upcoming Exhibitions
McARTHUR BINION
Notes on Form (Intimate Structures)
September 19–December 7, 2025
Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Gallery
McArthur Binion, Under:Ground, 2025. Graphite, paint stick, ink, and paper on board, 40 × 48 × 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Notes on Form (Intimate Structures) explores McArthur Binion’s work from 2009 to the present, highlighting his ongoing use of form, shape, and a deeply personal language of abstraction. Born in 1946 in Mississippi and raised as one of eleven children, Binion’s early life continues to inform the material and conceptual foundation of his practice.
Referring to each work as a self-portrait, he layers oil stick and ink in hatched lines of a grid, a signature characteristic of Binion’s oeuvre, on top of a collage of personal documents such as birth certificates, photographs, address book pages, and images of his childhood home. Each canvas becomes an extension of the “under conscious,” a term he uses to articulate the deeply embedded personal histories that materialize in his work.
While Binion’s compositions gesture towards the minimalist style of a grid, they resist the impersonal aesthetic often associated with this style in art history. The exhibition title nods toward Primary Structures, the Jewish Museum’s influential 1966 exhibition that introduced minimalist sculpture as a formal movement grounded in order and control. Binion’s “intimate structures,” by contrast, speak through touch, rhythm, presence.
This exhibition situates Binion’s work within Washington, D.C.—a city shaped by histories of Black abstraction, from Alma Thomas to Sam Gilliam, where abstraction has long served as a space of both personal expression and political agency. Binion’s shaped canvases enter that conversation with a distinct voice. The use of repetition, fragments, and layers echo both his lifelong stutter and his background in writing; often referring to himself as a “writer who paints.” Through this lens, Binion reimagines minimalism and abstraction as something lived, remembered, and felt.
The exhibition is generously supported by Maria & Alberto de la Cruz.
RECENT Exhibitions
Hung Liu: Happy and Gay
January 17 — April 13, 2025
Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Gallery
Hung Liu, Street Readers, 2013. Oil on Canvas, Wood shelf, Chinese Picture Story Books, 66 x 83 inches. Courtesy of Private Collection, San Francisco.
Hung Liu, Happy and Gay: Mother, 2012. Oil on Canvas, 60 x 48 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Hung Liu Estate, San Francisco.
From 2011-2012, renowned Chinese American artist Hung Liu (born Changchun, China 1948 - died Oakland, California 2021) created a series of paintings and works on paper titled Happy and Gay. In the 2024 fall semester, former Smithsonian curator and Director of the Hung Liu Estate, Dr. Dorothy Moss, will teach an Art History/Museum Studies seminar at Georgetown focused on Hung Liu’s life and work that will lead to a student- curated exhibition of Liu's Happy & Gay series at the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery.
This fascinating and little-studied series comprises oils on canvas with installation elements and works on paper. The series is based on Maoist propaganda cartoons that were published during the 1950s and 1960s in small booklets for children in China with a title that comes from a school exercise for children learning English: “Come boys and girls—let’s sing let’s dance. We are happy and gay. It’s our National Day.” Like the Dick and Jane books circulating in the United States in the 1940s through the 1960s, the illustrations were used to teach normative values such as hard work, family unity, and patriotism.
With Happy & Gay, Liu resurrects and subverts the images of her youth with subtle irony. Her formal choices, including replacing primary colors with pastels and employing scale to expose the power of propaganda, speaks to Liu’s conviction that “History is a verb.” A peer of artists Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Enrique Chagoya, and Amalia Mesa Bains, whose work reinserts buried histories into museum spaces, Liu often discussed her artmaking practice as “rewriting history.” In the paintings, Liu revisits the indoctrination of her education in China during the Cultural Revolution through recreations of pages from primers as well as depictions of her local street readers – public book stands where children could rent booklets to read on the premises. Among the paintings in Happy and Gay, and a frequent visual device in Liu's works, are lush details of animals and mythical landscapes which, along with the social realist images and those of literary figures such as Mulan, reveal Liu's attempt to ameliorate pointed political content or issues of social inequality with natural or supernatural beauty. Liu's depiction of the many disparities in real life, fiction, fantasy, and history provide the dynamic tension in much of her work. In these paintings, she negotiates her way between a personal history that embraces larger social issues and confirms the potential of art to confront, comment, and comfort.
The exhibition is guest by Dr. Dorothy Moss and AMUS class, Brett Everette Adams, Cindy Chen, Hannah Cunningham, Clare Daly, Catie Higgins, Amanda Jones, Rosa Manuel, Ali Mills, Sara Miller, Maia Perry, Sambhavi Sinha, Morgan Stevenson-Swadling, and Kaitlyn Wood.
Generously supported by Maria & Alberto de la Cruz.
Click here to purchase a copy of the exhibition catalogue.