Kwaku Ofori-Yirenkyi’s work is an impression and expression of the third-culture experience—of living between inherited traditions and the realities of the places he has come to call home. Drawing from his experience as a Ghanaian raised in America, he explores migration, memory, identity, belonging, and the ways culture transforms across borders and generations.

Through portraiture, abstraction, African textiles, Adinkra symbolism, and layered mixed-media surfaces, Absku creates figures and environments that exist between the familiar and the reconstructed. Eyes, mouths, fragmented faces, patterns, and recurring figures become a visual language for what is remembered, adapted, lost, and carried forward.

Working with acrylic paint, oil pastels, fabric, and sculptural materials such as clay foam, he builds tactile surfaces that blur the boundary between painting and relief. His practice explores identity not as something fixed, but as something continually negotiated and becoming.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Kamille Simone has long viewed abstraction as a form of decolonization for Black visual artists, prompting a deeper exploration of hard-edge painting in 2019. This period produced Triangle Painting, which challenges the traditional rectangular canvas through a triangular surface, flag-inspired queer colors, and a grid that functions as both an autobiographical and mystical motif. Drawing Table, a disassembled table gifted by a queer mentor, marked a departure from an illustration-based practice.

Simone’s work has since increasingly drawn from time spent outdoors, exploring themes of play, grounding, and the experience of navigating familiar and unfamiliar trails. Through painting and installation, Simone employs transcendental symbols—including hourglasses, the sun, eight-pointed stars, and landscape-inspired palettes—to evoke nature’s divinity and its capacity to mitigate marginalization. These motifs are examined through an ongoing consideration of their spiritual significance, as well as their potential for harm and appropriation. Ultimately, Simone seeks ways for Black American queer artists to represent their spiritual and lived experiences beyond the visibly centered Black body.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Mike O’Brien is a painter and printmaker who blends the vibrant colors and whimsy of 90’s cartoons with the bold lines of American traditional tattoos, creating characters and compositions that capture human imperfection and charm.

Cartoons, with their childlike innocence, may seem in sharp contrast to the adult world of tattoo culture, yet both share similarities. Both cartoons and tattoos emphasize bold colors and thick, confident lines. Like cartoons, which feature hidden jokes for adults, traditional tattooing distills complex ideas into a limited library of symbols that carry deep meaning for those who understand them but retain broad visual appeal.

Mike O aims to create art for all ages and backgrounds, drawing skulls that aren’t frightening and friendly monsters to evoke the same warmth they felt as a child watching cartoons with family. This intergenerational connection at the heart of their practice bridges the gap between hardcore adults and their inner children.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Trei Ramsey’s work features colorful, whimsical imagery that weaves in underlying themes that address serious and niche perspectives on our shared world. This approach is evident in the works at Touchstone, all from his Precocious Kid series.

Ramsey began the series in 2023 to explore how the environment affects overlooked communities. He addresses this concept through paintings, drawings, sketches, and multimedia. Inspiration may come from a book, the news, or a walk the artist takes. Ramsey reflects on why certain moments affect him and how they influence his mood. Once he identifies the environmental inspiration, such as light bulbs or a television, he considers how to represent it visually through sketches.

He starts with the face, following his guidelines for the character: a child with large eyes to signify innocence and influence, locs arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, and a head framed by a square to represent the child's constrained mental space, referencing the archaic slang term for an outsider, the “square.”

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Trei Ramsey is a self-taught multidisciplinary visual artist who works and lives in Washington D.C. He creates work that is described as powerful, colorful, and fun. Ramsey’s practice as an artist is inspired by his childhood obsession with Saturday morning cartoons, mythology, comic books, and western art history. Ramsey seeks to create a body of work that speaks to groups that are often ignored, by using the eclectic concepts he absorbed while growing up in America.

Ramsey’s artistic goal is to uplift, educate, and explore how we are similar to each other. He also wants to show how art and artmaking are accessible and vital for everyone. He has shared his visual art with the world since 2018, participating in many solo and group exhibitions at notable galleries across the DMV including Homme, Thundershark, Touchstone, Strathmore, and Washington Studio School. He earned his BFA in theater from Howard University.

Featuring work by Brittany Mona', Carolyn Marshall Wright, Dana Brotman, Deb Furey, Debra Perkins, Dee Levinson, Elaine Florimonte, Elena Tchernomazova, Gale Wallar, Hernan Murno, Janathel Shaw, Jazz Williams, Jenny Singleton, Jill Brantley, Jonathan Fuentes, Linda Bankerd, Marcia Coppel, Marthe McGrath, Maryam Rassapour, Rick Braswell, Setareh Pourrajabi, Sue Canuteson, Susan Dykeman, Veronica Barker-Barzel, and Yoshiko Ratliff

With the nostalgic perspective of a mother, Jamie Hurst’s current body of work focuses on the landscape as setting for childhood play. These scenes are places of potential games, craft, escape, connection, mystery, and memory.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Jamie Hurst is a Fine Artist born in 1984 in Clearwater, Florida. After living as an expatriate for many years, she is now based in the Greater Washington DC area. Jamie Hurst received her BFA in Art History from the University of Florida in 2006.

Jamie was recently the Artist in Residence for Artcelerate at the Made in Virginia Scott’s Addition location in Richmond. The residency included a solo show, A Place For Play. This exhibit included two-dimensional paintings and an interactive installation in which viewers were asked to participate in the exhibit by either taking or painting a river rock from a pile presented in front of the works. Her work has been in a number of group shows including figure at Touchstone Gallery. Before focusing on her fine art practice, she was an art historian at Sotheby’s in New York and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Meet the Artist Closing Reception: Sunday, October 18 from 1-3 pm

No Words—We live an era where our leaders debase language, mislead us with rhetoric, and flip the meanings of words of on their heads. In response, artist Amy Sabrin has created a series of works that invite us to look beyond their gorgeous, vivid surfaces to discern the words and sometimes troubling truths hidden beneath.  These paintings reflect a realm where things can be the opposite of what they seem; a sphere where all things -- including the paintings themselves – can be turned upside down; a world where words have meaning. Or do they?

Meet the Artist Closing Reception: Sunday, October 18 from 1-3 pm

What the Small Things Know is Anne Stine's exploration of how nature adapts and survives through community. In this collection of encaustic mixed-media paintings, she delves into the hidden worlds beneath our feet and the water's surface. Her paintings explore the quiet intelligence held within these tiny ecosystems, showing smallness as a place of resilience, reciprocity, and belonging. These micro‑landscapes remind us that the smallest organisms often carry the largest truths about how to live in relationship. This collection invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and consider what these intimate worlds can teach us about our own. 

The Touchstone artists Late Summer Group Shpw brings together a vibrant selection of work. Spanning painting, photography, mixed media, and works on paper, the exhibition features 25 artists including Anice Hoachlander, Anne Stine, Carolyn Marshall Wright, Connie Elsberg, Deb Furey, Elaine Florimonte, Elena Tchernomazova, Gale Wallar, Janathel Shaw, Jenny Singleton, Jill Brantley, Jonathan Fuentes, Lesley Clarke, Makda Kibour, Marthe McGrath, Mary D. Ott, Maryam Rassapour, McCain McMurray, Neville Barbour, Setareh Pourrajabi, Sue Canuteson, Susan Dykeman, Susi Cora, Veronica Barker-Barzel, and Yoshiko Ratliff.

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 22 from 4-7 pm

Linda Bankerd returns to her favorite subjects: still lives and interiors. In her usual manner, she paints with exuberance, using strongly infused colors and bold compositions. For Bankerd, color remains the most important aspect.

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 22 from 4-7 pm

The works in Debra Perkins’ Happenstance emerge through a laborious process of layering paint, collage, and marks—building a history of surface before introducing additional layers of color, shape, and, at times, ephemera. The resulting works evoke states of serenity, introspection, serendipity, and bursts of kinetic energy. Perkins describes the exhibition as an exploration of the emotional experiences that accompany lives in constant flux.

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 30 from 4-7 pm

The Lives We Never Lived is an exhibition that explores alternative pasts, the present, and our futures through memories, connections, and self-perceptions in Touchstone's Summer Project Gallery.

Curated by Touchstone Intern Skylar Ogunshakin-White, the artworks explore alternative pasts, presents, and futures through memories, connections, and self-perceptions. Viewers are invited to look at life through a different lens and question how the choices we make—and the ones we don’t—shape who we become. Blending culture and history with possibility, The Lives We Never Lived reflects on the many facets of human experience and the countless paths that define who we are.

Artists: Anice Hoachlander, Anne Stine, Charlene Nield, dana brotman, David Alfuth, Dee Levinson, Debra Perkins, Elaine Florimonte, Elena Tchernomazova, Gale Wallar, Janathel Shaw, Jazz Williams, Jill Brantley, Lesley Clarke, Linda Bankerd, Marthe McGrath, Maryam Rassapour, McCain McMurray, Neville Barbour, Setareh Pourrajabi, Skylar Ogunshakin-White, Susan Dykeman, Tory Cowles, and Veronica Barker-Barzel

In a fitting tribute to Touchstone Gallery's history, Landry Dunand will install a working tintype studio inside the gallery, echoing the tintype portraits Allan Janus created for his 1976 exhibition at Touchstone, in conjunction with the Smithsonian's 1876 Centennial celebrations. Fifty years later, Dunand revives this historic process, creating a living connection between Touchstone's past and present while inviting the community to become part of its ongoing story.

Studio Hours:

• Wednesday, July 22 from 5-8 pm (Opening Reception)

• Thursday, July 23 from 4-7 pm

• Friday, July 24 from 4-7 pm

• Saturday, July 25 from 1-4 pm

• Sunday, July 26 from 1-4 pm

• Monday, July 27 from 4-7 pm

Landry Dunand is a French-born photographer, educator, and MFA candidate at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Working primarily with the wet plate collodion process, his practice explores photography as a social and historical object, examining questions of representation and photographic authority.

Before moving to the United States, Dunand spent more than a decade living and working in Southeast Asia, primarily in Bangkok and Kabul, where he worked as a graphic designer while developing long-term photographic projects using the Afghan Camera in Bangkok and Kabul.

Alongside his artistic practice, he teaches art in Montgomery County Public Schools and runs a wet plate collodion tintype portrait studio in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Pat Goslee works in acrylic paint on cotton canvas, canvas made from recycled plastic bottles, wood and reclaimed wood. She does not begin with fixed ideas or planned compositions.

She makes beauty-impregnated surfaces; visual barometers that operate as patches of visual code suggesting amelioration. Without words the work addresses atmospheric moods — anxiety, bittersweet grief, a spark of joy, a dangerous protest or a transformational smile. The process is a synthesis of time (past, present and future) acting between a noun and a verb as a silent form of communication.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

In her artistic practice, painter Cathy Wilkin released expectations and let go of hesitation and fears. This opened up and created her immersive visual narratives through color, metaphor and personal myth.

She is a lifelong artist, who earned her MFA and had a career teaching painting, drawing and design in a small college. As Professor Emeritus, Wilkin bring decades of experience to her art through juried exhibitions, competitions and professional exchanges.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Juror Discussion: Monday, August 10 at 7 pm ET (Zoom)

Closing Reception: Sunday, August 16 from 2-4 pm

Fifty: A Community Memoir is a juried group exhibition exploring the layered histories, lived experiences, and enduring legacies that form our collective identity.

Memory is not only personal, but communal—carried over generations, embedded in place, and reflected in everyday life. This call seeks work that engages with ancestry, migration, neighborhood histories, family narratives, cultural traditions, and the marks left by time.

How do we remember? What do we inherit, preserve, or challenge? What stories have been silenced, and which ones endure?

Jurors: Laila Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, Fabiola R. Delgado and L. Kasimu Harris

Artists: Abby Huston, Amira, Autumn Spears, Aynex Mercado, Bevadine Zoma Terrell, Brandin Barón, Carley Dupre’, Carolyn Marshall Wright, Cathy Abramson, Cora Olson, dana brotman, Imani W. Russell, Jacques Liautaud, Jada Plummer, Jessica Cherry, Jonathan Fuentes, Julie Paez, Julius Cavira, Kristine DeNinno, Kwaku Ofori-Yirenkyi, Lin White, Margaret Dowell, Margarita Padua, Melanie Kehoss, Michelle Oconis, Nolan, Oscar Lopez, Reem Bassous, Ruth A. Keitz, Sally Canzoneri, Saya Behnam, Sharon Robinson, shedrick pelt, Shyama Kuver, Susanna Eisenman, and Yoshiko Ratliff.

Artwork on image: Téta by Reem Bassous

Saya Behnam’s work explores light, hope, and interconnectedness through repetition, texture, and handmade materials. Viewing texture as a form of sensory intelligence, their practice engages multiple senses through folded paper, layered surfaces, and pigments derived from botanicals and minerals. Using handmade kozo and mulberry papers, Saya creates contemplative works that emphasize time, memory, and gradual growth.

Saya is an Iranian-American artist with more than 20 years of experience in fine art. She lives in Virginia, and her studio is at Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Collagist Katy Jean May creates large, abstract, close-up portraits utilizing magazine paper and found objects. The color palettes, textures and tones work together to express the inner life and outer shell of the figure. The portrait can highlight the figure’s mental conflict or serenity, their sharp focus or distraction. Subtle imagery embedded in or swirling around the faces can further emphasize the figure’s memories, feelings, history or environment.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Lori Katz makes artworks that are a visual and tactile exploration of her materials, and increasingly include the substitution of areas that were, or could have been clay, with wire, recycled kiln parts and the occasional found object. Connection, conceptually and in practice, looms large as she coaxes sometimes disparate elements to work together.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Lori Katz is a studio artist working primarily in clay. She is known for the striking strength and simplicity of her work. Lori’s work has been included in definitive shows and art fairs in the US, Europe and Asia. Her work is in the permanent collection of the US Embassy in Bandar Seri Begawan, the Wustum/Racine Art Museum, the IBM Corporation, Amazon Web Services, New York Presbyterian Hospital and in numerous homes and public and private collections.

Lori’s work has been used as props in movies and on television; most recently in Maggie’s Plan, Zero Day, Succession and Inventing Anna. Lori maintains a studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA

David Gootnick is a mixed media artist working principally with wood. His designs draw from kumiko—a uniquely Japanese art form developed roughly 1400 years ago, with his works being contemporary interpretations of this technique at the interface of art and design.

Gootnick respects traditional Japanese patterns while creating works with both modern and ancient motifs. Kumiko uses narrow pieces of wood to create intricate geometric patterns. His compositions are made of hundreds, in many cases more than a thousand individual pieces of wood. He seeks to broaden the exposure to kumiko among artists, artisans, and the broader public. There are few examples of this form outside of Japan, and very few artists working in this tradition in North America.

50 for 50 is an artist opportunity that invites 50 community artists to showcase their work at Touchstone throughout 2026, the year of Touchstone’s 50th anniversary.

Artist Bio: Originally from Rochester, NY, David Gootnick has lived in Boston, New York, and currently resides in Washington, DC. David’s first artistic studies were at the College of Art and Design in Rochester, NY. David has a BA in Art History from Harvard University. In 2015 David began to study kumiko and finds it a fulfilling way to blend traditional Japanese artistry with contemporary design. He is attracted to kumiko’s intricate patterns, its emphasis on symmetry, and the interaction of geometry and art. His work demands focus; he finds it to be an exercise in precision and efficiency of movement.

David’s studio, which he designed and built himself, is an extension of his approach to the work; it is a place of contemplation and peace. David has exhibited at the Chautauqua Visual Arts Gallery, the Wharton Esherick Museum and the Trenton City museum, among others and has had solo exhibitions at the Parthenon in Nashville, TN, the Delaplaine Arts Center in Frederick, Maryland, the Arts Club of Washington DC among others.

Meet the Artist Closing Reception: Sunday, July 12 from 2-4 pm

For more than three decades, architectural photographer Anice Hoachlander has explored the relationship between structure, light, and form through the built environment. In Nature as Architect, she turns that same disciplined eye toward the organic world. Hoachlander approaches Nature as her client, revealing the quiet geometry and design embedded within forests, botanicals, and ancient trees. These photographs blur the boundary between natural form and constructed space, inviting viewers to consider nature itself as the original architect.  

Meet the Artist Closing Reception: Sunday, July 12 from 2-4 pm

This body of work reflects Lesley Clarke’s experience of traveling through four countries that left a lasting impression: Scotland, Iceland, Nepal and Croatia. Each place is represented through a sequence of three sizes of paintings that explore the way memory evolves over time. Working in encaustic, Clarke builds layers of pigmented wax that are fused with heat, creating depth, translucency and textured surfaces.

Grand Opening Reception: Thursday, May 28 from 5-8 pm

Community Celebration: Sunday, June 7 from 12-5 pm

Medium Material Method is a group exhibition celebrating the processes, materials, and techniques that shape the contemporary art practices of Touchstone artists. This exhibition, part of Touchstone’s 50th Anniversary celebration, turns attention to how artworks are made—highlighting the possibilities of specific artmaking materials and methods.

There are endless ways to make a painting, a collage, a sculpture, or an original hand-pulled print. Medium Material Method invites viewers to consider the physical components that support artistic production.

The exhibition encourages engagement with over 100 completed works of art and further enhances the experience with an interactive touch table that allows visitors to engage with the materials themselves, as well as frequent artist demonstrations that provide additional context and information. Explore how idea and execution become important in the completion of artworks you see at Touchstone!

See works by two dozen Touchstone artists!

Rick Gonzalez (b. 1988, San Jose, CA) is a video artist and mixed media artist who lives and works in Washington, D.C. With a minor in cinema from McDaniel College, Rick has always been drawn to artistic expression that tells a story. Through collaging and, most recently, an interactive video project, he has continued to experiment with different ways to create connections between unexpected images and visuals

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2 from 4-7 pm

In The Mask I Wore, Makda Kibour presents a series of layered portraits that explore identity, memory, and self-inquiry. Working with acrylic, collage, African textiles, and stitched canvas, Kibour creates surfaces where faces emerge, fragment, and reassemble, suggesting identity as something fluid rather than fixed.

Several works incorporate physical processes of cutting, stitching, scraping, and layering. In some paintings, the canvas itself is cut apart and sewn back together, allowing the surface to carry the marks of rupture and repair. These material gestures mirror the emotional and psychological themes explored throughout the exhibition.

Moving between the personal and the collective, the paintings reflect how identity is shaped through ancestry, culture, and lived experience. Repeated figures and layered faces suggest the many selves that exist within a single life.

The Mask I Wore reflects a journey through memory, survival, and self-examination—acknowledging the masks once worn to navigate the world while arriving at a place of greater honesty and self-awareness.

Explore works by more than 30 Touchstone artists in this springtime show

Experience Pollination, an interactive sculpture by artist Chris Combs, as part of the interactive art experiences in the 50 for 50 exhibition program.

This flower-shaped artwork responds to faces and spoken words. Its camera recognizes faces and splays them into rotating flower-like shapes; a central microphone listens for speech and shows its transcripts on a multitude of small screens.

In this work, Combs is analogizing the data that we spread when interacting in life to pollen: millions of invisible particles flowing in all directions with uncontrollable effects.

Chris Combs is an artist based in Washington, D.C and Mount Rainier, Maryland whose sculptural artworks both incorporate and question technologies. Chris was the 2025 Artist in Residence at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, and is a five-time recipient of the DC CAH Arts and Humanities Fellowship. He is a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art + Design and was a photo editor for National Geographic. He joined Otis Street Arts Project in 2021.

His show Supercycle (IA&A at Hillyer, 2023) invoked cycles of hype, such as “AI” and cryptocurrencies. The Next Big Thing (MoCA Arlington Innovation Studio, 2024) recreated Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa with E-waste that reacted to visitors’ faces and movements. Outsized Effects (Gradient Projects, Thomas, WV, 2023–4) included the room-sized Allegheny Data Company, examining data mining through the visual lens of coal mining. Industry Standards (McLean Project for the Arts, 2023) featured 18 works of reclaimed industrial components, reflecting on surveillance and environmental destruction. His artwork Periscopes is permanently installed in Buzzard Point, D.C., and Madness Method, a collaboration with David Greenfieldboyce, was part of Georgetown GLOW.

Artist Talk: Saturday, April 25 at 3 pm

Luckett’s solo exhibition reflects on movement as a fundamental force in human life—moments when individuals are compelled to search, leave, or transform. Some journeys are visible and life-altering, while others unfold quietly until they emerge into awareness. Through an intuitive practice of layering paper, paint, and assembled forms, the artist allows images to evolve and reveal their own meanings.

Motifs such as bridges, gardens, oceans, and rivers of time appear alongside symbolic elements that suggest passages between inner and outer worlds. A series of niche-like house portraits becomes shelters, evoking places of refuge, resilience, and belonging. Created amid contemporary debates around immigration, the work also reflects broader histories of migration and the enduring search for home.