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HEMPHILL is a contemporary art advisory with a 33 year history as a contemporary gallery in Washington, DC.

10/03/2026

Artist Citizens Love the Smithsonian shares recommendations from members of our community identifying objects held in one of the Smithsonian Museums that are personally meaningful, intriguing, and strikingly noteworthy.

Steven Cushner: Artist & Educator, Washington, DC.

In his book All The Beauty in the World , Patrick Bringley says “The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eyes chance to absorb all that’s there."

So, here goes. I sit. I feel and I think.

I’m quiet, I’m calm, I’m relaxed.

I’m a kid wandering in the woods. I find a good hiding place. I build a fort.

BOWER is so simple that I think I can build it. But then I stop and ask myself “How“? BOWER seems effortless - it hides its skill and craftsmanship. It is both delightfully childlike and surprisingly sophisticated.

Martin Puryear creates a visual language of touch and thought. BOWER is clearly sculpture, but he arrives at sculpture through new doors - basketmaking and weaving and furniture making. Puryear dissolves the line which used to divide art and craft and has opened up new possibilities for sculpture.

BOWER lives in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, but would be equally at home in the Renwick Gallery. Or the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Or the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. Or the Cooper Hewitt.

BOWER does what all great artwork does - it connects the viewer’s past with the present moment while also opening up possibilities for the future.

Image Credit: Martin Puryear, Bower, 1980, Sitka spruce, pine, and copper tacks, 64 1⁄4 × 94 5⁄8 × 26 in. (163.3 × 240.2 × 66.0 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, Alexander Calder, Frank Wilbert Stokes, and the Ford Motor Company, 2002.18, © 1980, Martin Puryear. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

10/02/2026

Artist Citizens Love the Smithsonian shares recommendations from members of our community identifying objects held in one of the Smithsonian Museums that are personally meaningful, intriguing, and strikingly noteworthy.

Sandie Tropper: Appraiser, Washington, DC.

Not far from where Alma Thomas painted at her kitchen table in Washington D.C., this glorious rainbow of color can be seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). “Snoopy” was the “nickname” for the Apollo 10 lunar module as it was going to “snoop” for a possible landing site on the moon. Apollo 10 in 1969 served as a dress rehearsal for the first landing of a manned spacecraft, on the moon, which Apollo 11 accomplished later that year.

In this painting, Alma Thomas has interpreted the well-known photograph, “Earthrise,” taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission on December 24, 1968. Thomas used her paint and characteristic brushwork for her personal interpretation of events that changed our view of the world.

Image Credit: Alma Thomas, Snoopy--Early Sun Display on Earth, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 49 7⁄8 x 48 1⁄8 in. (126.8 x 122.1 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Vincent Melzac, 1976.140.1 Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

10/01/2026

Artist Citizens Love the Smithsonian shares recommendations from members of our community identifying objects held in one of the Smithsonian Museums that are personally meaningful, intriguing, and strikingly noteworthy.

Rebecca Cross: Ceramic Artist & Gallerist, Hillsboro, VA.

Wendell Castle’s “Ghost Clock”, 1985, is one of my favorite objects in the Renwick Gallery’s collection. Why has the museum draped a sheet over its imposing colonial grandfather clock? – it must need a repair. Passing by, the sheet doesn’t sway. Drawn closer – the drapery is wood! Astonishingly, the whole work is solid carved mahogany, the cinched fabric bleached white and the foot of the clock stained in walnut – exquisite trompe l’oeil. Now, without the minutes ticking, we are aware of nature’s quiet measure of time – the rings of the tree. Castle instructs us to slow down to see, to live.

Image Credit: Wendell Castle, Ghost Clock, 1985, bleached Honduras mahogany, 86 1⁄4 x 24 1⁄2 x 15 in. (219.0 x 62.2 x 38.1 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program, 1989.68, © 1985, Wendell Castle. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

09/29/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through October 18, 2026.

Click the link in our bio to view the V. Exhibition!

To Your Left (Stanley, New Mexico), 2026
archival pigment print on rag paper

09/28/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through October 18, 2026.

Click the link in our bio to view the V. Exhibition!

Not That You Will Like It (Copiapo, Atacama, Chile), 2026
archival pigment print on rag paper

09/26/2026

Tanya Marcuse returned to the same deer carcass over nineteen months, tracking what David Campany’s essay calls “the transforming condition of the deer’s body”—different air, different light, different temperature each visit. It wasn’t a documentary project. Marcuse’s alchemical interventions produced magical and timeless images. DEER, with an essay by David Campany. On September 8, 2023, photographer Tanya Marcuse photographed a deer that died near the woods. She returned repeatedly to photograph the deer until its body disappeared nineteen months later, in April 2025. What unfolds in these photographs is not a straightforward chronicle of decomposition, but a metaphysical transformation, as the deer seems to unravel into the universe.

Through embellishments that verge on the alchemical, including the use of fire, Marcuse’s photographs transform the deer’s body into a portal from the terrestrial to the celestial, from matter to myth. Tanya Marcuse’s work investigates cycles of life and decay, and photography’s capacity to probe what lies beyond empirical fact. Deer extends this inquiry to its most distilled form. At once lavish and unflinching, these sixteen images hover between fantasy and fact, evoking an enigmatic hybrid of Ana Mendieta’s ritualistic earthworks and the dense symbolism of medieval tapestries.

David Campany writes in his essay, “Any place photographed becomes a stage, if only because it is in the nature of a camera to dramatize, turning what is photographed, and even the very place itself, into signs. Enigmatic signs, but signs nonetheless. To photograph a co**se in its resting place, then, is to stage its stage, and to image its image.”

Deer features a special insert composed of fragments of Marcuse’s own writings, written in the second person and addressed directly to the deer.

Click the link in our bio to purchase Deer.

09/24/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through October 18, 2026.

Click the link in our bio to view the V. Exhibition!

09/22/2026

Today is Alma Thomas Day!

In 2021 Mayor Bowser issued an official proclamation to acknowledge the artistic and educational contributions of Alma W. Thomas on the 130th anniversary of her birth.

A prominent abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s, Alma Thomas was the first African American woman to have a solo art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in 1971... Born in Columbus, Georgia on September 22, 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was the eldest daughter of John Harris Thomas, a successful businessman, and Amelia Cantey, a dress designer. In 1907 Alma and the Thomas family moved to Washington, D.C., where they settled in a house that Alma would occupy for the next seventy-one years and that remains in the Thomas family to this day.

After teaching art for several years, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., to study costume design. She graduated in 1924 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts, becoming the first Howard University student and perhaps the first African American woman anywhere to hold that degree. After a long and distinguished career as a teacher, Thomas retired in 1960 to focus her energies entirely on her own art. During her professional career she had remained active and visible in Washington's growing art community, and in the late 1950s she developed the confidence and knowledge to pursue the highly colored abstract style for which she is known. Her close relationships with fellow artists Gene Davis, Jacob Kainen, and Morris Louis of the Washington Color Painters, whose works emphasized abstract color shapes, assured her acceptance in this circle. Thomas's work was included in the important show Contemporary Black Artists in America , held in 1971 at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Thomas died in Washington, D.C., in 1978 at the age of eighty-six. Three years later a posthumous retrospective exhibition was held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. In 1998 the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana organized a retrospective exhibition of her paintings that traveled to Columbus. Today her work can be found in many major museums.

09/20/2026

Happy Birthday to Mingering Mike!

Between 1968 and 1977 Mingering Mike (American, born 1950) recorded over fifty albums, managed several of his own record labels, and played for sold out concerts all over the world. Yet it was not until 2003, when a record collector stumbled upon his work at a flea market, that anyone had ever heard of him. It was soon discovered that Mingering Mike’s career all took place solely in the imagination of a teenaged ghetto daydreamer in Washington, DC.

Mingering Mike created a soulful alternate universe in which he was able to express himself in the only way he knew how: through art and music, in fake intricately handcrafted albums complete with gatefold interiors, extensive liner notes, and grooves drawn onto "vinyl." Early teenage songs obsessed with love and heartache gave way over time to social themes surrounding the turbulent era of civil rights protests and political upheaval - brought even closer to home when he himself went underground dodging the Vietnam War. The album covers offer a glimpse into Mingering Mike’s fascinating and awe-inspiring career.

The book, Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar, by Dori Hadar, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2007. In 2010, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, launched a traveling exhibition titled, The Record, Contemporary ART and VINYL. Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, the exhibition included a selection of 27 records by Mingering Mike. In 2013, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired the collection of over 150 artworks made between 1969 and 1976. In 2015, the museum presented the exhibition Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits.

Mingering Mike: Original Music from Brother of the Dragon, (Decision, June 1974)
Printed 2008
Archival pigment print
14 x 14 inches
Edition of 50

09/19/2026

ANNE ROWLAND: It's Breaking Apart Like Nothing You've Ever Seen is on view at hemphillartworks.com, Artsy and Artnet through October 18, 2026.

Click the link in our bio to view the V. Exhibition!

Don't Mess With It Again (ad-Dahna Desert, Saudi Arabia), 2026
archival pigment print on rag paper

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Washington D.C., DC

Opening Hours

Tuesday	12pm - 5pm
Wednesday	12pm - 5pm
Thursday	12pm - 5pm
Friday	12pm - 5pm
Saturday	12pm - 5pm

Telephone

(202) 234-5601

Website

http://www.hemphillartworks.com/

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