Adam Lister Gallery
• November 3, 2011

Think “alternative space” and your mind will conjure up concrete floors, unfinished walls, improvised lighting with wires dangling from the ceiling. Alternative spaces in the hip, art world sense are somewhat rare in D.C., but are even rarer outside D.C. itself, let alone outside the Beltway, as the Adam Lister Gallery (3995 Chain Bridge Road, Fairfax, VA) is. Adam Lister is a Fairfax native who recently returned from New York after studying at the School of Visual Arts. Like many artists in New York, he lived and worked in Brooklyn. While living there he was involved in organizing and participating in art exhibits within alternative spaces, as well as galleries in NYC and New Jersey. He’s even done a show in the back of a Ryder moving van!

Adam recalls, “We would drive all over the five boroughs of New York City, parking on streets and opening up our show in different neighborhoods. I also ran a studio space in the industrial section of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The studio was in an old factory building, and we turned a raw 1000 square foot room into a six-studio ‘art lab’ for young emerging New York artists. I’m interested in the struggle and tension visible in young frustrated artists.”

The truth of alternative spaces is found in the rawness of its art. It is often more than a little unvarnished and with that famous edge, cutting or no. This is true of the Adam Lister Gallery, where many of the artists showing are still actually in graduate school. The work is inventive and searching. Its energy is undeniable. What it lacks in finesse is made up in earnestness, something often lacking in more “finished” work by artists further along. The urge to create here seems stronger, more palpable. There is more fumbling perhaps because more is being attempted.

One standout in the current show is Stephanie Rivers, the granddaughter of Larry Rivers, whose work fuses images from nature with graduated stripes. But the work in the show that is most magnetic, literally, is by Adam Lister, who uses magnets in surprising ways to create installation pieces as well as sculpture. His use of color is his own, and a pleasure for the eye. There are a number of pieces that incorporate mosaic, a technique Adam acquired while restoring New York subway stations.
With his gallery, Lister aims “to provide an environment and exhibition space for emerging artists at different levels in their careers. I currently have a rotating exhibition schedule and we’re in the process of setting up artist ‘labs’ for artists to have space to experiment, create, and have their work seen by the public. I would also like to create a space that offers rare and unique, quality artwork, in an area that craves a contemporary art space.” The gallery is currently doing an open call for a 2010 summer group exhibition. Submissions should be made online at www.adamlistergallery.com.
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The Two Sides of Rich Bloch
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Rich Bloch is a 60-something labor arbitration attorney, serving most notably as a neutral arbitrator for the National Football League and other professional sports organizations.

Rich Bloch is also a professional magician and a performer.

Both things are true. Bloch likes to keep the two things separate. He does not do magic tricks for 300-pound linemen and their agents.

Nor does he bill himself as a lawyer-magician when he’s performing at the Woolly Mammoth with his show “Best Kept Secrets,” where story-telling, humor and performance blend with Bloch’s finely honed magical abilities and, for want of a better phrase, bag of tricks, which includes card tricks, the famous Harry Anderson’s Last Monte, the world’s fastest tricks, and the assistance of his wife Susan, who is actually a Georgetown University law professor.

“To me, they’re two different worlds, they really are,” Bloch says. He and his wife live on Cathedral Avenue. He has two grown children, both of them attorneys. Also present are a number of pets, cats, a sheepdog, and a giant macaw who reportedly does card tricks.

“Both of the things I love to do — being an attorney, practicing the kind of law I do and being a magician — have enormous rewards, but you can also get frustrated. When that happens, you just pass through a door and go into the other world.

“I simply tell people that 80 percent of my professional life is being an attorney, and 80 percent is being a magician.”

Now that’s magic.

Bloch has been a practicing — and it takes enormous amount of practice, too — magician for several decades, and done well at it. He’s highly respected in a boundless community where magic and all the stuff that goes with it — tricks, equipment, professional secrets, show business and uniforms — are an important part of life. He’s performed on cruise ships, in Las Vegas and regularly at Hollywood’s Magic Castle, where he’s been a five-time nominee as Stage Magician of the Year.

Bloch first got interested when he was seven, which was in New Jersey in a time when cities and towns had magic shops. “I was seven, my father had passed away, and my mother, a remarkable woman, was on the road a lot as a traveling saleslady,” he said. “There was this shop on the corner, and it was a fascinating place, run by this old man, and, because it seemed I had to, I said to him you’ve got to hire me as an assistant. He said, ‘what kind of experience do you have?’ And I said, experience, I’m seven. But then, I remembered I had heard about a magician named Ted Collins, so I said my dad was Ted Collins. He said, ‘that’s impressive,’ and he hired me. And I was walking out, so I asked him his name, and he said, ‘Ted Collins.’

Magic.

“It’s a very special world,” he said. “But it’s more than just tricks and mystery. That’s once reason I’ve been doing this hour and a half show, that’s what it is. And that’s a different world.”

The Woolly Mammoth Theater is known for its edgy new plays, and draws a very different sort of audience than might be found at magic shows. “It’s a challenge, but that’s what I wanted to do, to entertain, to perform, to involve people in the magic show,” he said. “I love the small space, the intimacy and how you can interact with the audience, make them part of the show. I don’t do huge illusions, you can’t, but I do a varied repertoire of magic. I have a lot of equipment, and I wear a white tuxedo suit, one with a lot more pockets than most suits.”

“It’s taking things to the next level for me, and I think the response has been really good,” he said. “Good for me. It’s not the same. It’s not just about tricks, but it is about magic and it is about magic and me.”

In conversation, Bloch is self-deprecating, funny, really smart about his two roles and about magic in culture. He’s given considerable thought and feeling to what he does, and what a magician does.

“There is a difference between tricking people, deceiving them, and in creating illusions, moments of make-believe that seems real because it is,” he said.

Bloch, one thinks, makes magic magical.

“Best Kept Secrets” will be performed at the Woolly Mammoth Laboratory Theater March 31, April 1-4 and June 9-13.

Hirshhorn’s Homage to Josef Albers
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At the Hirshhorn Museum, “Innovation and Inspiration” is a perfect title for the exhibition focusing on the work and teaching of Josef Albers. Albers is known for his work on color theory, and I for one have never felt color fits into any theory, as it is so subjective in effect. Nevertheless, Albers had and continues to have an enormous effect on the way color is perceived in everyday use. If you look at his color exercises you see the colors we see around us in everyday life, whether in the home, or office, or other public spaces. Albers is far more influential than Martha Stewart!

Albers’ dynamic early graphic work had nothing to do with squares within squares, and in the pieces on view he experimented with type usage. He also used work that implied dimension through linear perspective, something Albers would not wholly abandon. In addition a few landscape lithographs that are unremarkable represent his earliest work. There is also a self-portrait by Albers that is pure Kokoshka. It is surprising to see even a glimpse of expressionism in the exhibition!

Assemblages by Albers incorporating glass and metal/wire/paint/nails/mesh/imitation pearls from the ’20s look contemporary. “Window Picture” has beautiful, rich, expressive color. “Grid Mounted Squares” is glass/iron/wire and again uses deep color, quite unlike later Albers. Modestly sized, these works are like modern stained glass windows.

What follows of Albers work is mostly his endless “Homage to the Square.” I have been looking, and sometimes not been looking, at Albers for almost 50 years, and there is sometimes a surprise. Yet I often feel about the squares the way I feel about hearing someone playing scales on the piano. It’s useful, but rarely exciting.

There is no doubting Albers’ importance in his role as teacher. Albers was a Bauhaus member from 1920-1933. Fleeing Hitler and coming to the U.S. to the incredibly important art campus at Black Mountain College (North Carolina), Albers was a founding director. Some of the greatest figures in mid-century art in America found their way to Black Mountain, either teaching or in its student programs. By art, I mean those working in all disciplines: John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and many more. One of the most important schools of poetry is the U.S. is known as Black Mountain poetry. In 1950 Albers became chair of the Department of Design at Yale University.

Albers’ students, including Rauschenberg, Noland, Nevelson, Bolotowsky and Judd fill the last two galleries with paintings, constructions, and sculptures. I have never seen Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg hanging next to each other so amicably! Not to be missed are some wonderful works by Anni Albers, wife of Josef. (Through April 11.)
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In the Realm of the Buddha at the Sackler
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At the Sackler Gallery, a wonderful exhibition of Tibetan art, “Lama, Patron, Artist: The Great Situ Panchen,” as well as a spectacular recreation of a Tibetan altar, have just opened. Situ Panchen was an 18th-century Tibetan version of the Abbé Suger, engendering the Encampment style that incorporated aspects of Chinese landscape and color. There are incredible paintings (thangkas) and bronzes in the show that have an amazing spiritual intensity. Though Tibetan Buddhist art is very much related to Chinese and Indian Buddhist art, it is somehow able to magnify its implosiveness.

Situ Panchen was an artist himself, and for that reason he was probably very interested in shaping the art that was produced for monasteries that were part of the Karma Kagyü sect he belonged to. Because Situ Panchen was a Rimpoche (reincarnated Lama), his life is chronicled, unlike most Tibetan artists. We know that Situ Panchen began to paint even before he had been schooled in painting. At the age of 15 he undertook instruction in iconometric proportions. One of the Karmapa Lamas, the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist sect that Situ Panchen belonged to, was also a noted painter.

The Encampment style of painting had emerged in central Tibet in the late 16th century. It was called by that name because the Karmapas lived in portable encampments, or moveable monasteries. There had subsequently been political problems that had resulted in the suspension of the style. Situ Panchen re-empowered the style.

Looking at Tibetan painting as a whole, the Encampment style stands out as being freer and having an extra element of fantasy. It also uses a sweeter and softer green and has some amazing landscapes, thanks to its Chinese infusion. In the midst of skies there are conjoined figures. It is symbolic, but at some level it is also sexual. Perhaps it is truly visionary sexuality.

In the show there are also some staggering sculptures of Lamas, some of the greatest portrait sculpture ever.

The Tibetan Shrine, with the contents of the Alice S. Kandell collection, makes an enormous impact. Though viewing individual works of art is preferable in the museum manner of the Situ Panchen show, the power of the actually quite-small chapel is possibly greater. I took students of mine, not well versed in art and not at all in Tibetan art, to see the show and chapel. They had a hard time looking long at anything. They stood and gazed into the fantastic array of Bodhisattvas and Demons and Lamas for many minutes, getting it. One student remarked it was just like his (Ethiopian) church. The chapel was truly enlightening. (Through July 18.)

Spring 2010 Visual Arts Preview
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Spring is finally in the works, which is good news for art galleries. After a showstopper of a winter, Susan Calloway of Susan Calloway Fine Arts recalls aborting two openings due to the torrential snowstorms. Now, optimistic from a successful show long since due, her gallery on Wisconsin Avenue has picked back up. “I sense a change in the market for fine art,” she says. Calloway has even seen an increase in business for the gallery’s archival framing services.

“I’m looking forward to the coming months with great enthusiasm,” says Norman Parish of Parish Gallery. The Parish Gallery has long helped make Canal Square a Georgetown destination. “Spring is here and with its beauty a breath of new life is anticipated for our coming shows,” he said. Parish, known for his focus on artists of the African diaspora, eagerly awaits his first exhibition of the works of renowned artist Robert Freeman (opening May 21). Freeman, noted for his theatrically alert groupings of figures and a continuing dialog within his work, focuses on race interactions.

Rebecca Cross, of Cross Mackenzie Ceramic Arts, has likewise been reveling in the dawn of art’s upcoming season. “Spring is shedding the recession. It’s more than cherry blossoms that are blooming!” Cross Mackenzie Ceramic Arts shows painting and photography along with top-shelf ceramics. Cross is additionally looking forward to showing her ceramic work in New York later this spring.

It seems that the economic devastation of the last two years is beginning to thaw with the warmth of spring, and patrons can look forward to getting back into the familiar swing of the spring arts season.

What To Look Forward To:

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
Christopher Addison of Addison/Ripley Fine Art is presenting a broad spectrum of Washington talent for the spring and summer season. Ranging from the serial abstractions and luscious surfaces of Dan Treado to the finely crafted, closely observed landscapes of John Morrell, Addison/Ripley Fine Art is sure to offer some of this season’s exemplary contemporary art in Washington this season.

In Treado’s third show with Addison/Ripley, “Requesting Quiet” (opening May 1), he works layering form over form, drawing from graphic and imagined imagery and juxtaposing subtle color with bold hues. The following month, June 12, sees the opening of John Morrell’s landscape paintings. From his offices above Georgetown, John Morrell, head of the Georgetown University fine arts department, has a spectacular view across the Potomac. Some of the artist’s impeccable landscapes reflect that inspiration while others elicit the scenic vistas of Maine and upstate New York. Finally, exercising his curatorial vision, Frank Day has selected a range of Washington portraitists in all variety of media for his curatorial venture, “Facing Washington.”

Irvine Contemporary
Irvine Contemporary’s current offerings are two solo exhibitions by contemporary female artists. “Swallowtail,” showing through April 20, is a solo exhibition of original paintings by Susan Jameson. Working with egg tempera on panel, Susan Jamison reflects on many traditions of imagery to create dream-like portraits and figures that question gender conventions. Reflecting back on sources like fairy tales, Renaissance portraiture, botanical illustration, and Kama Sutra manuscript paintings, Jamison uses the animals, plants, and objects in her work for their symbolic meanings, giving the Snow White-like female figures a contemporary, feminist perspective.
The gallery’s other exhibition, “American Vernacular,” features Susan Raab, whose documentary and fine art photography is noted for its distinctive approach in capturing the often overlooked places, people, and events in daily American life. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, Raab recently had a series of 10 photographs acquired by the Smithsonian Museum of American History for their permanent collection.

Long View Gallery
Long View Gallery’s upcoming show, “Identify,” features the latest series of work from Mike Weber. In over 30 photo-based mixed media works, Weber explores concepts of commemoration and heritage, including his own lineage, as he symbolically reinvents the life stories of his unknown or forgotten subjects. Weber selectively edits and reframes vintage snapshots derived from both his family’s collection and estate sales into newly composed digital prints on canvas. He augments these details with layers of paint, unorthodox collage materials and high-gloss resin, intensifying the mood of the original photograph. His artistic praxis ascribes a new narrative to his source materials and re-presents them as glossy, modern images. The opening reception will take place on April 22 at 6:30 p.m., and the exhibition will run through May 20.

Kathleen Ewing Gallery
In 1971, Steve Szabo, an award winning photographer for The Washington Post, took a six month leave of absence and moved to a 19th-century farmhouse in a remote area of Somerset County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In contrast to his fast shooting photojournalistic style, Szabo began working with a large format view camera to record the haunting scenes of Americana he found there. The Kathleen Ewing Gallery will feature Szabo’s photographic studies of rural America in “The Eastern Shore and Other Images,” curated by Kathleen Ewing herself, on display from April 5 to May 29.

Marsha Mateyka Gallery
The Marsha Mateyka Gallery opens their new season with paintings from the estate of Gene Davis (1920-1985). “Gene Davis: Cool / Works from the Artist’s Cooler Palette,” spans the work of Davis from 1959 to 1983. Gene Davis became well known in the early 1960s for his dramatic stripe paintings. In this exhibition, a selection of paintings from the estate reveals a more limited palette. Subtle, gentle tones of blue, purple, and green collide with vibrant effects.

Susan Calloway Fine Arts
Opening April 2 at Susan Calloway Fine Arts, “Changing Planes” is an exhibit of cityscapes by Linda Press. Press, interested in the poetic quality of light and shadow, engrains her European and American cityscapes with a sense of history in the architectural details of her work. Opening on April 9, and running in conjunction with Press’ paintings, the fine art photography of Diane Epstein captures the monuments, statues and fountains of Rome and other Old World cities, with a textural, timeless quality. Her show, “Italy: A Journey Through the Layers of Time,” brings to life the panoramic vistas of the Renaissance with the architectural details of the modern world.

Parish Gallery
In addition to the previously mentioned Robert Freeman, the Parish Gallery will be showing the work of Angela Iovino from April 16 to May 18. Iovino, a watercolorist who for the last four years has been exploring mixed media and acrylic, has produced work that could be described as expressionist landscapes, full of vibrant colors, rich textures, and lively brushwork. The work has been largely inspired by her travels to East Asia and Western Europe. With work on display beginning June 18, Parish Gallery will also feature the work of Tayo Adenaike, an eminent Nigerian watercolorist.

Fraser Gallery
Since 1996, the Fraser Gallery has developed a well earned reputation for introducing artists from the United Kingdom to the Washington, D.C. region. Their upcoming exhibition, “In My Blood,” includes work by six artists working in a variety of media, connected by one common theme: their homeland, Wales.

Among the contributing artists, Carwyn Evans’s installation “Everything Seemed So Simple and Beautiful,” is a noteworthy collection of miniature dioramas of sites under threat. The representations include a rural school and a farmhouse in ruin. Evans’s work reflects his personal experiences while exploring broader social and political shifts in rural Wales. Much of his practice has focused on his migration from an upbringing in rural Ceredigion to the Welsh capital Cardiff.

The title of Helen Grove-White’s video “Rising Slowly” refers to the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and to the rising sea levels that are eroding the Welsh coastline. The work makes many allusions to the landscape of Wales, with its layers of misty mountains, lakes, coastal plains, and frequently changing atmospheric conditions.

The Ralls Collection
Through the end of May, the Ralls Collection will be featuring work of Nicole Charbonnet. Textural and built up over long periods of time, textures, images, words, washes of paint, and veils of translucent fabric and paper create a visual threshold in Charbonnet’s work, meant to allow the viewer not only to see the painting, but to see through it. These surfaces reveal a memory of preexisting stages or structures. Her most recent work, featured in this exhibition, shows Charbonnet exploring images from popular culture in her signature style, inviting dialogue about redefined gender roles and social sentimentality in today’s society.

Cross Mackenzie Ceramic Art
The Cross Mackenzie Gallery, always with an eclectic and impressive variety of work, is hosting a series of shows throughout the spring and summer months. John Brown’s “Vine Series,” featuring abstract photographs of Wisteria Vines, hangs through the end of April. The month of May sees California-based painter Andrea Luria with a series of “Big Birds” — lush, textured portraits of water birds and chickens. Finally, opening June 18, Elizabeth Kendall, a ceramic artist, has put together an installation of button-like hanging clay sculptures. The gallery will fill itself with these pieces to make the space feel like an inverted pincushion.

Lister Gallery
A bit further south in Fairfax, VA, the Lister Gallery is hosting a group exhibition, “Process of Perception,” starting April 9. The artists in the show deal with process-based approaches and concepts. The May 14 show, “Invisible Energy,” finds a different group of artists addressing ideas about tension, power and stimulation. “It’s been a true balancing act trying to run a gallery space and make art at the same time,” says Adam Lister. “I feel like I see a different side of the artists.”

Museums At a Glance

Smithsonian American Art Museum
With the recent loss of Jeanne-Claude, one of the premiere environmental artists in history, it is fitting that the Smithsonian is exhibiting “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence.” Documenting one of the couple’s most daunting projects, the exhibition exposes the history and work behind “Running Fence,” an 18-foot high, 24.5-mile long stretch of white nylon fabric, that ran at one end down to the Pacific Ocean.

According to the Smithsonian’s website, “The exhibition includes components from the actual project, nearly 50 original preparatory drawings and collages, a 58-foot long scale model, and more than 240 photographs by Wolfgang Volz documenting the process and the many personalities involved with the project. Also included in the exhibition is a film by the legendary American filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, with Charlotte Zwerin. The film chronicles the unpredictable and ever-changing path that led to the completion of ‘Running Fence.’” The exhibit runs through Sept. 26.

National Gallery of Art
Allen Ginsberg, the counterrevolutionary wordsmith and ringleader of the Beat Generation, penned the lines that defined the unrest of his time. “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” is an exploration of the poet’s photography. Including portraits of Jack Kerouac and other contemporaries, Ginsberg’s poetry reflects a similar sentiment to his poetry: keen and sensitive observation of the surrounding world, intuitive expression, and a steady consciousness of a present time and place. The retrospective opens May 2 and runs through the beginning of September.

The Hirshhorn
Yves Klein, an influential artist of unfortunate brevity, had a career that spanned less than a decade. The Hirshhorn presents “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers,” the first retrospective of the artist’s work in nearly 30 years, opening May 20 and showing through September. The Hirshhorn explains, “Yves Klein took the European art scene by storm in a prolific career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962, when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 34 … Klein was an innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture, and theoretical writing. Self-identified as ‘the painter of space,’ he sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color. The artist’s diverse body of work represents a pivotal transition from modern art’s concern with the material object to contemporary notions of the conceptual nature of art.”
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Diane Epstein: All the Flavor of Rome
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It’s the Eternal City, and Diane Epstein has lived there for 15 years, where she is renowned not only for her photography but for her culinary accomplishments. And food is one of the subjects of her photography. Epstein has evolved a technique that she calls fresco photography. She has it printed on stone, but it’s the fusion of images she shoots and reshoots, layering into them images of Roman walls, that creates the resonance. Thus they have a blurred look that gives them their unique vintage.

Epstein does not shy from the familiar: it’s the Pantheon Dome (looking suspiciously like National Gallery rotunda,) the Forum, St. Peter’s, the Castel St. Angelo and the Coliseum. But there is also piselli (peas,) aglio (garlic,) and best of all carciofi (artichokes) looking like roses, almost. Some very beautiful limoni are one of her subjects as well.

Originally from New York and California, Epstein is self-taught in photography. She admires many photographers, but it is the impressionist painters who inspire her most. She mentions especially Cézanne and Renoir.

Recently she has had several commissions that have caused her to print her photographs in very large sizes so that her work has the feel of murals. She prints the fruits and vegetables in fairly small sizes, perfect for the kitchen.

In her culinary habit, she wanders around Rome with tourists and collects local produce and then prepares a feast. Epstein also shares her feast of Rome in her photographs. (At Susan Calloway Fine Arts, 1643 Wisconsin Ave., opening April 9.)

Angela Iovino at the Parish Gallery
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Watercolors are an often overlooked medium, their subtleties and patiently layered depths seemingly run off by the raw energy of so much popular expressionism and abstraction. Angela Iovino’s series of landscapes at the Parish Gallery, open through May 18th, is a kernel of cool mint, cleansing the palette between the explosive, bright flavors being offered around the city.

Even with such tangible titles as “Eastport Maine Morning” and “Hot Spring I,” to call these studies ‘landscapes’ is more of a projection than a precise definition. Iovino’s paintings are the geography of dreams that pull the viewer in only to stand beyond a world that cannot completely be entered.

Iovino lets the water do a lot of the work in her paintings, allowing the colors to dissipate, diffuse and coagulate in their wet state. I am inclined to believe that puddles of water may well have been spread carefully around the paper. The atmospheric effect created by this technique is thick and simultaneously transparent, recalling the feeling of intense humidity.

Like looking into a marsh, or staring fixedly at something and then closing your eyes – what is seen in Iovino’s work is more of a feeling of brevity, a weightlessness that cannot last. But in the meantime, it is a beautiful sight.

Through May 18 at the Parish Gallery (1054 31st St.)

‘Art in Congress’
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I have often noticed the incredible exterior of the 19th-century house at the corner of Q and New Hampshire. It is every bit as grand on the inside as the outside and it houses the Woman’s National Democratic Club (1526 New Hampshire Ave.). There is currently a show there (through July 22) entitled “Art in Congress,” with works by members of the U.S. Congress and their families. Everyone can cheer the inclusion of Representative Barney Frank’s partner, Jim Ready, who has a large photograph, “Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009.” It depicts the view of the crowd attending the Obama inauguration in epic manner.

The works in the show contain some surprises, including the thought that Senator Diane Feinstein of California could quit her day job and launch a respectable career as a floral artist. Though she is needed in the Senate, her lovely “Autumn Bouquet” would be welcome to anyone needing some quiet color affirmation. And Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona displays some very strong graphic gifts in his “Long Day of Legislating,” drawn with a Sharpie. One can feel the tension of April 28, 2007 in his jagged linear qualities.

A surprise is also the sumi-e brush painting on rice paper by Representative Jim McDermott, of Washington. He has been classically trained in the sumi-e technique, and his “Mountain Bamboo” brings its auspicious freshness to the show. On a totally different note, Representative Dina Titus of Nevada shows her book cover for “Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing.” It is appropriately grim.

Erin Kelly, daughter of Representative Betsy Markey of Colorado, is a gifted photographer. She has a diverse body of work that shows a wide range of styles. Representative Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii is represented by a technically accomplished clay sculpture entitled “Tokyo Dango” that includes cherry tree twigs. There is a bit of ikebana in the piece; it is bold, but in a graceful way.

There is a poem by Representative Diane E. Watson of California entitled “Aunt Gert.” Poems should be found more often on the wall. And California Congressman Mike Thompson has a very skillfully done “Drake Hunting Decoy” made of redwood, oil, and glass, used for duck hunting in the Pacific Flyway of California.

Suzanne Finney of the Woman’s National Democratic Club’s Arts Committee accompanied me through the show. I asked her in the spirit of bipartisanship if any Republicans were invited, and she smiled in response. [gallery ids="99134,102722,102714,102699,102707" nav="thumbs"]

Edie Hand in Good Company with ‘True Grit’
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You won’t find Oprah Winfrey or Kitty Kelley in the book “Women of True Grit,” co-authored by Edie Hand and Tina Savas. The absence is neither a reflection on Kelley, Winfrey, the book or its authors.

What you will find in “True Grit” is a remarkable group of 40 women, many of them pioneers in one arena of life or another.

Some are extremely well known, like Meredith Viera, the co-anchor of “The Today Show,” Phyllis Diller, one of America’s pioneering female comedians, or Joanne Carson, Johnny’s wife. Many are not household names, but should be: Justice Janie L. Shores, the first woman elected to a U.S. Appellate Court, Anne Tolstoi Wallach, the first woman to break the glass ceiling in the advertising world, Dr. Judy Kaminsky, psychologist, famed sex therapist and author of 12 books, Shirley R. Martz, the first female certified public accountant in North Dakota, retired Air Force General Wilma L. Vaught, the president of the Women’s Memorial Foundation, Martha Bolton, the first female staff writer for Bob Hope, and Anne Abernathy, the oldest woman athlete to ever compete in the Winter Olympics — as a bobsledder, no less.

You might see a theme here: the word “first” comes up a lot. These women had to endure ceilings, glass or otherwise, barriers, traditions, being as good and, more often than not, better in a man’s world.

The book includes a foreword by country singer Barbara Mandrell and a poem contributed by Dr. Maya Angelou, not to mention quotes from famous women, such as “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain,” from Dolly Parton. And it’s all the result of a partnership between Hand and Savas, the founder of the Birmingham Business Journal and a number of other publications in Alabama. Savas’ newspaper legacies included running lists: the 50 Richest Women, the top 40 under 40 and so on.

But the book’s spirit can be found in a real woman of true grit. That would be Edie Hand, who’s written books on Elvis, inspirational books, hosted television cooking shows and has written and produced numerous other books, including novellas.

The grit? Hand has probably experienced more personal tragedy than any one person should have to handle in a lifetime, losing three younger brothers. She is also a three-time cancer survivor, having just experienced the last episode while working on this book. Naturally, she feels blessed.

Her voice is rangy Southern: you’ll find Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee there and a lot of enthusiasm, energy and drive. “I thought it was an ideal partnership,” she said of working with Savas. “She had the publication experience, the whole experience of putting great lists together. We could do another forty with no trouble at all.”

Somebody ought to do one on her, however. She’s a cousin of Elvis Presley, and remembers hearing him when she was 16. She’s seen trouble and tragedy, all of which has somehow infused her with more energy.

“We wanted to give the women we chose their voices, their words, their views,” she said. “We can learn so much from each other and one of the things I’ve learned is how unique these women are, how alive, how admirable … how brave. They’ve got courage.”

The book debuted with a special book signing at the Women’s Memorial in Washington this spring. It’s a book you can take to the beach and be inspired by.

What is Mrs. Warren’s Profession?
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The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of George Bernard Shaw‘s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is gorgeous to look at, often out-loud funny, even more often sharp and witty and wonderfully acted. It’s also, in the end, devastating and cruel. Call it a comic tragedy, a tragic comedy. Mostly, put it on your theater calendar if you haven’t done so already.

The reasons? The main ones are Elizabeth Ashley and Amanda Quaid as mother and daughter, and, this being Shaw, protagonists and antagonists. This being a Shakespeare Theatre production, you can be sure that director Keith Baxter can take a good share of the credit.

Baxter has directed a number of terrific comedic productions here, including two Oscar Wilde plays starring Dixie Carter, who was supposed to have starred in this production but succumbed to cancer.

Ashley fills in, and there is no question that this Mrs. Warren is Ashley’s Mrs. Warren. Mrs. Warren, to set the scene, is a hugely successful proprietor and manager of a string of brothels, a profession which has allowed her a regal life and the ability to raise her daughter Vivie in a country house and give her the Oxford education that has made her a steely, very modern young lady.

Set early on in the country, it has a first act full of revelations, which are less devastating perhaps than they ought to be. Vivie was never aware of her mother’s history or lifestyle, but accepts at first the fact that it was the only route to prosperity for her mum, who came from a poverty-tainted background.

Alas, what she doesn’t know is that mom isn’t about to give up the business; it’s too lucrative, too successful, it allows mom to be mom. And that’s where the two women — strong-minded, stubborn, each with her own code — clash to the pain of both.

This is a play about cynicism, hypocrisy, the good old English class system and, of course, the effects of wealth and power. It’s not a fight for love or glory, but a battle for the high ground.

Quaid’s Vivie is lovely, all cheek and bones, she stands so straight that sometimes you think somebody should slap her for her principled stands. Ashley’s Mrs. Warren, on the other hand, moves like a billowing battleship, all guns blazing in dresses that can’t even come close to stifling a giant willful spirit.

In this battle, there are the usual suspects of characters: a parson and a parson’s son who chases Vivie madly, an older creative type (wonderfully played by Ted Van Griethuysen) and a cynical lord who’s Mrs. Warren’s not-so-silent partner. Still, they are mere foot soldiers in the battle between mother and daughter, and none of them have an ounce of the two women’s solidity.

“Mrs. Warren’s Profession” runs at Sidney Harman Hall through July 11. [gallery ids="99153,102844" nav="thumbs"]