Glenstone Museum

Faith Ringgold at Glenstone - On view in the Gallery from April to October of 2021. In advance of the exhibition, Faith Ringgold visited the exhibition with her family. Watch this video to hear her reflections on the show, which includes works from every decade of her sixty year career.

Our full series on Ringgold's exhibition can be found here.

Arthur Jafa at Glenstone Museum - In this video, Jafa discusses his art, his relationship to images, and what he thinks about when he makes a new work. Arthur Jafa’s presentation at Glenstone opened in September of 2021.

"The conversation about political violence is not closed. It is open, and it is up to us to tell the story. That is my task. It’s who I am. And it’s why I work.” — Doris Salcedo On view in Room 2 of the Pavilions at Glenstone Museum: an exhibition of sculptures by Doris Salcedo, the first such exhibition in the Washington, D.C. area. Grounding her practice in research and firsthand interviews with survivors of political and domestic violence, Salcedo creates powerful and moving sculptures that translate the experiences of these survivors into poetic and compassionate forms. This exhibition features a recently completed work commissioned by Glenstone, “Disremembered X”, 2020/2021, a sculpture in four parts which originated from interviews the artist conducted with American mothers who have lost children to gun violence. While we prefer to let art and the artist speak for themselves, please know this video contains discussion of forms of sexual and political violence.

“I’m the old fashioned solitary painter… I don’t have a formula. I’m not a machine. I have a kind of a touch that’s different on different days.” —#VijaCelmins On view at Glenstone, “Vija Celmins”, a monographic exhibition of works by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins. The exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation in the Washington, D.C., area since 1979. Celmins is acclaimed for her meticulous renderings of images of the natural world—the night sky, the ocean surface, and spiderwebs, among others—many of which were featured in “To Fix the Image in Memory”, a major retrospective of her work that traveled the United States and Canada from 2018-2019, installed at the Met Breuer, SFMOMA, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Glenn Ligon on "Warm Broad Glow II", 2011 - Glenn Ligon once asked a fabricator, “Can you make black neon?” This counterintuitive question eventually led to "Warm Broad Glow II.” In this video, Ligon discusses this work and his practice more broadly, touching on his process and the enduring persistence of Black joy.

While most artists have a difficult time looking back at their own body of work – understandably since they are still alive and kicking and producing exceptional works of art – this short piece offers a glimpse at Jeff Wall’s oeuvre through his own lens, and through the lens of today. In his unique, mild-mannered way, a defiant and groundbreaking Jeff Wall dissects his complicated relationship to the tradition of photography, his love and reverence for painting and filmmaking, his objection to repeating the same thing over and over again, and how it all ties together in his beautifully complex, ever-changing, and epic photographs.

‘It’s really nice to see [the sculptures] differently, cycling back into my life. I think they sing together as a group. Having them here, working like events and active in the moment, you know, brings them back into the present for me.”—#CharlesRay On view in Room 8 of the Pavilions at Glenstone Museum, the third in a series of rotating exhibitions by Charles Ray. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, the selected sculptures showcase Ray’s practice from early in his career to the present day, with works ranging in material from concrete and steel to the hand-made paper used to realize a recent figurative work, “Return to the one” (2020).

The work of Kara Walker, while playful and whimsical on the surface, is dark and deeply challenging upon closer inspection. The Glenstone Museum displayed a range of her pieces throughout the summer of 2023, headlined by the dynamic sculpture The Katastwóf Karavan (2017), an ornately and disturbingly decorated wagon that houses a fully functioning steam calliope. Rava Films was fortunate to be able to capture the initial activation of this work at Glenstone by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran in all of its harrowing beauty, using that performance as a base for an exploration of Kara Walker’s work as a whole and the importance of engaging an audience through art to reckon with a devastating past.