Amber Robles-Gordon’s “When a Honey Is Looking Just Right,”
East of the River
Although it doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive, Honfleur Gallery’s annual “East of the River Exhibition” usually offers a broad survey. This year brings a tighter focus, with only three contributors. Both Sheila Crider and Amber Robles-Gordon work with fabric and found objects. The art of painter Asha Elena Casey is less closely related, but she does inscribe textile-like patterns into thickly applied, mostly black-and-white pigment.
A view of the exhibition "i found god in myself," with works inspired by the choreopoems of Ntozake Shange's play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf." The show is on view at the Houston Museum of African American Culture through April 15.
by Lian Parson, www.theavenuephilly.com
When “i found god in myself: the 40th anniversary for Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls” exhibit premiered, Shange herself attended to view the 20 original works curated by Peter “Souleo” Wright.
By then, she had suffered two strokes and was in a wheelchair. But when she saw the life-size portrait of herself by painter Margaret Rose Vendryes, Shange tried to get out of her wheelchair to show how the tattoos on her body perfectly matched the ones in the painting.
By Eric Hope, http://www.eastcityart.com
Coinciding with the organization’s one-year anniversary, Otis Street Arts Project recently unveiled its newest exhibition The Critiqued featuring works by thirteen area artists. Artists on display have all participated in the Project’s Critique program, an ongoing series of critical dialogues open to the public and facilitated by area arts professionals. Several of the finished pieces on display in this current exhibition were shown and discussed in unfinished states during those earlier peer reviews, giving audience members a unique perspective into the artists’ thought processes as they work to determine when a work is indeed finished.
By Cara Ober, http://www.bmoreart.com
A Conversation with Mikhaile Solomon, Director and Founder of Prizm, Art Basel Miami Beach’s only art fair dedicated to artists of color
LOUIS JACOBSON, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com
Art theory is often inscrutable, and it’s doubly so for abstract painting. That’s why the framing of the “Real Beauty” at Carroll Square Gallery needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
“Abstraction is arguably the truest representation of how the world feels, though by definition it obscures how the world actually appears,” reads the exhibit’s wall-posted introduction.
Is this genius or gobbledygook? It’s hard to tell. And most of the works—all of them abstractions, by four different artists—don't offer much help in sorting it out.
Robles-Gordon cobbles together sculptures and canvas collages from scraps of paper and fabric she finds in the neighborhood’s trash cans and storefront windows. She’s shown her work at the Honfleur Gallery. Right now, she has a striking wire and fabric mesh artwork on view near the Deanwood Metro stop.
But as ARCH Development Corporation continues to expand its constellation of arts destinations in Anacostia—the latest is the Anacostia Arts Center on Good Hope Road SE—Robles-Gordon wonders if her neighborhood will still have room for her.
There’s a tendency to see Anacostia, long on talent and struggle but short on just about everything else, as a blank canvas. With the right kinds of art and advertising, the thinking goes, Anacostia can become a hub for the creative class. But who gets left out?
Delusions of Grandeur seems about right for the name of an artists’ collective showing in a hole in the wall in Brentwood.
Located on the second floor of the Gateway Arts Center, the 39th Street Gallery is a 450-square-foot box that has been known to put on pretty cool little shows, including a recent micro-retrospective of the great D.C. painter Manon Cleary, who died last year. But the National Gallery of Art it is not.
