PAST EXHIBITIONS

Small Talk

Curated by the 2024 American University Studio Art MFA Graduates, Small Talk considers the layering of heavy and light topics, surface and depth, and the connections in between.

Featuring: Francisco Donoso, Erin Fostel, Marie B. Gauthiez, Genie Ghim, Charles Jean-Pierre, Ian Kline, Charles Mason III, Lindsay Mueller, Johab Silva, and Taylor Sizemore.

The Reading Room

August 24-September 28, 2023

The Reading Room is a Black art reference library and destination for discovery anchored by a collection of nearly 600 books on Black visual art, history and culture. It's mission is to:

Increase visual arts literacy and cultural awareness
Celebrate the past, present and future of Black creativity
Provide resources for Black artistic and scholarly ecosystems to thrive in the South and beyond.

someone decides, hawk or dove Niamh McCann

September 7-30, 2023

someone decides, hawk or dove is a new body of work by mixed-media artist Niamh McCann that responds to the 1922 institutionalization of the Northern and Southern borders of Ireland and the ongoing consequences and reverberations of this partition. Combining sculpture, collage and video, McCann mines deep seams of colonialist atrocities and legacies of ‘The Troubles’ to present, subvert and reinvent assumed perspectives of social, political and geographical landscapes, allowing viewers access to a nuanced world of layered and co-mingled realities.

McCann revisits the archival record to speculate on what language, story and imagery might be missing from accepted colonial narrative(s) or obstructed by its in-built global systems of naming, ownership, political power-play and cultural displacement. The presentation of animal figurines and bronze objects at the onset can be viewed as a playful assortment of objects and peculiar monuments but are testaments of political realities and the reconciliation of systemic outcomes. Concerned with acts of remembrance and reflection, this work draws from territory borders, architecture, street names, flags and ceremonies to convolute history and to allow for elucidated slippages and the emergence of complex, non-linear narratives.

someone decides, hawk or dove shows at STABLE Arts, Washington DC, a location steeped in the layered resonances of American and Indigenous histories, cultures, stories, monuments, and myths. McCann’s work sorts through the public memory and collective reckoning of colonialism, a global project that has impacted the world for generations, an intermingling of two different landscapes with familiar stories - neighborhoods and communities lost and survived.

A recipient of the 2022 Norman Houston Award from Solas Nua, McCann lives and works in Dublin. She is a recipient of the 2021 Stephen McKenna Fellowship from the Royal Hibernian Academy and is represented by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin. McCann’s work is housed in the collections of The Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon; Limerick City Gallery, Swansea City Council; The London Institute; Hiscox, London and Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. Work from someone decides, hawk or dove - or iterations of same - has been shown at the Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie, Ludwigshafen, Germany (hosted by Wilhelm-Hack-Museum), at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and at The Boyne Valley Visitor Centre, Ireland.

Her work is supported by Solstice Arts Centre, Meath, Creative Ireland, Culture Ireland, the National College of Art and Design (Ireland) and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

The New Eagle Creek Saloon

May 27-July 8, 2023

STABLE Arts is excited to announce the first Washington, D.C. presentation of artist Sadie Barnette’s The New Eagle Creek Saloon. Barnette describes the exhibition as, “...an installation, and a vibe, that reimagines my father’s bar — the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. Glowing somewhere between a monument and an altar, the glittering bar structure is not only a place but is at once an invocation and an invitation. This work is honorific but also generative; with intimacy rather than reverence, my restaging of the New Eagle Creek Saloon offers space for connection and new energies, to dance and dream, to call the names of those lost and to see one another as we are in the glow of our own small moments of freedom.”

The exhibition has toured The Lab, San Francisco, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Kitchen, New York, and is currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This Washington, D.C. presentation will draw local relevance with robust programming including weekly happy hours, conversations, film screening, live music, wellness activations, and more. The New Eagle Creek Saloon will be on display May 27-July 8, 2023 with viewing hours Friday-Saturday from 2-8p, and Sunday from 12-6p. Programming partners include: For Freedoms, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, Black Techno Matters, DIRT DMV, The Psyce Podcast,DC Public Library People’s Archive, and more.

Tradewinds

Tradewinds, on view September 30-November 4, 2022, approaches DC’s Go-Go music club culture from dual angles of photography and soundscape. Rooted in collaborative research, the exhibition is the culmination of the Nexus Residency wherein photographer Larry Cook and ethnomusicologist Allie Martin worked in tandem to meld their practices, presenting a unified body of new works. Tradewinds presents an intentional focus on scale and new medium exploration for the artists.

Club backdrops, often considered as background spectacle, loom large as Cook unsettles the idea of the figure and its connection to prominent poses and portrait gestures. Using dazzling crystals imposed atop signature surrealist painted backdrops and Polaroids, Cook’s works span regional subcultures of Black music and picture making. Martin’s, The City is the Club is the City, is a multimedia installation directly inspired by Cook’s approach to photography and club aesthetics, particularly inverting what is typically background and peripheral into central focus. Drawing on soundscape recordings created at the iconic corner of 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW, the installation features a series of sonic vignettes that blur the lines between inside and outside, between varied publics. Utilizing traffic, club noise, Go-Go music, bird sounds, and other sonic elements these vignettes bring background noise to the fore, creating the feeling of being suspended in a doorway where the club is the city, and the city is the club.

Cook and Martin’s pieces mirror and expand the essential light and sound of club aesthetics as a mode of community archival practice. The exhibition’s works engage Black life on its own terms, amplifying understandings of how Black people know and document their lived experiences. The archive is a living embodiment of gesture, sounds, and socially engaged materials varied in locales both private and public.