Also: Focusing on the fight for self-empowerment, multiple meanings in a common email sign-off, and drawing attention to endangered species.
Ad Astra Per Aspera
The debut show at Alliance Gallery, the Arlington Artists Alliance’s new venue, takes its title from the Kansas state motto, which translates from Latin as “to the stars through hardship.” The slogan is meant to link all five artists in “Ad Astra Per Aspera: Empowerment Explored Through Textiles, Collage and Print,” which includes painting-stitchery hybrids by Anna Nazaretz Radjou and Nicole Tobin. But the most striking pieces address struggles of African American history.
An installation view of the five-artist show “Ad Astra Per Aspera: Empowerment Explored Through Textiles, Collage and Print.” (Arlington Artists Alliance)
At the center of the Christina Papanicolaou-curated show is Eleftheria Easley’s hanging grid of hundreds of printed paper squares, some of them with multilingual text. Among these are tickets, coupons, stamps, maps, game cards, nutrition labels and Beatles lyrics. Solicited on social media, the scraps constitute a sort of World Wide Web of pre-internet artifacts, evocative and nostalgic.
Photographer Pedro Ledesma III takes a much more local approach, limiting himself to Richmond. One of his pictures shows a statue in midair, presumably making a much-delayed retreat from a campaign to glorify the losing side of the Civil War.
Justyne Fischer turns more directly to Black history with mixed-media portraits of John Lewis and Angela Davis. Fischer’s most ambitious contribution is a multilevel portrayal of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, then one of the country’s most affluent Black neighborhoods. The artist hand-burned a scene of destruction onto two wooden panels and then printed a version of the same image on translucent fabric that hangs in front of the panels. As the gauzy curtain moves, a century-old infamy flutters into view.
Ad Astra Per Aspera: Empowerment Explored Through Textiles, Collage and Print Through Aug. 18 at Alliance Gallery, The Crossing Clarendon, 2800 Clarendon Blvd., Arlington. arlingtonartistsalliance.org. 571-483-0652.