"Where we once belonged": Marilyn Gates-Davis, memory, and seeing a changing Washington
August 14, 2026
As America’s 250th anniversary prompts institutions, museums, and galleries to ask who gets remembered in the national story, one of the most compelling answers can be found not on the National Mall, but in Bethesda.
At Amy Kaslow Gallery’s current exhibition, Where We Once Belonged, artist Marilyn Gates-Davis turns her attention to Washington, D.C.’s historically Black neighborhoods and the people whose presence shaped them. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s broader America 250 programming, a year-long series exploring democracy, civic life, history, and contemporary American identity.
The timing feels particularly resonant.
"8 O'Clock in the Morning" by Marilyn Gates-Davis
Across the country, conversations about urban development, displacement, cultural memory, and neighborhood identity have become increasingly urgent.
In Washington, those questions carry special weight. Once known as the “Chocolate City,” the nation’s capital has undergone dramatic demographic and economic transformation over the past several decades. Gates-Davis approaches those changes not through statistics or policy arguments, but through painting.
“When people first started using it, the moniker 'Chocolate City' was about demographics – D.C. was a statistical anomaly for a major U.S. city at the time. People who grew up in ‘Chocolate City’ have a shared upbringing rooted in specific cultural, academic, community, sports, arts, and political experiences… as a Black utopia.” Nayion Perkins, February 12, 2026, from 51st News
"Sit Still" by Marilyn Gates-Davis
Painting What Remains
Gates-Davis is best known for work that celebrates Black family life, community, memory, and everyday experience. Throughout her career, she has focused on images that counter stereotypes by emphasizing joy, dignity, resilience, and connection.
In Where We Once Belonged, those concerns take on a broader civic dimension.
The exhibition depicts familiar Washington scenes: row houses, neighborhood streets, corner stores, children playing basketball, neighbors gathering outdoors, and the rhythms of daily life that define a community more deeply than any official map. Yet these are not straightforward documentary paintings. Gates-Davis layers ghostlike figures over architectural spaces, creating a visual language of presence and absence.
According to the exhibition materials, abandoned structures are rendered in detailed paint while former residents appear as translucent overlays of ink on vellum.
The effect is haunting without becoming sentimental.
Nostalgic, but not naive.
Viewers encounter neighborhoods as they exist today while simultaneously seeing traces of the lives that once animated them.
The result is a meditation on memory, gentrification, urban change, African American history, and cultural preservation – subjects that increasingly define conversations about cities across the United States.
"Two Old Dudes" by Marilyn Gates-Davis
From Political Satire to Cultural Memory
What makes the exhibition particularly interesting is its relationship to the gallery’s previous America 250 exhibition, What’s So Funny?
That show featured Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonists Nick Anderson and Mike Luckovich, whose works used humor, caricature, and satire to examine contemporary American life. Through political cartoons, they explored democracy, polarization, public discourse, and the absurdities of modern society.
At first glance, Gates-Davis’ paintings seem far removed from editorial cartooning.
Yet both exhibitions are asking remarkably similar questions: Who gets represented in American culture? What stories survive? How do artists document social change? What does civic engagement look like? How do we confront difficult truths while maintaining hope?
The cartoonists in What’s So Funny? use wit and exaggeration to expose contradictions in American public life. Gates-Davis uses memory and visual storytelling to recover histories that risk disappearing altogether.
One exhibition asks viewers to laugh, then think.
The other asks them to remember, then reflect.
Together they demonstrate how art can function as both critique and preservation.
"Young Love" by Marilyn Gates-Davis
The Politics of Remembering
One of the most powerful aspects of Gates-Davis’ work is that it refuses nostalgia as a simple exercise.
These paintings are not merely celebrations of a lost Washington. Instead, they ask viewers to consider what happens when communities change faster than collective memory can keep pace.
The title itself – Where We Once Belonged – contains a tension. Belonging is not just about geography. It is about culture, relationships, shared experiences, and inherited stories. The exhibition suggests that even when physical places disappear or transform, traces of community remain embedded in the landscape.
For audiences interested in Washington, D.C. art exhibitions, Black contemporary art, African American artists, community memory, and socially engaged painting, the show offers a compelling example of how personal narratives can illuminate larger historical forces.
America at 250, One Neighborhood at a Time
Amy Kaslow Gallery has framed its America 250 programming around civic engagement and national reflection. While large institutions often approach anniversaries through grand historical narratives, Gates-Davis reminds us that American history is also local history. It exists in row houses, family photographs, neighborhood basketball courts, and conversations on front stoops.
As the United States approaches its semiquincentennial, exhibitions like Where We Once Belonged suggest that the most important questions may not concern what happened 250 years ago, but rather what – and whom – we choose to remember today.
In that sense, Gates-Davis’ paintings are not only about Washington. They are about every city grappling with change, every community confronting displacement, and every viewer wondering how memory survives when the physical world around it does not.