Dear Gallery 102 Supporters,
We're excited to share what 2019 brought us. Over this past year, we've welcomed in a new group of artists from around the globe, and we're again (like every year) so honored and thankful that we were able to share space with such intelligent creatives.
Our Spring 2019 semester of exhibitions was curriculum heavy. We started out with a group exhibition from our Corcoran Scholars, entitled Preserving Memory. Next, we were excited to host the four solo exhibitions of our graduating MFA students. These included Tyler Wellington's The Shell Game, Dan Winter's Rat Nest, Sarah Cooke's Phantom—Trigger, and Mei Mei's Lay Dying. To close out the Spring 2019 semester, we exhibited work from the graduating class of BA Fine Art students. Entitled Converging Flow, the exhibition illustrated the ways in which art is an important and necessary antidote to the ephemeral distractions of contemporary life.
During Summer 2019, we hosted, for the third year in a row, our Summer Solo Series. The series was created to bring together artists from across the DMV region and beyond and provide a space to exhibit new work. This year we were excited to welcome a group of three new artists to the space — Sobia Ahmad, Joshua Citarella, and Yacine Fall (BFA '19). Ahmad's exhibition Imbrications underlined the question of how do we 'other' through language? How do we identify the other through language? Citarella's exhibition Forward-Facing Politics pushed audiences to consider the imminent political, climatic, and cultural disaster, asking us what space exists to envision a better world. The last exhibition of the summer, Fall's Looking for God, saw one of our largest site-specific installations to date. Drawing from Sufism, a mystical sect of Islam, Fall placed the body and the environment at the forefront of accessing and interacting with god. In addition, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Nicole Ivy, contributed a poignant catalog essay for Fall's exhibition.
We closed out our 2019 season with two Fall exhibitions. From the Margins, curated by our Director and members of the Students Exhibitions Committee, took an honest and contemporary look at the legacy of photographic representation in the context of the closing of Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 30 years ago. The exhibition considered the continued risk of representation, while infusing the notion of "critique as care" into the curatorial ethos. The exhibition asked how do we (and can we) practice radical care in spaces and institutions that actively suppress care? A selection of the exhibiting artists included: John Edmonds (BFA '12), Naima Green, Benjamin Fredrickson, Shen Wei, Carlos Motta, Matt Storm, Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Sara Lusitano, Peter Clough, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, John Paradiso, and more. In addition, Gallery 102 curated a resource library that included publications such as GenderFail, Original Plumbing, Aperture, and more. Lastly, we printed our largest, fully illustrated, exhibition catalog to date with over 12 contributors. We are still sitting with the magnitude of the show and the amount of care and love that was given to it by so many people.
To close out our 2019 season, we currently have Enter: Future on view. Curated by a group of freshman students enrolled in Professor Bibiana Obler's "Art of the Exhibition" course, the show displays an array of visions of the future, both dystopian and utopian, and makes an effort to convey these visions of the future from the perspectives of the eleven artists included. The exhibition is on view until Friday January 17, 2020. We encourage you to stop by, check it out, and snag a catalog!
To conclude this letter, I'd like to thank all of the guest curators and collaborators, both I and the committee are so thankful for your insight and vision. To all of the artists who have exhibited with us this year, we are so proud to have been able to show your work and share it with the public. To the Student Exhibitions Committee and the Gallery 102 Intern team, you all are truly amazing; none of this could have been possible without your skill and creativity. Thank you to the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design and to GW. Lastly, thank you to all of our supporters.
Have a safe and happy holidays!
Warmest regards,
Andy Johnson, Gallery Director
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Gallery 102
Gallery 102 and the Student Exhibitions Committee (SEC) is committed to the exhibiting of contemporary art, including work from GW & Corcoran students, DC-area artists, and nationally recognized artists of all medium. The SEC consists of GW & Corcoran students -- undergraduate and graduate, majors and non-majors, artists and art historians -- who both develop innovative, original, and thought-provoking exhibitions throughout GW's campus and invite a select group of guest curators to present exhibitions each semester. The gallery provides practical curatorial experience to the student body. Students have the opportunity to exhibit work, curate shows, and install exhibitions.
