FEATURED IN EAST CITY ART
AMY KASLOW GALLERY:
SANDRA DOOLEY: LAYERS
February 26, 2024
Sandra Dooley, Invitacion a la Danza (3), mixed media on canvas, 47 x 47 in.
Image Credit: Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 29 from 6-8pm
Lyrical and layered as her native Cuba, Sandra Dooley’s canvases are painted, sewn, wrapped and appointed with purpose. Known for their striking surfaces rich with color and 3-D form, the artist’s creations command a close look at just what she assembles to compose each element.
Dooley’s palette is found materials, collected, saved, even savored over time. “I have some Indian Silk!” she exclaimed to us a few months back, delighted to have the nubby jewel-toned rarity in her hands. With this special fabric, she manifested a series of quaint ballet dresses that pay proud homage to the beloved Ballet Nacionale de Cuba, an exquisite talent performing in a crumbling country.
As all Cubans must, Dooley gives new life to used objects, texturing her canvases, sculptures and 3-D installations with repurposed burlap, buttons, sequins, and lace. Salvaging on the island, now in its seventh decade of the US embargo, is de rigueur, and just as her mother and grandmother cobbled together beauty from scraps, Dooley does, too. In abundance are the assemblist’s artistry and imagination, which she says renders any scrap of fabric or paper into a unique texture or image within the work. To conserve paper and paint, she makes collagraphs printed on Fabriano paper, enhanced with colored pencils and watercolor. All are distinctive and all are artist proofs.
The artist’s standouts are multi-layered portraits of well-dressed women who pop from the canvas. There is always plenty to examine, but her trademark eyes draw us, with simple button pupils floating like they’re reflected in water. To some, her pieces are so very real; to others, surreal. And that seems to be Dooley’s take as well, as she redirects her frustration with everyday challenges into life only dreamed of, on canvas.
“Life in Cuba has a lot of difficulties…” the artist explains, and these problems become greater when the country is out of the public eye. As disease and wars have gripped global attention, Cubans have endured far greater deprivation. Their past five years ushered in a new constitution restricting freedom of speech to the maximum, a surge in femicide, a twin collapse of healthcare and the economy, and punishment for any form of political activism.
“When life gets hard for people, it’s a lot worse for street animals,” says Dooley from her people/pet compound that includes her zany studio and a large dusty outside area.The painter pours her earnings into care for many of the island’s stray canines and felines. Starting with her first art sales until now, she’s created a sanctuary, replete with medical care, for dozens of dogs and cats. These are just the permanent residents; the entire neighborhood of abandoned animals responds when Dooley calls for dinner.
Dooley’s most compelling works, to date, come from the crushing post-pandemic environment, which emptied out her once vibrant and artful seaside town of Santa Fe, Cuba. Creative people and their energy have vanished, their homes are now boarded up. “I can barely recognize it…,” Dooley writes, “it’s almost empty, almost destroyed and completely hopeless…and yet, so loved by me!”
Despite this dramatic shift, Sandra Dooley is committed to living and working in the quiet, practically still town of Santa Fe, Cuba, feeding the large community of dogs and cats who have been left behind.
Dooley’s collectors are avid and worldwide.
Join Amy Kaslow Gallery Thursday February 29th from 6pm to 8pm for the opening of Sandra Dooley: Layers.
Amy Kaslow Gallery
7920 Norfolk Avenue
Bethesda, MD
AMY KASLOW GALLERY:
HOLIDAY FINE ART MARKET
December 18, 2023
Silk Kaitag by Mehmet Çetinkaya and Emma
Image Credit: Amy Kaslow Gallery
Join Amy Kaslow Gallery for their Holiday Fine Art Market. Find unique handmade pieces at great prices from artists around the globe to elevate your holiday gift list. Open Tuesday through Sunday 12 – 6pm and Fridays till 9pm, December 15th – December 23rd.
Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda.
FOLK ART IS FINE ART:
HERITAGE ALIVE
December 11, 2023
Clay head by Maricela Gomez Lopez, Amy Kaslow Gallery
From their Aboriginal Dreamings to Zimbabwean linocuts, our makers’ works in this year’s Folk Art is Fine Art collection keep their heritage alive. Living in distant, even remote regions around the globe, many of these creators are little known beyond their own communities, others are highly collectible on the global market, and all share a zest for sharing their humanity through art. They celebrate age-old traditions adapted to the here and now, with stunning results.
Find contemporary clay vessels and sculpture out of Mexico’s red earth mountains where Oaxacan potters innovate on the area’s 2,000-year-old traditions. Elegant, perforated clay pots (think organically shaped colanders) in an array of shapes and sizes, and perfectly smooth wheat-colored vessels marked in rich brown splatter.
Deceptively simple in appearance, painstakingly complex in execution, Cuban artist Leandro Gomez Quintero’s cars and trucks are uncanny replicas of the island country’s crazy mixed up automotive works. Assembled and held together with found materials, they are powerful artistic metaphors for Cuban society.
Statuesque and grounded, our birds come from deep in Colombia’s rainforest where the Tikuna people live in stilted open-air houses along rivers and tributaries. Tribe members don bird masks and body gear, as shown in these sculpted wooden Toucans, for their Pelazón ceremony introducing Tikuna girls’ entrance into adult society.
In organic Khwe collecting baskets from the finest weavers in Northern Namibia, palm strands become smooth fibers infused with natural dyes extracted from the roots, leaves and bark of local plants, fashioned after basketry with a long history of use in the field.
Darian Fernández de la Fuente deploys the same technique Cuban cigar makers used for 19th century labels to hand paint his woodblocks in a vivid Art Deco palette. In this latest surfside series, portly women lounge in swimsuits, boys dive off the roadside into a swirl of water, and a surfer hits the waves with an ironing board.
Haiti’s famed metal smithing town of Croix des Bouquets bangs and clangs as steel oil drums – long a national resource in this constant disaster zone – are chiseled into fine art. Josnel Bruno is part of the soundtrack, striking contemporary forms that deliver a lyrical mix of repurposed heavy industrial metal and natural composition. His richly hued Lotus bowls, some incised, others formed around wheel components, are striking designs.
Gulnora Odilova’s sumptuous silks, woven, petit-pointed and smooth, have their origins in 17th century Shakhrisabz-style designs. Learning from her own mother, Odilova sources the silk locally and teaches other women the art. Named by Uzbekistan’s president as the best artisan in the country, Odilova is especially proud to revive this ancient textile.
Khatija Possum Nampijimpa is a standout in a proud and prominent family of leading Aboriginal artists descended from Clifford Possum, the founder of the Modernist Movement in Australia’s Central Desert. Her Dreaming, acrylic on canvas, is an aerial view detailing Aboriginal life.
Dreamings are spectacular art, and often introduced into court to specify and legalize indigenous claims to their ancestral lands.
Among Africa’s preeminent stone sculptors, Zimbabwean Joseph Muzondo brings us this captivating series of linocuts on handmade paper. Fusing his sculptural hand with color on pliable fiber, he gives intriguing depth to a very familiar subject, the thumbprint. The artist’s complex impression transforms into a modernist mask.
Welcome to Folk Art is Fine 2023, where heritage is alive.
Featured Artists: Josnel Bruno, Dairan Fernández De La Fuente, Maricela Gomez Lopez & Manuel David Reyes Ramirez, Joseph Muzondo, Jabulile Nala, Omba Arts, Gulnora Odilova, Khatija Possum Nampijimpa, Antonila Ramos Bautista, Davron Toshev, and Colectivo 1050.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda, MD.
MAKING TRACKS:
A CONVERSATION ON CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN ART
November 6, 2023
George Alexander, Multidimensional, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 40 x 60
Talk: Wednesday, November 8 from 6-7:30pm
Join Amy Kaslow Gallery for a K/NOW Dialogue featuring important voices in Native American arts as Muscogee-Creek painter George Alexander and Diné entrepreneur Sheyenne Sky Lacy discuss the surging interest in indigenous creativity and how Native artists make their mark with contemporary works.
George Alexander a.k.a. Ofuskie is featured in our ongoing exhibition Staking Claim: Native American Artists on Identity and Place and the National Gallery of Art’s The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. His pieces blend distinctive modern symbolism, Indigenous values and humanitarianism.
Sheyenne Sky Lacy is a Diné entrepreneur with advanced degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Advising Native business people through her consultancy HODZA.mgmt, she also has a textile collection, LAND+OBJECT. She is a lead champion of Diné perspectives in the Navajo business world.
Join them for libations and a robust dialogue on Wednesday, November 8th from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm at Amy Kaslow Gallery. 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814 (on the corner of Norfolk Ave, and Cordell Ave).
This Dialogue is part of programming for our exhibition Staking Claim: Native American Artists on Identity & Place on view through December 3rd.
STAKING CLAIM:
Native AMerican Artists on indentity and place
October 16, 2023
George Alexander, Multidimensional, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 40 x 60.
Collecting, curating, and chronicling this exhibition opened many robust conversations with Native American creatives; we are listening to probing, powerful and ancestrally rooted voices. Out of hundreds of years of continuing disruption, destruction and near erasure, contemporary Indian Country artists look forward with boldness. We have assembled thirteen artists who deliver thirty-three works that transmit their memories, their passions, and their destinations.
Presenting this stunning collection of contemporary work from talented emerging and established Native American artists fills us with humility and pride. Featured works by George Alexander, Jerome Ebelacker, Cavan Gonzales, Terrance Guardipee, Larsen Harris Jr, Justin Lomatewama, Ira Lujan, Sharon Naranjo Garcia, Brandon Ortiz, Desiree Red Elk, Pauline Romero, Tony Tiger, and Beau Tsatoke.
More information and the link to RSVP to this event can be found here: https://amykaslowgallery.com/events/stakingclaim2023.
The exhibition will be on view at 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda through December 3rd.
AMY KASLOW GALLERY:
DIALOGUE ON “ARTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIAL CHANGE”
September 18, 2023
Los colores de mi tierra (The Colors of My Land), 21.5 x 18.75 inches, Glendy Emiliana Muj Mendoza.
Talk: Thursday, September 21 from 6-7:30pm
Please join the Amy Kaslow Gallery at 7920 Norfolk Avenue in Bethesda for a Dialogue on Artrepreneurship and Social Change with Multicolores, a cooperative of indigenous Maya textile artists changing the equation for women and girls in Guatemala.
Multicolores’s Co-Founder and Creative Director, Reyna Isabel Pretzantzin Chipix will join us for this talk to share how artists, their families and their communities stabilize, and even grow from their members’ success.
Multicolores artists live and create in one of the world’s most inhospitable zones for females. But their entrepreneurship works to replace the extreme threat of femicide that many face. Through fine art textiles, they develop new skills, become masters and teach other talented women to do the same. Multicolores artists are standouts, claiming their own self-worth, that of their families and their communities.
Please join us for libations and a robust dialogue on Thursday, September 21st from 6 pm to 7:30 pm at Amy Kaslow Gallery located at 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814, on the corner of Norfolk Ave, and Cordell Ave. This Dialogue is part of programming for our ongoing exhibition Mother Earth: Fine Fiber Art from the Middle of the Americas.
Learn more and RSVP here: https://amykaslowgallery.com/events/know-dialogue-artrepreneurship-and-social-change.
MOTHER EARTH:
Fine Fiber works from the middle of the americas
August 7, 2023
Guatemala, Land of Volcanoes, Juana Yolanda Churunel Ajú.
From the middle of the Americas, its terraced mountains to its rainforest rivers, we present exquisite fiber works by artists who celebrate Mother Earth. The organic and upcycled materials show their reverence for the environment and remind us just how essential this region is to the entire globe’s well-being.
AMy kaslow gallery Hosts:
K/Now Dialogue: UKRAINE'S WAR IS DEMOCRACY WAR
May 1, 2023
Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Talk: Friday, May 5 from 6pm to 7pm
Please join Amy Kaslow Gallery at their new location for a K/NOW Dialogue: Ukraine’s War is Democracy’s War in conversation with two leading voices.
- Natalie Jaresko is Ukraine’s former minister of finance. She just returned from a dispatch to Puerto Rico where she spent years reducing its overwhelming debt. She currently chairs Aspen Institute Kyiv.
- James Steinberg has been State Department policy planning chief and deputy secretary, and White House deputy national security adviser. He served as dean of Maxwell School at Syracuse University and dean at the University of Texas, Austin Lyndon B, Johnson School of Public Affairs. He is current dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Explore what Russia’s invasion in Ukraine means for democracy, worldwide.
Find us onsite at 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda. Friday, May 5th, 6pm-7:30pm at Amy Kaslow Gallery.
This dialogue is part of programming for our ongoing exhibition “Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain” featuring Kyiv-based artist Jaroslav Leonets.
JAROSLAV LEONETS DOCUMENTING LANDSCAPES:
Ukraine's vanishing terrain
April 10, 2023
Blue Sky, Jaroslav Leonets, oil on canvas, 32” x 40.”
Wrapping up three remarkable years in NW, Washington, DC, we open our doors in Bethesda this month. We are humbled and deeply proud to introduce “Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain,” an important collection of works that transport us from daily headlines about war’s destruction to the bucolic and brilliant vistas that once defined the country’s scenery.
GABRIELLA POSSUM NUNGURRAYI, NELLIE MARKS NAKAMARRA & KHATIJA POSSUM NAMPIJINPA:
DREAMINGS
January 8, 2023
Grand Mother’s Country. Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi. Acrylic on linen. 26.5” x 26.”
Aboriginal Art from Australia’s Central Desert
Featuring works by Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi, Nellie Marks Nakamarra & Khatija Possum Nampijinpa.
Remote, flat, and vast, Australia’s central desert is home to Aboriginal peoples dating back 50,000 years. Perhaps the world’s oldest civilization, these First Peoples have always illustrated their reverence for ancestors, their historical ties to the earth. Early clans captured this narrative by scratching figures and symbols into rock formations or by drawing them in the sand. Today they paint on big broad canvases, designing stunning works that now ignite the Australian craze for contemporary indigenous art.
Called Dreamings, these visual stories of creation and life are necessarily large, dynamic, often complex works, fusing mysticism with territorial claims. Their beauty belies the nonstop trauma Aboriginal peoples have endured since Australia’s early days of colonization, when white arrivals made land grabs and expelled, enslaved and killed indigenous for sport. In 1970, Australia’s government finally ended its Aboriginal reserve system of forcible displacement.
Fallout continues, of course, as Aboriginal peoples struggle with poverty, violence, and homelessness and the Australian government slowly addresses its abusive history. For Aboriginal painters, creating a Dreaming, a narrative of life across a terrain that is forever familiar, is grounding. Remarkably, they accomplish this with soaring topographical perspectives.
An abstract art piece to the outside world, each work gives an immense sense of placement and pride to locals. For clans seeking to reclaim geographic areas taken during the last century, Dreamings serve as aerial mappings of the past, present and future. This documentation of historical connections to land is essential to Aboriginal survival. Their language does not use the written word; instead they use vivid, detailed imagery to convey, record, and pass along their sacred stories. Each work is unsigned, but unmistakable in its provenance. Lawyers for Aboriginal clients have introduced their Dreamings as evidence for specific land claims that the painting references.
Today’s artists use acrylic on canvas, and many still deploy the opposite end of the paintbrush, a tool white Australians introduced to them in 1971. Each clan, even each family, conveys, paints, and tells their own exclusive stories; these are rights handed down along gender lines, from one generation to the next. No one is entitled to that story without the artist’s permission, the modern day equivalent of intellectual property.
They are proud to present six major pieces by three leading Aboriginal artists of the current day: Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi, Nellie Marks Nakamarra, and Khatija Possum Nampijinpa.
Enjoy a close up, then a distanced look at these topographical works of ancestral Aboriginal ground.
Hours:
- Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 12pm – 6pm
- Wednesday: By appointment
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW.
GABRIELLA POSSUM NUNGURRAYI, FOLK ART IS FINE ART:
TEXTURE
September 19, 2022
Zulu Beer Pot, Jabulile Nala, hand sculpted mud glazed with animal fat (detail), 14″ x 12″ x 12″. Image courtesy of the gallery.
Opening: Friday, September 23 at 6pm
Welcome to TEXTURE, striking works from around the globe that tell the compelling stories of the people who create them. The second in our series of Folk Art is Fine Art exhibitions, TEXTURE celebrates astounding talent that is often remote, even hidden from public view. Thanks to our close collaboration with the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, we have curated Folk Art at its very finest. Our selection of sculptors, painters, weavers, potters and assemblers deploy the same practices, natural materials and dyes of many generations before them, meshing the ancient with the contemporary. Hand spun raw silk soaked in botanical colors, then stitched into perfectly smooth piles, form tapestries. Mud contoured into ceremonial beer pots, their cylindrical shapes decorated with raised dots to enumerate the number of cows a tribal chief owns. From Colombia’s forested tribes to Uzbekistan’s old silk route, TEXTURE is a stunning way to see the people and parts of the world so few have explored.
Learn More and RSVP for the opening here.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW.
WASHINGTON LANDSCAPES
August 5, 2022
Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Opening: Thursday, July 14 at 6pm
Artist Talk: Friday, August 19 at 6pm
Washington Landscapes opens Thursday, July 14th at Amy Kaslow Gallery, offering a sumptuous look at the nation’s capital. Paintbrushes, pen and ink and intricate appliques of three artists capture the capital city’s majestic landscape, from strikingly different perspectives.
Bernard Dellario brings the outside in with his elegantly hued gouaches and oils. His inspiration is endless. From its creek beds to the tree canopies, rambling and rolling Rock Creek Park provides Dellario’s biggest canvas. The painter’s urban scapes are just as immersive: that familiar climb up the steep, Connecticut Avenue hill; a hot and steamy afternoon around Dupont Circle; the turreted rooflines of Logan Circle have a strong local calling. President of the Washington Society of Landscape Painters, among the oldest active artist organizations in the metropolitan area, Dellario paints and teaches throughout the Maryland Eastern Shore and Washington, DC regions. He has won local and national awards. He lives in Easton, Maryland.
Brandon McDonald transports us to Washington’s favorite hiking trails, the BIlly Goat, the C&O Canal and the shoreline of the Potomac River. With the finest detail, his pen and ink impressions capture nature along the edges of daylight. McDonald’s skilled hand creates magical worlds where we find hillsides rugged with rock, paths that snake along waterways and vistas with uncanny depth of field. McDonald spent his early years in Washington state, where he began his lifelong love sketching Mother Nature and where he later earned an art degree at Pacific Lutheran University. This is McDonald’s second exhibition with Amy Kaslow Gallery. He lives in Cabin John, Maryland.
Andrea Limauro probes the very reason for Washington as a center of persuasion and power, literally channeling our view of that bastion of American Democracy through pressing climate change, migrant identity, and gun violence, and other vexing concerns. A visual artist and city planner, Limauro brings a remarkable dynamism to Washington landscape. He selects icons like the Lincoln Memorial and challenges us to see them from a wider angle. Limauro’s work has been widely exhibited in Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia.
Join them at 6pm Thursday, July 14th at Amy Kaslow Gallery for the opening of Washington Landscapes at Amy Kaslow Gallery. The exhibition will be on view through August 28th.
Learn more: https://amykaslowgallery.com/events/washingtonlandscapes.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW.
HUMANKIND:
GROUP EXHIBITION
May 20, 2022
The Kiss by Nestor Madalengoitia. Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Opening: Friday, May 20 at 6pm
Talk: Thursday, June 16 from 6pm to 7:30pm
HumanKind at Amy Kaslow Gallery opens Friday, May 20th, an exhibition of painted, sculpted and assembled works that celebrate how we see ourselves and one another. The artists peel back our defects to expose the raw beauty we so often overlook: our trust in ourselves, our personal resolve, our connectedness, our decency. Clearly, they want us to see it, too.
HumanKind has been two years in the making. As disease and war gripped the world, we have also concentrated on the creatives who chronicle daily life with their paint brushes, chisels, wires, needles and threads. We selected works that capture struggle and triumph, retreat and reach. Consider the dignity of the uniformed porter, standing alone along the train track; the series of Guatemalan families proudly dressed in their finest traditional textiles; a pair of life-sized silver feet moving through the white wall, all that’s still visible of the “persevering woman” who is passing through. The artists offer us an elevated view of our world that might give us the confidence and the curiosity to step up and into it; to look for that pride, that decency in one another.
About the Artists
Esperanza Alzona is a metalworker whose anatomical sculpture is grounded in her life as a dancer and choreographer. Metal, she says, allows her “to render a certain weight, a material presence” to her 3-D creations. Colorful, quizzical, and bursting with talent, Sandra Dooley hails from Cuba, where resourcefulness using found objects and recycled materials exemplify the country’s can-do. When times are tough for people, they’re tougher for animals, says the painter, who sells her work to feed the entire neighborhood of felines and canines when she calls for dinner. Nestor Madalengoitia takes what he calls a “Patternist” approach to his work — the subtext or the overlay, depending on your perspective, for his paintings and pastels. After easily getting lost in the maze-like graphics, the full pieces are particularly striking. Joseph Muzondo’s sculpture has long been prized by collectors in Europe, the US and the southern cone of Africa. In this series, he fuses his sculptural hand with paint on pliable paper, giving intriguing depth to a very familiar subject, the thumbprint. Steeped in Maya culture, Multicolores’ taps into more world class folk art talent in the northern highlands of Guatemala with hand-embroidered pieces, detailed and superbly crafted. Family and self-portraits show the traditional dress and hand woven textiles of Mayan pride. Noah James Saunders says he “speak[s]in wire; and faces are my language” and the mostly self-taught master creates profiles, busts and reliefs that are feats of artistry and engineering. His sculptures move and cast shadows so ethereal, we must remind ourselves that they are strips of metal. Elroy Williams has enjoyed an award-winning career as a commercial artist, and he has a keen eye for what captivates. Williams says he creates what “can only be said through the visual,” which seems obvious once we examine his evocative pastels.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW. The exhibition will be on view through July 10th. Learn more: https://amykaslowgallery.com/events/humankind.
Artist Talk with RENEE BALFOUR: NATURE UNBOUND
March 15, 2022
Ascending. Renee Balfour. 54” x 28”. Walnut. Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Talk: Thursday, March 17 at 6pm
Join Amy Kaslow Gallery on Thursday, March 17th at 6pm for an interactive evening with sculptor Renee Balfour who turns raw planks into the most sinewy, contemporary art forms. A gifted and generous teacher, Balfour will demonstrate for us just how she accentuates the wood’s contours, exposes its most beautiful grains, burls, and bumps. She’ll show us how she assembles the spectacular walnut and cherry pieces on our gallery walls for maximum shadow effect. Come for lively conversation and community, beautiful art, and a refreshing libation.
Sinewy, smooth and sleek and utterly multi-dimensional, Renee Balfour’s sculpted works come from nature’s treasure of trees, the black walnut, cherry, and white oak from White Oak Canyon along Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Manipulating large band saws and small chisels, Balfour’s skilled hands accentuate the grains of these majestic woods, creating new lines with space and color. She sources her medium at the base of the mountain in Syria, Virginia, just a few miles from her Madison studio. Balfour hand-selects each piece, but only after planing – the process of leveling the wood – reveals the color and grain. The artist brings the raw planks to her studio where, after further planing, she deploys her saws, her arbortech ball gouge, grinders , hand rasps, and sanders. The result is a most refined series of organic sculptures, respectful to their roots. Nature Unbound includes eleven of Balfour’s works installed along our whitewashed walls, their curves and spikes casting shadows that transition in density and length throughout the day and into the night. This is relief sculpture in its most compelling form.
A natural teacher over her 30 year career in the studio, Balfour has meshed her ability with arts advocacy, working with University of Virginia Children’s Hospital and Community Art Works to help create sustainable arts programming for children in Rwanda. She is co-author of The Virginia Visual Arts Resource Directory and past president of McGuffey Art Center in downtown Charlottesville, where she maintains a studio. Balfour’s work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the US and abroad. She is the co-founder of ArtSmart Consulting Charlottesville, an art consulting group established in 2014 and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW. Learn more: https://amykaslowgallery.com/events/reneebalfour-natureunbound.
RENEE BALFOUR: NATURE UNBOUND
February 25, 2022
Flight. Renee Balfour. 54” x 25”. Walnut. Photographed by Scott Smith.
Sinewy, smooth and sleek and utterly multi-dimensional, Renee Balfour’s sculpted works come from nature’s treasure of trees, the black walnut, cherry, and white oak from White Oak Canyon along Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Manipulating large band saws and small chisels, Balfour’s skilled hands accentuate the grains of these majestic woods, creating new lines with space and color. She sources her medium at the base of the mountain in Syria, Virginia, just a few miles from her Madison studio. Balfour hand-selects each piece, but only after planning – the process of leveling the wood – reveals the color and grain. The artist brings the raw planks to her studio where, after further planning, she deploys her saws, her arbortech ball gouge, grinders , hand rasps, and sanders. The result is a most refined series of organic sculptures, respectful to their roots. Nature Unbound includes nine of Balfour’s works installed along our whitewashed walls, their curves and spikes casting shadows that transition in density and length throughout the day and into the night. This is relief sculpture in its most compelling form.
A natural teacher over her 30 year career in the studio, Balfour has meshed her ability with arts advocacy, working with University of Virginia Children’s Hospital and Community Art Works to help create sustainable arts programming for children in Rwanda. She is co-author of The Virginia Visual Arts Resource Directory and past president of McGuffey Art Center in downtown Charlottesville, where she maintains a studio. Balfour’s work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the US and abroad. She is the co-founder of ArtSmart Consulting Charlottesville, an art consulting group established in 2014 and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW. Learn more: https://amykaslowgallery.com/events/reneebalfour-natureunbound.
Jane Kell:
Abstract Light
November 30, 2021
Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Opening: Thursday, December 2 at 6pm to 7:30pm
As German-American abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann observed, “in nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.”
Amy Kaslow Gallery is proud to introduce Abstract Light, artist-in-residence Jane Kell’s newest collection of 17 big bold oils with occasional pastels on canvas. Kell says “I felt ready to let go of realism and just focus on the color and what I could achieve with it.” The painter once again shows us that she herself is an uncommon combination of combustion and complete control. Her dynamism is matched by her follow through, a quality that so many of her works give. She takes us to that cove, to that sloping coastline, that suggested river in the distance. She leads us through her amazing mix of pigmented light to get there.
AMY kaslow Gallery Talk: UNBOUNarD Art and Revival with zehra Çentinkaya
November 1, 2021
Talk: Friday, November 5 from 6pm to 7:30pm
Heritage, innovation and opportunity collide in a stunning Turkish-Armenian collaboration featured in Amy Kaslow Gallery’s current exhibition Native Hands: Folk Art is Fine Art. Join the Gallery on Friday, November 5th at 6pm for conversation about art and revival. Zehra Çetinkaya is coming from Istanbul, Turkey’s Mehmet Çetinkaya Gallery, where her family creates some of the world’s finest textiles. With silk from Bursa, dyes from plants, seeds, pits, and insects, and old compositions from the Caucasus, they’ve revived ancient designs with needlework not seen in centuries and sustainable income for the masterful women stitching them. See the results in the gallery: strikingly modern pieces adapted from antiquities, and saturated in organic color. Mehmet Çetinkaya Gallery’s works will be on view in Native Hands: Folk Art is Fine Art through November 28.
Please join Amy Kaslow Gallery Friday, November 5 at 6 pm to engage and learn more. Libations served. Masks required. Street parking available. More information can be found on their website:
www.amykaslowgallery.com/events/gallerytalk-zehracetinkaya.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd NW.
Native Hands:
Fine Folk Art
September 27, 2021
Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Opening October 1 and on view through November 28 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, Native Hands: Fine Folk Art brings you world class works from artists around the globe who innovate on generations-old practices, and train others to carry them forward. Creatives from tribal and ethnic groups with rich cultural heritage share their stunning collections — canvases, metals, woods, stone and clay — highly prized by leading patrons of the arts.
We’re partnering with the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, whose professionals and seasoned advisors reach across the globe to assess folk art’s economic impact and find the most skilled artisans likely to pay it forward. We’ve tapped into this brimming talent to select simply the finest painted, woven, sculpted and polished pieces. Think big, bold installations like stunningly modern woven Armenian silks and smaller gems such as the intricate expressions captured in the Mexican clay heads. Storyboards move visitors through with crisp contexts about each artist, community and country represented.
Lisa tubach and John Geci:
Sea glass
August 9, 2021
Scribbly Meets Marine by Lisa Tubach.
Opening: Thursday, August 12 at 6pm
Washing up smooth, sometimes shiny, sea glass tumbles along the ocean’s edge, long after breaking from its origins. It can take hundreds of years before these coveted pieces come to shore, but our Sea Glass exhibition offers you a shorter wait. Opening August 12th, Sea Glass pairs Lisa Tubach’s sensuous painted underwater scapes with John Geci’s bold and elegant blown glass vessels. It’s a mesmerizing combination.
About the Artists
Lisa Tubach
Tubach’s paintbrush dips into ethereal underwater worlds, defined by brilliant, bold-toned sea life. Channeling her zest for protecting tropical ecosystems into painting stunning tableaus, she gives us big strokes and remarkable detail as we enter coral installations, move through grasses and into grottos. Her oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and guaches on paper are informed by her conservation work: immersion with shark conservationists in Belize, coral garden maintenance in Hawaii, invertebrate collection in Puget Sound, reef documentation in the Bahamas and next, perhaps, a trip to Iceland where she wants to “dive into fissures” to examine their geo-thermal state. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Tubach graduated from Macalester College, earned an M.F.A. from Michigan State University, and a certificate in digital video production from New York University. She is Professor of Art at James Madison University and has had exhibitions and artist residencies throughout the globe.
John Geci
Geci’s studio sits atop a hill in Western North Carolina, where he considers his medium, he says, “as a canvas to display the inherent beauty…of the glass”. A master glassblower who found his calling in college, John Geci soon traveled to Penland School of Craft in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, to immerse himself in the art. After studying and apprenticing with leading local artists who imparted many techniques and approaches, Geci landed the first-ever glass residency at EnergyXchange, an innovative small business incubator based on sustainability. For two decades, the artist has produced his own distinctive designs known as J. Geci Glass. Geci’s vessels are in galleries and private collections across the country. Active in the dynamic local arts community, he chairs the glass jury at the EnergyXchange and is a member of the robust Toe River Arts Council.
Find John Geci’s luminous vessels paired with Lisa Tubach’s striking renderings of underwater worlds at the upcoming exhibition, Sea Glass, August 12th – September 25th at Amy Kaslow Gallery. Visit www.amykaslowgallery.com for more info.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd NW.
DC Lines
June 21, 2021
Courtesy of Amy Kaslow Gallery.
DC LINES
There is something so appealing about the simple line. Originating in nature, it’s everywhere we turn. Humankind walks it, wears it, draws it, and crosses it. Here we assembled striking pieces from four Washington artists whose works are inescapably, alluringly linear. Washington Lines includes Elroy Williams, who marshals his mastery as a commercial artist into contemporary fine art, crisp and clean mixtures of gorgeous color, and graceful form. Linda Cafritz’s seemingly sculpted acrylic paintings give us lines defined as much by textured hues as they are by their elegant verticality. From the late lacquer artist Andrew Kaslow, highly polished geometrics spring from square wallboards. And Amy Kaslow’s latest botanical images put a new lens on natural pinstripes and curves, all in sumptuous tones. Washington Lines opens June 24th and runs through August 8th.
ELROY WILLIAMS
Elroy Williams has a keen eye for what captivates. Throughout his decades-long career, he’s created art “to converse with the world, saying things that can only be said through the visual”. As a young graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, Williams landed a job in advertising, where honed his commercial skills while privately committed to his own drawing and painting. His earliest exhibition was a solo show at the Emily Lowe Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea art district. Earning design and concept awards from his peers in the advertising industry, Williams eventually served as an art director in advertising and publishing in New York and Maryland firms. His fine art has won wide recognition locally and throughout the nation
LINDA CAFTRIZ
Washington, DC painter Linda Cafritz studied art at The American University, The Corcoran School of Art, and The American College of Art & Design. Using acrylics and texture on canvas, Cafritz’s unusual and striking color combinations are both abstract, deep, and distinctively linear. Her work has been exhibited at Glen Echo’s Yellow Barn Gallery, the Ira Pinto Gallery, Baltimore’s Light Street Gallery, the New York and Washington Design Centers, SRA Architectural + Design, among others. Cafritz’s paintings are in private and commercial collections in the United States and the United Kingdom.
ANDREW KASLOW
Andrew Kaslow loved the natural world and made his home on the deeply wooded edge of Maryland’s Loch Raven Reservoir, where he tended his garden and watched his bat boxes at night. A master finisher, musician, and designer, he combined his artistic talent with his zest for the organic when he created rare wood top tables in the shape of grand pianos. The spray booth and hard living cut Kaslow’s life very short, and he left us usable sculpture — bases of hand-forged, smoothed, and polished steel topped by ribbon mahogany, curly maple, sinewy sliced pear, straight-line cherry, and more rare woods Kaslow collected over his lifetime. These pieces are functional art and exceptional craftsman/womanship. We are proud to have them on our gallery floor. We have converted his best prototypes into one-of-a-kind pieces, with thanks to Mondrian, Mother Nature, and others who inspired this unfinished work.
DC LINES runs through August 8th at Amy Kaslow Gallery.
ANCESTRAL COLORS
May 10, 2021
Dance of Chichi, Juana Calel, Patanatic Community, 46.5” x 24.5”.
Currently on view through June 15, 2021.
Direct from the steep Highlands of Guatemala, we present Ancestral Colors: exquisite indigenous rugs and embroidery cloths created by 18 master Maya artists. Opening with a special Mother’s Day celebration, the exhibition runs now through June 15th, 2021.
Each work is an indigenous woman’s mix of her own ancestral heritage with contemporary society as she seesaws between striving for social change and upholding cherished tradition. Each textile tells a story of triumph and endurance, even sustainability. The artists are members of Multicolores, a collective of highly cultivated weavers and embroiderers, who share techniques and supplies as they pool their efforts and profits. They are standouts in a region of deep poverty and harsh violence, where indigenous women face barriers to education and work, where girls often become mothers before they learn to care for themselves.
“These rugs signify our culture, but also our efforts—how we have worked hard to get ahead,” says exhibiting artist Ramona Cristina Tumax Tzunún. “The rugs are part of us: part of our struggle to be valued, respected and recognized.” Indeed, the artists’ innovation on age-old beliefs and practices also portends social change, because as they tap their talent and highlight their heritage, they elevate their self-worth and their importance in the community. Most become their family’s top income earner: they can afford uniforms to send their children to school, to fund fresh water pumps for the village, to add more nutrition to their diets.
The fine art collection of 27 contemporary floor and wall pieces draws on centuries of Maya women weaving cultural identity and pride into their own huipiles (blouses) and other traditional Mayan clothing. Each geometric design and coloration comes from one of the Kiche, Kaqchiquel and Tzutujil communities that climb the country’s rugged, volcanic mountainside. Mother Earth centers their Maya worldview, one rich with legends and folktales, and the artists give layers of life to these indigenous symbols. Vivid and precise, each of their creations plays on sophisticated mastery of color. Their innovative medium, recycled fabrics, builds on stewardship of the land.
“Pride is what I want to celebrate in this artwork,” says exhibiting artist Hilda Raquel García Tzunún. “I hope this piece conveys joy, brilliance, and hope – these are the emotions I feel when I think of my own Maya identity.”
Multicolores artists created this heritage collection for Amy Kaslow Gallery and we are proud to curate it for collectors drawn to art with impact. The Maya artists’ works have been exhibited in Central America, the US and Canada. Prized at Santa Fe’s International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, they have made their way into the finest private collections in the hemisphere.
Ancestral Colors runs through June 15th at Amy Kaslow Gallery.
amy kaslow gallery hosts art night event with NOAH JAMES SAUNDERS:
SCULPTING SHADOW
April 19, 2021
Oui Ca Va Bien, Noah James Saunders, Galvanized steel wire, 32″ x 27” x 10”, Featured in Sculpting Shadow at Amy Kaslow Gallery.
Event: Friday, April 23 and Saturday, April 24 from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM
Noah James Saunders brings us the male human form, sinewy and powerful. The searching eyes to the brawny shoulders, the body mechanics of these wonderful pieces fill the room with presence.
“I speak in wire; and faces are my language,” says the Athens, Georgia-based artist. For thirty years, the largely self-taught sculptor has manipulated metal wire, inventing new techniques and honing his talent in the US and in Europe. Today, his works are feats of artistry and engineering. Heads and torsos move, casting shadows so ethereal, we must remind ourselves that these are strips of metal.
Saunders’ works are experiential and intimate. By day, the heads, torsos, and tableaus turn, and with every rotation they create a new expression, a new figure. After dark is another dimension as the artist invites us to flash our own cellular phone light at life-sized sculptures that throw an array of contoured faces and forms along the gallery’s whitewashed walls. All in shadow, all commanding.
Saunders delights in humanizing a medium – wire – usually forgotten in the back of a drawer. After three decades, he remains drawn to the simplicity of the material, and the complexity he creates. As he sculpts, he still balances each piece against its shadows, which he uses as a guide to manipulate the wire and perfect the profile.
Visit the gallery for our Art at Night event on Friday April 23rd or Saturday April 24th from 7:30pm – 9:30pm to meet the artist and sculpt your own shadows. Masks and social distancing are required. Reception to take place outside on the patio, and the number of guests allowed inside the gallery at one time will be limited for safety. Street parking is available.
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Road NW.
NOAH JAMES SAUNDERS:
SCULPTING SHADOW
March 15, 2021
Oui Ca Va Bien, Noah James Saunders, Galvanized steel wire, 32″ x 27” x 10”, Featured in Sculpting Shadow at Amy Kaslow Gallery.
On View: March 18 – April 25, 2021
Georgia native Noah James Saunders opens his stunning metal works on March 18th, 2021 at Amy Kaslow Gallery in Washington, DC.
Suspended from the ceiling and hanging from the walls, Saunders’ sculpture shows us the male human form, sinewy, stately, and strong. From searching eyes to brawny shoulders, the body mechanics of these life-sized pieces fill the room with presence.
“I speak in wire; and faces are my language,” says Saunders. For thirty years, in the United States and Europe, the master of wire has honed his talent and invented new techniques. Today, his pieces are feats of artistry and engineering. Heads and torsos move and cast shadows so ethereal, we must remind ourselves that these are an assemblage of metal strips.
Saunders delights in what he calls “humanizing the wire usually forgotten in the back of a drawer” and after three decades he’s still drawn to the simplicity of the material, the complexity he creates with form and shadow. His sheer raw talent has nurtured a career of sculpting and exhibiting. The celebrated artist has held teaching residencies, launched dozens of solo shows and has collected awards from his home state of Georgia to Luxembourg. He was a finalist for the Luxembourg Art Prize, selected from 12 artists around the world. Saunders claimed the prestigious People’s Choice Award at ArtFields2019 which provided him the exploratory time in Italy he needed to ideate and create Join Me: A Prelude. The sculptor’s work is in private collections across the US and Europe.
See Saunders’ evocative portraiture, his mastery of metal, space and shadow. March 18 through April 25, 2021 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 4300 Fordham Road NW. For more information: www.amykaslowgallery.com.
Amy kaslow gallery presents:
bark!
February 1, 2021
Florida Rainbow Eucalyptus Tree, Eucalyptus Deglupta. Full immersion metallic paper, ¼ inch acrylic face-mount. Image courtesy of Amy Kaslow.
On View: February 2 – March 14, 2021
BARK!, a stunning array of the tree’s most intricate and protective armor, opens February 2nd through March 14th at Amy Kaslow Gallery, in Washington, DC.
The exhibition includes more than a dozen large-scale fine art photographic works, all close ups capturing nature’s brilliant color, texture and form. Think deeply-pitted Royal Palms studded with brilliant hues of lichen, smooth and dense Maryland Beech splashed with “flowers” pretty enough to pluck, Argentinian Sycamore as detailed as an etching in muted creams and greys, and the shocking “color wheel” tones painted on Rainbow Eucalyptus.
About the Artist
A Washington DC native, Kaslow opened Amy Kaslow Gallery in 2020 to show fine art that celebrates the natural world in content, form, and medium. It’s a new direction for the longtime journalist/photographer and publisher of K/NOW. Her LIfe After War exhibitions have traveled across the country: large-format portraits of from El Salvador to Nigeria, of victims, perpetrators, eyewitnesses, and survivors, each paired with storyboards exploring how human resilience meets threatening, often deadly challenges. The Palmer Gallery, Vassar College, University of Maryland’s Center for Conflict Resolution, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, New York’s Chinatown Soup Gallery and the IATI Blackbox theater, U.S. Library of Congress, among her exhibition venues.
“Human nature is full of flaws. Mother Nature’s more than an essential elixir, she’s our example. Take tree bark, which mesmerizes with detail, it grows, protects and adapts.”
BARK! follows the Gallery’s fall/winter exhibition of British colorist Jane Kell’s abstract landscapes and Brandon McDonald’s pen and ink works “Rocks, Creeks and Woodlands.” Spring and Summer exhibitions include Noah James Saunders’ lifesize stainless steel installations of the human form; indigenous, richly-hued rugs created by women in the highlands of Guatemala; and the sleek organic wood wall and floor pieces from Virginia sculptor Renee Balfour.
Find more information at www.amykaslowgallery.com
Amy Kaslow Gallery is located at 4300 Fordham Rd. NW.