April 1 – May 1, 2022

“Seeing My Way,” an exhibit of work by Sonya Michel, will open at Touchstone Gallery on April 1 . Michel, a noted historian of U.S. women and social policy, began her career in art after retiring from a professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016. She joined Touchstone several years later and presented some of her work in a virtual solo show in 2020. This will be her first in-person solo exhibit.

According to Michel, the title of her show has two meanings. The first refers to the process by which she became an artist. After many years of teaching and publishing (she is the author or editor of some thirteen books and dozens of articles), she decided to return to her “first love”: making art. Since then, she has been exploring and experimenting with many different media as she develops ways to express how she sees the world and responds to it.

The title’s second meaning emphasizes Michel’s effort to “find her voice,” to see things her way. She began her new career with painting but soon found herself drawn to less conventional materials—what she calls “the stuff of everyday life”: packaging and labels; textiles, paper and plastics; “found objects,” large and small. She incorporates these things into her work as-is or prepares them by tearing, painting, crunching or otherwise modifying them. The results take the form of collages and assemblages as well as works on canvas.

Michel points out that her artwork is not unconnected to her previous output as a scholar. There, she addressed women’s experience and how it has been shaped not just by the ideologies, laws and policies of their day but also by the built environments in which they live and work. These days, she says, she is “intrigued by modern domesticity and the colors, textures and shapes of items that compose it—not just the products themselves but the packaging in which they arrive.” At the same time, she notes, “I can’t help seeing the perils of abundance: the stuff that enables our lifestyles also clutters the world and poisons our air and water. To borrow a phrase from William Butler Yeats, it is a terrible form of beauty.”

April 1 – May 1, 2022

CROSS PURPOSES by Amy Sabrin

Amy Sabrin’s art deploys a maze of complex surfaces and mosaic-like patterns to conjure the emotional essence of spaces with which she is familiar. Her work Intentionally avoids representation of any specific place or person, offering instead a complex visual and emotional experience.  By building up a jewel-like puzzle pieces of simple shapes – crosses, Xs, dots, stripes, boxes, cells, cross-hatching and more – and suffusing the surface with layers of paint, shifts of hue, and texture, Sabrin‘s art captures the feeling of wandering (perhaps lost) between spaces, down city streets, or into dead-end alleys, only to make unanticipated discoveries. The intent is to seduce the viewer, consciously or not, to try to untangle the maze and see patterns that may or may not be there, much like reading a map or viewing an unfamiliar landscape; in other words, to infuse their own meaning into the pattern.

About Amy Sabrin

Amy Sabrin has painting on and off her whole life, but almost full-time since she retired from practicing white collar criminal defense law 11 years ago. She is a juried member of the Potomac Valley Watercolorists and Touchstone Gallery, and her work has been exhibited (and won awards) at juried shows at The Art League in Alexandria, the Hill Center in D.C., Friendship Heights Gallery, and Glen Echo’s Yellow Barn.  In 2019 she was selected to have a solo show at the Tower Gallery at Glen Echo National Park. Born and raised in the New York City area, Sabrin has lived in Washington D.C. since 1974. More of her work can be found at www.amysabrinstudio.com.

Image: “Maid’s Walks”