Arlington, VA | Exhibition Tours & Networking at MoCA Arlington

Join us for an exclusive tour of Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, the recently rebranded Arlington Art Center, to hear more about their new mission as a non-collecting museum and what that means for the surrounding art scene. We will hear from Executive Director Catherine Anchin, Curator & Resident Artist/Collector Liaison Amanda Jirón-Murphy, and Curator of Exhibitions Blair Murphy, on what is on the horizon for them, as well as enjoy a private tour of their inaugural biennial exhibition. ArtTable members will be invited to stick around for a networking mingle after the tour is finished as a way to start off the new year meeting new members and reconnecting!

Admission:

• ArtTable Members – $10
• Guests/Public – $20

Registration is required below.

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Please note that all income from program fees goes towards program expenses and ArtTable’s internal costs for organizing programs.

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About the Speakers

Catherine Anchin joined the museum in 2021 as Executive Director, where she leads the direction of the museum and works closely with the Board of Directors to deliver strategic objectives. She brings extensive experience in arts fundraising and administration, as well as a commitment to contemporary visual arts.

Her career includes tenures at major national and regional museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio. She also serves as arts faculty for Leadership Arlington and has served as a university guest lecturer and conference panelist on topics such as creativity, museum fundraising, arts social media, and volunteering.

She holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Museum Studies from Syracuse University, as well as a graduate certificate in Nonprofit Management from the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Case Western Reserve University.

Amanda Jirón-Murphy joined the museum in 2020, first as a contract curator then as Curator & Resident Artist/Collector Liaison in 2022. In her role, Amanda curates the resident artists’ exhibitions, manages the artist residency program, and the museum’s collectors’ program, a public program sharing knowledge about art collecting and supporting artists careers.

In addition, Amanda organized the museum’s 2021 exhibition We Can’t Predict Tomorrow, which explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on artistic practice within the regional contemporary arts sector.Amanda has served as the Gallery Director at Hamiltonian, where she directed and curated exhibitions, art fairs, and projects for an international roster of over forty emerging and mid-career artists and as the Coordinator of Public Programs and Adult Interpretation at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. She also interned with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.

Amanda has also served as a guest speaker and panel moderator at cultural institutions and schools around the Washington, DC area and has written for many publications including: The Rib and DIRT DMV. She holds a BA in Art History from John Cabot University in Rome, Italy and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art and Connoisseurship from Christie’s Education in London, England.

Blair Murphy joined the museum in 2018 as Curator of Exhibitions, where she shapes the vision for the exhibitions program and curates numerous exhibitions. Previous exhibitions include: Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy, Stretched, Applied Forces,  Transitional Objects, Over, Under, Forward, Back, and By Proxy, the museum’s first virtual exhibition. In addition, she launched the museum’s biennial exhibition series, Assembly, in 2019 and Global Spotlight, a new series focused on international artists, in 2022. She also served as Acting Executive Director of the museum from October 2020 to May 2021.

Previously, Blair served as the Managing Director at DC Arts Center, Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University, and Program Director at Washington Project for the Arts. Her previous curatorial projects include exhibitions at The Kitchen (New York, NY), Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Field Projects (New York, NY), VisArts Rockville (Rockville, MD), and with the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Blair has served as a guest speaker and panel moderator at cultural institutions around the Washington, DC area and New York, including the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. She has also written for many publications including: Hyperallergic, Bmore Art, and DCist. She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MA from Georgetown University.

About MoCA Arlington

The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (formerly Arlington Arts Center) is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit museum that enriches community life by connecting the public with contemporary art and artists through exhibitions, education programs, and an artists-in-residence program. It was founded by artists in 1974 and has been housed since 1976 in a historic school building. The facility includes nine exhibition galleries, working studios for twelve artists, and two classrooms.

About the Exhibitions

Launched in 2019, Assembly is the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington’s biennial exhibition program, which highlights the material and conceptual trends being explored by contemporary artists in the present moment. The artists in Assembly 2022: Time and Attention demonstrate a deep commitment to process and craft, which is channeled through materials and into research. Through these carefully considered approaches, they are creating work that speaks to the present moment in ways that feel both urgent and timeless. In what feels like a moment of ongoing, even perpetual, crisis they bring this focused approach to issues that are fundamental to contemporary American life, including questions of identity, history, immigration, place, and belonging.

Let Them Kids Be Kids, a solo exhibition by MoCA Arlington resident artist Lex Mari, uses the playground as a framework with which to examine the joys of Black childhood and the ways in which issues of race and equity are inscribed on the site. Employing images from her personal life to examine these ideas, Lex Marie’s newest paintings and installations address the issue of adultification bias as she makes the case that all children have a right to innocence.

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Images:

1. Mandy Cano Villalobos, Bluer Skies for Brazen Hips, 2022, Installation view from Assembly 2022: Time & Attention at MoCA Arlington. Photo by Luke Walter.
2. Headshots courtesy of MoCA Arlington website