Thursday: Mickalene Thomas at the Phillips Collection Best known for her complex and beautiful portraiture of Black women completed on a massive scale, New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas ’ mixed-media paintings can be found across D.C. at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum , the Rubell , and now in the Phillips Collection’s newest special exhibition, Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage .
Her larger-than-life work usually speaks for itself, but Thomas is coming to town this Thursday to discuss the inspirations behind her pieces in the exhibition with Multiplicity ’s curator, Katie Delmez . If Thomas’ words on craft and artistic vision strike a chord within you and leave you wanting to make your own masterpiece, you’re in luck. In addition to this talk, Multiplicity is hosting a slew of free artist events and collage workshops before the exhibit closes on Sept.
22. Allow Thomas’ words inspire you to let your inner collage artist free and make some art worthy of display in the Phillips (or your living room). The conversation between Mickalene Thomas and Katie Delmez starts at 6:30 p.
m. on Aug. 15 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St.
NW. phillipscollection.org .
Sold out, but standby ticketing will be offered dependent on availability on a first come, first served basis. — Serena Zets Friday: The Little Mermaid at the MLK Memorial Live-action versions of beloved animated Disney classics were always inevitable. Once the technology caught up to the drawings, it absolutely made sense for the incredibly successful studio to revisit the highest-grossing films in their vaults.
While Emma Watson as Belle in Beauty and the Beast was perfectly fine and Will Smith as the Genie in Aladdin was ...
blue, the reimagination that garnered the most attention in Disney’s transition from drawings to people was 2023’s The Little Mermaid . Interest in the film was high for its nearly five years of production (thanks COVID for the slowdown). Melissa McCarthy was perfectly cast as Ursula and Halle Bailey as Ariel helped make the young actor an icon to children around the globe.
Due to those COVID delays, it also became one of Disney’s most expensive productions. Due to its quality, it became the 10th highest-grossing movie of 2023. The film once again cements The Little Mermaid as a Disney classic while—to the chagrin of racists who think a half-human, half-fish must be White—allowing kids of all races to see themselves as a little mermaid.
All kidding aside, the most recent edition of Hans Christian Andersen ’s 1837 fairy tale is a remarkable achievement in storytelling, technology, and British tax breaks . A year after its theatrical run, it is becoming a staple of outdoor film screenings. The most inspiring of these is at the Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorial as part of the Films at the Stone Series. With D.C.
weather finally turning somewhat enjoyable rather than sweltering, it looks as if this mid-August screening will also be one of the most pleasant ways to spend an evening on the National Mall. The Little Mermaid screens at 8 p.m.
on Aug. 16 at the MLK Memorial, 1964 Independence Ave. SW.
thememorialfoundation.org. Free .
—Brandon Wetherbee Sunday: Dogs on Shady Lane at Songbyrd Since forming in 2018, Dogs on Shady Lane have released only a handful of original songs, plus one precocious Beyoncé cover . But each entry in their short discography is a jewel, glittering softly with gauzy instrumentation and sharp confessional songwriting. Although the indie rock outfit began in Providence, Rhode Island, as lead singer and guitarist Tori Hall ’s solo project, Hall has called upon her gaggle of musical friends for small gigs and recording opportunities since the beginning.
Now riding as a four-piece band, the group still have the loose and affectionate feeling of the best jam collectives; the credits for 2022’s folky sleeper hit “Cole St.” shout out the contribution of “stomps and claps by many lovely friends.” Dogs on Shady Lane’s new EP, Knife, released by the discerning DIY label Lauren Records in February, signposts where the young group may be headed—away from those stomp-and-clap drum lines and plucky banjos and toward a more jagged, electric, soft emo sound.
On standout track “Pile of Photos,” Hall’s hushed vocals are nestled amid feathery shoegaze textures that explode into teasingly short moments of catharsis, landing somewhere between Slow Pulp and Soccer Mommy . The band, which have recently made the quintessential art kid pilgrimage from Providence to Brooklyn, are stopping in D.C.
as part of a late summer tour—the perfect season for languorous indie angst. They’re supported on the bill by a trifecta of up-and-coming alt acts from the DMV that have been adroitly selected to round out the wistful vibe: D.C.
dream-pop duo GLOSSER , the exuberant Richmond-based band Drook , and local musician (and Songbyrd sound engineer) Ryan Plummer ’s plaintive solo act Dumb Lucky . The show will prove a helpful scene sampler for any slowcore or pop punk veteran wondering what their Gen Z progeny might be listening to these days. Dogs on Shady Lane play at 8 p.
m. on Aug. 18 at Songbyrd, 540 Penn St.
NE. songbyrddc.com .
$15–$18. —Amelia Roth-Dishy Through Aug. 24: Belkin • Caldwell • Shull at Hemphill Artworks A three-artist exhibit is an atypical format for Hemphill Artworks, but you can see how it came to be.
Textile artists Sophia Belkin and Randy Shull and digital photographer Colby Caldwell share a large format and an appreciation for abstraction. Of the three, Shull’s work is the most different. He creates hammocks like those typical of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where he spends much of the year; he then paints the hammocks and lets them “cure” in the sun.
Shull’s finished works feature draping, spaghetti-like strands of twine whose curlicues suggest a 3D iteration of the hand-drawn contour lines in works by Linn Meyers . “Bisagras III” adds a hammock-like shape that suggests either a smiley face or the mouth of Batman ’s Joker . The Baltimore-based Belkin, for her part, uses dye painting, embroidery, and textile collage while Caldwell continues the technique he has used in recent years of deploying a flatbed scanner as a camera.
The works by both Belkin and Caldwell walk the line between abstraction and realism, but Belkin’s careful stitching contrasts with the seemingly random glitching of Caldwell’s scanner patterns. (In a nice twist, some of Belkin’s imagery echoes that in Caldwell’s seminal series “ How to Survive Your Own Death ,” which is based on a now decades-old video glitch.) What elevates Caldwell’s works is the interaction between his floral subject matter and the cubist-adjacent geometries created by the scanner glitches.
In one noteworthy image, yellow flowers alternate with electronic defect patterns that suggest sharp daggers; the image becomes a fruitful pairing of beauty and danger. Belkin • Caldwell • Shull runs though Aug. 24 at Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St.
NW. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.
hemphillartworks.com . Free.
—Louis Jacobson Ongoing: Of Light and Shade at VisArts Artist Alexander D ’ Agostino has a fascination with codes, secret symbols, and hidden messages, which becomes clear in Of Light and Shade at VisArts. The collaged images within are pulled from archival photos, broadsheets, and newspaper clippings, gay porno mags, and ritualistic texts—there’s a whiff of the illicit about them. The subject matter and the eras they come from hint at queer stories that were historically kept under wraps, as well as the usage of codes to both identify comrades and stay undetected to outside eyes.
A huge array of chlorophyll prints done on real plant leaves lines the walls, and their production reveals the conundrum of revealing versus hiding oneself. Chlorophyll prints use the natural process of photosynthesis and pigments in plant leaves to create images: Placing objects or transparent images on top of leaves and exposing them to light causes the parts that are obscured to be left behind in the original shade of the leaf, while the rest of the leaf fades to yellow. Shedding light on these images brings them out, but expose the prints further and they’ll fade altogether.
The walls are bedecked with tapestries printed with this collaged imagery using solar prints, which similarly use the light exposure from the sun to create prints. The most ingenious use of light comes from a series of artists’ books, accompanied on a shelf by a small keychain with a blacklight on it, which can be used as a code breaking tool. Shine the light across the pages, and reveal the hidden messages written throughout.
These include some dirty little bon mots and scribbled love notes declaring the romance of Abraham Lincoln and his rumored lover David Derickson . It feels as thrilling and illicit as reading someone else’s diary by flashlight. Of Light and Shade runs through Oct.
6 at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. Wednesday and Thursday, noon to 4 p.
m.; Friday noon to 8 p.m.
; Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. visartscenter.
org . Free. —Stephanie Rudig.
