Despite the light rain, people swarmed from all parts of the city to the annual H Street Festival, an outdoor event Sept. 17 celebrating and promoting local artists, including an AU professor.
People gathered on street corners outside bars and ethnic restaurants. Vendors sold corn, barbecue, tacos, funnel cakes, cupcakes, ribs, fried chicken, watermelon, and lobster. Jamaican, Middle Eastern and Lebanese food was also displayed, all from local shops.
Sculptures, paintings, art cars and performers lined the streets in small galleries and tents. Part of the up-and-coming arts community is the Gallery Oonh, which was also a festival sponsor.
The OonH gallery is a small two-story building that transports visitors into a small retro gallery on Martha’s Vineyard.
“We are trying to build a community space,” co-owner Dolly Vehlow said. “A culturist’s community greater than the bars; a broader cultural environment.”
Down the street from the festival was the H Studio Gallery, opening an exhibition of Pam Rogers and AU Adjunct Professor Katherine Mann’s work.
Mann said her paintings at the H Studio were moderately sized and “more intimate” than her typical works. She works mostly with paint but incorporated some print making into her paintings.
“D.C. is up and coming for art,” Mann said. “For the first time, an art fair is coming to D.C. We are beginning to compete with New York.”
In the next room were Rogers’ works, a combination of ink, pigments from plants, smoke, and pencil. She makes her own paint and paper. Each piece is “a narrative, a story and it’s process based,” Rogers said.
Rogers worked for the Smithsonian Institution doing detailed sketches of artifacts, which she finds creep into her personal work in some ways even though she is a painter.
“Negative space is something I think about more than anything else,” Rogers said. “Each piece I create is a narrative, a story. I’ll throw something down and think, ‘Hm, what’s it gonna be?’”
