Friday: Eddie Palmieri at the Library of Congress
South Bronx-raised pianist Eddie Palmieri established his musical reputation decades ago by innovatively combining the Afro Caribbean dance music he heard growing up in the 1950s with the African American jazz. Now 87, Palmieri continues to love performing live where he often enthusiastically shakes his head and smiles while energetically pounding his fingers and sometimes his forearms and elbows on the keys. Although Palmieri has sometimes worked with vocalists, and emphasized more straight-ahead rhythms, he often, as he will be doing at the Library of Congress, digs into his Latin jazz songbook that highlights his ability to solo and improvise with his band. It’s this technique that led the National Endowment of the Arts to award him a Jazz Master in 2013, and he has won various Grammys over the years. Palmieri’s acclaimed skills also draw from the classical piano lessons he took as a youngster, the brief period as a teenager where he played timbales in his uncle’s Latin dance music orchestra. His work has been fueled by his own social justice values. Thus, Palmieri can play sweet and touching chords as he did solo on a song for his late wife Iraida Palmieri in a 2016 NPR Tiny Desk appearance, get noisy with his combo and use unusual time signatures, or combine all these different aspects as he did on his song “Justicia.” For this show Palmieri will be playing with longtime bandmates Luques Curtis on bass, Louis Fouche on alto saxophone, and Camilo Molina on drums. They’ll help provide the mix of dissonance and funky polyrhythms that Palmieri has become legendary for providing. The son of parents who emigrated from Puerto Rico, the charismatic Palmieri is likely to further enhance the evening with stories about his life between songs. Eddie Palmieri plays at 8 p.m. on Oct. 18 at the Library of Congress’ Coolidge Auditorium, 10 1st St. SE. loc.gov. Sold out, but Free RUSH passes will be available on site two hours before the concert. —Steve Kiviat
Eddie Palmieri, courtesy of the Library of Congress
Opens Saturday: Mixed Up, Cut Up at Pyramid Atlantic
Pyramid Atlantic is known locally as a hub for artist studio space and workshops, but it’s also a hub for printmaking and paper arts more broadly, attracting workshop instructors and exhibitors from around the country and the globe. Its most recent guest is Houston-based artist Carlos Hernandez, showing an exhibit of his silkscreens and collages, as well as hosting an artist talk and two workshops. Hernandez creates both commercial and fine art works, creating concert posters and projects for corporations while also exhibiting widely, from small galleries all the way to the Smithsonian and Library of Congress. He’s worked collaboratively, founding the printmaking space Burning Bones Press in Houston and joining up with the group Outlaw Printmakers. Over the course of his storied career, he has racked up accolades including recognition from the Communication Arts Typography Annual for his playful and inventive lettering work and serving as artist in residence for the legendary Hatch Show Print letterpress shop. Mixed Up, Cut Up features works that are vibrant, frenetic, and jampacked with details, rewarding close looking. There is a level of planning that must go into making multicolored prints in order to get all the pieces to line up, and Hernandez’s work at times is meticulously planned; at other times it embraces the chaos and unpredictability of the process. His workshop on Oct. 17 (from 6 to 9 p.m.) preceding the exhibit revolves around using unconventional or mixed media in daily sketchbook use, and his own doodlings and explorations in this realm are the foundation of the finished works. Mixed Up, Cut Up runs from Oct. 19 to Nov. 24 at Pyramid Atlantic, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. Wednesday and Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Friday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. An artist talk and opening reception start at 5 p.m. on Oct. 19. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. Free. —Stephanie Rudig
Closes Oct. 26: Gary Anthes at Studio Gallery
“Abandoned Farm, Kimball, Nebraska, 2023” by Gary Anthes
A photographer’s road trip through the sparsely populated west is, at this point, something of an American cliche. Gary Anthes’ exhibit Dust and Destiny on the Great Plains includes some of the expected subject matter—abandoned general stores, dilapidated farm buildings, boarded-up Main Street shops, dusty vintage cars, cracked and peeling grain elevators—and it offers a Dust Bowl warning about looming environmental decay. Still, the series benefits from its surprisingly sprightly mood, offering a striking contrast between the decay on view and the glorious light that illuminates it. Anthes—whose most notable prior exhibit in D.C. involved placing natural and man-made objects against the backdrop of interiors of an abandoned 200-year-old barn on his property—made his current collection of images during a 1,000-mile, back-road jaunt through seven states. Several of Anthes’ images feature facades with compellingly rhythmic wooden shingling, one of which includes an appealing arrangement of broken windows, in an echo of Minor White’s “The Three Thirds.” Another image, of a row of grain elevators alongside a receding rail line in Yuma, Colorado, conjures the Neoclassicism of Charles Sheeler’s painted depiction of Ford’s River Rouge plant. Anthes’ finest image may be one from eastern Colorado. It features a gently undulating field of grasslands under a mesmerizing sky in shades of blue; against this elemental pairing, a long piece of irrigation equipment jumps and snakes backward into the frame, providing a bracing sense of three dimensionality. Gary Anthes’ Dust and Destiny on the Great Plains runs through Oct. 26 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. Wednesday through Friday 1 to 6 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. studiogallerydc.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson
Closes Oct. 26: Perspectives, a Morton Fine Arts’ *a pop-up project, at Washington Square
From Perspectives. Credit: Jarrett Hendrix
Morton Fine Arts brings another installment of its trademarked *a pop-up project, titled Perspectives, to Washington Square. In a press release, Morton promises that this free exhibit of “’nature-based abstraction” will “communicate elements from nature directly” as experienced by the featured artists, who have been “[f]reed from the limitations of traditional representation.” Earlier this year, Morton Fine Arts staged another pop-up exhibit at Gallery B in Bethesda: Creating in Abstraction: A Pop-up Project Group Exhibition of 11 Global Contemporary Artists. Two of the highest-profile artists featured in that exhibit, Morton heavyweights Rosemary Feit Covey and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, return for Perspectives. The other artists featured in Perspectives are Natalie Cheung, Hannelie Coetzee, Maya Freelon, Hiromitsu Kuroo, Eto Otitigbe, Andrei Petrov, and Jenny Wu. In interpreting the theme, the artists’ imaginations have varied widely: from Tzu-Lan Mann’s signature blending of Eastern and Western brushwork to Otitigbe’s blue-toned aluminum plate engravings; and from Freelon’s neon tissue ink monoprint Eclipse series to Wu’s latex-and-resin wood panel pieces. Wu’s panels, notably, feature titles that would not be out of place on a Fall Out Boy album, such as “DMV Still Does Not Default to Department of Motor Vehicles For Me,” “This Is Almost As Exciting As the Bylaw Review,” and “I Checked the Tag But I Don’t Understand the Tag.” With the unbeatable price of free and a wide variety of styles to survey, Perspectives is an opportunity for anyone who is modern art-curious but has been afraid to commit. Perspectives runs through Oct. 26 at Washington Square, 1050 Connecticut Ave. NW. Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. mortonfineart.com. Free. —Allison R. Shely
Ongoing: Mari Calai’s GENESIS at Photoworks
By Mari Calai
You can’t accuse photographer Mari Calai of lacking inspiration. Calai, in her capacity as artist in residence at Photoworks, has assembled a collection of works of unusual breadth. In one series, Calai—a native of Bucharest, Romania, who now lives in Falls Church—photographs doilies, but with a fuzzed approach that softens their fine, lacy details into near ethereality. In another series, Calai produces “chemigrams,” cameraless images made in the darkroom using light and chemicals, which she prints and attaches directly, without fuss, to the wall. The patterns in these chemigrams range from Japanese-style filigrees to abstract expressionist blobs; their toning ranges from mocha to an unexpected shade of pink. Other works teeter on the edge between realism and abstraction; some images suggest a raging fire, others like astronomical orbs, while others could pass for a foggy mountain valley—often printed on paper with subtle textures. The most impressive images veer a little closer to realism, notably a scene that appears to be sand dunes, a look upward into leaves and branches, and a spiral shell, highlighted with gold leaf. Mari Calai’s GENESIS runs through Nov. 10 at Photoworks at Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. glenechophotoworks.org. Free. —Louis Jacobson
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