Join us at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Saturday, March 22 from 11am-5pm for drop-in Mask Making with Steven Luu using materials from the Nothing Personal exhibition and graphic chronology.

Steven Luu

The wounds of combat have had a profound impact on Steven Luu. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he is a survivor of the Communist oppression. For nearly 46 years, he was relocated to numerous places. Him and his family were placed in re-education camps by Vietnamese Communist when he was only 1 year old. Escaping to freedom on a small fishing boat when he was 7-year-old boy and spent over two months floating on the open sea until rescued by the British Royal Navy and taken to a Hong Kong refugee camp. In 1991, Steven and his family arrived in the United States-again-as refugees. After completing high school in 1995, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for 20 years as a Medic. For 11 of those years, he was stationed in Europe-spending three years in combat zones. In all his numerous deployments to the Middle East, he witnessed many violent deaths, and those experiences have had a profound psychological impact on him. 

He was first introduced to art by the intensive treatment program provided by Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Steven recognizes that art allows him to present his feelings comfortably and focuses on expressing traumatic experiences creatively and non-verbally. As someone with a background in the medical field and a wounded veteran himself, he relates deeply to many service members that return home suffering from the aftereffects of deployment, such as feeling guilty or isolated. He creates his art both to help and communicate with others, focusing on mental health-related matters. Through the years, he has earned a BA in Theology and BFA with a concentration in sculpture. As an artist, he is an advocate for veterans. When the opportunity arises, he guides and encourages many fellow wounded veterans to find a new language to express their pain and emotions – the language of art. Steven is well known for producing serialized artwork; he believes the repetition method helps dedramatize his past and is a form of discipline to understand the materials. 

Join us on Friday, March 7, 5-7pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for an evening read aloud and conversation by international and local writers: 2025 Cheuse Fellow: Klara Kalu; Prof. Vivek Narayanan: Author of "After"; Malik Thompson: Washington based writer; and Itoro Bassey: journalist and author. The evening is designed around the visit of Spring Cheuse Fellow: Danson Kahyana who will also be reading his creative work.

The evening will explore aspects of queerness and intimacy through literature and allyship. 

The boat (borrowed from songwriter Noah Kahan)  are the ideas that keep us afloat, conveying the beauty of the Republic of Imagination (borrowed from Azar Nafisi)! The images are from the cover of "After" by Vivek Narayanan. 

Featuring Danson Kahyana

The Cheuse Center is proud to announce Danson Kahyana as the Spring 2025 Cheuse Center Scholar. Kahyana, an esteemed writer and academic from Uganda, will visit the Washington area from March 2 to March 8, 2025.

This prestigious fellowship, supported by the Scholl Foundation, is dedicated to providing opportunities for writers at risk, offering them a space to create, reflect, and share their stories. Kahyana’s work—marked by its courage, depth, and humanity—has long amplified underrepresented narratives, making him an exceptional fit for this honor.

During his residency, Kahyana will engage with students, faculty, and the local literary community through public readings, and conversations about his work and the broader challenges faced by writers globally. 

We are thrilled to host Danson Kahyana and looks forward to the impactful contributions he will bring to the spring program. Stay tuned for updates on events and opportunities.

MORE ABOUT DANSON KAHYANA: Sylvester Danson Kahyana is a visiting professor in the English Department at Boston College. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and Research, Harvard Kennedy School, having survived a brutal attack on his life on April 26, 2022. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa (where he is an Associate Researcher in the English Department) and an MA and BA in Literature from Makerere University (where he was an Associate Professor in the Literature Department before he fled Uganda). Uganda’s contributing editor to Index on Censorship and a former board member of PEN International as well as a former President of Ugandan PEN, he has defended artistic freedom and human rights for over two decades. A published poet and anthologist, he has edited five books and published more than 30 scholarly papers. Some of the awards he has received include the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network Individual Award (2023), the Fulbright Research Fellowship Award (2021), and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Award (2015).

ABOUT ITORO BASSEY: Itoro Bassey is the author of Faith (Malarkey Books, 2022) and a journalist at the BBC. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Slice, Catapult, and Hippocampus, among others. A new piece of hers 'How Eno Became Enobong' is forthcoming in Fence (March 2025). 
She is the recent winner of the W.S. Porter Prize for her short short story collection Ajebutter Woman that will published in 2027 through Regal House Publishing. This collection is poised to complicate notions surrounding identity and social dynamics while engaging readers with its rich storytelling. Some of the other awards she has received are from International Literary Seminars, Glimmer Train, and Prairie Schooner. She has received fellowships from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, the Edward Albee Foundation, and elsewhere. In 2018 she lived between Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia for five years which has broadened her perspective on diaspora and belonging. In her spare time, she supports writers in the Washington, DC area as a board member of The Inner Loop. 

ABOUT MALIK THOMPSON: Malik Thompson (he/they) is a Black queer person from Washington, DC. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Monson Arts. He can be found on IG via the handle @latesummerstar.

ABOUT VIVEK NARAYANAN: Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S. His new collection is After (NYRB Poets, 2022).  A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019. He teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.

ABOUT KLARA KALU: Klara Kalu is an MFA Creative Writing student specializing in Fiction at George Mason University. She writes contemporary stories that enlighten and offer insights into the intricacies of African narratives, focusing on themes of love, loss, and emotional depths of human connection. Her work explores the spaces between tradition and modernity, memory and reinvention, offering fresh perspectives on identity and belonging. With the Cheuse Fellowship, Klara is traveling to Barbados to explore the echoes of culture and kinship within the island’s communities. Through archival research, oral histories, and on-the-ground immersion, she aims to trace how ancestral ties have endured across generations despite displacement and erasure. Her project seeks to breathe life into forgotten stories, reconnecting threads between the Caribbean and Africa, and reimagining the ways in which history continues to shape contemporary diasporic experiences.

ABOUT NOTHING PERSONAL This exhibition closely examines the book, Nothing Personal (1964), a collaborative artwork in book form by two legendary American artists, James Baldwin, the African American writer, public intellectual, and civil rights activist, and Richard Avedon the Jewish fashion and portrait photographer. Learn more here:  https://www.masonexhibitions.org/exhibitions/nothing-personal-mea

Art work in this post is from the cover of "After", by Vivek Narayanan. This cover is from his Indian edition, published by Harper Collins.  

More information on the lineup to come! 

Join us on Thursday, March 6, 6-8pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for a film screening of ‘Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round’, followed by a brief Q&A with the filmmaker, Ilana Trachtman. The film is about the desegregation of Glen Echo Park, and it discusses the role that Howard University students played in leading this effort.

For almost 60 years, Glen Echo Amusement Park was the wholesome, beloved playground of white metropolitan Washington, DC. Every summer, tens of thousands enjoyed its Crystal Pool, wooden rollercoaster, Spanish Ballroom, and Tunnel of Love. But the Black children living nearby could only gawk from the road.

In June of 1960, three shocking, unprecedented events happened at “idyllic” Glen Echo Amusement Park:

• Howard University Students arrived up at the Park, and sat down on the carousel.

• White, middle-aged neighbors, largely Jewish, joined the protests.

• The American Nazi Party showed up.

AIN'T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND is the forgotten story of how those three events shook metropolitan Washington, forced sides, changed lives, and ignited sparks that flew out across the Civil Rights Movement for years to come.

Using just-discovered archival footage, and focusing on the stories of six individuals, viewers are transported to those heady days, when private businesses could choose their customers, and the walls between Black and white were so high that friendships were unimaginable.

AIN’T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND offers a rare intimate lens on one protest in the early Civil Rights Movement. Telling the story of one amusement park, one group of individuals, and one moment in time, the laser focus allows for deep understanding of the non-famous individuals whose efforts, sacrifices, and personal awakenings fueled the Civil Rights Movement. 

Tuesday, March 4, 2025 7:00 PM EST
Johnson Center, Cinema

A special screening of The Price of the Ticket, the documentary by award-winning filmmaker Karen Thorsen that explores the life and legacy of James Baldwin.

Following the screening, Karen Thorsen will be in conversation with  Leeya Mehta and Prof. Keith Clark to discuss Baldwin’s legacy, the making of the documentary, and its continued relevance in today’s world.

Join us at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Thursday, February 27, 6-8pm for a conversation with the authors of Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp!

In Radical Paper, the authors discuss the contemporary breakthrough of using colored paper pulp as an integral element in creating art – as opposed to serving only as the surface on which art is created.

The book chronicles the rapid development of the movement over the last 70 years, and how early practitioners in the mid-20th century first began manipulating colored pulp, freeing it from its two-dimensional function as a substrate.

Mapping out new directions in using colored paper pulp, progressive papermakers, such as Douglass Morse Howell, Laurence Barker, and Kenneth Tyler, inspired the careers of generations of artists, including Pacita Abad, El Anatsui, Firelei Báez, Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Melvin Edwards, Helen Frankenthaler, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, Jim Hodges, Eddie Martinez, Wangechi Mutu, Adam Pendleton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Alan Shields, who have taken this medium in fresh and unexpected directions.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lynn Sures creates multi-media works examining the juncture of geology, physics, and the origins of humans. She has been a SARF Fellow in Kenya and a US State Department American Artist Abroad in Sri Lanka. As an artist-in-residence, she made works at Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain, and the Press at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe. Collections that hold her works include US Dept. of State; Library of Congress; Yale University; Schomburg Collection, NY Public Library; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, Fabriano, Italy; Museum of Art & Photography, Bangalore, India; and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt. Sures is Professor Emerita, Corcoran College of Art & Design (GWU).

www.lynnsures.com

Michelle Samour’s work explores the intersections between science, technology, and the natural world, and the socio-political repercussions of redefining borders and boundaries. Her artist residencies include Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and The Banff Centre. She has exhibited her work at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Kohler Art Center, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She has received grants from the MA Cultural Council and a Society of Arts and Crafts NE Artist Award. Collections that hold her work include the International Paper Company, Meditech, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Watson Library. Samour is Professor Emerita of the SMFA at Tufts University.

https://www.michellesamour.com/

The Baldwin100, the Cheuse Center and Busboys and Poets present:

Just Love: A Dinner Salon with Jazz & Poetry inspired by James Baldwin
to celebrate the Baldwin100

Venue: Busboys and Poets, 14th and V
Time: 5:30pm
  
The night will open with Martheaus Perkins, who will read his poem dedicated to Baldwin. Then we will have Zeina Azzam and E. Ethelbert Miller perform poems, and chat about love, Baldwin, and their own creativity. The evening’s headliner is Lena Seikaly and her quartet.

In collaboration between the Cheuse International Writer’s Center and the Reston Community Center, the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” will be screened at the CenterStage on Febuary 5th, 2025. 

Wednesday, February 5, 2025 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EST
the CenterStage, 2310 Colts Neck Rd, Reston, VA

I Am Not Your Negro, 2016 (94 minutes)

"Using James Baldwin's unfinished final manuscript, Remember This House, this documentary follows the lives and successive assassinations of three of the author's friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., delving into the legacy of these iconic figures and narrating historic events using Baldwin's original words and a flood of rich archival material. An up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, this film is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of BlackLivesMatter.”

Mason Exhibitions welcomes you to join us for the Opening Reception of Nothing Personal: A Collaboration in Black and White at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Friday, January 31, 5-8pm.

Dive into the 1964 Atheneum edition of infamous photobook Nothing Personal, featuring an essay by James Baldwin and the portrait photography of Richard Avedon. 

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located at 3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA. Paid street parking is available, and the Virginia Square metro station is across the street.

Please email Alissa Maru at amaru@gmu.edu with questions about the event.

Best of Film at George Mason is a showcase of recent notable and award-winning films. This year's program includes student and alumni work in documentary filmmaking, fiction film directing, music video, and senior thesis films.

This event is free and open to the public.

Join Mason Exhibitions and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center on November 15, 6-8pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for a book launch of two authors, Megan Doney's Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir  and Amanda Newell, Postmortem Say.

This event is in collaboration with Faces and Figures: Identity Through Printmaking Between South Africa and DC. Themes of the exhibition respond to violence, reconciliation, and the spirit of Ubuntu (I am because we are).

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located at 3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA, across the street from the Virginia Square Metro station, and paid street parking is available.

Please email Alissa Maru with questions/concerns (mailto: amaru@gmu.edu)
Free and Open to the Public

About the Books

Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir

After surviving a school shooting, English professor Megan Doney was traumatized and adrift. Rather than hardening her heart and life, she wrote Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir. An insightful response to American gun violence and illusions of public and private safety, this memoir is about how to live with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.

Postmortem Say

Love and death, poetry's immortal themes, are interwoven throughout Amanda Newell's Postmortem Say. Death is everywhere-in the fields and forests, on darkened roads, in the delivery room-but there is also love, the kind that defies convention and outlasts death itself. These poems confront, without flinching, hard truths about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife, and a lover.

-Sue Ellen Thompson, author of Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems

Time to get inky! You want to make prints, but what do you do if you don’t have access to a printing press? Before the printing press was invented, blocks were printed by hand. Learn how to carve and print using soft easy-carve relief blocks. You will be given suggestions on size and concept, but ultimately the imagery is left up to you. Best of all, you’ll have learned all the basic techniques to continue creating prints using your own designs after the class is over!

Slots are extremely limited and your registration is a reservation. If you are unable to attend the workshop, please email Alissa Maru (amaru@gmu.edu) 3 days prior to offer your reservation to another participant.
All materials will be provided.

The third annual Arlington Art Walk is a self-guided tour connecting local galleries, artist studios and cultural events. 

At Mason Exhibitions Arlington, printmaker Fleming Jeffries will lead a ‘Kitchen Lithograph’ make and take-home craft activity, and a live DJ will be onsite. All materials will be provided

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located at 3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA, across the street from the Virginia Square Metro station, and paid street parking is available.

Please email Alissa Maru with questions/concerns (mailto: amaru@gmu.edu)

This year’s Art Walk coincides with the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington’s (MoCA) daylong celebration of the National Biennial Exhibition, fall shows and Art After Hours. Enjoy a variety of activities, including Fred Schnider Gallery, Made in Arlington Market at MoCA, Mason Plaza activities and entertainment at Northside Social Arlington. Don't miss the courtyard video screens at Mason Exhibitions showcasing the 40th anniversary of Arlington Public Art installations.

For more information and a downloadable map, visit the Arlington Art Walk webpage.

Check out the Innovation Economy Podcast featuring Alissa Maru, Associate Curator at Mason Exhibitions Arlington and Susan Soroko, Director, Creative Economy  //  Strategic Partnerships at Arlington Economic Development

Join us on Saturday, September 21, 2-5pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for the opening reception of Faces and Figures: Identity Through Printmaking Between South Africa and DC with a documentary celebrating the Black printmakers of DC.

Featured Documentary:

BLACK PRINTMAKERS OF WASHINGTON DC
PERCY B. MARTIN & MICHAEL B. PLATT

We'll be joined with filmmaker Susan Goldman, artists Percy Martin, Carole Beane- wife of Michael Platt, and Artist Proof Studios.

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located at 3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA, across the street from the Virginia Square Metro station, and paid street parking is available.

Please email Alissa Maru with questions/concerns (mailto: amaru@gmu.edu)
Free and Open to the Public

Run of Show:

2-2:30- See exhibition, enjoy food, mingle.

2:30-3pm- Introduction from Susan Goldman and screening of film

3-3:30- moderated discussion, Percy Martin, Carol Beane, Susan Goldman and (hopefully) artists from Artist Proof Studio (zoom), and 5 artists in Black DC exhibition

3:30-4pm- Q/A and final thoughts, promotion of programs and other printmaking activities

Join us for Citizen Joy: A celebration of democracy focused on agency, harmony, and gratitude on Friday, July 26 at 4:30-6pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington.

This is a family-friendly event that is free and open to the public. During this interactive and experiential event, visitors will be invited to think about what it means to be part of a community that we all have some ability to influence. You’ll share your thoughts and experiences on the democratic process, and explore ways to make an impact and bring your community closer together.

This event is free and open to the public and we encourage guests to RSVP at the following link:

During the event, you will see the current exhibition on view, A Closer Look: Conflicted Art from Ukraine, hear music and poetry, and more! Citizen Joy is a program of Jeff Raz where different sites across the country will have art installations about the joy of participating in the voting process on Saturday, July 27.

Questions should be emailed to Yassmin Salem at ysalem@gmu.edu

This event is organized by Mason Exhibitions in collaboration with George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, including the School of Art, School of Theater, and Reva and Sid Dewberry Family School of Music

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located across the street from the Virginia Square Metro and 2 blocks west of the Mason Square campus. Paid street parking is available nearby.

Join us on Friday, May 31 at 5pm-8pm for the Opening Reception of A Closer Look: Conflicted Art From Ukraine at Mason Exhibitions Arlington.

A Closer Look: Conflicted Art from Ukraine presents artistic responses to war through the works of 13 contemporary Ukrainian artists from the frontline. Through photography, video, painting, sculpture, and installation, these artists explore critical issues on the fault lines of conflict. Their works initiate a dialogue between viewers and the profound realities of conflict, encouraging and modeling resilience in the face of adversity.

Curated by Sophie Bae with Yevgen Nemchenko, Conflicted Art.

Program

5:00 | Reception
6:00 | Brief Remarks Mason Exhibitions
6:10 | Curator's Talk: Sophie Bae and Yevgen Nemchenko
6:40 | Overview of the Art Amplifier project by Diana Guzijan
7:00 | Mingle & Artwork viewing

About Conflicted Art
The project Conflicted Art is a collection of paintings, sculptures, and other forms of art by Ukrainian artists that were created right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was conceived a few days into the war and was meant to show the war through the artists’ eyes as it was happening in the moment. Some works are an artist’s attitude to a specific event that happened during the course of the conflict, while others show an artist’s reflection on their feelings and their current situation. The project revealed a theme that while a certain amount of social change or even instability might be useful for an artist to draw inspiration from, the overall conditions and situation in which an artist creates must be at least somewhat comfortable. Otherwise, work might stop or take unpredictable forms.

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located at 3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA, across the street from the Virginia Square Metro station, and paid street parking is available.

Please email Alissa Maru with questions/concerns (mailto: amaru@gmu.edu)
Free and Open to the Public

Join us on Wednesday, April 24 at 4:30pm in the Sculpture Yard of the Art and Design Building for 'The Caged Bird Screams' for Noise Awareness Day 2024. Noise Awareness 2024 fully combines taught moments with experimental opportunities. It brings together artists to engage in the ways sound art and visual art can transcend space, borders, and carcerality and explore themes of isolation, destruction, and transformation.

Artist Maria Gaspar will share her sonic sculpture, ‘We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis)’, a series of iron cell bars salvaged from the deconstructed Cook County Jail in Chicago, to be transfigured into an experimental experience through touch and vibrations.

Professor Thomas Stanley’s Sound Art students have developed artworks incorporating the sounds from ‘We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis)’, which will be mixed into an original performance by Professor Stanley and percussionist Jamal Moore.

Professor Brian Davis and his Advanced Sculpture students will present a collaborative kinetic sculpture in response to the work of Stephanie Mercedes.

All of this emerged from the Faces of Resilience exhibitions in Fairfax during Fall 2023 and Arlington during Spring 2024.

About Noise Awareness:

The Center for Hearing and Communication (CHC) founded International Noise Awareness Day (INAD) in 1996. This yearly event encourages people to minimize bothersome noise where they work, live, and play. In 2010, Professor Thomas Stanley encouraged his Sound Art (AVT 374) students to expand NAD’s focus on safe listening practices to include a deep engagement with listening as a process of self and social inquiry.

Mason's Noise Awareness all-night concert (noise-a-thon) and related activities became an important part of the audio arts calendar in the DC area and an opportunity to interrogate the arbitrary designation of new and experimental music as noise.

From 2010-2017, Stanley and the students of AVT 374 presented a campus-wide observance of Noise Awareness Day that celebrated hearing and encouraged encounters with the socially and sonically unfamiliar.

NOISE AWARENESS 2024/The Caged Bird Screams marks the first on-campus celebration since the pandemic!

Join us for an Opening Reception on Friday, April 19 at 5pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington (3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA)

MFA Candidate Chen Bi is presenting Dreams / Shelter: Myth and Memory in a Cross-Cultural Journey from April 15-26, 2024.

Artist Statement:
Dream/Shelter: Myth and Memory in a Cross-Cultural Journey explores cultural displacement and identity evolution. Each piece is a blend of my personal memory and cultural heritage, inviting you on a journey through spaces that define and challenge the notion of home and belonging.

Weekday Hours:

Monday, April 15th - Friday, April 19th, 2-8pm

Monday, April 22nd - Friday, April 26th, 2-8pm

Weekend Hours:

Saturday, April 20, 1-7pm

Sunday, April 21 1-7pm

Saturday, April 27 1-7pm

Mason Exhibitions Arlington will host an interactive theater experience with Voices Unbarred. Voices Unbarred employs a tactic of Theater of the Oppressed, a revolutionary art form that helps people analyze the world around them, explore social and political issues, and create solutions, to examine issues surrounding incarceration. It employs games, dialogue, and interaction between audience and performer. These ideas will serve as a framework for the development and evolution of stronger ideas for us to all take to heart and action!

Voices Unbarred will deploy their curated interactive program, Rehearsal for Change, where you'll engage with thought-provoking activities and witness real stories from people with lived carceral experience. In the final activity of the event, you'll break out into small groups to collectively brainstorm new policy ideas that reimagine the prison system.

About Voices Unbarred: Voices Unbarred, the programming arm of Ally Theatre Company, centers the voices of people impacted by incarceration and collaborates with theatre practitioners and policy organizations to creatively reimagine the prison system and advocate for change. At the core of Voices Unbarred’s strategy is organizing people directly affected by incarceration and centering their ideas. Voices Unbarred Community Advocates use their lived experience and learned theatre techniques to advocate for themselves and the changes they want to see in the system. This includes changing current prison conditions, working towards the end of mass incarceration, exploring restorative justice and other approaches to healing harm, shifting disparaging narratives about people who have been impacted by incarceration, and exposing the systemic racism and intersectional systems that funnel a disproportionate amount of Black community members into jails and prisons.

Former Rehearsal for Change YouTube video

Questions about this event should be emailed to Alissa Maru (mailto:amaru@gmu.edu).

Join Mason Exhibitions and Sofar Sounds on Friday, March 22 from 8-10pm. You’ll see 2 or 3 short sets from incredible performers from all musical genres, and sometimes even spoken word, comedy or dance. Each show’s lineup is curated by our artist booking team to be diverse and varied. Grab your ticket and get ready to discover your new favorite artist!

Head over to Sofar Sounds’ YouTube channel to check out past shows and see some of today's biggest artists who played small, intimate Sofar shows along their journey!

More information about Sofar Sounds:

Sofar Sounds is a global music community that connects artists and audiences through live music. We bring people together to create space where music matters in 400 cities around the world.

Sofar Sounds Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/sofarsounds

This event is in conjunction with the Faces of Resilience currently on view at Mason Exhibitions Arlington.

Join us on Friday, March 15, 7-9pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington to witness and participate in The Innocents & Disappearance Jail Punch Party with Maria Gaspar.

The Innocents provide a dramatic soundscape which endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system. Enveloping the soundscape will be a commissioned sonic sculpture of decommissioned jail bars of Maria Gaspar, exploring how these artifacts  transfigure what were once materials of confinement into new experiences of liberation.

Additionally Gaspar will lead a ‘punch party’ where Gaspar aims to abol­ish carceral spaces by incorporating prints of current Virginia carceral spaces into the Disappearance Jails project. These prints will be obscured through perforations by exhibition visitors.

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. In collaboration with George Mason University’s data mapping and art history scholars, Gaspar will continue to realize her goals of abolishing carceral spaces by adding prints of current prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities in Virginia to the Disappearance Jails project, which will ultimately be obscured through perforations by exhibition visitors.

The Innocents is a social justice advocacy performance art piece by musicians and composers Allen Otte and John Lane. Using a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts, the one-hour dramatic soundscape will explore various aspects of the issues surrounding the American criminal justice system.

John Lane is an artist whose creative work and collaborations extend through percussion to poetry/ spoken word and theater. As a performer, he has appeared on stages throughout the Americas, Australia, and Japan. As an advocate of social justice he co-created with Allen Otte The Innocents which the duo has performed throughout the US, including appearances at the Innocence Network Conference, Woody Guthrie Center, and Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights. He has recorded two albums: The Landscape Scrolls (Starkland Records, 2018), TRIGGER: Artists Respond to Gun Violence (Albany Records, 2021). John is the Professor of Percussion at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. www.john-lane.com

Allen Otte was a cofounder of the Blackearth Percussion Group and of Percussion Group Cincinnati, and toured for decades throughout the world performing new and experimental music created for him and his colleagues. Otte regularly presents his own creative work, often in residencies centered around the theme of performing social justice, and is the regular percussionist with the early music quartet Trobar Medieval. He is professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati, and in 2017 was inducted into the International Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

Program Note: This approximately one hour dramatic soundscape is comprised of seventeen individual tableaus which endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, psychology, politics, injustice, and resilience. Though we do this from our admittedly privileged perspective, we have available not only the information – both factual and testimonial – but, significantly, we have resources of a time and sound-based art. In performance we have the opportunity to direct and focus not only attention, but more importantly, to engage on an emotional level where experience is more than simply processing facts and figures.

Questions should be emailed to Alissa Maru at amaru@gmu.edu

To enhance the engagement with the content of mass incarceration within Faces of Resilience, Mason Exhibitions is hosting a film screening of Since I Been Down, a film by Gilda Shepard. Gilda and Kimonti have prepared a special message just for the Mason Exhibitions audience!

Meet Kimonti Carter : Former president and current member of an over 40-year Washington State prisoner-initiated program, the Black Prisoners’ Caucus. At 34, Kimonti founded TEACH (Taking Education and Creating History), a remarkably innovative prisoner education program

Kimonti and a group of his peers maneuver through a non-negotiable pathway to joining gangs as early as 11-years-old. This is a community profoundly impacted by the city's disinvestment in housing, education, and employment as well as our policies in the 1990's

The film, told by the people who have lived these conditions, unravels intimate stories from interviews brought to life through archival footage, cinema verité discussions, masquerade, and dance , unravelling why children commit violent crime and how these children – now adults – are breaking free from their fate by creating a model of justice that is transforming their lives, our humanity and a quality of life for all our children.

Light refreshments will be served

Questions should be emailed to Alissa Maru at amaru@gmu.edu

Thursday, February 22, 2024 @ 4:45 pm - 6:30 pm 
MARIA GASPAR

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. In collaboration with George Mason University’s data mapping and art history scholars, Gaspar will continue to realize her goals of abolishing carceral spaces by adding  prints of current prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities in Virginia to the Disappearance Jails project, which will ultimately be obscured through perforations by exhibition visitors.

This event will be held via Zoom. RSVP is required for Zoom link.

Contact Jeffrey Kenney with questions/concerns (mailto:jkenney5@gmu.edu)

Join us on Friday, February 16, 2024, 7-9pm for an Incarcerated Salon curated by artist Carlos Walker, who will kick off the night with a Political Rap Battle performance.

There will be a variety of musical performances, spoken word poetry, and other creative presentations. The microphone will be open to any audience members who would like to perform!

Faces of Resilience features works by 14 previously or currently incarcerated artists who participate in year-round art workshops at SCI Phoenix, Southeast Pennsylvania’s maximum-security prison for men located 33 miles outside of Philadelphia. The exhibit is supplemented by the works of three professional artists: Maria Gaspar, Sara Bennett, and the late Winfred Rembert (1945–2021).

Questions about the event should be directed to Alissa Maru at amaru@gmu.edu

Join us on Wednesday, January 17, 2024 for a Virtual Artist Talk with some of the many artists in the Faces of Resilience exhibition, including Sara Bennett, Ronald Connelly, and Luis 'Suave' Gonzalez.

Faces of Resilience features works by 14 previously or currently incarcerated artists who participate in year-round art workshops at SCI Phoenix, Southeast Pennsylvania’s maximum-security prison for men located 33 miles outside of Philadelphia. The exhibit is supplemented by the works of three professional artists: Maria Gaspar, Sara Bennett, and the late Winfred Rembert (1945–2021).

Questions about the event should be directed to Alissa Maru at amaru@gmu.edu

Join Mason Exhibitions and artist Brian Davis on Friday, December 8 for the closing reception of "Reconciliation (Disco)" at Mason Exhibitions Arlington. Come and be part of an immersive sound installation with a special performance.

Date and time : Friday, December 8th, 2023, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM

Location: Mason Exhibitions Arlington 3601 Fairfax Dr, Arlington, VA 22201

This event is free and open to the public.

Drop-in anytime on Saturday, November 11 between 11am-3pm for a zine-making workshop in collaboration with Art Enables and disability advocate and artist Jen White-Johnson.

Location: 2204 Rhode Island Ave NE, Washington, DC 20018

Come create zines with us that celebrate Disability Justice, Joy and Belonging. Participants will be encouraged to participate in a zine making workshop and add their zine creation to a pop up zine installation at Art Enables and facilitated by Disability Art Activist and Designer, Jen White-Johnson who centers Black disabled joy and futures, informed by disability justice and Black feminist disability framework.

This workshop is catered to Neurodivergent and Disabled folks. No previous art making experience required. 

“Disability is not a brave struggle or courage in the face of adversity. Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live." - quote by Neil Marcus, disabled actor and playwright

Join Mason Exhibitions and the Cheuse International Writers Center on Wednesday, November 8 from 7-9pm for an anthology reading of "In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine", featuring Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky, Lyudmyla Khersonska, and Boris Kershonsky. 

The event will take place at Mason Exhibitions Arlington. Street parking is available, and Virginia Square Metro Station is across the street.

Join Mason Exhibitions Arlington and ReelAbilities Film Festival: Northern Virginia on November 4 from 2-4pm for a film screening of short films and 1 feature film documenting the various lives of those that identify as disabled. Promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories and artistic expressions of people with disabilities.

Films Include:
ILLUSTRATING SAM NEWTON
Directed by Lily Drummond
28 Min | English, Australian Sign Language (ASL) | Australia | Narrative

A viral online photographer wants to remain anonymous in order to hide parts of their identity. When a fan from the other side of the world makes a connection, they learn to accept themself by sharing the universal language of art.

IMAGININGS
Directed by Anja Hiddinga
13 Min | ASL | US | Narrative

Six deaf performers share struggles and dreams of a new Deaf generation. These poetic self-portraits in sign language show empowerment and confidence, and the vulnerabilities that come with being different.

Trailer Here

LIVING ART
Directed by David Rochkind
32 Min | English | USA | Documentary
As she prepares for the opening of the biggest gallery show in her career, Mara Clawson, battles with her Familial Dysautonomia (FD) diagnosis - a rare genetic disease that damages the autonomic nervous system that only affects Jews of Ashkenazi descent - and her undetermined life expectancy.

Gain insights from artist Mara Clawson and director David Rochkind, creators of the film Living Art, as they share their experiences and artistic vision.

These film screenings showcase the stories and artistic expressions of individuals with disabilities in conjunction with the 'Disrupt And Resist' exhibition at Mason Exhibitions Arlington, running from September 9th to November 11th.

This event is presented in collaboration with the ReelAbilities Film Festival:Northern Virginia

This event is free and open to the public.

Always wanted to try your hand at weaving? Join us at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Saturday, November 4, 12-2pm to learn the patterns and processes to weave a small scarf or wall hanging.

You'll be surprised how meditative the process is! Arlington Weaves will bring portable looms for fiber art weaving and demonstrate paper weaving. Materials will be provided.

Arlington Weaves is a program supporting individuals with disabilities. Participants within the program learn to weave and produce handcrafted woven art, including color tote bags, pencil cases and so much more. 100% of the proceeds for each item are given to the artisan who created it.

How do you make/ hack your wardrobe to make it fully celebrate the intersection of all of your identities? 

Join Mason Exhibitions Arlington and Rebirth Garments on Saturday, October 21, 12-2pm. We will explore the idea of Radical Visibility, a Disabled Queer dress reform movement based on highlighting the parts of us that society typically shuns.

What to bring: your own clothes (nothing will be permanently altered)

Materials list: 

1. No sew creative dressing: 

2. Clothing /your closet (nothing will be altered)

3. Your body! 

4. Optional: safety pins

Garment generator game: 

1. Paper 

2. Marking tools (colorful ones are most fun) 

The Founder of Rebirth Garments, Sky Cubacub, will be doing interactive draping demos using a no sew method of designing in our own closets, to promote creativity and imagination. We will play with Sky’s surrealist Garment Generator Game to brainstorm drawing up new designs through fun constraints. By centering our joy and our identities, we can send the message that disabled queers deserve accommodations not just in terms of mobility but also in terms of our expression and our right to be seen.

This event is free and open to the public and will be held via Zoom. An RSVP is necessary to receive the Zoom link:

This event is held in conjunction with the Disrupt And Resist exhibition at Mason Exhibitions Arlington, running from September 9th to November 11th.