Opening Reception: Friday, September 9, 7-9pm
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery presents VESSEL as a launch event for The 9/11 Arts Project. VESSEL combines abstract works to evoke a sacred space of “holding” undeterred by the divisive fears of “we” versus “other” that have plagued our cultural psyche since 9/11. At the time of this landmark anniversary, the exhibition opens with the hope of using art to generate avenues for community dialogue and healing discourse that inspire its audience. Selected works express an effort to move beyond past tragedy and reveal that healing is possible for everyone. VESSEL is the grand re-opening exhibition post-renovation of the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery in 2011. The 9/11 Arts Project is an interdisciplinary citywide project initiated by the Smith Center to kick off a year of healing commemorating the 10th anniversary of September 11th, 2001.
VESSEL features works by Emily Biondo, Alonzo Davis, Jenny Freestone, Pat Goslee, Ani Kasten, MJ Kavian, Madeleine Keesing, Rachel Rotenberg, Angela White, and Millicent Young.
The opening reception on Friday, September 9 featured a dance performance by Nathaniel Bond, Anthony Gongora, Tzveta Kassabova, and Giselle Ruzany of Maida Withers Dance Construction Company, based on Collision Course with live music by Steve Hilmy. Other additional programming presented in conjunction with the exhibit include:
- “Divided We Fall” film screening, Thursday, September 15, with facilitated discussion by psychosocial trauma expert Dr. Siddarth Shah
- Donor event, Thursday, September 22
- Sharon Shapiro family reception, Sunday, September 25
- Cross-Pollinate Literary Art Tour, Tuesday, October 11 from 6:30 – 8:30 PM hosted by Melanie Figg founder of Cross-Pollinate featuring the writing of Lindsay Bernal, Melanie Figg, Steve Godwin, Micah Greenberg, Danielle Kuczynski, Whitney Gratton, Buzz Mauro and others
For more project details and events on the 9/11 Arts Project, please visit – www.911artsproject.com.
Adams’ work in Efflux straddles the domains of performance and installation art; consisting of a graphite drawing designed and created specific to the space, a video of Adams creating the drawing, and a final performance of the work’s on-site destruction. Together the components of Efflux offer a complete metaphor for evolution – moving the viewer through creation, existence and destruction. The feathery quality of Adams’ graphite line drawings evokes plumes of smoke, equally transitory and in keeping with the larger work’s momentary existence. Alongside the installation’s gestural work will also be a monitor looping footage of Adams creating the piece itself. 
The work Kristina Bilonick creates explores ideas of personal history and memory. With fabricated familiar, Bilonick presents a space that everyone can relate to: a kitchen with a table, chairs, and food on the table. But this kitchen is actually a very specific place – it is the kitchen of her grandmother, Mary. From the wallpaper, to the rug, to the strewn items and the cookies on the plate, Bilonick recreates personal memory and a sense of the time spent visiting her grandmother. The artist writes: “My grandmother recently passed, and during the last years of her life she suffered from dementia. During these years she found comfort in surrounding herself with familiar things – certain foods, photos, books and papers. When she passed, I was not able to keep many of these items of hers, so I find solace in finding or creating objects similar to the ones she loved, and surrounding myself with them.”
Byron uses the external cues of clothing, gesture, dialogue, and physical form to explore the elusive, identity of six, female subjects. In her work, What Matters, Byron paired three sets of woman in conversation, asked them to wear clothing they strongly identified with and prompted them to discuss “What Matters.” While these strangers sat in close dialogue Byron recorded their conversation and used photographs from their shared intimate moments to create life-size color pencil drawings of their bodies and clothing. Further adding to the work’s confluence of form and dialogue, the subjects were then asked to journal their inner thoughts on the reverse, hidden side of their drawings. Then the drawings were soaked in water and wrapped back upon their subjects, resulting in a cast form of each woman’s body and recalling the paper dolls of feminine childhood. While the sculptural drawings will be on display in 3 widows of the 1700 U Street NW block, pedestrians will also have the opportunity to call a phone line playing audio excerpts of the women’s conversations. By weaving the audio trace with the delicate, 3-D portraits, Byron pulls us deeper into her subjects’ private conversations and offers us a glimpse at the elusive nature of identity and self.
Clothing serves many purposes. The first and most obvious is the need to protect the body—comfort, warmth, etc. It is also a signifier of identity and personal history. Victoria Greising’s installations, in which she deconstructs and reconstructs clothing into environments and spaces, facilitate a new interaction and evoke an energetic sense of being surrounded, protected, and enveloped by clothing. Greising’s installations are an embodiment of the memories associated with the donated clothing, an activation of personal memories, and creation of new associations with material and space. In this 3-part, street-side installation, she intentionally uses garments that have a history— ranging from discarded, beat up t-shirts to shirts donated in memory of loved ones who have passed. Each article comes to her infused with a narrative, marks from its previous owner, and with unique material characteristics– holes, stains, dried out elastic. Yet, Greising is not illustrating individual narratives. She deconstructs and weaves these individual articles to create a new web of meaning. Mixing together, overlapping, and building on each other, Greising constructs a social network and physical representation of personal connections and memories.
Since 2007, Matthew Black has documented the outrageous and provocative social activist group, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Members of this international Sisterhood take on the identities of 21st century nuns, dedicated to “promulgating universal joy, expiating stigmatic guilt, and serving the community.” Far more than street performers or typical drag queens, they use the art of drag to raise awareness for the LGBT community, educate about safe sex & AIDS, raise money for local non-profits, and advocate for human rights. In Black’s engrossing, public-private portraits of Sisters in the Seattle chapter he visibly captures their transformation between various personas and brings to light the deeper, universal question we each ask ourselves — Who am I really?
lotus: descending, featuring Matt Hollis. Sept. 3-23, 2010
In this rare exhibition, Maggie Steber, award-winning National Geographic photographer, and over 30 Haitian artists offer us a window into how Haitians experience their post-earthquake world and a glimpse at their extraordinary strength of spirit and unwavering faith. “Through Their Eyes” exhibits, alongside Maggie Steber’s photjournalist works, the work of artists and children currently living in Haiti and actively using the arts to heal. Featuring over 100 photographs and handcrafts produced by Haitian children, and traditional Vodou flags hand-sequined by seasoned artisans. The American Visionary Art Museum, Zanmi Lakay and Art Creation Foundation For Children have generoulsy provided the exhibition’s Haitian artworks. All works are available for purchase with 100% of the proceeds donated to Haiti relief.
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Alex Todorovich (1950-2009) was an untrained, or naive, artist, who first turned to art when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 54. Her diverse body of work–collage drawings, assemblage sculptures and beaded jewelry–integrates years of experience in folk art, decorative arts, and ornamentation. By giving form to her internal dialogs and philosophical tips on life she addresses not only the existential and cultural experience of cancer, but also the socila body of love, celebration, and connection that comes with healing. She challenges us to walk with her as she attempts to answer her own questions: How do you leave a life before you are ready? How do you let go, to die?
In November 1946, then Senior Minister Rev. A. Powell Davies delivered the widely circulated sermon, Lest the Living Forget, denouncing a party at which military officers rejoiced over a cake shaped like the atomic cloud seen over Hiroshima. The bold sermon text came to the attention of an aide to General MacArthur in Japan, Dr. Howard Bell, who wrote to Davies describing the plight of the 400 children at the Honkawa School, and asked about “the possibility of putting on a ‘desk cleaning project’ that would yield substantial numbers of pencil stubs, used erasers, Crayons and notebooks? Are war memories still too fresh?” In response, the Children at All Souls Church, Unitarian collected over half-a-ton of school supplies and shipped it to the Honkawa and Fukouromachi Schools in Hiroshima and the nearby Ninoshima Orphanage. Several months later, the children in Hiroshima sent back 48 watercolor and crayon drawings that reflected not the devastation of war, but vibrant depictions of the abundant life they hoped for. Unlike other historical materials depicting the events of Hiroshima, the 18 exquisite and hopeful images on display tell the story of healing and reconciliation between once war-torn enemies. Later this summer the collection will travel back to Hiroshima, where the original artists will be reunited with their childhood artworks after 62 years. piece, 2009..jpg)
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Over the past thirty years Mia Choumenkovitch, founder of the Lorton Art Program, has revealed art’s liberating and rehabilitative power in her work with residents of the DC Department of Corrections facilities, and was duly honored with the Mayor’s Art Award in 2007. This rare collection of her students’ works exhibits the unique perspective of an artists living behind bars-looking to the outside world, not only from their physical confines but also from the interior of their soul. The exhibit includes works by Gerard Kennedy, Vincent Fong, Taurus Evans, Shelton Armstead, William Larkins, Duane Marbury, and Howard Holland & James Hardy.
