Art and Access

Elizabeth Coffey discusses her exhibition titled “Landed” on view at Hillyer in October 2025.

Like the Romantic notion that vertebrate evolution is recapitulated in the human fetus, this work imagines Ratheal’s materialist experience as a transmogrification of his ancestors’ religious worldviews. He sees religious European paintings as expressions of a long history of negotiating with unknowable, nonhuman otherness. He tries to make visible the alien immediateness he perceives in them—to give them space to breathe and express themselves anew.

In his recent works, the content referenced from these paintings drip and burst onto the wall. The works are also a register of seismic seizures of a collective unconscious, marking the violent destabilization of identity that is disconnected from being and cannot admit difference. They mark the inability of the descendants of Europeans to find a new expression for the memory embedded in their inherited images, who seek to make the world an image of hell, so that it can, at least, be recognized.

Paloma Vianey talks about her solo exhibition “Don’t Zip Me Up” on view at IA&A at Hillyer from March 8–30, 2025.

Contemporary artist Paula Mans talks about her exhibition “Cotton Flower.”

The exhibition titled AUGUST is a re-creation of a suburban summer night. Growing up in Arlington, Virginia, Kate Fleming spent nights driving around in cars with friends, drinking slurpees under sodium street lights, breathing in the humid scents of lawn grass and hot asphalt, and listening to the crickets sing. For Fleming, a hot summer night is a magical, limitless experience, full of infinite possibilities.

Black Chalk Intimacy immerses visitors in the intimate world of a woman with Down’s Syndrome, who writes on the wall with black chalk a list of daily activities to organize her life. The exhibition features a continuous screening of “Black Chalk” an 8-minute short film, still frames from the film, and sculptures created especially for this exhibition as symbols of the themes explored.

In this interview, Deborah Grayson talks about her exhibition titled “They Think of Love as a Reddening of the Earth,” which is on view at Hillyer during the month of April 2024.

The following is recording by Elaine Qiu, who provides a narrative overview of her solo exhibition “Every Place We’ve Been.” The exhibition is on view at Hillyer in March 2024.

At Hillyer’s contemporary art space, Dawn Whitmore led a gallery talk about her exhibition titled “Human Nature.”

In January 2024, Hillyer featured three solo artists: George Lorio, Oluwatoyin Tella, and Dan Leizman. This episode places a spotlight on their work and Hillyer’s success to start the new year.