Past Exhibitions

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.