AU Museum Winter Opening Reception at the Katzen Arts Center
Details
Always an ArtHouse favorite, the next Katzen Museum opening looks like a good one. We always meet around 6 pm in the lobby to socialize where they serve some food and open a cash bar, and then go into the 3-floor museum around 7 pm. Underground parking is convenient but does cost now. Buses also service the venue.
Here's the lineup:
Ilana Manolson: The Air We Share
A Project Space exhibition
Ilana Manolson, Artist
Sarah Tanguy, Curator
The Air We Share invites viewers to look closely at the plants that thrive at the edges of human attention. Painter, printmaker, and naturalist Ilana Manolson celebrates and elevates species often dismissed as weeds, revealing their vitality, beauty, and essential roles within the ecosystems we share.
This exhibition challenges the hierarchies humans impose on nature. Weeds, often maligned as invaders, stabilize soil, retain water, and offer shelter, medicine, and renewal. By placing them at the center of her compositions, Manolson reclaims their dignity and reveals their quiet power.
As climate urgency intensifies, The Air We Share calls for renewed awareness of our interdependence with the natural world. Manolson’s paintings remind us that life not only persists but flourishes in the margins, and that every living thing contributes to the shared breath that sustains us all.
## Vital and Veiled: Valerie Brathwaite and José Gabriel Fernández
Valerie Brathwaite, Artist
José Gabriel Fernández, Artist
Jesús Fuenmayor, Curator
Two pioneering sculptors, Valerie Brathwaite and José Gabriel Fernández, reveal how abstraction can speak to identity, sensuality, and the complicated histories that shape the Americas. Trinidad-born Brathwaite channels the landscapes of her childhood and the ecological tensions of urban life into luminous organic forms. Her stones, flowers, and “soft bodies” pulse with what she describes as the vitality of nature, shaped from clay, plaster, cement, fabric, and color that suggest both the Caribbean’s exuberance and its fragility. Her lifelong engagement with materials creates an aesthetic language rooted in memory, movement, and an enduring concern for the natural world.
## The Magical World of Joan Danziger
Joan Danziger, Artist
Jack Rasmussen, Curator
Enter a world of transformation—where imagination takes physical form; where wire, glass, and celu-clay become creatures of wonder; and where an abstract painter evolves into a surreal sculptor guided by her fascination with fantasy and dream imagery.
## Humanist Touch: Works from the Weber Collection
Presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art
Joan and Bruce Weber, Collectors
Laura Roulet, Curator
Assembled over four decades, these works from the Weber collection reflect Joan and Bruce Weber’s long engagement with contemporary DMV artists and galleries. When they describe their collection, a strong sense of community emerges, one enriched by personal ties to the artists and by the many conversations, visits, and encounters that shaped their choices.