Margaret Sanger, 2022, dye, ink, spray enamel, acrylic, 28” x 23”
ELLYN WEISS
Artist Statement
I am a visual artist in two and three dimensions and an independent curator, with studios in Mt. Rainier, MD and Truro, MA. I have exhibited widely over the past 25 years, in over 25 solo shows and many juried and curated group shows and been reviewed regularly by the Washington Post and other media. I work in a wide variety of materials; my recent shows have included work made with encaustic, tar, monoprint on acrylic, wire and plastic dip and recycled plastic, in addition to the more traditional drawing and painting media.
I believe in engagement as an artist with the issues that face our community and our world. For many years, my work has been concerned with environmental and political issues. I have mounted collaborative installations on the climate change-caused melting of the polar icecaps (National Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC and the McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA; the destruction of coral reefs (Artists and Makers, Rockville, MD); and the movement of tropical diseases northward (Otis Street Arts Project, Mt. Rainier, MD). I am currently preparing an exhibition for the American University Museum called The Human Flood, about the mass migration around the globe caused by climate change.
I am also co-founder of the group ArtWatchDC and conceived the One House Project, a collaboration of 300 artists celebrating the strength that diversity brings our country. One House was shown in Touchstone Gallery in 2017 and expanded in Black Rock Center for the Arts in 2018.
I have co-curated a series of four group shows beginning in 2009 called the Zeitgeist Exhibitions, each themed around an issue that was of particular salience at that moment in time, ranging from pervasive surveillance to the effects on the human brain of endless streams of digital information and the meaning of the election of America’s first African American President.
I serve on the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national environmental organization and am past President of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. I was a founding Board member of the Touchstone Foundation for the Arts in DC and of Artomatic, the episodic artistic free-for-alls begun in 1999.
Past Group Exhibitions: Structures of Feeling, 2022 Fractal Nature, 2021 Forever is composed of Nows, 2020 Active directions of the mind, 2019 Facing Disjunction, 2018