With a total of nine galleries plus meeting rooms and artist studios, the Arlington Arts Center is one of the largest non-federal venues for contemporary art in the Washington area. Currently, the nonprofit center, housed in the historic, two-story Maury School building west of Clarendon, is featuring three artists in solo exhibitions in addition to its curated group show We Can’t Predict Tomorrow.
Visitors to the center first encounter an interactive sculpture created by Dane Winkler and installed on the center’s front lawn. From there, they move through Timepiece Mythos, constructed entirely out of materials from a century-plus-old barn in North Carolina that the artist disassembled and transformed.
Serving as a portal to both the past and the future, the work, dubbed by Winkler as an “architectural folly,” nods to the cyclical nature of history repeating itself. Proceeding into the center, visitors will come across suspended artworks from Emily Fussner in the exhibition Even a Parking Lot is Beautiful at Dawn, set up in the Wyatt Resident Artist Gallery. Born with a rare brittle bone condition, Fussner channels her relationship with fracture and healing by using wet paper pulp to fill pavement cracks that becomes further molded into shape by everyday wear and tear until she eventually removes the forms, which can evoke a skeleton, an aerial map, or “a scar that can cast a shadow.”
Finally, Patrick McDonough’s eight portraits of unsung Arlington County workers, all of whom have labored to repair the streets and sidewalks outside the center as well as maintain the property itself, can be viewed in the Jenkins Community Gallery. McDonough’s drawings in Portraits of a County by a Youngish Man feature paper the artist made from clippings he harvested from mowing a section of the center’s lawn two years ago.
All three exhibits are on display through Aug. 28. In-person artist talks with Fussner on Saturday, Aug. 14 and McDonough on Saturday, Aug. 28, both at 2 p.m., are free but registration is required. Arlington Arts Center, 3550 Wilson Blvd. Call 703-248-6800 or visit www.arlingtonartscenter.org.
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