboxes.
December 2, 2021 – February 19, 2022
Emerson Gallery & Online: Give and Take: Building Form
Featuring abstract wood sculpture by Emilie Benes Brzezinski, Rachel Rotenberg, Foon Sham, and Norma Schwartz 
Featuring dynamic abstract sculptural works by four artists who work primarily in wood, this exhibit will explore each artist’s personal vision along with their methodology of making. By employing varying degrees of adding and subtracting material–laminating or carving, sawing and sanding–these artists build form by either giving or taking away. With this mind, process is highlighted, understood and demonstrated with an eye towards clarifying the genesis and emergence of form.
Atrium Gallery & Online: Intersectional Painting: Works by Sheila Crider
Artist Sheila Crider exhibited works from an on-going series combining painting, drawing, braiding, stitching and weaving to create three-dimensional abstract forms. Through these works, which are both beautiful and evocative, Crider found an inventive and original process that enables her to visually explore multiple intersections between material, place, tradition, race, gender, history, culture, narrative, art, painting, object and picture.
September 18 – November 13, 2021
Emerson Gallery, Atrium Gallery, & Online: (Not) Strictly Painting
(Not) Strictly Painting, a juried biennial exhibition, celebrated the depth and breadth of paintings–or works related in some way to painting–from artists throughout the mid-Atlantic area. Now in its 13th iteration, Strictly Painting is one of the region’s most important painting exhibitions. (Not) Strictly Painting was juried by Foon Sham, Virginia-based artist and Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Virginia Treanor, Associate Curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Pictured, clockwise from top left: Sookkyung Park, “Wave III”; Ally Morgan, “St. Elmo’s Fire”; Anne Cherubim, “Earth in Pieces II”; Johan Lowie, “EARTHBOUND, GROUNDED”; Jenny Walton, “The In Between”
June 24 – August 15, 2021
MPA Atrium Gallery: MPA Faculty Art Exhibition
The MPA Faculty Art Exhibition featured works from a number of our faculty, including: David Carlson, Naomi Chung, Barbara Januszkiewicz, M. Jane Johnson, Rula Jones, Joyce Lee, Pamela Saunders, Kerry Vosler, and Jordan Xu.
April 1 – June 10, 2021
Pictured, clockwise from top left: Yuriko Yamaguchi, “Indian America. The Last Buffalo Hair”; Alonzo Davis, “Microclimate Series III”; Yuriko Yamaguchi, “Light”; Alonzo Davis, “Microclimate Series IX”
Emerson Gallery & Online: Intium Novum: Humanity’s End As A New Beginning, featuring artist Yuriko Yamaguchi and writer Mineke Schipper
Organized around a concern about climate change and the future of our planet, Initium Novum: Humanity’s End As A New Beginning is inspired by end-of-the-world mythologies from around the globe. Yamaguchi’s expressionistic paintings alluding to these universal stories are paired with Schipper’s writings, reached through QR codes on the wall. Also included are two site-specific installation works by Yamaguchi, making use of both physical materials, video, and light. Poetic in nature, the message is subtle and subliminal, the effect profoundly ephemeral and experiential, never didactic.
Atrium Gallery & Online: Navigating Climate Change, Extended
Featuring work by Alonzo Davis
Building exuberant raft-like works from a variety of materials including bamboo, sailcloth, paper, twine, wax, paint, and light, Alonzo Davis alludes to many things, including both his childhood along the windy shores of Southern California and the stick charts of Micronesia he encountered during a lifetime of open-eyed, curiosity driven world travel. A love of patterns, bright color, and an embrace of low-tech construction techniques is central to the improvisational look and feel of these works. But a long career as a gallerist, educator, and artist also brings a practiced and sure hand and deft feel for the structural, compositional, and interactive bedrock upon which each piece is founded. These works are unique, dynamic, and immediately relevant.
Exhibitions underwritten by Donna and Bruce Berlage.
DECEMBER 9, 2020 – FEBRUARY 20, 2021
Pictured, from top left: Joseph Cortina, “Media Burn”; Shanthi Chandrasekar, “Multiverse – Random”; Shanthi Chandrasekar, “Multiverse – Fractals”
Emerson Gallery & Online: Vertical Interval: New Works by Joseph Cortina
Drawing on his background as a painter and his long career creating films and interactive experiences for museums, McLean-based artist Joseph Cortina’s works are a response to the fleeting, elusive quality of time-based media. His paintings, which can be seen as singular frames in an on-going dialog, revel in their own materiality. Wholeheartedly embracing depth of color, texture, and line, Cortina is drawn back to painting for its immediate, direct, and therapeutic significance.
Click here to watch the Vertical Interval exhibition overview video.
Atrium Gallery & Online:Beginningless Endless: Works by Shanthi Chandrasekar
Intensely curious by nature, Shanthi Chandrasekar creates work that explores the big questions of science and the natural world. Employing the mediums of drawing, painting and sculpture, and tapping into her training in physics and psychology, Chandrasekar has created a vehicle for both her observational questioning and the wild journeys of her imagination. With astounding precision and skill, these works depict a perfect balance between our inner and outer worlds.
Click here to watch the Beginningless Endless exhibition overview video.
Exhibitions underwritten by JBG Smith
SEPTEMBER 17 – NOVEMBER 14, 2020
Sculpture NOW artists included, from top left: Melissa Burley, “When Time Stood Still”; Keith Krueger, “Hit the North”; Louisa Neill, “Capsule & Counting Continuity”; Kanika Sircar, “Gateway 3”
Emerson Gallery & Online: Sculpture NOW 2020
Presented by The Washington Sculptors Group and McLean Project for the Arts
What a wonderful collection of strong, inventive and well- crafted work. The submissions covered a broad spectrum of approaches, from conceptually oriented, more focused on formal concerns, and often a dynamic balance of the two. These sculptures all represented a high level of creativity in both material construction and ideas. My task was to choose the works that live most completely in the world, the ones that walk the line between communicating the intentions of the artist with both clarity and mystery, while at the same time leaving open a space for personal viewer response and interpretation. As the juror and a viewer with some experience, I chose for inclusion the pieces that worked best for me in this way, the ones that most clearly asserted both their presence and their purpose and did so with the appropriate amount of skill. In addition, I sought to honor the diversity of the submissions by choosing works that represented a myriad of styles, approaches and subject matter. I think the resulting exhibition is both wildly eclectic and deeply optimistic, a testament to the acts of creating and communicating as essential aspects of the human spirit.
Nancy Sausser, Sculpture NOW Juror
JULY 15, 2020 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2020
Online: SHIFT
How has your world been affected by this “SHIFT” in our lives?
MPA’s first online juried exhibition, SHIFT, featured works focusing on the concept of shift, change or exchange in paradigm, position, direction, tendency, viewpoint, atmosphere, needs, dreams, schedules, interactions, environment, perspective…
SHIFT was juried by Juried by Henry L. Thaggert and Sarah Tanguy.
DECEMBER 5, 2019 – FEBRUARY 29, 2020
“Take Flight”, Kyujin Lee, left; “Cluster Box”, Eve Stockton, right
Emerson Gallery: Eve Stockton: Origin Stories
Known for large-scale woodcut prints, Stockton’s works are inspired by a close observation of nature and an eclectic interest in science. Combining her prints and stone sculpture, she works to create an atmosphere that can subtly envelop the viewer.
Atrium Gallery: Replay and Reshuffle: Paintings by Kyujin Lee
Combining the spontaneity of surrealist automatism with refined illustrative skill, Kyujin Lee draws on the world of fairy tale to compose paintings exploring dreams, identity and personal transformation.
SEPTEMBER 19 – NOVEMBER 16, 2019
“Qaimnuq”, Meghan Walsh, left, and Untitled work by Miriam Mörsel Nathan, right
Emerson Gallery: Strictly Painting 12 An Fharraige Fheargach: The Fiery Sea
Works by Meghan Walsh
Meghan’s organically shaped stone and mixed media mosaic sculptures appear to twist and turn, as if trying to slide right off the wall. These hand formed objects are made in partnership with the stone, capturing and encapsulating a sense of past experience, like glaciers or frozen time capsules. Walsh describes the works, which strongly reference landscape, as “primordial connectors or archives of wisdom.” They speak of our quickly changing world, tapping into a deep historical perspective as they point out the dignity and beauty found in the communion of unexpected objects.
Atrium Gallery: Some Pieces of the Nature of Things: Drawings by Miriam Mörsel Nathan
Miriam Mörsel Nathan will exhibit drawings on paper that combine fragmented landscape references, abstract marks and field, and sensitive, meandering line work. Drawing on her background as a poet, the calligraphic and fluid musicality of the written word is sometimes included in the composition as well.
JUNE 8 – JULY 13, 2019
MPA@ChainBridge: Strictly Painting 12
Currently in its twelfth iteration, Strictly Painting is one of the region’s most important painting exhibitions, celebrating the depth and breadth of painters working throughout the mid-Atlantic. The Strictly Painting 12 juror was Adah Rose Bitterbaum, owner and director of the Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington, Maryland.
APRIL 11 – JUNE 1, 2019
MPA@ChainBridge: Taking Territory: New Works by Susan Goldman, Barbara Kerne, Eve Stockton and Patricia Underwood
These four DC-area printmaking artists came together in Taking Territory to show works that mine many of the myriad techniques available to artists working in printmaking today. Using the media as a way into personal expression and conceptual concerns, each also draws on their vast knowledge and experience, as artists and as human beings, stretching boundaries and entering new personal territory.
JANUARY 10 – MARCH 2, 2019
MPA@ChainBridge: Intention/Invention: Works by Delna Dastur and Maryanne Pollock
Intention/Invention featured work by two abstract painters, Delna Dastur and Maryanne Pollock. Both artists make works created through a delicate and magical blend of intentional, planned process and improvisational experimentation. Maryanne Pollock’s exuberant works combine painting and printmaking techniques to create abstractions with calligraphic marking and patterning influenced by time living and working in Egypt. Delna Dastur, also an abstractionist, uses architecturally inspired compositional structure to make intricately layered lyrical paintings that display atmospheric experimentation based on both honed skill and intuition.
NOVEMBER 15 – DECEMBER 22, 2018
MPA@ChainBridge: From Here to Elsewhere: Kindled by Things
From Here to Elsewhere: Kindled by Things
Curated by MPA’s Exhibitions Director Nancy Sausser, From Here to Elsewhere: Kindled by Things featured artists who are inspired to use materials, both ordinary and unusual, in new and unorthodox ways. Bringing together found materials, building on and adding to what is already there, and placing objects in new contexts are a few of the ways working employed by each of these artists. As a result, the viewer is encouraged to see differently and to follow the creative impulse of the artist into unexpected territory.
Featured artists include:
- Suzi Fox
- Maria Karametou
- Ruth Lozner
- Betsy Packard
- Evan Reed
SEPTEMBER 13 – NOVEMBER 3, 2018
MPA@ChainBridge: Encounters: Works by Mia Halton
Mia Halton
Baltimore artist Mia Halton uses humor and metaphor to visually describe the joys, challenges and vagaries of being a human being in this world. Drawing on both paper and clay, she captures quickly and with a sense of expressive urgency the interrelationships between us as well as the inner conversations that go on inside us.
This exhibition, arranged as an installation, included works created during a recent residency in Puebla, Mexico. The works represent an exploration of her challenges and experiences living and making work in this new, inspiring environment.
JUNE 14 – AUGUST 18, 2018
MPA@ChainBridge: Too Much of Too Much: Overstimulated, Overexposed and Overextended
“From 500 Sketches”, by Frank Phillips
Juried by Independent Curator Laura Roulet, this exhibit featured works by Mid-Atlantic artists whose works explore the ideas of overstimulation, excessiveness and bombardment, be it through too much information, activity, expectation, or by any other means.
APRIL 12 – JUNE 3, 2018
MPA@ChainBridge: Erratic Landscapes: New Works by Artemis Herber
Artemis Herber, “Polyphemus: After Casting Rocks,”
mixed media on cardboard, 2018
Using recycled cardboard—the material used for packing and shipping that is so omnipresent in our consumer society—German-born and Baltimore-based artist Artemis Herber creates intense collaged paintings that explore the complicated interconnections between human beings and the land. In her deep and wide-ranging research, Herber gathers ideas from multiple fields, including philosophy, archeology, economics and architecture.
Of critical interest to Herber is an investigation of deep time and human impact through the lens of the Anthropocene, which refers to the relatively short period beginning when human activities first started to affect the earth’s ecosystem.
Working with a three-point framework that includes land use, time and global positioning, Herber’s large-scale land and cityscapes employ expressive and energetic drawing and painting techniques and a self-invented torn and cut collage process including both construction and disintegration.
JAN 11 – MAR 3, 2018
MPA@ChainBridge: Methods of Inquiry: Fields of Discovery
Methods of Inquiry: Fields of Discovery featured six artists whose work is influenced by science. Both the methods of discovery and images and concepts related to fields such as chemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, physics and genetics are referenced. Commonalities that exist between science and art are embraced as both process and outcome in the works included in this exhibition. Exhibited together, the works of these six artists offer views from multiple angles of the wonder found in the natural world, both inner and outer, and the processes human beings employ in order to gain a greater understanding of them. Participating artists included Leslie Holt, Susan Main, Michele Banks, Spencer Dormitzer, Marc Roberge, and Atsuko Chirikjian.
NOV 9, 2017 – DEC 23, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: Nature as Prototype
Photo credit: Elsabé Johnson Dixon
Nature as Prototype aims to examine the role of nature and biology as a source of inspiration for art and design. The artists included in this exhibition—Adam Nelson, Yoko K., and Grethe Wittrock—will collaborate to create an immersive environment that explores the changing nature of our relationship to the natural world. Additionally, Sarah Beth Oppenheim will choreograph a site-specific dance that she will perform in the space toward the closing date of the exhibition. Continuing the conversation about how we choose to co-exist in what is described today as the Anthropocene, the exhibition will examine how art and design are fundamentally linked to scientific, biological, mathematical, philosophical, and social investigations.
SEPT 7, 2017 – NOV 4, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: Discordant Voices: Paintings by Madalyn Marcus
Madalyn Marcus, “Maestra”
Washington artist Madalyn Marcus will exhibit evocative large-scale paintings meant to be experienced holistically. Influenced by both textiles and jazz, these paintings create around themselves a field of active energy as color interaction and mark improvisation blend and riff off each other.
JUNE 15, 2017 – AUG 12, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: Strictly Painting 11
This juried biennial exhibition presents the work of artists from throughout the Mid-Atlantic region exploring the medium of painting.
Juror: Anne Reeve, Assistant Curator at Glenstone, a private museum near Washington, DC devoted to modern and contemporary art.
APR 13, 2017 – JUNE 3, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: With the Grain: Paintings by J.T. Kirkland
J.T. Kirkland, “Subspace_251”
This exhibition features multipart and shaped paintings on wood. Focusing on line, color, form and structure, J.T. Kirkland combines wood and paint into uniquely warm and abstract paintings in the minimalist vein. Using grain of the wood as both guide and essential component, Kirkland incorporates and contrasts the organic nature of the material with the crisp intentionality of hard-edged blocks of color.
MAR 15, 2017 – APR 2, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: Youth Art Show
MPA hosted two Youth Art Shows celebrating works by Fairfax County Public School elementary, middle and high school art students from both the Langley and McLean pyramids.
FEB 2, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: Sculpture Now 2017 — Washington Sculptors Group (WSG) Juried Exhibition
WSG and MPA collaborated on a Sculpture Now show for 2017. The exhibition was open to members of the Washington Sculptors Group. Sculpture Now 2017 was a non-thematic exhibition of new works, finished within the last two years.
To learn more about the Washington Sculptors Group, click here.
JAN 12, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017
MPA@MCC Emerson Gallery: Construction Work: New Sculpture by Mary Walker
Mary Walker, “Catenary Curve Series: Theme”, mixed media
Baltimore artist Mary Walker exhibited wall-hung constructions that combined imagery and concepts from natural science, mechanics and the landscape. Found objects such as cable, screws, nuts and bolts are combined with painting, referring to the processes of building and constructing. An interest in the dualities of gesture and geometry, the man-made and the natural and chance and intention is also a key concept.
JAN 12, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017
MPA@MCC Atrium Gallery — Alice Kresse: Some Assembly Desired: The Printmaker as Jeweler
Alice Kresse, “Oh Pink Grotesk”, monoprint
Kresse highlights the similar sensibilities inherent in her monoprints and handmade jewelry in an exhibition that featured both approaches. Kresse brings her long career in graphic design to bear on her work in printmaking, creating images that are poetic, carefully balanced and multilayered. The monoprint process allows her to construct a piece much as you would an object, building layer upon layer with image and atmosphere emerging from the space beyond.
JAN 12, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017
MPA@MCC: Power Poles: Sculpture by Alonzo Davis
Alonzo Davis
Deeply influenced by his international travel experiences, Alonzo Davis makes freestanding, wall oriented and suspended sculpture. The imagery and energies of the American Southwest, Brazil, Haiti, West Africa and the Pacific Rim are all present in these works, combing bamboo, wood, paper, paint and LED lights.
DEC 8, 2016 – JAN 21, 2017
MPA@ChainBridge: Moving Through: Works by David A. Douglas
Working at the intersection of drawing, painting and photography, David A. Douglas creates large-scale works that explore the power of place. Depicting personally significant landscapes on a monumental scale, Douglas offers the viewer the opportunity to enter the works on their own terms and experience the highly charged potency that lies within the ordinary moment. Amplifying the inner beauty within the ordinary, Douglas’ works resonate with the intense simplicity of a poem, simply stated yet somehow glowing with life from the inside out.
A native of Northern Virginia, Douglas has works in numerous public, private and corporate collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Chrysler Museum, and the Academy Art Museum. His work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions, including exhibits with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and Sally Mann. Douglas received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Virginia Intermont College and a Master of Fine Arts degree in paining from James Madison University. He teaches painting, drawing and photography at the Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Read more about the artist.
NOV 17 – DEC 23, 2016
Emerson Gallery: Abundance: Works by Mei Mei Chang, Amy Boone McCreesh, Leslie Shellow, and Jungmin Park
This curated exhibition features four artists whose inclusive approaches combine ideas and materials in a swirling, exuberant, “more is more” manner to create works that unabashedly claim and own their space. Using both traditional and scavenged components, these works flourish both on and off the wall as they move into and through space with an elegant, imaginative, experimental and experiential energy.
Atrium Gallery: Above the Horizon: Works by Nikki Brugnoli
These abstracted and expressionistic drawings and prints center on a post- industrial, post agricultural landscape as they explore memory and experience, vastness and the precision of proximity. Light, abstraction, transparency and glowing color come together to create works that offer a meditation on safety, separation and the deep familiarity of place. Called to return again and again to the image of an abandoned silo, Brugnoli creates an impactful visual symbol imbued with a longing for the past, the comfort of the present, and the endless adventure of imagination.
Ramp Gallery: In Process: Photographs by Ajay Malghan
The large- scale, evocative, and innovative photographs on display by Baltimore artist Ajay Malghan incorporate time as a formative element. Inventive in both conception and process, the works gather light, form and space into both calm and energetic compositions that transport the viewer into the atmosphere of elsewhere. Color glows and radiates, proposing mood and eliciting response, creating a new and intriguing landscape in which to experience and enter the day.
NOV 22 – DEC 23, 2015
The Same but Different: Creative Morphology
This curated exhibition features works by artists who make use of the processes of observing, sorting and classifying as a prelude to creating shape, structure and color. The exhibit will highlight the inherent conceptual and procedural similarities between scientific and artistic pro- cesses. Works by Susan Eder, Laurel Lukaszewski, Richard Dana and Tom Green are included.
McLean Art Society Juried Exhibition
Ramp Gallery
Works by members of the McLean Art Society in a variety of styles and media will be exhibited. This year’s exhibition is juried by nationally-known watercolor artist Chris Krupinski. The McLean Art Society, established more than 50 years ago, supports and encourages regional artists and art education.
Wanderer: The Travel Journals, Works by Maria Karametou
Atrium Gallery
These mixed media works are based on visual observations the artist has collected while wandering in different parts of the world. Karamatou has saved these visual glimpses as a way of synthesizing and interpreting her experiences, encasing them in small plastic sleeves, like an archival photographic display. Hung together they present an open-ended story with both personal and universal impact.
SEPT 10 – OCT 24, 2015
Color Riffs: Paintings by Barbara Januszkiewicz
Ramp Gallery
These vibrant acrylic paintings on canvas dynamically explore color interaction. Responding to the experience of listening to music during the painting process, Januszkiewicz works abstractly, creating paintings that reflect the harmonies, melodies, chord structure and harmonic progressions vividly expressed in the traditional American Blues. Fully conversant in color theory, Januszkiewicz builds on this bedrock as she applies paint to canvas with educated and intentional spontaneity, celebrating simultaneously a buoyant, expressive freedom and a solid structural base developed through experience and practice.
JAN 8 – MAR 7, 2015
Manifesting Phenomena: Drop, Hover, See-through, Lean…
Emerson Gallery
This curated exhibit will include work by three artists who are interested in investigating the many and most basic concepts of physical science. Ranging from sculpture that inhabits physical space in unusual ways in order to better understand and demonstrate force, motion, energy and matter, to works depicting the patterns of the earth and its cycles of change, the artists in this exhibit explore natural phenomena in ways both literal and conceptual. Included are Joan Belmar, Annie Farrar and Barbara Josephs Liotta.
Out For a Spin: Mixed Media Paintings by Jean Sausele-Knodt
Atrium Gallery
Beginning with loose references to flora and fauna, Sausele-Knodt creates shaped paintings that deftly move the viewer through a series of shifting and fragmented picture planes. Animated images and energetic color conversations come together to form constructions that depict a fresh personalized sense of time and place.
Contemporary Scrolls: Works by Laura Litten
Ramp Gallery
Laura Litten will exhibit long, scroll-like drawings in the Ramp Gallery. These are expanded, fabricated landscapes that impart to the viewer a sense of vast space coupled with lovingly rendered participants in the natural world
NOV 6 – DEC 20, 2014
Sculpture by Rachel Rotenberg / Ryan Carr Johnson / JD Deardourff
SEP 11 – OCT 25, 2014
Voyage of Discovery: Michele Banks, Jessica Beels and Ellyn Weiss / Patterson Clark / Sally Kauffman
JUN 12 – AUG 2, 2014
Transformations: From One Thing to Another / Juried by Jack Rasmussen
APR 17 – MAY 31, 2014
Nature and Culture: Drawings by Elzbieta Sikorska / Amy Finkelstein / James Crable
JAN 16 – MAR 1, 2014
Contraption: Reflections on the Almost Functional / Melissa Burley / Eric Celarier
SEP 12 – NOV 2, 2013
Buried Voices: Retrospective of Works by Susanne K. Arnold / Alex Tolstoy
JUN 13 – AUG 3, 2013
Strictly Painting 9 / Juried Margaret Heiner
APR 18 – JUN 1, 2013
Sprays, Dusts and Aerosols, A Chemical Revolution: Works by Nils Henrik Sundqvist and David D’Orio / Rula Jones / Jessica Van Brakle
JAN 17 – MAR 2, 2013
Small Stories: Paintings by Nora Sturges, Matthew Mann and Gregory Ferrand / Thomas Xenakis / Rosemary Luckett
NOV 29 – JAN 5, 2012
Edges and Grids: Greg Braun, Julia Bloom, Jeanne Heifetz, Steven Pearson and Nikki Painter / Ellyn Weiss / Ron Paras
SEP 13 – NOV 3, 2012
“In Which Innocent Figures Stuck to the Canvas Try to Escape”: Beverly Donnenfeld Chello / Kris Iden / Alice Whealin
JUN 14 – JUL 28, 2012
Something and Nothing: Activating the Void / Juried by J.W. Mahoney
APR 19 – JUN 2, 2012
Four Perspectives: Becoming MPA (50th Anniversary)
MAR 7 – APR 8, 2012
31st Annual Youth Art
JAN 19 – MAR 3, 2012
Eric Garner / Renee Sandell / MPA Instructors
