Group shows are challenging and a group show with 48 artists is daunting. In preparation for my visit I scoured the web and social media for more information about their backgrounds. Fortunately, it is a new world where each artist has detailed bios, CVs, and works readily available at the touch of a button. They were selected from 1,500 entries after an open call, and have a tight or loose link to the DMV (Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia) area in keeping with one of The Phillips Collection's missions to support local artists. The juried exhibition Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise is divided into five rather abstract themes: Gazing, Archiving, Challenging, Processing and Experimenting.
The poetic title is followed by a reference to a song from Chico Buarque, a beloved singer who fought oppression during the Brazilian dictatorship, though in the United States he is best known among Samba and Bossa Nova aficionados. Setting a partisan undertone, the exhibition's introductory panel casts the November 2024 U.S. presidential election as a "significant political shift", showcasing only works created after the event. Seven pieces are displayed in the foyer on the third floor, with only one from a male artist, reflecting the selection heavily geared toward women, who make up three-quarters of the selected candidates. In diverse media and style, the sample of works covers an array of subjects, from personal struggles to international crises. Pregnancy, chronic pain, colonialism, and war inspire them as they take us to the Philippines, Myanmar, and Gaza. A convoluted wall text attempts to connect the pieces only to confuse the message.
A children's song leads to the next gallery which contains an immersive installation. Visitors can sit on a bench to watch a video of a row of anonymous women wearing hijabs, or view a chalkboard covered with inscriptions in Farsi and their translation in English. Classroom Solidarities: Jin Jiyan Azadi (2022-26), the second prize winner, is an ongoing work by Mojdeh Rezaeipour and also includes a wall covered by analog collages of classrooms and schoolgirls gesturing in protest to complete the display about women/womxn rights. The visitor's participation is encouraged through pencils, cards, and a fake mailbox to share thoughts about the impact of the international movement "Woman, Life, Freedom". Filled with heavy thoughts, I walked into the twin gallery featuring a formal display of eleven works selected to explore "matter", taken in the literal and figurative sense. The media stay traditional: watercolor, acrylic, oil, charcoal, and yarn, alongside an experiment with cyanotype. The predominant subject involves self-healing through art following traumatic events. It includes a multi-self-portrait of the only transgender artist featured in the show expressing dysphoria through art in their search for identity. Finding "Who am I?" becomes the focus.
By now, the five themes announced in the press release are lost in the verbose comments of the wall texts and the labels next to each work. About twenty of them occupy the main gallery divided by a partition. The subjects are varied, ranging from sexism to climate change, identity struggles, capitalism, dementia... Untitled Windows Series 21 (2024), Erin Fostel's drawings on drafting film, is an empty urban landscape, mysterious, dreamy and poetic, an architectural composition of superimposed planes melting into one another. A nearby beachscape also captured my attention. Mark Armbruster's photograph overlaid with painted charts, is a sobering reminder of destructive coastal erosion. From a distance, I recognized the centuries-old oak trees from City Park in New Orleans. Alexandra Silverthorne symbolically soaked a photograph of the giant trees in Mississippi River water revealing dry cracked soil at their feet and underlines the precarity of their future. Artists grouped under the label 'diaspora' take us on a journey from Iran to Mexico via Chile, India, Lebanon, with works inspired by the cultures of their homeland through ancestral techniques, and reignite the debate between fine art and craft. In the next gallery, the mixed-media work by Cianne Fragione, Meriggi e Ombre / Waves Chatter / Tangle (2025) tells a story of hard physical labor: heavy canvas is worked to build a knotted construction next to an abandoned, rusting industrial artefact. Above on the wall, a small painting of a simple yellow shack set against a Mediterranean blue sky completes the assemblage, alluding to Arte Povera. I found its simplicity and rawness compelling.
Across the room, what appears to be a large snake orange and black climbing the wall from floor to ceiling is a scroll from Kei Ito. Sungazing Scroll (2024), the first prize winner, is a performance of sorts, a recording of 108 of the artist's breaths captured on C-type photographic paper later exposed to the sun. The photogram aligns with Ito's practice which is deeply inspired by his family history and aims at denouncing the use of nuclear weapons. In 2024, the Japanese-American artist participated in the 30th birthday of The Kreeger Museum, a Washington D.C. local staple, with two daunting chemigrams of charred human remains left by the WWII bombings in Japan. Other works include a quilt of a drowning Statue of Liberty losing her crown, a poem in Arabic swirling into a black-and-red abstraction, and notes from an artist's mother, written during her psychiatric internment. The show concludes on a thunderous note with Emily Francisco's installation 2025 July 9: A Thunderstorm // When Systems Collide (2025), a dramatic grand finale of tornado warnings, rumbles and flashing lights.
The art marathon can take an emotional toll on the audience, surrounded by mostly hopeless, joyless works reckoning with personal trauma, human or natural catastrophes, and overall existential angst through various media, styles and techniques. Overwhelmed by the variety of cultural, geographical, historical, and political references, the viewer may just walk past, their capacity for empathy dulled by the sheer number of works. Early on, the curators make their viewpoint clear, underscored by an introduction that alludes to a "spirit of defiance and hope... despite political oppression," borrowing the words of musician Chico Buarque and looming large over the selection of the works. The number and diversity of entrants reflect the rich artistic landscape of the community leaving us to wonder about the remaining 1,400+ participants! For me, the best artists are those who succeed in moving me, even if I can't personally relate to their subject matter. Ultimately each visitor will have a different experience at the show. As a final thought, art can be a vehicle for activism, but cannot be reduced to it. Art is more than activism.
Photographs by the author
Alexandra Chiou "Becoming Light" (2025)
Pamela Crocket "Sub-Cortical 2" (2025)
Kei Ito "Sungazing Scroll" (2024), First Prize Winner
Se Jong Cho "Suspended Semiosis: Tile Mountains" (2024)
