Valley Women
A “Women Artists of the DMV” show that’s almost all “V.” Also: Florimonte & Murno’s near-landscapes; Méné’s ritual patterns; Binion’s personalized abstraction; Mazumdar’s fabulist realism
Jody Mussoff, “Tree Hair” (Melissa Ichiuji Studio Gallery)
AFFILIATED WITH THE “WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE DMV” PROJECT yet literally distant from it, “Daughter of the Stars” presents close to 150 pieces by 72 artists, nearly all of them at least part-time residents of the Shenandoah Valley. The show includes a few artists who are well-known closer to D.C., one of whom is its organizer: Melissa Ichiuji, whose performance-video piece is a highlight of the flagship “DMV” exhibition at the American University Museum.
“Daughter of the Stars,” at Ichiuji’s namesake gallery in Front Royal, includes several of her burly yet thematically fragile metal sculptures, notably one in which the upper half of a woman’s body has become a bouquet of painted steel flowers. This theme of transubstantiation also characterizes the gently surrealistic drawings of Jody Mussoff, who portrays one woman who’s fragmented and another whose hair is a grove of trees; and the intricate prints of Elizabeth Hall, in which vines and leaves entwine intimately with human internal organs.
Christine Andreae’s botanical drawings are precisely realistic, but given an edgy quality by the red X’s slapped atop them; it turns out that all eight depict plants extirpated from Virginia. In Rosabel Goodman-Everard’s circular painting, executed with intriguing anti-naturalism mostly in pink and metallic gold, a perhaps-bodily fluid drips from a gashed tree trunk. What appear to be stones are rendered with beautifully mottled colors in Peggy Duvall’s handsome watercolors. Julie Farrar embodies animals, most strikingly a coiled pangolin, as elegant ceramic sculptures.
Most of the floral pictures, of which there are many, are conventionally representational. They’re similar in outlook to the multiple landscapes and pictures of children, sometimes accompanied by dogs, or horses. These are all well-made, but probably wouldn’t have made it into any “DMV” show curated by mega-exhibition organizer Florencio Lennox (Lenny) Campello.
Among the most assured works are two by non-Shenandoah artists who often exhibit in Washington: Jean Jinho Kim’s towering pair of streamlined steel boots, a trademark of the artist who’s also showing three small paintings on wood; and Janis Goodman’s six-panel suite of paintings of cloud-like shapes, each one in a different predominant color. Just as poised, though, are two portraits by Teresa Duke, who lives in exurban Northern Virginia and apparently hasn’t shown her work in D.C. in many years. There’s nothing trendy about her pictures, one an oil and the other a charcoal drawing accented by white chalk, and that’s fine. In a show packed with solid representational art, Duke’s superb technique transcends all other considerations.
Elaine Florimonte, “Crash Through the Surface” (Touchstone Gallery)
BOTH ELAINE FLORIMONTE AND HERNAN MURNO MAKE PICTURES that evoke landscapes, but are not literally of that genre. In separate shows at Touchstone Gallery, the two local artists depict natural features that are recognizable, if sometimes just barely. Florimonte’s “That Far Away Blue” is rendered mostly in green, brown, and blue-tinted white, and with gestures that suggest the pictorial elements are hurtling toward some kind of convergence. Hernan Murno’s “Freedom, Process, Continuity” includes paintings of classical structures amid neon-bright color fields, much like pictures he exhibited at Glen Echo’s Park View Gallery this spring. But his show also ventures into several other directions.
Horizon-like lines and other horizontal features punctuate Florimonte’s collage-paintings, yet the orientation remains vertical. That’s partly because of loosely layered brushstrokes that seem to sprint toward the top border, as well as upward-thrusting shapes that, sometimes, are clearly trees. Also, beneath the pigment are half-buried strata, notably glassine bags printed with green stripes. These bars can appear faint or insistent, and occasionally flip 90-degrees sideways, but mostly reach for the sky. The overall effect is immersive, even when the artist slices the scenery into the miniatures that comprise the bulk of this show. The smallest Florimonte paintings send the eye on an epic journey.
Inspired by historically resonant Greco-Italian sites, Murno portrays temples and amphitheaters, as well as a more abstracted Mount Vesuvius. These often realistically drawn locations are contrasted by fields and accents rendered in hot orange and red paint and such glittering materials as glass beads and metal flakes and powder. If the juxtaposition of classical structures with pop-art hues is a bit incongruous, that’s surely intentional. It’s also compellingly vivid.
About half of Murno’s selection is devoted to many other kinds of things. These include a few collages, several geometric abstractions, one picture that stencils the word “coda” in bouncing letters on a black backdrop, and a sculptural painting that sets birds’s eggs made of blue-speckled foam in a nest made of shredded cardboard. The wide-ranging array is perhaps too eclectic for its own good, but offers numerous paths for future exploration.
Méné, “Supernatural” (American University Museum)
AN INTRIGUING COMPLEMENT TO SEVERAL CURRENT SHOWS of Australian Aboriginal art, “From Ancestral Traces to Contemporary Visions - The Art of Méné” is also a contemporary extrapolation of traditional motifs. The Côte d’Ivoire artist, whose full name is Ange Martial Méné, uses acrylic paints to render symbolic landscapes. Dense with interlocking forms, the 11 paintings in the American University Museum exhibition -- all from 2025 -- are bright and exuberant.
Like some Aboriginal artists, Méné takes his cues from primeval cave paintings. Another similarity is the Ivorian artist’s extensive use of dots. Sinuous lines of them undulate through his pictures, often following the contours of solid shapes that resemble everything from gourds, leaves, and feathers to headless snakes. The backgrounds are mottled fields in the colors of earth, grass, and water. On top, seemingly, are those arrays of dots, often in bright white that pops visually. These beads of paint may be inspired by scarification, ritual patterns cut into the flesh -- a traditional African practice with parallels in Australia.
Méné’s paintings are basically flat, without a sense of perspective. But some elements appear lightly modeled to simulate depth and volume, and the intricate compositions draw the eye from one image to the next. Especially in his broadest canvases, such as “Supernatural,” the artist conjures a sense of sweep and motion.
The show was curated by Anne-Béatrix Keller Semadeni, who represents Méné through her D.C. gallery, African Art Beats. (The paintings will move there after the AU show closes.) In her catalogue essay, she calls the artist’s work “a walk across the thresholds of dream, time, and existence.” This is another possible kinship with Aboriginal art, which represents “dreamings” of sacred places and events that are both historic and outside of time. Méné’s nature-scapes are imaginary, yet feel rooted in the physical world.
McArthur Binion, “DNA:Study:VI, 2014” (Courtesy of David and Gerri Kahnweiler)
THE TITLE OF MCARTHUR BINION’S DE LA CRUZ GALLERY SHOW contains the word “form,” and from a distance the Chicago artist’s pictures do appear keyed to the central concerns of mid-20th-century abstraction: color and form. The Mississippi-born Binion, who spent most of his childhood in Detroit, was awakened to visual art during a stint in New York, where he discovered the Museum of Modern Art’s abstract expressionist canvases. But the exhibition’s title, “Notes on Form (Intimate Structures),” also includes the word “intimate.” According to a gallery note, each Binion artwork is a “self-portrait.”
Autobiography is a preoccupation of 21st-century art, and all these pictures were made since 2009. But, as is also common, Binion doesn’t write his life story explicitly. Instead, he submerges it within images usually built with dense applications of ink, graphite, and oil paint stick. (Two single-color rounds were made entirely with wax crayon, thickly and sensuously stippled.) The artist’s “DNA” series incorporates shredded personal documents, notably multiples of his birth certificate, while the most recent item, 2025’s “Under:Ground,” is constructed atop images of his childhood home. These scraps of individual identity ground the compositions but don’t define them. Such works can even be seen as exercises in self-overcoming.
The phrase “intimate structures” plays on the title of “Primary Structures,” the seminal 1966 Jewish Museum exhibition of minimalist sculpture. Binion’s use of geometric matrices, especially grids, reveals his affinity with such minimalists as Sol LeWitt. Unlike that precursor, however, Binion doesn’t make drawings by writing instructions for others to follow. The textures of his pictures are roughly, eccentrically handmade, rendering them just as personal as the documents buried within them.
Mahua Mazumdar, “Forever Summer” (Art League)
FACES, FLESH, AND FABRIC ARE ALL IMMACULATELY RENDERED in Mahua Mazumdar’s paintings and drawings. The marquee image of “Expressions in Light,” the Northern Virginia’s artist’s Art League show, depicts an elaborately garbed man who’s hoisting an ornate goblet. But Mazumdar’s neoclassical technique is just as assured when portraying naked or near-naked figures, such as a man who displays his muscled back or a shirtless skateboarder whose face sports an expression of timeless adolescent dissatisfaction.
The show comprises 15 pictures executed in a range of realistic styles, some looser than others but all detailed and specific. Four of the artworks are charcoal or pencil drawings that are mostly black-and-white, although one is a female nude with a pink tinge. Light does indeed play across Mazumdar’s subjects, accenting cheekbones and highlighting the muscles flexed under their glowing skin. Yet the complex illumination seems to serve primarily to reveal character.
If her nudes are candid and visceral, the artist also has a taste for the theatrical. Several of her subjects wear period costumes and many sport a hat, hood, turban, or other sort of headgear -- including a thicket of upward-thrusting dreadlocks that mimics a crown. The feline companion in one portrait looks more like a caracal than an ordinary house cat, and that man with goblet appears to be some sort of latter-day alchemist. Mazumdar is a realist who dabbles evocatively in fantasy.
Daughter of the Stars
Through Dec. 21 at Melissa Ichiuji Studio Gallery, 223 E. Main St., Front Royal. melissaichiuji.com/artgallery.
Elaine Florimonte: That Far Away Blue
Hernan Murno: Freedom, Process, Continuity
Through Dec. 7 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.
From Ancestral Traces to Contemporary Visions - The Art of Méné
Through Dec. 7 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum
McArthur Binion: Notes on Form (Intimate Structures)
Through Dec. 8 at Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery, Georgetown University, 3535 Prospect St. NW. delacruzgallery.org. 202-687-8039.
Mahua Mazumdar: Expressions in Light
Through Dec. 7 at the Art League, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. theartleague.org. 703-683-1780.