About ASSEMB\Y
The process of organizing Assembly 2019, Arlington Arts Center’s inaugural regional biennial, has been a matter of considering not only the make-up of this year’s exhibition but also the long-term goals and possibilities of the program as a whole. What should a regional biennial look like? What are the possibilities and limitations of this type of exhibition? How can Assembly best serve our audiences and what can it offer to the Mid-Atlantic’s art scene overall? Or, more simply, what is a regional biennial exhibition and what can it do? Assembly will present a survey of artwork from the MidAtlantic, highlighting a selection that is broader in scope than a thematic exhibition, but also provides some thematic and aesthetic connections for viewers to follow. The shape an exhibition takes is formed in no small part by the way the artists are selected. The artists in Assembly 2019 were chosen from an open call that attracted more than 250 submissions and was open to artists living and working in Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Although small non-profit organizations like AAC often rely on open calls in order to select artists for exhibitions it is, of course, not the only possibility. AAC relies on a mix of selection processes for its exhibitions, with artists for the SOLOS program selected by outside jurors, in conversation with AAC staff, and artists for thematic group exhibitions typically invited by AAC’s curator. The choice to hold an open call for Assembly 2019 was an attempt to cast a wide net, to find artists who might lay beyond my own network. It also meant relying on the applications we received as I began to think about threads and commonalities, whether aesthetic or thematic. While open calls provide a certain level of transparency and fairness, they also have their own limitations. For Assembly 2019, the artist pool was notably tilted towards areas in close proximity to AAC – Virginia, DC, and Maryland. This may suggest that artists who are closer and potentially more familiar with AAC as an organization were more likely to take a chance on participating in an ambitious new program. The result is an exhibition that gives an overview of our particular corner of the Mid-Atlantic, stretching from Baltimore to DC and through Virginia. For the inaugural exhibition, this tighter geographic focus allows us to home in on the work being done closer to AAC. For future incarnations of Assembly, we’ll need to consider how to negotiate bringing together a wider pool of artists, whether through partnerships