Open September 1st - September 31st
Washington Art Association is pleased to present The National Iron Bank - Riley Weaver, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Riley Weaver. Bringing the work of members of the Washington Art Association to the community, the exhibition will be on view September 1st - September 31st, 2026.
Washington Art Association is thrilled to announce a brand-new year-round partnership with the National Iron Bank in Washington Depot, providing WAA members with an exciting new opportunity.
Each month, one Washington Art Association member artist will be featured inside the National Iron Bank. This collaboration between WAA and the National Iron Bank will bring local artwork into the heart of the Washington community, while offering you, our members, an additional professional venue to exhibit and sell your work.
We want to celebrate our members, increase visibility for local artists, and strengthen the connection between two longstanding and historical community institutions.
The Art of Alibaba Awrang
Four years ago, Arman and Arezo Awrang arrived in Litchfield County from Afghanistan unable to speak a word of English. Later this month, the siblings will begin college at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Their remarkable journey is at the heart of From Kabul to Litchfield Hills, a special exhibition of contemporary abstract paintings by their father, internationally recognized Afghan artist Alibaba Awrang.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Washington Art Association & Gallery and the Washington Refugee Resettlement Project, and is co-curated by WAA Executive Director Nathaniel Cardonsky and Maria Mostajo of the Washington Refugee Resettlement Project.
The exhibition opens Saturday, August 22, from 3:00–5:00 p.m. at the Washington Art Association’s Sunshine Center, 11 Green Hill Road, Washington Depot, and continues through September 19. The exhibition is both a celebration and an opportunity. While financial aid, scholarships, and the family’s own contributions cover much of Arman and Arezo’s college expenses, a remaining gap persists. Proceeds from the sale of Awrang’s paintings will help support the siblings as they begin this next chapter.
Awrang’s own story is one of extraordinary resilience. Born in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, in 1972, he was trained in the ancient tradition of Persian calligraphy, earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees through the Iranian Calligraphy Association in Shiraz and Tehran. He later taught painting and chaired the Calligraphy and Miniature Painting Department at Kabul’s Turquoise Mountain Institute.
In 2021, at the height of his career, Awrang and his family were evacuated from Afghanistan by the U.S. Department of State following the Taliban takeover. They resettled in Connecticut in 2022. Within months, Awrang received a remarkable commission from the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. Working on the floor of his new bedroom, he created a monumental 12-by-20-foot triptych that is now permanently installed in the museum’s entry gallery.
Since coming to the United States, Awrang’s work has entered the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and has been exhibited at the Wadsworth, the Mattatuck Museum, 836M Gallery in San Francisco, and the 2024 Sydney Biennale. His work is also held by the RMIT Museum and Gallery in Melbourne. He has received grants from Mass MoCA and the Connecticut Office of the Arts and participated in the Studios at MASS MoCA Artist-in-Residence program.
Although Awrang’s paintings are abstract, their roots lie in Persian calligraphy particularly the graceful Nastaliq script, known as the “bride” of calligraphy. The letters are not meant to be read. Instead, they become gesture, rhythm, color, and form. “My art is meant to offer the viewer an intimate connection with color, form, balance and harmony,” Awrang says. “It invites meditation and reflection.”
Working intuitively, Awrang builds his paintings through layers of Japanese ink, acrylic, gold and silver leaf, using traditional bamboo pens and brushes on paper, canvas, and wood. He begins with a letter, form, or pattern without knowing where it will lead. “I often get lost in the layers and am surprised by the final work,” he says. That sense of discovery is what makes the work so compelling: ancient tradition becomes contemporary abstraction, and a visual language born thousands of miles away finds new expression in the Litchfield Hills.
From Kabul to Litchfield Hills is ultimately about more than art. It is about resilience, community, and the possibilities that emerge when people are given the opportunity to begin again.
The Washington Art Association and the Washington Refugee Resettlement Project invite the community to join Alibaba Awrang, his family, and the curators for the opening reception on Saturday, August 22, from 3:00–5:00 p.m. at the Sunshine Center, 11 Green Hill Road, Washington Depot. The exhibition will remain on view through September 19.
From Kabul to Litchfield Hills
August 22–September 19, 2026
Opening Reception: August 22, 3:00–5:00 p.m.
Sunshine Center, 11 Green Hill Road, Washington Depot
Washington Art Association is pleased to present The Living Surface, a group exhibition featuring the work of Eric Aho, Ira Barkoff, Pat Brentano, Alyssa Fanning, Margaret Grimes, Jessica Elzea Kogel, Stanley Lewis, Ruth Miller, Ron Milewicz, and Kelly Normand. Bringing together paintings, drawings, collage, and ceramic sculpture, the exhibition will be on view August 15 through September 12, 2026.
Landscape is one of the most enduring subjects in the history of art, yet it has rarely been intended as simply a record of the visible world. No landscape survives the act of being seen unchanged. Like every work of art, it carries the marks of the person who made it: their attention, memory, experience, and the countless decisions made between looking and making.
Across painting, drawing, collage, and ceramic sculpture, The Living Surface considers landscape not as scenery or backdrop, but as a living surface shaped by weather, time, growth, erosion, and light; as well as by perception, memory, and imagination. The works suggest that observation and imagination are intertwined ways of understanding the world. The simple act of looking with intention is itself a deeply personal and creative undertaking.
The Living Surface invites viewers to consider the many ways artists transform what they see into something uniquely their own. Together, these works remind us that looking is never passive. It is an ongoing conversation between the world before us and the world within us.
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 27, 4:00–6:00 PM
Washington Art Association is pleased to present How I Got Here: Space, Color and Pattern, an exhibition of paintings by Barbara Grossman. On view from June 27 through August 8, 2026, the exhibition brings together paintings from across Grossman’s career, tracing her engagement with interior spaces, color relationships and the human figure.
Rather than treating interiors as static settings, Grossman constructs them as living environments built through interval, repetition and chromatic tension. Her work has remained steadily committed to the language of painting: shape against shape, color against color, figure against ground.
Born in New York, Grossman studied at Cooper Union and the Akademie der Künste in Munich. Awards and honors include the Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowship, the Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award, and a Fulbright-Hayes Grant. She has taught at the Yale School of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, Brandeis University, the New York Studio School, Western Connecticut State University and the Chautauqua Institution.
Grossman is a member of the National Academy of Design and was a founding member of Bowery Gallery in New York. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at the New York Studio School, Dartmouth College, Washington and Lee University, the National Academy of Design, Hollins University, The Arkansas Art Center and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Her paintings are held in numerous public collections including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Housatonic Museum of Art.
How I Got Here: Space, Color and Pattern is a retrospective exhibition of Grossman’s work, bringing together paintings from across decades, revealing a long-term, dedicated exploration of color, pattern, and the expressive potential of intimate, familiar spaces.
May 30 – June 20, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 30, 4:00–6:00 PM
The Washington Art Association is pleased to present Beauty in Breaking, a juried group exhibition exploring the transformative potential found in rupture, fracture, and change.
We all encounter moments of strain—points where pressure, time, or circumstance cause something to fracture. Some breaks are deliberate, others arrive without warning. What follows is often the more compelling story: how we respond. Fractures may be displayed proudly as evidence of endurance, or carefully mended until their seams nearly disappear.
Through painting, sculpture, ceramics, and mixed media, the artists in this exhibition consider breaking not as failure, but as transformation—an opening that allows something new to emerge.
Participating artists include Mary Lou Alberetti, Suzanne Ashley, Isis Bartels, Katie Bassett, Loren Birtha, Lesley Neilson Bowman, Sara Bowman, Lisa Brody, Becky Butler, Wendy Costa, Robert De Matteo, Alistair Dunn, Patty K. Fogle, Joe Gitterman, Claire Goodman, Sarah Griswold, Alexandra Herst, Richard Heys, Judy Jackson, Jay Kaplan, Victoria Kingsley, Jennifer Kusaila, Kenny Litwack, Carroll MacDonald, Matin Malikzada, Deana Tierney May, Nancy Mich, Katherine Moran, Francis Patnaude, Rich Pomerantz, Bonnie Riedinger, Lulu Roche, Carla Rogozinski, Holly Russell, Roberta Shea, Mary Terrizzi, Riley Weaver, and Peter Wiehl.
Natural Forms: Tom Doyle, Rachel Portesi, and Amelia de Neergaard
The Washington Art Association & Gallery is pleased to present Natural Forms, a three-person exhibition featuring the work of Tom Doyle, Rachel Portesi, and Amelia de Neergaard. On view from April 25 through May 23, 2026, this exhibition brings together three artists whose practices engage with the structures of the natural world from varied material and personal perspectives.
Tom Doyle (1928–2016), a major figure in postwar American sculpture, was a recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Doyle exhibited widely, including in landmark exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the Whitney Biennial. His work, held in major museum collections internationally, distills mass and structure into compositions that feel both architectural and natural.
Rachel Portesi’s photography examines the shifting terrains of femininity, motherhood, and aging. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Griffin Museum, and the Newport Art Museum, and has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Forbes, and Art News.
Amelia de Neergaard, who lives and works in Cornwall, Connecticut, creates intricately constructed works using organic materials and processes rooted in papermaking and fiber techniques. Influenced by Japanese and Scandinavian design, her work emphasizes repetition and accumulation.
Alexander Purves
Sketchbooks: Travelling
March 21 - April 18, 2026
Alexander Purves graduated from Yale College in 1958 and following a three-year tour in the US Army, received a Master’s Degree from the School of Architecture in 1965. Following ten years as an architect with Davis, Brody & Associates in New York City he moved to New Haven in 1976 to join the faculty of the School of Architecture and to open his own practice. While in New York he worked primarily on middle income housing. His architectural design work in New Haven includes the Cushing Whitney Medical Library and the renovation of the Hope Building, both for the Yale School of Medicine and executed in collaboration with Allan Dehar Associates. Having coordinated and taught design studios at all levels in the School of Architecture, Purves currently restricts his teaching to “Introduction to Architecture”, an undergraduate course open to any student in the University. For fourteen years he led an intensive drawing seminar in Rome for graduate architecture students. Purves has lectured widely and has led a number of Yale Educational Travel programs in Italy, France and the British Isles as well as Eastern Europe, the Turkish coast, Egypt and Japan.
Purves’s watercolors have been included in many group shows. Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City (2006, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2021, 2024), and at the Washington (CT) Art Association (1987, 1992, 2003). In 2013 the Whitney Humanities Center mounted a show of his Roman sketches, and in 2002 his travel drawings were exhibited at the Hunter College Leubsdorf Gallery in a show entitled “On Site”. The Yale School of Architecture displayed a selection of his watercolors together with his travel sketchbooks in a 2024 show entitled “On Looking”.
As a current member of WAA, you may enter ONE recent work in the medium of your choice. The maximum size this year will be 31 inches in any direction, including frame. We will not be accepting ANY larger pieces this year. All work must be wired for hanging, no sawtooth hangers, any “multiples” must be connected so they can be hung as a single work. Improperly prepared work or “wet” work will not be hung.
Receiving: Saturday, January 3 to Monday, January 5, 10am to 4pm
No late work will be accepted
Pick up: Saturday, February 7 to Monday, February 9, 10am to 4pm
Work MUST be picked up by closing on Monday, February 9
Awards to be presented:
Painting
Works on Paper
Sculpture
Photography
Winners will be announced in the gallery and on our website
www.washingtonartassociation.
to close out the Opening Reception.
Category Winners
painting
1st place: Starry, starry night by William L. Cesario
2nd place: I Dreamed aubergine by Molly morgan
3rd place: Tuesday the 30th by wendy walker
honorable mention: Chicago El, Girl in Pink by Judith Wyer
honorable mention: Orange Crush by Roberta Shea
works on paper
1st place: blue by Brigitte Fehn
2nd place: last sigh by mary lou alberetti
3rd place: birds flying high by ruby hondros
honorable mention: Westchester County, NY Atlas by susan lerner
honorable mention: coyote by christina maschke
sculpture
1st place: Impasse by Nathaniel Cardonsky
2nd place: Stitched #9 by Tanya Kukucka
3rd place: the violence of the colonialist by sarah griswold
photography
1st place: porsche tractor by William W. Nietsch
2nd place: Lady Grove by Lori Barker
3rd place: Evening Glow by Joan Macfarlane