Kohl Gallery
Located in Gibson Center for the Arts, Kohl Gallery is Washington College's flagship venue for visual arts programming
Devotions is centered within Sobia Ahmad’s ongoing connection to the Pando Forest in Utah. This ancient grove of 47,000 aspen trees is considered Earth’s oldest living organism. Pando stretches over 100 acres and is unified by a single immense root system, making it ‘a forest of one’. In response to this unique and living site, Ahmad created One Big Eye. This hand-processed 16mm film transferred to HD was made in collaboration with Benny Shaffer and weaves scientific, folkloric, and mystical ways of relating to Pando. Writing about this forest and its broader influence on her artistic practice Ahmad shares: “I see Pando’s root system as a guiding metaphor for interconnectedness. I am interested in the theme of entanglement through the lens of Oneness in Sufi mysticism, the power of film as a medium to remind us of our shared reality, and the political implications of relating to each other and a more-than-human world as an interconnectedness whole.”
In addition to One Big Eye, Devotions includes Ahmad’s premier of a handmade accordion book, thirty feet long, entitled The Breath within the Breath. The book depicts a single continuous photograph taken on one roll of 35mm film as Ahmad stands in the center of the forest and holds the camera to her chest capturing the image as she turns in time with her breath. The Breath within the Breath’s title is a verse from the South Asian mystic poet Kabir. Evoking the dance of the Sufi dervishes, this work engages with the notion of embodied prayer.
The artist will also be exhibiting a miniscule gelatin silver print of the moon from her series Punctuations. Ahmad’s films are developed through her experiments in alternative photochemistry. Like Jemery Lynch who generations before her developed his photographs in Lake Ontario where chemicals from Eastman Kodak’s Rochester factory flowed from the mouth of the Genesee River, Ahmad’s work stands out amongst a lineage of artists whose practice is informed and energized by the collateral imperfections created through a laborious environmentally-conscious process. Through years of trial and error, Ahmad mixes a careful selection of groceries including coffee, Vitamin C powder, salt, and lemon juice over the kitchen sink to tease a seemingly infinite galaxy of stars from the sludge of wet coffee grounds for her To become dust that sings its melody to the night 2024 gelatin silver print. For Ahmad, this devotional practice, “honors the materiality of the film, the ecological situation at large, and my own contemplative practice.”
Washington College's First Three Black Graduates from left to right:
Thomas Edgar Morris, Class of 1962
Patricia Godbolt, Class of 1964
Shirley Dale Patterson, Class of 1965
This important project is the culmination of 2 years of work Patterson completed during his Frederick Douglass Visiting Fellowship at The Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and the result of a year-long collaboration between Patterson, Kohl Gallery, and The Starr Center. The project was additionally awarded a 2020 Chesapeake Heartland Fellowship and the virtual exhibit is hosted and supported by Chesapeake Heartland.
About Kohl Gallery
Kohl Gallery fosters the study and understanding of art through a diverse range of exhibitions and public programs. Embracing its liberal arts context, Kohl Gallery presents fresh perspectives on historical and contemporary art and promotes interdisciplinary conversations about historical, social, and cultural issues of significance to Washington College, Chestertown, and beyond.
Each year, Kohl Gallery presents a series of curated exhibits that emphasize a broad range of aesthetic and intellectual concerns of relevance to our current society. Each spring, Kohl Gallery also hosts two student exhibits: the '100 Proof' juried student exhibition, and an annual senior capstone exhibition presenting the works of graduating Studio Art seniors.
Kohl Gallery organizes diverse programming throughout the academic year. With each exhibit, the gallery hosts a combination of artist talks, public receptions, and scholarly presentations. Kohl Gallery also partners regularly with Washington College classes and groups from the Chestertown community to create unique, interdisciplinary opportunities for engagement with the works on view.
Location
Gibson Center for the Arts
300 Washington Avenue
Chestertown, MD 21620
Kohl Gallery is located on the first floor of the Gibson Center for the Arts. Parking is available in the lot behind Gibson and in the lots next to the Roy Kirby, Jr. Stadium. Please use the spots marked Visitor if parking prior to 3pm.
Visitor Information
Kohl Gallery on Washington College's campus is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Walk-in Gallery Visitation Hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 1:30-5pm
Wednesday 4-7pm
Saturday 12-3pm
COVID PROTOCOL:
*Masks are OPTIONAL in Kohl Gallery. This is subject to change based on Washington College COVID Policy.
General Information:
- Admission is free.
- Kohl Gallery is closed between exhibitions and during all college breaks.
- Photography may be permitted on a show to show basis.
- For security reasons, all bags may be subject to search upon entering the Gallery.
Accessibility:
Kohl Gallery aims to adhere to all ADA guidelines in its exhibit preparations and installations. For more information or to make an accommodation request please contact Gallery Director, Tara Gladden.
Contact Kohl Gallery
Jason Patterson
Interim Director for Kohl Gallery
Email: jpatterson3FREEwashcoll
Follow Us!
Follow Kohl Gallery on Instagram: @kohlgallery
Follow Kohl Gallery on Facebook: @kohlgallery
SPONSORS
Kohl Gallery is is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org)
ARCHIVE: PAST EXHIBITS AND PROGRAMS:
2023-24 Season
Exhibition: October 24-December 9
Opening Reception featuring a live performance by Verónica Peña: Tuesday, October 24, 4:30-6:30pm
Art History Talk by Professor Benjamin Tilghman: Abstractions Pre-Histories: Color, Pattern, and Line in Medieval and Islamic Art: Thursday November 16, 4:30pm Litrenta Lecture Hall, Toll Science Building
COLOR SURFACE SPACE & The Abstract Imagination includes abstract works on paper, paintings, and sculpture from the 1960s to the present created by artists working in the mid-Atlantic region. 4 de Kooning lithographs recently donated to Washington College serve as the impetus for the exhibition. These works set the stage for an installation that explores formal elements associated with abstraction such as legacies of modernism, painterly vs. graphic styles, individual uses of color, line, shape, and form and the role of the imagination in both the creation and viewing of abstract art.
Historically, it presents works created by artists associated with or influenced by the NY School of Abstract Expressionism and various waves of the Washington Color School. It moves into contemporary practice with the work of artists extended from these movements into minimalism, post-minimalism, and conceptual art. Finally, it presents a selection of abstract works created by notable contemporary living artists in the region.
In addition to the 4 de Kooning lithographs and presenting the work of regional contemporary artists, it features a large selection of works created by historically significant artists borrowed from the collection of Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD. In its focus on the mid-Atlantic, the inclusion of works from this important collection highlights a rich cultural resource we have right here on the Eastern Shore, bringing a museum level experience to our community.
The combination of works by both iconic masters and contemporary artists presents a dialogue between modern and contemporary approaches and mindsets. It also offers the opportunity to consider not only varying formal approaches to abstraction in the ways artists navigate color, surface, and space but also the capacity of abstraction to engage the imagination in myriad ways.
Special programming includes a live performance created in response to the exhibition by NY-based artist Verónica Peña, and a talk entitled “Abstractions Pre-Histories: Color, Pattern, and Line in Medieval and Islamic Art” offered by Washington College Art History Professor Benjamin Tilghman, further expanding formal and historical considerations of abstraction.
Artists in the exhibition include Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Paul Jenkins, Pat Steir, Richard Tuttle, Leon Berkowitz, Sam Gilliam, Paul Reed, Terry Parmelee, Anne Truitt, Natessa Amin, Adrienne Gaither, Heather Harvey, Claudia “Aziza” Gibson-Hunter, Andy Martinelli Clark, Brooke Rogers, Bill Schmidt, and Hae Won Sohn.
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2022-23 Season
100 Proof Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition
Each year students across the Washington College campus from all majors are invited
to submit their artwork for inclusion in this professional juried exhibition. Join
us for the opening reception on March 24 from 4:30-6pm. Free and open to the public.
Light refreshments will be served.
This year's juror is WC alum, Kris Kelley. Kris earned her B.A. at Washington College in Psychology and Studio Art. She moved to Philadelphia to pursue her Master’s of Fine Art and Certificate in Teaching at Temple University. In 2022, she returned to the Eastern Shore with her husband. She is a professional photographer, practicing artist, an arts educator and administrator. She is currently serving as Arts Education Coordinator at RiverArts. Kelley gives a talk on March 30 at 5pm at Larrabee Arts Center..
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Kohl Gallery and the Rose O'Neill Literary House present:
EXHIBITION AND VISITING ARTIST PROGRAM
EXHIBITION:
January 30 - March 7, 2023, Exhibition in Kohl Gallery
SmooOOoOoooooOooth Operator: the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior
Walk-in Gallery Hours: Tues., Thurs., Fri., 1:30-5pm, Wed., 4-7pm, Sat., 12-3pm
Kohl Gallery and the Rose O’Neill Literary House are pleased to announce the solo exhibition SmooOOoOoooooOooth Operator: the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior, featuring the work of artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Rasheed will present photographs, videos, drawings, and prints on various substrates. Together, these works create an evolving ecosystem of Rasheed’s ongoing research into machine learning and its relationship to translation, Islamic mysticism, divination practices, the eroticism of constraint and edging, and call-and-response traditions.
A learner foremost, Rasheed’s practice grapples with the poetics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. With interest in the rituals and technologies we use to generate, share, and conceal knowledge, Rasheed’s sprawling practice includes architecturally-scaled Xerox-based collages; large-scale public installations; publications; prints; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; performance scores; poems/poetic gestures; video; and other forms yet to be determined. SmooOOoOoooooOooth Operator: the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior continues her inquiries into learning and knowledge production through an iterative process that began in 2020. As she worked through this process, she considered Walter Benjamin’s 1923 assertion that
Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course.
In September 2020, Rasheed was invited by P! to facilitate a generative writing activity over Zoom. She asked participants to select the text nearest to them and type four words into the chat window. Using these words, Rasheed had 37 minutes to combine these words into a piece of writing. In 2021, Rasheed was invited to present at the Computer Mouse Conference and Rasheed presented Algorithmic Music Composition Using Approximate Mouse Coordinates. Inspired by FLUXUS member Benjamin Patterson’s Ants (1960-62), Rasheed reviewed the screen recording of her 2020 writing process with P! and translated the mouse coordinates into sound by creating a simple algorithm that established a relationship between the concentration of mouse locations in different quadrants to output sound. In early 2022, Rasheed continued to play with this piece of writing through OuLiPo tools like N + 7 and other constrained writing techniques, arriving at a sentence that felt most akin to Lyn Hejinian’s description of an “open text.”
the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior
In late 2022, for the first iteration of Smooooooooooooooth Operator at University of Georgia - Athens, Rasheed worked with the sentence above in collaboration with a text-to-image machine learning tool called MidJourney. Using a specific syntax, text tokenization, and characteristic commands, Rasheed created a series of output images which she combined with her existing work and gestures to create new compositions. These four works show up as large asemic prints printed on acetate, silk, photo paper, and CNC-carved piece mounted on wood. Alongside these works are several photographs and a video work, Smooth Operetta plays in the space. It morphs Sade’s well-known Smooth Operator into a series of absurd lyrics that riff on both OuLiPo practices and early GPT-2 outputs. The 2023 continuation of the work at Kohl Gallery includes new wall and paper drawings and a reimagined installation of the existing work. Foregrounded is Rasheed’s concern with the “menace of smoothness” or the tendency toward standardization and forced patterning by disregarding dirty data (or noise) in the service of fulfilling the audience’s expectations. Thinking alongside Prem Krishnamurthy’s notions of “bumpiness” and Harryette Mullen’s discussion of mistranslation and slippage, SmooOOoOoooooOooth Operator: the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior is invested in modes of reading, writing, thinking, and being that embrace the in-progress, the unfinished, the feral. Often concerned with the stages leading up to rendering an image or text, rather then the resulting output only, SmooOOoOoooooOooth Operator: the eternal outlays ennoble and rekindle an unlikely savior invites us into an ongoing process and unfinished works.
EVENTS:
*For the health and safety of our visitors and our staff (who are immune-compromised people), please bring a mask with you to the events. Thank you for your empathy!
January 30, 5:30pm, Tawes Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts
Lecture: The Erotics of Translation
In this lecture, Rasheed will build on her September 2022 Poetry Project presentation to explore translation as a container to explore how and why we desire comprehension across fields of difference. Exhibition opening reception immediately following the lecture in Kohl Gallery.
January 31, 5:30pm, Rose O’Neill Literary House
Workshop: Feral Play
In this workshop, participants are invited to play! Participants will be invited to perform a series of writing and drawing prompts encouraging us to think about the relationships between copies, mimics, and iterations.
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they), grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. They are a recipient of a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. They are an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and a Mentor-in-Residence with NEW Inc. Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.
This program is presented collaboratively by Kohl Gallery and the Rose O’Neill Literary House in celebration of its 50th Anniversary and is sponsored in part by the Hedgelawn Foundation and the Maryland State Arts Council. The exhibition Smooooooooooooooth Operator was first shown at University of Georgia-Athens and we are happy to host this second iteration of the project at Washington College.
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Inauguration Opening Reception and Exhibition Tour
Celebrate Washington College’s innovative spirit and unique history as a premiere teaching and research center for American pyrotechnics through the impressive medium of light art. Join Kohl Gallery Director and Curator Tara Gladden for a tour that begins at the Radiant Material group light exhibition in Kohl Gallery and culminates at the Radiant Echo permanent light installation in the McLain Atrium of the Toll Science Center at sunset.
OPENING RECEPTION: RADIANT ECHO STUDENT PHOTO CONTEST EXHIBITION: October 27, 4:30pm, Kohl Gallery. Contest winners will be announced and photos chosen by Juror, Roxana Azar will be on display. Light refreshments will be served.
Kohl Gallery in conjunction with the Art + Art History Department at Washington College is pleased to present, nothing to do but be with ourselves, the 2022 Studio Art Senior Capstone Exhibition, on view from April 22 - May 13. An opening reception featuring short artist talks presented by each artist will be held on Friday, April 22 from 4:30-6:30pm. Light refreshments will be served. The reception and ongoing exhibition are free and open to the public. Join us to celebrate these artists' accomplishments. All are warmly invited to attend.
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Artist Talk by this years' Juror, Hae Won Sohn is supported in part by Phi Beta Kappa, Theta of Maryland.
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Inspired by a photograph from 1918 depicting an all-female survey crew, the project encompasses experimental workshops, exhibitions and transdisciplinary research. To date there have been six workshops held at field stations in the USAmerican West. These interactive and field-based gatherings flourish at the intersections of art, science, and imagination and have featured time traveling pre-apocalyptic performances, storytelling walks, the study of edges and desert ecotones, the mapping of ant homes, reimagined sculptural leveling rods, emergent and site-responsive voice, song, poetry and breath cameras to name just a few. Over the past 2 years Mapping Meaning has also generated 4 issues of an interdisciplinary journal with our most recent focused on “Life after the Anthropocene.”
This exhibition, "Encounters and Entanglements: The Art of Mapping Meaning," features artwork from those within the collective to highlight ways experimental, process-driven methods as well as interdisciplinary and collaborative practices offer up avenues for agency and transformation: plants become sculpture and image; participatory performance doubles as community action; family history uncovers environmental legacy; birds communicate the future; poetry speaks new forms into being; and collaborative processes make and unmake worlds. Utilizing divergent approaches and a diversity of media, each artist or collaborative project examines the messy and complicated yet lively and beautiful encounters between people and more-than-human worlds. Together they reveal ways that our ecological condition is directly entangled with how we see ourselves as individuals and how as individuals we live in relationship with each other.
This program is supported in part by the Hedgelawn Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org) and Phi Beta Kappa, Washington College Chapter.
OPENING EVENTS: OCTOBER 20, 2021
All events are FREE and OPEN to the public.
MASKS REQUIRED FOR ALL IN-PERSON EVENTS
Jahan Bose's Kohl Gallery exhibit, "RENEW," will include a selection of saris, paintings, prints, sculptures, artist books, and performance videos that represent her wide-ranging socially engaged practice and recent work exploring issues surrounding climate change within the context of COVID quarantine with communities in Bangladesh and Washington DC. The exhibit will be accompanied by an artist talk and a climate pledge workshop in which our community's pledges will create a new climate sari.
Learn more about Jahan Bose's work and community engaged process here: