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Effective January 1: Masks are Optional in VisArts’ Classrooms and Studios
By Mark Jenkins
April 28, 2025
ENTERING VISARTS’S GIBBS STREET GALLERY, visitors encounter Isabella Whitfield’s equivalent of Xi’an’s Terra-cotta Army: dozens of tiny humanoids cast in off-white paper and arranged in a tight grid. The figurines in the local artist’s “All My Children Are Good People” are not life-sized, and are made of plaster and recycled cotton-paper pulp, not terra-cotta. Yet the two projects have a similar effect, demonstrating the mesmerizing power of multiple iterations produced by hand rather than machine.
According to the gallery statement, “Whitfield embraces a process that values endurance above all else.” But there are other lessons in the exhibition, which reuses pulp from “Best regards,” her 2024 Hamiltonian artworks show. The additional pieces — some made with beeswax, joint compound and other materials — are all the same hue, which appears both functional and ghostly. A single sneaker made of cotton is instantly recognizable yet odd, a mix of consumer good and Platonic ideal. In Whitfield’s all-ivory world, simple forms come into unexpected focus.
Isabella Whitfield: All My Children Are Good People
Through May 4 at VisArts’ Gibbs Street Gallery, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. visartscenter.org. 301.315.8200.
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