Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that “hell is other people.” But hell may actually be having to work in an office with décor designed by Lisa Dillin. The Baltimore-based Dillin creates mixed-media works that seem to toy with the mismatch between what designers think people want and what they actually want. The most benign are pieces [...]

One wonders if the conceit behind Carroll Square Gallery’s “Space Is the Place” is meant half-jokingly. The two artists in the show—Mariah Anne Johnson and John Watson—were asked to make “site responsive installations,” yet there are probably a dozen galleries in town with more interesting spaces for an artist to be “responsive” to than Carroll [...]

Cynthia Connolly’s black-and-white documentary series “Letters on Top of Buildings” dates back to the photographer and art impresario’s childhood in Los Angeles. Connolly used to ride in the backseat of her mother’s car on the elevated highways of L.A., watching as the car whizzed by old art deco signs on building roofs. Connolly later spent [...]

Alan Sislen, a Bethesda-based photographer, has traveled around the world making landscape photographs. But for his current exhibition, he found compelling material just steps away from his home.
Sislen’s exhibit at Alexandria’s Multiple Exposures Gallery, “Variations,” is on view through June 18. I recently spoke with Sislen. Here are some excerpts:
CityPaper: Where do you live now? [...]

In “Traces of Memory,” a photographer and a historian collaborate on an elegy to a once-thriving Jewish community and its destruction during the Holocaust. The late British photojournalist Chris Schwarz and professor Jonathan Weber of the University of Birmingham spent 12 years documenting Galicia, a region on the border of Poland and Ukraine. The exhibit, [...]

“African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond” is proof that black artists not named Jacob Lawrence or Romare Bearden produced a ton of compelling 20th century art, even if they make it into our museums less frequently. The sprawling exhibit features 100 works by 43 artists—a generous mix of painters, sculptors, and [...]

Apparently, photography isn’t dead. For the second year in a row, the graduating exhibition for the Corcoran College of Art and Design features a wealth of photography. Several series deal with rural or small-town life. Ethan Browning has produced a crisp, Coen Brothers-esque series of images of life in Frankenmuth, Mich., a predominantly German town. [...]

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is bringing a number of thematic exhibits to the National Portrait Gallery; the most recent is a selection of images of Union generals by the most famous photographer of the era, Mathew Brady. The museum has created modern prints from original negatives, all in the petite format known as [...]

There’s nothing kinky about “Twisted,” the new show of painting and sculpture at Cross-MacKenzie Gallery. The title is meant literally, encompassing all manner of art whose elements are intertwined and meandering. Brett Price offers a ceramic bowl crafted from an agglomeration of coiled, earthworm-like shapes; Lynn Horton painstakingly hand-draws looping, penciled swooshes on a monumental, [...]

“Washington Realism” bills itself, accurately, as an exhibit in which the artists ignore the “glitz and glam” of Washington’s political culture. One could also say that, to a large extent, it ignores Washington, D.C., itself. The 10 artists included in the exhibit were all D.C.-based, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the work on [...]