Welcome to The Artful Five
-our weekly picks for getting your art and culture fix!
See The Art League 2025 Student/Faculty Show. This annual exhibit is a celebration of creativity, where our students and talented instructors take the spotlight. View incredible works that students created in class during the Winter 2024–Winter 2025 terms, along with inspiring pieces by the artists who teach them. The 2025 Student/Faculty Show is on view in The Art League Gallery through March 2. Join us on the final day of the exhibit from 2:00–4:00 pm for a closing reception where award winners are announced; Torpedo Factory, Studio 21, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria, Virginia.
Catch Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 at the National Portrait Gallery before it ends on February 23. It celebrates famed female American expats—Gertrude Stein, Anaiis Nin, Zelda Fitgerald, Josephine Baker, to name a few—who thrived in the creative freedom that Paris offered and made their marks on contemporary culture. Before you go read Why Women Leave and Other Takeaways from ‘Brilliant Exiles’, Leigh Donlan’s vivid and engaging review that shares interesting details about the women portrayed and their stories.
Check out Culture Type’s “16 Black Art Books of 2024,” a listing of varied monographs, catalogs, and compendiums published over the past year. Sam Gilliam, Elizabeth Catlett, Alvin Ailey, and themes including the Harlem Renaissance, Caribbean makers, and ancient Egypt’s influence on Black art and culture are among the artists and exhibition themes explored in Culture Type’s stand-out picks distinctive for their “innovative design, exceptional imagery, effective editorial strategy, and delivery of new and engaging scholarship.”
View We Gather at the Edge: Contemporary Quilts by Black Women Artists at the Renwick Gallery. It features 33 quilts from the extensive collection of Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, a prolific artist, curator, and scholar who is also an aerospace engineer. This exhibition is remarkable in its scope and groundbreaking in its representation of Black history and culture as told with needle and thread. It celebrates members of the Women of Color Quilters Network, an organization Mazloomi founded to help isolated makers connect and continue Black textile traditions.
Listen to a talk by the various artists whose works are featured in the Athenaeum Sculpture Invitational Eclipse on Sunday, February 23, at 2:00 pm. Michael Janis, Lori Katz, Carol Prusa, Sarah Hood Salomon, Salih Zeki Sayar, Murat Sener, Michael Enn Sirvet, Tim Tate, Erwin Timmers, Maduka Francis Uduh, and The Art League’s very own Michael Price will discuss their artistic processes, selection of materials, and the inspiration behind their work.
