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The Popcorn Gallery showcases the work of established visual artists, including resident artists at Glen Echo Park, as well as artists from the greater Washington, D.C. area. Popcorn Gallery exhibitions attract visitors from across the region and bring new audiences to Glen Echo Park. This gallery presents group exhibitions or occasional solo exhibitions of established artists.
Saturdays & Sundays | 12pm to 6pm
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In partnership with the Glen Echo Park Partnership for Arts and Culture, the National Park Service, and Montgomery County, Maryland, Glen Echo Glassworks proudly presents: Gathering Perspectives.
Resident artist Paul Swartwood showcases his recent explorations in both functional and sculptural blown glass. He is joined by collaborative local artists who have worked in the Glen Echo Glassworks hotshop.
Contributing Artists include: Mark Hill, Michaela Borghese, Ian Kessler Gowell, Carol Hurwitch, Ian Schmidt, Amy Snyder, Phil Valencia, Janet Wittenberg, and Karen Wilson.
Alice Momm
Gleaner's Song for Glen Echo
February 22 - March 23, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 22, 6 - 8 PM
The Popcorn Gallery presents Gleaner’s Song for Glen Echo, a solo exhibition by artist Alice Momm. Gleaner’s Song for Glen Echo is an exhibition of mixed-media and ephemeral works inspired by Alice Momm's desire to reconnect with a shared animate world, and in response to the layered histories and natural environment of Glen Echo.
“I was raised in Washington, DC, and the most magical parts of my childhood were spent in Rock Creek Park with special trips to Glen Echo, Great Falls and walks along the Canal. After 28 years in NYC, I now divide my time between NY and DC to be with my family and aging parents. The return to my childhood home brings a poignancy echoed in my artwork as I confront the fragility of life and my grief at the unfolding effects of climate change. I meet this grief with love and an openness to the more-than-human living world that surrounds us.”
This exhibition continues in the vein of work Momm created for Gleaner's Song for Central Park (2020, in the Park's Arsenal Gallery) which grew from daily park walks and the joys and wonders found there. Through artworks crafted primarily from picked-up natural or recycled materials, augmented with photos and text, Gleaner's Song for Glen Echo invites viewers to find poetry in our shared connections.
Artist Statement
Alice Momm is an urban artist whose practice grows from her longing to reconnect with the more-than-human living world. Materials are met on walks in city parks and, when lucky, in places with more birdsongs than buildings. On these walks she slows down, listens, watches in silence. Things are picked up, thoughts jotted down, photos snapped. Momm is drawn to the humble and the quiet, and to the tension of working with extremely fragile materials to bring them into the sphere of art.
As a daily practice, the collections amassed in her studio are sewn, cut, drawn, woven, painted, collaged and photographed as she connects with the "beingness" of each thing. Faces emerge from bark shards, weavings are created from studio scraps, a flock of birds grows from discarded coffee cup sleeves, leaves become lace, small worlds emerge, and poetry is written in response to the ever-shifting connections on her studio walls.
When working outdoors, Momm creates large environmental sculptures and ephemeral works that encourage viewer interaction. "Interlude for Millay," her recent large-scale piece, incorporates gleaned and sown plants, with Momm in the middle weaving it all together, responding to growth, decay, shifting light and changing seasons, all to create an ever-evolving piece that is also a site for visitors. Momm dances in this direction - collaborating with the living world; creating sculptures by hand that are host to plants, perches for birds and other living beings. Whether large scale sculptures or tiny works on paper, all are designed to encourage curiosity, wonder, and a deeper immersion in and care for the natural world. It is how she meets climate grief with love.
https://www.alicemomm.com
Artist Biography
Alice Momm is a NYC and Washington, DC based artist whose work is inspired by her immersion in and longing for connections with the more-than-human living world. In the city, her creative life centers around park walks – with picked-up natural materials, photographs and impressions forming the basis for her ephemeral, sculptural and written works. When possible, Momm gravitates toward working outdoors on a larger scale using gleaned natural materials.
Momm’s art has been exhibited at venues such as the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, Wave Hill in the Bronx; the Visual Arts Center of NJ in Summit; and the Kjerringøy Land Art Biennale, Norway; and her prose and poetry have been published in the Brooklyn Rail and in the anthology Art in the Anthropocene. An illustrated interview with Momm entitled "From the Smallest Scrap of Nothing" was published in Sculpture Magazine, November 2022. In 2023, Momm was invited to create a large-scale environmental sculpture at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY. In 2023, Momm also collaborated with Alison Cook Beatty Dance and Composer Peter Christian to develop three site-responsive dance works "Not So Grimm Central Park" in various locations of the park.
Jan Rowland & Danielle Bensky
Drifting with Nature
October 5 - November 3, 2024
The Popcorn Gallery presents Drifting with Nature, a two-person exhibition by artists Jan Rowland and Danielle Bensky. In this exhibition, viewers will experience how profoundly the artists have been inspired by nature over the course of many years of making art.
Rowland and Bensky are deeply committed to bringing art to the public through interesting and challenging interpretations of the world around us. Through seeing, recording, and transforming nature, they create visual representations that are unique to each artist.
“We have lived American lives through the prism of our diverse cultural backgrounds from our native France and Australia,” said the artists. “We realize that Glen Echo Park is often described as a “people’s park,” and we revel in establishing contact with the richest of its resources, its people.”
About the artists
Australian born, Jan Rowland is primarily a painter now but was formerly a ceramicist. Rowland earned her BFA from Newcastle School of Art and Newcastle University (Australia) then continued with ceramic studies for two years at Canberra School of Art. She taught high school students for 12 years before marrying a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and taking off around the world, leaving her potter's wheel in Australia. After arriving in the DC area in 2000, Rowland spent time working and doing life drawing locally. She began to paint in 2009. She received awards in regional juried art shows and has paintings in many private collections. She was a resident artist at Glen Echo Park for three years (2019-21) Currently, Rowland works as a Curator at Friendship Heights Village Center (2024) and also as an artist at City Line studios (2022-24) in Friendship Heights.
Danielle Bensky’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as La Maison Francaise of the French Embassy, Georgetown University, Katzen Art Center, Klutznick Museum, Sumner Museum, Susan Conway Gallery, The Arts Club, Strathmore Arts Center, National Institutes Salon d’Automne, Grand Palais, UNESCO, Galerie Maillet, Galerie Arte Viva, among others. Bensky has received public sculpture commissions at American Chemical Society (ACS), Georgetown University: Lauinger Library, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH). Her work can be found in private collections in Chile, England, France, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Scotland, Switzerland and the United States.
Artist Statement (Jan Rowland)
“Nature has always been a source of inspiration for me. The colors, the shapes, the beauty and the ease of gaining esoteric comfort from the eternal existence of nature has sustained me. For the past two years, I have been focusing on the world of Kenilworth Gardens in DC with emphasis on the lotus and other water plants. Within the garden's environs can be seen the contradiction of exquisite flowers and leaves emerging from dark, muddy, uninviting waters with the energy-sapping heat and humidity guaranteeing the interplay of these opposites. From beauty to the unsightly, from pleasure to discomfort and order to disorder, the opposites are always present at the gardens.
With my art, reality emerges from the frame of a painting. Inside the frame is the play of color, the slow movement of shapes creating an oblique reference to nature. My artwork involves multiple, ever-shifting perspectives: areas that generate an imaginative yet real experience of the natural world. My work navigates between the world of dreams and that of reality. However, it is not surprising that most creative people are vague and dreamy, for to be creative in writing or painting or music you have to navigate between the real and imaginative realms. It is in imagination that creativity is found. Or, as expressed by Wassily Kandinsky, ‘painting should grow out of .... an internal necessity’ and a painting should ‘be the inner voice of an artist.’ Thus my paintings are a language and a direct communication in which I can disclose the joys and torments of an inner dialogue within my thoughts.”
Artist Statement (Danielle Bensky)
“Why do I paint? What am I trying to achieve? I can truthfully say that painting is my very personal way of passing along the silent language of reality as I perceive, encounter, and experience it.
My work is not at all engendered by concepts, which is why I have fondness for the Surrealists. Their founding poet, Andre Breton, speaking of his own process, said “words came knocking” at his window pane as he was writing. By analogy, this is what happens to me in my studio: on days when I’m lucky, forms, themes and colors come knocking or dancing on my skylight, demanding to be admitted and welcomed.
This is why I am so fond of symbiosis and metamorphosis, in which an external element - notably trees - will be transmuted by a poetic encounter with a female spirit-figure, no doubt some secret persona deep in my psyche yearning for expression. The result will be a movement toward suggestions of the symbolic, not as initial intention but by happenstance, an unexpected encounter somewhere on the road less traveled.
Like the unfurling of a story, yes, a narrative symbolism in which we the viewers become narrators setting in motion our own memories and imagination.”
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