Inside Outside, Upside Down was an invitational art exhibition held from July 17 to September 12, 2021, at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., as part of the museum's centennial celebration exhibitions. [1] [2]
This exhibition was an invitational exhibition which showcased the work of 64 Washington, DC area artists. The work was selected by jurors Phil Hutinet, Founding Publisher of East City Art, artist Renée Stout, Abigail McEwen, Associate Professor of Latin American Art, University of Maryland, and Elsa Smithgall, Senior Curator, The Phillips Collection. [1] [3] [4] [5]
The exhibition focused on capital area artists' reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, and reflected the "vivid the turmoil, strength, and resiliency of the human spirit in the face of the past year's global COVID-19 pandemic and social upheaval." [1] The Washington Post also noted that the "exhibition is also a rare major museum showcase for a large group of local artists." [5]
More than 800 artists submitted work to the jurors, who then invited 64 area artists to exhibit. [5] Some of the area's more notable artists, such as Tim Tate, Chawky Frenn, Judith Peck, Kate Kretz, F. Lennox Campello, Michael Janis, Nicolas F. Shi, and others were included in the exhibition. [1] [3] [6]
The exhibition was widely reviewed, [7] [3] [5] [8] [9] and The Washington Post art critic wrote that the "show is one of the largest and most impressive to ponder the crises, paradoxes and sheer boredom of 2020, when some people sheltered at home while others spilled into the streets," [5] while The Washington City Paper critic commented that the show "forces us to remember a time that left us 'confused, battered, and disoriented' through the eyes of 64 D.C.-area artists." [3] The show and the selection process also spawned a Salon of the Refused exhibition, exhibiting many of the rejected artists. [10]
Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, active in France and the United States. He was one of the first to apply the principles of Cubism to architecture, analyzing human figure into geometrical forms.
The Phillips Collection is an art museum founded by Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Phillips was the grandson of James H. Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company.
Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
The Renwick Gallery is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located in Washington, D.C. that displays American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to 21st century. The gallery is housed in a National Historic Landmark building that was opened in 1859 on Pennsylvania Avenue and originally housed the Corcoran Gallery of Art. When it was built in 1859, it was called "the American Louvre", and is now named for its architect James Renwick Jr.
Nicolas F. Shi is an artist in Washington, D.C. He is best known for paintings that create an illusion of depth through contour lines like those on a topographic map, with the space between adjacent ones of the contour lines being filled by a single color.
Sam Gilliam was an American abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator. Born in Mississippi, and raised in Kentucky, Gilliam spent his entire adult life in Washington, D.C., eventually being described as the "dean" of the city's arts community. Originally associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Gilliam moved beyond the group's core aesthetics of flat fields of color in the mid-60s by introducing both process and sculptural elements to his paintings.
The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center is home to all of the visual and performing arts programs at American University and the American University Museum It is located at Ward Circle, the intersection of Nebraska Avenue and Massachusetts Avenues in Washington, D.C. This 130,000-square-foot (12,000 m2) space, designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts, provides instructional, exhibition, and performance space for all the arts disciplines. Its 30,000-square-foot (3,000 m2) art museum exhibits contemporary art from the nation's capital region and the world. The museum gallery is the Washington region's largest university facility for art exhibition.
Renée Stout is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and connected through her art to New Orleans, her art reflects this interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
The American University Museum is located within the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC.
Jack Albert Youngerman was an American artist known for his constructions and paintings.
Jonathan Monaghan is a contemporary visual artist who uses computer animation software to create his work. He received his B.F.A. in computer graphics from the New York Institute of Technology. Monaghan then went on to receive a M.F.A. from the University of Maryland.
Glenstone is a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland, founded in 2006 by American billionaire Mitchell Rales and his wife, Emily Wei Rales. The museum's exhibitions are drawn from a collection of about 1,300 works from post-World War II artists around the world. It is the largest private contemporary art museum in the United States, holding more than $4.6 billion in net assets, and is noted for its setting in a broad natural landscape.
Chawky Frenn is a Lebanese-born American artist, author, and art professor. He currently teaches art at George Mason University in northern Virginia. His highly realistic paintings have strong narrative social and political elements. Frenn is a former Fulbright scholar, and currently resides in the Greater Washington, D.C. area.
Zenith Gallery is a fine arts gallery in Washington, D.C.
Michael Janis is an American artist currently residing in Washington, DC where he is one of the directors of the Washington Glass School. He is known for his work on glass using the exceptionally difficult sgraffito technique on glass.
Tim Tate is an American artist and the co-founder of the Washington Glass School in the Greater Washington, DC capital area. The school was founded in 2001 and is now the second largest warm glass school in the United States. Tate was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1989 and was told that he had a year left to live. As a result, Tate decided to begin working with glass in order to leave a legacy behind. Over a decade ago, Tate began incorporating video and embedded electronics into his glass sculptures, thus becoming one of the first artists to migrate and integrate the relatively new form of video art into sculptural works. In 2019 he was selected to represent the United States at the sixth edition of the GLASSTRESS exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
Judith Peck is an American artist currently residing in the Greater Washington, D.C. area who is predominantly known for her allegorical figurative oil paintings.
F. Lennox Campello is an American artist, art critic, author, art dealer, curator, and visual arts blogger. In 2016 The Washington City Paper called him "one of the most interesting people of Washington, DC."
Cianne Fragione is an American-born Italian abstract artist based in Washington, D.C. She is known for her mixed-media works that incorporate found objects and textiles with heavily layered oil paint and collage. She can be found in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University, and Georgetown College.
The Tephra Fine Arts Festival is a juried major outdoor visual arts show held annually since 1991 on the streets of the Reston Town Center in Reston, Virginia and sponsored by the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, formerly known as the Greater Reston Arts Center.