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Dar AL Sulh - Michael Rakowitz
Photo courtsey of Emma McMorran
Michael Rakowitz, Dar Al Sulh, 2017.
Dar Al Sulh (Domain of Conciliation) is Michael Rakowitz’s multifaceted, collaborative project with Regine Basha and Dr. Ella Habiba Shohat. It was initially organized as a series of dinners in Dubai in 2013, serving traditional Iraqi-Jewish dishes for the first time in the Arab World since the exodus of Jews beginning in the mid-1940s. The meals were based on the artist’s Iraqi-Jewish grandmother’s recipes. As the artist explains, the title Dar Al Sulh, means “a domain of conciliation, a territory where an agreement between Muslims and non-Muslims was made to provide freedom of religion, autonomy, and protection to all.” While it references the social and political climate before the establishment of Israel in 1948— echoing a time and reality when one could claim both Jewish and Arab identities without a conflict— it also aligns with the main premise of this exhibition–to build solidarity, surpass divisions, cultural, political, and ethnic, and reunite through art and food “around the table.” This iteration of Dar Al Sulh features a food truck as an outdoor public artwork, adorned with emblems of Dar Al Sulh, namely a banner with the logo displayed on the awning of the restaurant in Dubai featuring a portrait of the artist’s grandmother, Renée Shamoon.
Dar Al Sulh represents a continuation of Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck) project, which started in 2004 during the Iraq war. The project aimed to reverse power dynamics by having Iraqi chefs in charge of preparing food while the US veterans served the meals. This flip enabled sharing the war experience in earnest, and deepening mutual understanding. At the present historical moment, the concept of Dar Al
Sulh, implying principles of conciliation, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence, seems to be more urgent than ever before. In Rakowitz’s words, it hopes “to reclaim a space where there was harmony”—a space that “can be reflected in the food and conversations around it.”
BElonging: online archive
“Tell us a time that someone’s action made you feel that you belonged.”
— Jennifer Wen Ma
BElonging is an interactive, audio-based installation. The audio features a compilation of singular stories on the notion of “belonging,” recorded and collected from community members in Washington, DC, including those from Georgetown and Howard Universities, during the spring and summer. Through an invitational prompt set up by Ma — “tell us a time that someone’s action made you feel that you belonged” — and by following the principles of oral history, the artist and her team interviewed more than 50 participants from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds and age, gender, and occupation groups. This resulted in a compelling array of personal narratives that speaks to the complexity and diversity of lived experiences.
Jennifer Wen Ma, BElonging, 2024.
Handblown glass, metal armature, laser-cut paper, directional dome speaker, and audio recordings on the notion of belonging.
Courtesy of the artist.
Current EXHIBITIONS
Photo: Vivian Marie Doering Photography
Around the Table: Shared Experiences| Open Conversations| Coming Together
September 27 – December 8, 2024
Georgetown de la Cruz Gallery
Around the Table is a group exhibition that engages the theme of food, not as a material or medium, but as a means of social interactions and communal round ups over meals. It features contemporary national and international artists whose works reference food as a metaphor of shared experiences, open conversations, and coming together.
Conceived as a series of separate yet interrelated installations and interventions, the aspirations of Around the Table are manifold: to explore the sensorial, social, and political significance of food; to spark earnest discussions across divisions; and to strengthen commonalities rather than differences among people.
Around the Table presents emblematic works by prominent artists Suzanne Lacy, Valeska Soares, Jo Smail, and Michael Rakowitz; new commissions by Jennifer Wen Ma, Helen Zughaib, Adam Silverman, and Monsieur Zohore; and social convenings by Philippa Pham Hughes. Although varied in their vocabularies, formal and conceptual, the featured works collectively aim to rise above social polarization of our time, celebrating cultural diversity, multiplicity of viewpoints, and gathering “around the table.”
At heart multidisciplinary, Around the Table extends the conventional exhibition framework with a “menu” of participatory activations, performances, convenings, and talks by exhibiting artists, bringing the gallery setting to life as the space of communal experience and belonging.
Exhibition curated by Dr. Vesela Sretenović.
Photo: Vivian Marie Doering Photography
Alex McQuilkin: That Hand-Touch Sensibility
September 27 – December 8, 2024
Spagnuolo Gallery
Alex McQuilkin (b. 1980, lives in New York State) creates work in multiple media that explores the construction of female identity within the context of a patriarchal system that affects women’s lives in both obvious and subtle ways. In the installation, Alex McQuilkin: That Hand-Touch Sensibility, the artist has hand embroidered statements from Sol Lewitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967) in soft pastel hues on hand-dyed fabric typically used as cloth diapers. The works are framed in industrially fabricated aluminum hoops painted to match the thread and textile. The resulting monochromes reference the heroic and gendered language of minimalism while simultaneously framing craft, labor, and motherhood as the legitimate subject of art. The embroidered works are placed on an artist designed wallcovering based on the Laura Ashley and Ralph Lauren wallpapers that adorned the walls of many fashionable homes during the artist’s formative years. Overall, McQuilkin’s installation becomes a microcosm of a stereotypically feminine domestic space where gender dynamics are revealed in real time.
Exhibition curated by Helaine Posner (C’75).
upcoming EXHIBITIONS
Hung Liu: Happy and Gay
january 17 - april 13, 2025
Georgetown de la Cruz Gallery
From 2011-2012, renowned Chinese American artist Hung Liu (born Changchun, China 1948 - died Oakland, California 2021) created a series of paintings and works on paper titled Happy and Gay. In the 2024 fall semester, former Smithsonian curator and Director of the Hung Liu Estate, Dr. Dorothy Moss, will teach an Art History/Museum Studies seminar at Georgetown focused on Hung Liu’s life and work that will lead to a student- curated exhibition of Liu's Happy & Gay series at the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery.
This fascinating and little-studied series comprises oils on canvas with installation elements and works on paper. The series is based on Maoist propaganda cartoons that were published during the 1950s and 1960s in small booklets for children in China with a title that comes from a school exercise for children learning English: “Come boys and girls—let’s sing let’s dance. We are happy and gay. It’s our National Day.” Like the Dick and Jane books circulating in the United States in the 1940s through the 1960s, the illustrations were used to teach normative values such as hard work, family unity, and patriotism.
With Happy & Gay, Liu resurrects and subverts the images of her youth with subtle irony. Her formal choices, including replacing primary colors with pastels and employing scale to expose the power of propaganda, speaks to Liu’s conviction that “History is a verb.” A peer of artists Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Enrique Chagoya, and Amalia Mesa Bains, whose work reinserts buried histories into museum spaces, Liu often discussed her artmaking practice as “rewriting history.” In the paintings, Liu revisits the indoctrination of her education in China during the Cultural Revolution through recreations of pages from primers as well as depictions of her local street readers – public book stands where children could rent booklets to read on the premises. Among the paintings in Happy and Gay, and a frequent visual device in Liu's works, are lush details of animals and mythical landscapes which, along with the social realist images and those of literary figures such as Mulan, reveal Liu's attempt to ameliorate pointed political content or issues of social inequality with natural or supernatural beauty. Liu's depiction of the many disparities in real life, fiction, fantasy, and history provide the dynamic tension in much of her work. In these paintings, she negotiates her way between a personal history that embraces larger social issues and confirms the potential of art to confront, comment, and comfort.
Exhibition curated by Dr. Dorothy Moss.
Hung Liu, Street Readers, 2013.
Oil on canvas, wood shelf, Chinese picture story books, 66 x 83 inches.
Private Collection, San Francisco.
Marilyn Bridges, Kahiltna Glacier, AK (1990), gelatin silver print.
Georgetown Special Collections.
& Loving: Photography from the Georgetown Collection
Spring 2025
Spagnuolo Gallery
To be curated by Prof. Ian Bourland and Georgetown students.
"Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever." – Aaron Siskind
Photography, in a way that no other medium can, captures fragments of life – intimate, raw, emotionally charged moments that would otherwise pass in an instant. The [insert number] of images within this exhibition seek to capture our shared humanity, offering glimpses into the universal emotions that connect us all. Each individual photo holds unique fingerprints of not just the subject and the artist, but everyone involved in the process from moment to print.
Using Georgetown’s Photography Collection from the Booth Special Collection, we are able to bring in, albeit limited, perspectives of the 20th century spanning intimate moments on a park bench to singing your heart out at a Beatles concert.