A New Season of Art

A new season of art exhibitions at St. Michael’s began with “The Quilted Word,” featuring art quilts by Terry Peckarsky. In addition to a well-attended Artist Talk on September 22, the exhibition attracted the attention of a number of visitors to our blockbuster Block Party on October 5. The show concluded earlier this month, the first in our series of 2019–2020 exhibitions to note on your calendars.

For Advent in December, St. Michael’s joins the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH) to present “Visualizing Our Community, Ourselves: APAH Data Walk with Photographs by Matt Swanson.” Planning is underway for an interactive activity using Matt’s images of our neighborhood and the Data Walk — a series of compelling and awareness-building posters featuring information about Arlington and its residents. Details about the upcoming exhibition will appear in a future issue of The Guardian, on St. Michael’s Website, and in service bulletins.

Beginning Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020, St. Michael’s plays host to “Contemporary Artists Interpret Stations of the Cross.” The exhibition will commemorate artists’ unique, contemporary interpretations of each event at the end of Christ’s life, from condemnation to burial, as recorded in the gospels or inferred from religious legends. Early Christians’ practice of visiting and praying over the places of Jesus’s Passion dates to the 5th Century in the Holy Land but became common in Europe in the early 15th Century; devotions continue today. The artists participating in this not-to-be-missed exhibition, which will be on view until early April, come from around our region and beyond the DMV.

From April 29 to May 28, 2020, the exquisite layered paper artistry of Ronni Jolles will be on view in “Mothers at Work.” Ronni, who uses beautiful hand-made papers from around the world, describes her technique as “painting with paper.” For this solo show, she will present for the first time anywhere a subject she’s long held close to her heart.

Parishioners returning from summer vacations will find “The Divine Feminine: A Group Exhibition” in the Parish Hall. Running from September 9 to October 8, 2020, the exhibition paintings — all exploring the notion of the Divine Feminine — will include landscapes, still lifes, collages, and abstracts in oils, watercolors, acrylics, and alcohol inks. The participating artists will be Elise Ritter, Linda Maldonado, Kat Jamieson, Deb Taylor, and Beth Hudgins.