Join us on Thursday, June 26, 6-8PM at Founders Gallery in Van Metre Hall on the Mason Square Campus for the Opening Reception of Re:Vision & Re:Frame, a juried exhibition collaboratively produced by Mason Exhibitions and Arlington Art Alliance.

Join Mason Exhibitions on Saturday, June 21, 7-10pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for a Reception for The Invisible Skate Theory.

THE INVISIBLE SKATE THEORY

The theory that we can be, or already are, connected through skateboarding in a way we cannot see.

Mason Exhibitions Arlington
June 4 - August 16, 2025
Curated by Gato

Skateboarding has always existed on the fringe of cities, of systems, and tradition. The Invisible Skate Theory explores the community built in these edges, creating new spaces and paying homage to those that paved the way. Where they’ve long been left out yet continue to pay it forward. 

Rooted in the DMV’s growing skate scene and expanded through digital platforms like Instagram, this exhibition centers the often-unseen networks of connection, care, and co-creation that hold today’s skateboarding culture together.

It tells the story of how skaters without industry access have made their own maps finding each other through meetups, zines, pop-up events, and social media. It highlights pivotal moments like the 2024 arrival of Bolivia’s all-female skate collective, Imilla Skate, to Washington, D.C. brought by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. That cross-cultural exchange continues to ripple across communities and coasts.

This exhibition also looks at the imbalance that persists: women are skating, but they are still underrepresented in leadership, industry, and visibility — especially outside of major hubs like NYC and LA. In the DMV, that gap is being closed not by big brands, but by organizers, artists, and everyday skaters doing the work on their own terms.

The Invisible Skate Theory poses the question of how this connection can expand further through the shared moments in this exhibition. While celebrating the behind-the-scenes labor, friendships, and the powerful force of finding a place to belong. It’s about movement, across cities and communities,  and what happens when those movements align.

Join Mason Exhibitions and the George Mason University School of Art on Saturday, June 7, 9am-1pm for a Community Stage Sk8 Session at Powhatan Springs Skatepark in Arlington, VA.

The session will be facilitated by a longtime local artist and skater, Ben Ashworth. This is an open invitation to all artists and creators to join us in turning Powhatan Springs Skatepark into a community stage!

This session is aligned with current art exhibition, The Invisible Skate Theory, on view at Mason Exhibitions Arlington until August 16, 2025.

THE INVISIBLE SKATE THEORY

The theory that we can, or already are, connected through skateboarding in a way we cannot see.

Mason Exhibitions Arlington
June 4 - August 16, 2025
Curated by Gato

Skateboarding has always existed on the fringe of cities, of systems, and tradition. The Invisible Skate Theory explores the community built in these edges, creating new spaces and paying homage to those that paved the way. Where they’ve long been left out yet continue to pay it forward. 

Rooted in the DMV’s growing skate scene and expanded through digital platforms like Instagram, this exhibition centers the often-unseen networks of connection, care, and co-creation that hold today’s skateboarding culture together.

It tells the story of how skaters without industry access have made their own maps finding each other through meetups, zines, pop-up events, and social media. It highlights pivotal moments like the 2024 arrival of Bolivia’s all-female skate collective, Imilla Skate, to Washington, D.C. brought by the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. That cross-cultural exchange continues to ripple across communities and coasts.

This exhibition also looks at the imbalance that persists: women are skating, but they are still underrepresented in leadership, industry, and visibility — especially outside of major hubs like NYC and LA. In the DMV, that gap is being closed not by big brands, but by organizers, artists, and everyday skaters doing the work on their own terms.

The Invisible Skate Theory poses the question of how this connection can expand further through the shared moments in this exhibition. While celebrating the behind-the-scenes labor, friendships, and the powerful force of finding a place to belong. It’s about movement, across cities and communities,  and what happens when those movements align.

Join Mason Exhibitions on Saturday, May 10, 12-2pm at the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas for an intimate reception with artist Roshanak Hooshmand, in celebration of her exhibition The Fire of Spring.

Roshanak Banoo Hooshmand (b. 1933, Tehran, Iran) started painting for the first time 10 years ago at the age of 82. Over the last decade she has been remarkably prolific and ambitious, creating a vibrant body of work that is deeply reflective of a lifetime of experience, introspection, and devotion to the wisdom found in ancient Persian culture. Inspired by poets such as Jalal Al-Din Rumi and Hafiz Shiraz, whose verses encourage learning from the natural world, embracing the present, and enacting the divine through love and devotion, Houshmand’s paintings celebrate the sensuality of color, emotional truths, and direct self-expression.

Though self-taught, her paintings show the influence of a range of classical and modern art historical precedents. Her “direct from the tube” approach to color is similar to Fauvists such as Henri Matisse, while her playful use of mixed pictorial perspective has analogies in Persian Miniature painting as well as the neo-cubist techniques of contemporary painter David Hockney. In addition to natural forms and scenes drawn from memory or observation, Hooshmand often works in a purely abstract mode creating loose geometries that resemble textile patterns, vases and other decorative motifs that may include poetic verses in Farsi inscribed on their surfaces.

Like the great poets she admires, Hooshmand’s art is an emotional channel for an inner spirit deeply engaged with the circumstances of her surroundings. Through painting, she transmutes this unique perspective into an offering—the world anew and full of possibilities—a blazing spring.

Join us at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Thursday, May 1, 6-8pm!

Current Arlington County Poet Laureate Courtney LeBlanc and Poets Laureate Emeritae Katherine E. Young and Holly Karapetkova read their work and discuss the role of the Poet Laureate in building community through the literary arts. 

Holly Karapetkova is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington County and the recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her most recent book of poetry, Dear Empire, was co-winner of the 2024 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and winner of the 2024 Willliam Meredith Poetry Award and was published by Gunpowder Press.

Book Synopsis:

Dear Empire is co-winner of the 2024 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and winner of the 2024 William Meredith Prize for Poetry. The poems in this collection offer an unflinching look at the Empire in which we all dwell. Karapetkova writes with a passionate, urgent voice, compelled to call out injustice wherever she sees it, tackling issues of race, white supremacy, and other forms of personal and historical empire. More information (including blurbs) located here: https://gunpowderpress.com/product/dear-empire-poems-by-holly-karapetkova/

Katherine E. Young is the author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist) and editor of Written in Arlington. She translates poetry and prose by Russian-language writers from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. She served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia (2016-2018).

Book synopsis:

People and Trees by Akram Aylisli, translated by Katherine E. Young (Plamen Press, 2024)

Set in the mountains of Azerbaijan just after World War II, Akram Aylisli’s People and Trees chronicles the wrenching transformation of traditional Azeri society under Soviet rule. Private land is collectivized; mosques are converted to silk factories or bulldozed to build “palaces of culture.” The young narrator, Sadyk, fantasizes about striding hand-in-hand with a beautiful girl into the bright, socialist future he’s seen on the movie screen. The village women, meanwhile, navigate religious, economic, and social upheaval, including famine and the loss of an entire generation of men to war. Drawing on the rich folklore traditions of the Caucasus mountains, this timeless collection of “tales” is the work that put Azerbaijan’s greatest living author on the international literary map.

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of four full-length collections, most recently, Her Dark Everything. She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate and founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.

Book synopsis:

Her Dark Everything by Courtney LeBlanc: Part elegy to a friend who died by suicide, part love poem to a friend who continues to survive, Her Dark Everything is a collection that will pull you through the darkest depths until you feel the light against your skin. It will make you grieve for who have lost the battle against the beast that is depression while simultaneously making your grateful for those who stay and fight. In equal measures dark and light, soft and sharp, Her Dark Everything will roost in your heart permanently.

Join us on Wednesday, April 30 from 7-11pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for Noise Awareness Day!

Noise Awareness taps into and exposes the unconventional and vibrant side of our student community.  Noise Awareness this year will be in conversation with the current art exhibition on view, Nothing Personal: A Collaboration in Black and White.

AVT 374  (Dr. Thomas Stanley) instructs students in the multiple contexts in which sound art can be presented, including live performance. The gallery welcomes Music Research Strategist Marshall Trammell in workshop-performance process involving first training the attendees in improvised performance and the interpretation of graphical scores. Then students from AVT 374 will use Trammell’s pre-prepared 2’ x 2’ foam-core boards to conduct a blended ensemble featuring Trammell, Dr. Stanley and students (a vocalist and electronic musicians).

Professor Brian Davis' Advanced Sculpture class will present a series of interactive, touch-sensitive cast cement sculptures that respond to human contact with sound. When touched, each object triggers audio—potentially including recordings of its own making and other non-musical sounds—that have been collaboratively composed and layered by students from both Davis’s and Stanley’s classes. 

Join us on Thursday, April 24, 7-9pm at Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery for the Spring Celebration of Offerings to the Potomac: Acknowledging Indigenous Place.

Celebrate the deep and meaningful research that this exhibition is built on, and all the talented artists, scholars, and community members who made it happen! There will be traditional drumming, dancing, singing, and skateboarding!

We welcome you to consider ways to honor the ancestors, join in caring for these lands in right relationship, and support contemporary local Indigenous communities. This is an Indigenous place. Home is here. 

Questions about the event should be emailed to Yassmin Salem (mailto: ysalem@gmu.edu)

Join us on Friday, April 18, 4:30-6pm at Gillespie Gallery in the Art and Design Building for two poetry readings followed by a Q&A led by Katey Funderburgh. Books will also be for sale!

Taylor Franson-Thiel and Martheaus Perkins, two Poetry MFA students at George Mason University both have debut poetry collections releasing in 2025. Perkins’s The Grace of Black Mothers and Franson-Thiel’s Bone Valley Hymnal both centralize on the impact of maternal lineage. What burdens do we lift from our mothers’ shoulders? How does poetry help us explore our inherited traumas? This event will showcase both debut collections and curate a conversation about publishing as a student. 

About the Writers and Moderator

Taylor Franson-Thiel is the author of “Bone Valley Hymnal” (ELJ Editions 2025). She is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe and the EIC of BRAWL. She can be found on Twitter @TaylorFranson and at taylorfranson-thiel.com

Martheaus Perkins was born to a single mother in Center, Texas. After a childhood in and out of homes in Houston, he graduated from Stephen F. Austin University as a first-generation student. His debut poetry collection, "The Grace of Black Mothers," releases in 2025. He currently lives in the DMV, co-edits BRAWL Lit, and teaches at George Mason University.

Katey Funderburgh is a queer poet from Colorado. As a current MFA student at George Mason University, she is a co-coordinator for the Incarcerated Writer's Project of phoebe journal. She serves as a Poetry Alive! fellow and is a 2025 Cheuse Travel Research Grant recipient. Her favorite things include very tall trees, very strong coffee, and her very wonderful community. 

Join Murals at Mason and the Native American and Indigenous Alliance to help paint a mural on Thursday, April 17, 5-8pm in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery.

No experience is necessary! All supplies will be provided!

Meet Girasol O’Neill, one of the artists in Offerings to the Potomac: Acknowledging Indigenous Place, and help him paint murals that are going on Old Town Hall in the City of Fairfax this summer!

Come make your own plantable paper! Participants will create their own handmade cotton paper, imbued with wildflower seeds, which can be planted or used for artistic projects.

Registration is free but required to hold your spot, as there is limited space in the paper making studio. No experience necessary and all materials provided!

This workshop is offered in conjunction with the opening of Fenwick Library’s Seed Library and the exhibition Cross-Pollination on view in Fenwick Gallery through April 25.

Location: Art & Design Building, room 1009
Instructor: Forrest Lawson, Printmaking & Letterpress Studio Manager

Join Murals at Mason and UndocuMason to help paint a mural on Tuesday, April 15, 3-7pm in Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery.

No experience is necessary! All supplies will be provided!

Meet Girasol O’Neill, one of the artists in Offerings to the Potomac: Acknowledging Indigenous Place, and help him paint murals that are going on Old Town Hall in the City of Fairfax this summer!

Join us on Friday, April 11, 12-3pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington to imagine joy with James Baldwin in the current art exhibition, Nothing Personal: A Collaboration in Black and White.

12:00PM-1:00PM - Enjoy coffee, tea, light breakfast and experience a one-of-its-kind art exhibit

1:00PM-2:30PM - Meet others and participate in a reading group with Kritikos. Theme of this semester is The Power of Imagining, and this session will highlight the influential James Baldwin.

About Kritikos

Members of the community (near and far) are called to meet online each semester for a 90-minute session once a week with a goal of long-term commitment to relationship building, awareness, reimagining, transformation, and action, around anti-racist practices, racial justice, and the creation of conversations as well as systems of compassion and healing. We continue to focus on anti-Black racism and its effects on society.  
  
Grounded in the knowledge that it is not a question of whether we are racist, but rather, how racism is expressed and experienced in ourselves, our lives, our behaviors, and our institutions, we explore books, music, art, essays, podcasts, and documentaries that allow us to critically question and consider our roles as artists, thinkers, citizens, and creatives in a society founded on racist values and practices. All are welcome.

Celebrate the beauty of plants and photography! Join us to learn about cyanotypes, a special photographic process that uses sunlight, and make your own prints using botanical pictures, seeds, or plant matter. 

Registration is free but required to hold your place. No experience is required, and all materials will be provided. Participants are welcome to bring their own flowers or other materials to make the prints.

Please note this is scheduled as an outdoor workshop! We will meet in the Fenwick Library lobby before moving outside. In the event of rain or inclement weather, we will move indoors to Fenwick 2001.

This workshop is offered in conjunction with the opening of Fenwick Library’s Seed Library and the exhibition Cross-Pollination on view in Fenwick Gallery through April 25.

Location: Fenwick Library Atrium (rain location: Fenwick 2001)
Instructor: Liz Louise Johnson, MFA candidate & Fenwick Gallery GRA

Join us for free food and fun activities as you learn more about campus resources and Patriot Packout, George Mason's donation initiative that collects new, like-new, and gently used items, beginning April 21-May 14!

When: 12PM - 4PM on Thursday, April 10

Where: SUB I Patriots Lounge (2nd Floor Lobby)

Mason Exhibitions invites you to a special fundraising in support of Before the Americas, an upcoming exhibition highlighting rich and diverse artistic traditions, curated by Cheryl Edwards.

Enoy an afternoon of art, conversation, and community in support of this important project!

Your donations will directly support the exhibition's research, curation, and presentation! Every donation makes a difference.

Saturday, April 5, 3:00-4:30PM
The Kreeger Museum, Washington, DC
2401 Foxhall Rd NW, Washington DC 20007

Visual Voices is a lecture series hosted by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. We look forward to seeing you online on Thursday, April 3, 4:45pm to 6:30 pm.

Jordan Nassar is a Palestinian-American artist who was born and raised in New York City. Extending from this, his work evokes a very particular kind of imagined space: the sort of utopian vision of Palestine held by the displaced constituents that comprise the region’s diaspora.

RSVP is required to receive the zoom link the day-of the event via email! Please note, this event is online only!

Questions and concerns should be emailed to Jeffrey Kenney at jkenney5@gmu.edu. 

Join Mason Exhibitions, Facilities & Campus Operations, and the School of Art for a Cyanotype Workshop to kick-off Earth Month!

Drop in anytime from 11am-3pm at the rear lower level patio of the Art and Design building for this workshop!

Donated plain t-shirts in various sizes will be provided by Patriot Packout. Paper will also be available.

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a blue-colored print. It involves using two chemicals, ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, which react when exposed to sunlight or UV light to create a blue image.

Interested in growing your own food? Want to get into gardening? Join us for the opening day of the Seed Library at Fenwick Library!

The Seed Library is a Patriot Green Fund project meant to encourage gardening and growing your own food at home. Patrons take seeds from the library, grow them, then harvest, dry, and return the seeds.

Seed libraries have quickly grown in popularity around the country, being found in public libraries, community centers, community gardens, makerspaces, and university libraries. The concept of the seed library model is that the library is stocked with seeds, which patrons take, grow, and then return seeds to the library. The emphasis, however, is on the taking and growing of seeds and less on the drying and returning, given the experience of other seed libraries. They promote growing your own food, wellbeing, community, and learning in a hands-on way.

Join us at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Saturday, March 22 from 11am-5pm for drop-in Mask Making with Steven Luu using materials from the Nothing Personal exhibition and graphic chronology.

Steven Luu

The wounds of combat have had a profound impact on Steven Luu. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he is a survivor of the Communist oppression. For nearly 46 years, he was relocated to numerous places. Him and his family were placed in re-education camps by Vietnamese Communist when he was only 1 year old. Escaping to freedom on a small fishing boat when he was 7-year-old boy and spent over two months floating on the open sea until rescued by the British Royal Navy and taken to a Hong Kong refugee camp. In 1991, Steven and his family arrived in the United States-again-as refugees. After completing high school in 1995, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for 20 years as a Medic. For 11 of those years, he was stationed in Europe-spending three years in combat zones. In all his numerous deployments to the Middle East, he witnessed many violent deaths, and those experiences have had a profound psychological impact on him. 

He was first introduced to art by the intensive treatment program provided by Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Steven recognizes that art allows him to present his feelings comfortably and focuses on expressing traumatic experiences creatively and non-verbally. As someone with a background in the medical field and a wounded veteran himself, he relates deeply to many service members that return home suffering from the aftereffects of deployment, such as feeling guilty or isolated. He creates his art both to help and communicate with others, focusing on mental health-related matters. Through the years, he has earned a BA in Theology and BFA with a concentration in sculpture. As an artist, he is an advocate for veterans. When the opportunity arises, he guides and encourages many fellow wounded veterans to find a new language to express their pain and emotions – the language of art. Steven is well known for producing serialized artwork; he believes the repetition method helps dedramatize his past and is a form of discipline to understand the materials. 

Visual Voices is a lecture series hosted by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. We look forward to seeing you in person or online on Thursday, March 20, 4:45pm to 6:30 pm.

Adriana Monsalve (she /they) is an artist, educator, cultural worker and collaborative publisher working (mostly) in the photobook medium. Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text.

Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is an archivist and visual communicator who produces in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between race, gender, and immigrant adjacent experiences.

As an educator, she enacts radical imagination in the classroom daily. Monsalve believes it is the first step in building worlds we can safely live in. She says, “..art maps our journey toward liberation. To realize our freedom fantasies for our larger community, we also engage with education between the practices of imagination and creation. I am certain liberation comes in communal form, because the culture of white-supremacy that we were all born into, thrives on individualism.. In contrast, imagination taps into our desires, so that we can share (education) and realize them collectively (creation).”

This event will be held at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the link via email the day-of!

Join us on Tuesday, March 18, 5:30-7:30pm at Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery for the Reception of Offerings to the Potomac: Acknowledging Indigenous Place.

You will meet the curators and hear from School of Art alumni artists whose work are featured in the show!

Questions about the event should be emailed to Yassmin Salem (mailto: ysalem@gmu.edu)

Join us on Friday, March 7, 5-7pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for an evening read aloud and conversation by international and local writers: 2025 Cheuse Fellow: Klara Kalu; Prof. Vivek Narayanan: Author of "After"; Malik Thompson: Washington based writer; and Itoro Bassey: journalist and author. The evening is designed around the visit of Spring Cheuse Fellow: Danson Kahyana who will also be reading his creative work.

The evening will explore aspects of queerness and intimacy through literature and allyship. 

The boat (borrowed from songwriter Noah Kahan)  are the ideas that keep us afloat, conveying the beauty of the Republic of Imagination (borrowed from Azar Nafisi)! The images are from the cover of "After" by Vivek Narayanan. 

Featuring Danson Kahyana

The Cheuse Center is proud to announce Danson Kahyana as the Spring 2025 Cheuse Center Scholar. Kahyana, an esteemed writer and academic from Uganda, will visit the Washington area from March 2 to March 8, 2025.

This prestigious fellowship, supported by the Scholl Foundation, is dedicated to providing opportunities for writers at risk, offering them a space to create, reflect, and share their stories. Kahyana’s work—marked by its courage, depth, and humanity—has long amplified underrepresented narratives, making him an exceptional fit for this honor.

During his residency, Kahyana will engage with students, faculty, and the local literary community through public readings, and conversations about his work and the broader challenges faced by writers globally. 

We are thrilled to host Danson Kahyana and looks forward to the impactful contributions he will bring to the spring program. Stay tuned for updates on events and opportunities.

MORE ABOUT DANSON KAHYANA: Sylvester Danson Kahyana is a visiting professor in the English Department at Boston College. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and Research, Harvard Kennedy School, having survived a brutal attack on his life on April 26, 2022. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa (where he is an Associate Researcher in the English Department) and an MA and BA in Literature from Makerere University (where he was an Associate Professor in the Literature Department before he fled Uganda). Uganda’s contributing editor to Index on Censorship and a former board member of PEN International as well as a former President of Ugandan PEN, he has defended artistic freedom and human rights for over two decades. A published poet and anthologist, he has edited five books and published more than 30 scholarly papers. Some of the awards he has received include the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network Individual Award (2023), the Fulbright Research Fellowship Award (2021), and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Postdoctoral Award (2015).

ABOUT ITORO BASSEY: Itoro Bassey is the author of Faith (Malarkey Books, 2022) and a journalist at the BBC. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Slice, Catapult, and Hippocampus, among others. A new piece of hers 'How Eno Became Enobong' is forthcoming in Fence (March 2025). 
She is the recent winner of the W.S. Porter Prize for her short short story collection Ajebutter Woman that will published in 2027 through Regal House Publishing. This collection is poised to complicate notions surrounding identity and social dynamics while engaging readers with its rich storytelling. Some of the other awards she has received are from International Literary Seminars, Glimmer Train, and Prairie Schooner. She has received fellowships from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, the Edward Albee Foundation, and elsewhere. In 2018 she lived between Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia for five years which has broadened her perspective on diaspora and belonging. In her spare time, she supports writers in the Washington, DC area as a board member of The Inner Loop. 

ABOUT MALIK THOMPSON: Malik Thompson (he/they) is a Black queer person from Washington, DC. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Monson Arts. He can be found on IG via the handle @latesummerstar.

ABOUT VIVEK NARAYANAN: Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S. His new collection is After (NYRB Poets, 2022).  A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019. He teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.

ABOUT KLARA KALU: Klara Kalu is an MFA Creative Writing student specializing in Fiction at George Mason University. She writes contemporary stories that enlighten and offer insights into the intricacies of African narratives, focusing on themes of love, loss, and emotional depths of human connection. Her work explores the spaces between tradition and modernity, memory and reinvention, offering fresh perspectives on identity and belonging. With the Cheuse Fellowship, Klara is traveling to Barbados to explore the echoes of culture and kinship within the island’s communities. Through archival research, oral histories, and on-the-ground immersion, she aims to trace how ancestral ties have endured across generations despite displacement and erasure. Her project seeks to breathe life into forgotten stories, reconnecting threads between the Caribbean and Africa, and reimagining the ways in which history continues to shape contemporary diasporic experiences.

ABOUT NOTHING PERSONAL This exhibition closely examines the book, Nothing Personal (1964), a collaborative artwork in book form by two legendary American artists, James Baldwin, the African American writer, public intellectual, and civil rights activist, and Richard Avedon the Jewish fashion and portrait photographer. Learn more here:  https://www.masonexhibitions.org/exhibitions/nothing-personal-mea

Art work in this post is from the cover of "After", by Vivek Narayanan. This cover is from his Indian edition, published by Harper Collins.  

More information on the lineup to come! 

Join us on Thursday, March 6, 6-8pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for a film screening of ‘Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round’, followed by a brief Q&A with the filmmaker, Ilana Trachtman. The film is about the desegregation of Glen Echo Park, and it discusses the role that Howard University students played in leading this effort.

For almost 60 years, Glen Echo Amusement Park was the wholesome, beloved playground of white metropolitan Washington, DC. Every summer, tens of thousands enjoyed its Crystal Pool, wooden rollercoaster, Spanish Ballroom, and Tunnel of Love. But the Black children living nearby could only gawk from the road.

In June of 1960, three shocking, unprecedented events happened at “idyllic” Glen Echo Amusement Park:

• Howard University Students arrived up at the Park, and sat down on the carousel.

• White, middle-aged neighbors, largely Jewish, joined the protests.

• The American Nazi Party showed up.

AIN'T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND is the forgotten story of how those three events shook metropolitan Washington, forced sides, changed lives, and ignited sparks that flew out across the Civil Rights Movement for years to come.

Using just-discovered archival footage, and focusing on the stories of six individuals, viewers are transported to those heady days, when private businesses could choose their customers, and the walls between Black and white were so high that friendships were unimaginable.

AIN’T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND offers a rare intimate lens on one protest in the early Civil Rights Movement. Telling the story of one amusement park, one group of individuals, and one moment in time, the laser focus allows for deep understanding of the non-famous individuals whose efforts, sacrifices, and personal awakenings fueled the Civil Rights Movement. 

Tuesday, March 4, 2025 7:00 PM EST
Johnson Center, Cinema

A special screening of The Price of the Ticket, the documentary by award-winning filmmaker Karen Thorsen that explores the life and legacy of James Baldwin.

Following the screening, Karen Thorsen will be in conversation with  Leeya Mehta and Prof. Keith Clark to discuss Baldwin’s legacy, the making of the documentary, and its continued relevance in today’s world.

Join us at Mason Exhibitions Arlington on Thursday, February 27, 6-8pm for a conversation with the authors of Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp!

In Radical Paper, the authors discuss the contemporary breakthrough of using colored paper pulp as an integral element in creating art – as opposed to serving only as the surface on which art is created.

The book chronicles the rapid development of the movement over the last 70 years, and how early practitioners in the mid-20th century first began manipulating colored pulp, freeing it from its two-dimensional function as a substrate.

Mapping out new directions in using colored paper pulp, progressive papermakers, such as Douglass Morse Howell, Laurence Barker, and Kenneth Tyler, inspired the careers of generations of artists, including Pacita Abad, El Anatsui, Firelei Báez, Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Melvin Edwards, Helen Frankenthaler, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mona Hatoum, David Hockney, Jim Hodges, Eddie Martinez, Wangechi Mutu, Adam Pendleton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Alan Shields, who have taken this medium in fresh and unexpected directions.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lynn Sures creates multi-media works examining the juncture of geology, physics, and the origins of humans. She has been a SARF Fellow in Kenya and a US State Department American Artist Abroad in Sri Lanka. As an artist-in-residence, she made works at Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain, and the Press at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe. Collections that hold her works include US Dept. of State; Library of Congress; Yale University; Schomburg Collection, NY Public Library; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, Fabriano, Italy; Museum of Art & Photography, Bangalore, India; and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt. Sures is Professor Emerita, Corcoran College of Art & Design (GWU).

www.lynnsures.com

Michelle Samour’s work explores the intersections between science, technology, and the natural world, and the socio-political repercussions of redefining borders and boundaries. Her artist residencies include Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and The Banff Centre. She has exhibited her work at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Kohler Art Center, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She has received grants from the MA Cultural Council and a Society of Arts and Crafts NE Artist Award. Collections that hold her work include the International Paper Company, Meditech, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Watson Library. Samour is Professor Emerita of the SMFA at Tufts University.

https://www.michellesamour.com/

The Alan Cheuse International Writer’s Spring Scholar in Residence Oksana Maksymchuk will share selections from her powerful poetry collection, Still City amongst the current art exhibition in Gillespie Gallery, Morgan Ashcom: Abstract Land and Filing Company.

Gillespie Gallery is inside the Art and Design building of GMU Fairfax. The nearest paid visitor parking is at Shenandoah Parking Deck.

ABOUT OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK

Oksana Maksymchuk is a celebrated poet, translator, and essayist whose works resonate deeply within and beyond literary circles. Her poetry collections, translations, and essays have received international acclaim, positioning her as a vital voice in the contemporary literary landscape. Oksana’s impactful work has resonated widely, with her latest book, Still City, captivating readers with its profound explorations of resilience and identity. She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.

ABOUT MORGAN ASHCOM

Morgan Ashcom's multidisciplinary artworks and books explore the tension between fiction, myth and lived experience in the context of imperialism. Ashcom's work has been exhibited and published across the globe. He has received numerous awards including German Photobook and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Purchase Prize. His work has been featured in Le Monde, The Brooklyn Rail, Jewish Currents, and The British Journal of Photography. Ashcom is former faculty of Western Connecticut State University, Ithaca College, University of Hartford, Cornell University and the University of Virginia. He is also the Founding Director of Visible Records. He currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA

Join acclaimed author Moriel Rothman-Zecher for an engaging reading and discussion of his latest novel, Before All the World. He will be joined by multidusciplinary artist Morgan Ashcom amongst his current exhibition, Abstract Land and Filing Company at Gillespie Gallery inside the Art and Design Building of GMU Fairfax. The nearest paid visitor parking is Shenandoah Parking Deck.

Rothman-Zecher will share insights into his writing process and discuss themes explored in the novel, along with his broader body of work that continues to captivate readers and critics alike.

ABOUT MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novels Before All the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which was named an NPR Best Book of 2022, and Sadness Is a White Bird (Atria Books / Simon and Schuster), for which he received the National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ Honor, and which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, Nashville Review, The New York Times, The Paris Review’s Daily, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Moriel is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships for Literature (2017 & 2020), a Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship for Yiddish Cultural Studies (2018-2019), and holds an MFA in Poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he was the recipient of a Donald Hall Scholarship for Poets (2021-2023). Moriel teaches creative writing at Swarthmore College, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, and is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars’ MFA Program. 

ABOUT MORGAN ASHCOM

Morgan Ashcom's multidisciplinary artworks and books explore the tension between fiction, myth and lived experience in the context of imperialism. Ashcom's work has been exhibited and published across the globe. He has received numerous awards including German Photobook and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Purchase Prize. His work has been featured in Le Monde, The Brooklyn Rail, Jewish Currents, and The British Journal of Photography. Ashcom is former faculty of Western Connecticut State University, Ithaca College, University of Hartford, Cornell University and the University of Virginia. He is also the Founding Director of Visible Records. He currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA.

Visual Voices is a lecture series hosted by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. We look forward to seeing you in person or online on Thursday, February 20, 4:45pm to 6:30 pm.

Morgan Ashcom's multidisciplinary artworks and books explore the tension between fiction, myth and lived experience in the context of imperialism. Ashcom's work has been exhibited and published across the globe. He has received numerous awards including German Photobook and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Purchase Prize. His work has been featured in Le Monde, The Brooklyn Rail, Jewish Currents, and The British Journal of Photography.

Ashcom is former faculty of Western Connecticut State University, Ithaca College, University of Hartford, Cornell University and the University of Virginia. He is also the Founding Director of Visible Records.

This event will be held at the Harris Theater and RSVP is required to receive the zoom link the day-of the event via email!

Harris Theater is building #27 on the campus map and the nearest paid visitor parking is at the Mason Pond Parking Deck.

Questions and concerns should be emailed to Jeffrey Kenney at jkenney5@gmu.edu.

The Baldwin100, the Cheuse Center and Busboys and Poets present:

Just Love: A Dinner Salon with Jazz & Poetry inspired by James Baldwin
to celebrate the Baldwin100

Venue: Busboys and Poets, 14th and V
Time: 5:30pm
  
The night will open with Martheaus Perkins, who will read his poem dedicated to Baldwin. Then we will have Zeina Azzam and E. Ethelbert Miller perform poems, and chat about love, Baldwin, and their own creativity. The evening’s headliner is Lena Seikaly and her quartet.

In collaboration between the Cheuse International Writer’s Center and the Reston Community Center, the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” will be screened at the CenterStage on Febuary 5th, 2025. 

Wednesday, February 5, 2025 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EST
the CenterStage, 2310 Colts Neck Rd, Reston, VA

I Am Not Your Negro, 2016 (94 minutes)

"Using James Baldwin's unfinished final manuscript, Remember This House, this documentary follows the lives and successive assassinations of three of the author's friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., delving into the legacy of these iconic figures and narrating historic events using Baldwin's original words and a flood of rich archival material. An up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, this film is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of BlackLivesMatter.”