CURRENT PROGRAMS

OPEN FORUM

Open Forum is a facilitated dialogue for artists to share ideas and works in progress. An artist cohort will be selected by our guest facilitator for this intimate gathering of ideas, feedback, and support. The guest facilitator will select a thematic focus that reflects their practice, and helps us narrow down the pool of applicants to an intimate group.

May | Application Here

On Belonging: Connecting to Archive
Application Open: April 2

Application Close: April 18

Applicants engaging the archives in their practice are encouraged to apply.

Sam Vernon earned her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2015 and her BFA
from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2009. Vernon’s installations
combine xeroxed drawings, prints, photographs, paintings and sculptural components in an
exploration of personal narrative and identity. Sam has exhibited with many institutions including
the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, California; California African
American Museum in Los Angeles, California; G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography,
Toronto, Canada; Seattle Art Museum, Olympic Sculpture Park; San Jose Institute of
Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum along with many galleries.

June | Application Here

Open Forum: On Belonging

Application Open: April 2

Application Close: April 30

This session explores how we see/interpret concepts of home. Confinement during and after lockdown offered artists different ways to create works that have taken on new meanings, feelings, and dimensions about place. We will consider Home/Place construction/deconstruction. How do we reimagine Home/Place and what is it now? This day-long workshop encourages participants to consider images, archival photographs, text, and other works that focus on cultural, political, social, and intimate moments. Participants contemplate new questions and consider moments both comforting and disconcerting. Participants challenge themselves to refine unfinished projects and consider the construction of agency in the domestic place. Discussion on Identity and Place is central. How can our images locate us in the photo world today? What do we want our photographs to conjure, change, or just be? We often use words like resilience, strength and love when discussing themes in the category. Discussion and visualize this experience. Use your own photographs.

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and the Director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, contemporary women photographers and beauty. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She has received awards from the College Art Association for Writing Art History in 2021, the Outstanding Service Award from the Royal Photographic Society in the UK and the 2022 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Home: Reimagining Interiority" at YoungArts, Miami, "Framing Moments in the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts," "Migrations and Meanings in Art", and "Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory" at FotoFocus 2022. Most recently, Dr. Willis was named the 2023 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art.

PAST

someone decides, hawk or dove Niamh McCann

September 7-30, 2023

Thurs.-Sunday, 12-6p

someone decides, hawk or dove is a new body of work by mixed-media artist Niamh McCann that responds to the 1922 institutionalization of the Northern and Southern borders of Ireland and the ongoing consequences and reverberations of this partition. Combining sculpture, collage and video, McCann mines deep seams of colonialist atrocities and legacies of ‘The Troubles’ to present, subvert and reinvent assumed perspectives of social, political and geographical landscapes, allowing viewers access to a nuanced world of layered and co-mingled realities.

McCann revisits the archival record to speculate on what language, story and imagery might be missing from accepted colonial narrative(s) or obstructed by its in-built global systems of naming, ownership, political power-play and cultural displacement. The presentation of animal figurines and bronze objects at the onset can be viewed as a playful assortment of objects and peculiar monuments but are testaments of political realities and the reconciliation of systemic outcomes. Concerned with acts of remembrance and reflection, this work draws from territory borders, architecture, street names, flags and ceremonies to convolute history and to allow for elucidated slippages and the emergence of complex, non-linear narratives.

someone decides, hawk or dove shows at STABLE Arts, Washington DC, a location steeped in the layered resonances of American and Indigenous histories, cultures, stories, monuments, and myths. McCann’s work sorts through the public memory and collective reckoning of colonialism, a global project that has impacted the world for generations, an intermingling of two different landscapes with familiar stories - neighborhoods and communities lost and survived.

A recipient of the 2022 Norman Houston Award from Solas Nua, McCann lives and works in Dublin. She is a recipient of the 2021 Stephen McKenna Fellowship from the Royal Hibernian Academy and is represented by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin. McCann’s work is housed in the collections of The Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon; Limerick City Gallery, Swansea City Council; The London Institute; Hiscox, London and Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. Work from someone decides, hawk or dove - or iterations of same - has been shown at the Rudolf-Scharpf-Galerie, Ludwigshafen, Germany (hosted by Wilhelm-Hack-Museum), at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and at The Boyne Valley Visitor Centre, Ireland.

Her work is supported by Solstice Arts Centre, Meath, Creative Ireland, Culture Ireland, the National College of Art and Design (Ireland) and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

The New Eagle Creek Saloon

May 27-July 8, 2023

Friday and Saturday: 2-8p

Sunday: 12-6p

STABLE Arts is excited to announce the first Washington, D.C. presentation of artist Sadie Barnette’s The New Eagle Creek Saloon. Barnette describes the exhibition as, “...an installation, and a vibe, that reimagines my father’s bar — the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. Glowing somewhere between a monument and an altar, the glittering bar structure is not only a place but is at once an invocation and an invitation. This work is honorific but also generative; with intimacy rather than reverence, my restaging of the New Eagle Creek Saloon offers space for connection and new energies, to dance and dream, to call the names of those lost and to see one another as we are in the glow of our own small moments of freedom.”

The exhibition has toured The Lab, San Francisco, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Kitchen, New York, and is currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This Washington, D.C. presentation will draw local relevance with robust programming including weekly happy hours, conversations, film screening, live music, wellness activations, and more. The New Eagle Creek Saloon will be on display May 27-July 8, 2023 with viewing hours Friday-Saturday from 2-8p, and Sunday from 12-6p. Programming partners include: For Freedoms, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, Black Techno Matters, DIRT DMV, The Psyce Podcast,DC Public Library People’s Archive, and more.

Tradewinds

Tradewinds, on view September 30-November 4, 2022, approaches DC’s Go-Go music club culture from dual angles of photography and soundscape. Rooted in collaborative research, the exhibition is the culmination of the Nexus Residency wherein photographer Larry Cook and ethnomusicologist Allie Martin worked in tandem to meld their practices, presenting a unified body of new works. Tradewinds presents an intentional focus on scale and new medium exploration for the artists.

Club backdrops, often considered as background spectacle, loom large as Cook unsettles the idea of the figure and its connection to prominent poses and portrait gestures. Using dazzling crystals imposed atop signature surrealist painted backdrops and Polaroids, Cook’s works span regional subcultures of Black music and picture making. Martin’s, The City is the Club is the City, is a multimedia installation directly inspired by Cook’s approach to photography and club aesthetics, particularly inverting what is typically background and peripheral into central focus. Drawing on soundscape recordings created at the iconic corner of 7th Street and Florida Avenue NW, the installation features a series of sonic vignettes that blur the lines between inside and outside, between varied publics. Utilizing traffic, club noise, Go-Go music, bird sounds, and other sonic elements these vignettes bring background noise to the fore, creating the feeling of being suspended in a doorway where the club is the city, and the city is the club.

Cook and Martin’s pieces mirror and expand the essential light and sound of club aesthetics as a mode of community archival practice. The exhibition’s works engage Black life on its own terms, amplifying understandings of how Black people know and document their lived experiences. The archive is a living embodiment of gesture, sounds, and socially engaged materials varied in locales both private and public.