Walking up 18th Street in Adams Morgan, you often wonder about the spaces on the second floor of the buildings lining the sidewalks. Beyond the popular storefronts and restaurants, what lies above? Apartments, offices, maybe a vacant space waiting to be filled. But on February 13, two banners flow over the roof to the second floor of 2438 18th St. NW, catching the eye of many a pedestrian. Backlit by the glow of yellow windows, they read: “WE MEND IN END TIMES.”
There’s no check-in at the top of the narrow staircase that ejects curious passersby into the center of a wide room. Rather than a traditional information desk, you feel as though you are entering a treehouse on a ladder through a hole in the floor. Classic white walls and exposed brick are typical to a traditional gallery, but the experience is anything but traditional. The art is not encased in ornate frames from a bygone era; rather, the textile art pieces physically overflow onto the light hardwood floors. The lighting design serves as the frames, with spotlights throwing pools of light around the array of projects on the walls.
Not even 30 minutes after the opening of We Mend in End Times, an exhibition by co-curators Lucas J Rougeux and Izy Carney, The DC Arts Center (DCAC) main gallery space is crowded with people, all with eclectic styles and unique faces and a diverse array of ages. DCAC Deputy Executive Director River Hansen weaves between the throng, offering red wine in plastic cups.
Carney emerges from the crowd to push a VHS tape into a vintage Sony television in the corner, which lights up with a curatorial video of the exhibit, complete with retro yellow subtitles, putting the exhibit’s inspiration into context for viewers.
DCAC is a space that confounds expectations for art. It specifically does not shy away from the realities of inequity in artistic spaces – in fact, it was built to confront them. In 1989, board members at the Washington Project for the Arts raised that the issue of gentrification in the city had seeped into not just housing or business, but also into the arts. After discussions, a group of the members decided to start a new initiative focused on creating and sustaining opportunities for underrepresented and displaced artists, as well as those working out of the mainstream.
“The idea was to challenge the hierarchy and challenge the notion that a good artist is only an artist that comes from one institution – or that it’s an artist that comes from any institution, period,” said Sean Elias, executive director at DCAC.
Since then, the nonprofit has grown into a home for art of all disciplines (visual, theatrical, literary, even forays into the culinary arts) in Adams Morgan and DC at large. It draws funding from a variety of sources, including institutional grants and individual contributions, enabling them to stay independent and autonomous in a time of turmoil for arts and cultural institutions. “That allows for the spirit of experimentation that seems to be harder to find, especially in a city that has gentrified and moved its focus to commercial work and the selling of commercial work,” said Elias.
The experimental nature of DCAC and the art it houses leads to creative and bold endeavors from a wide variety of artists. Elias was particularly struck by a previous exhibit by artist Esha Sadr, an Iranian multidisciplinary artist in DC, that highlighted the ongoing issues immigrants face across the world, particularly in America. “It was really the first time that I think I physically experienced art in a professional setting that was so civically engaged – and so immediate,” said Elias.
Years after Sadr used those very same walls, that same sense of immediacy remains within the art of DCAC. A piece by contributing artist Fatima Janneh entitled Relief catches my attention during the opening of We Mend in End Times. Flesh-toned fabric, rippled and wrinkled imperfectly, hosts blue cyanotype x-ray prints and a red circle stitched in surgical thread. It evokes an almost uncomfortable humanity, as if I am viewing a body on an operating table after a procedure. On the opposite wall, a piece by Rougeux: an abstract textile landscape, green stripes and a yellow sun dotted with red spots of fabric that could be flowers -- or droplets of blood. The nameplate on the wall reads, The Land Grows through its Scars.
“What you’ll see in the gallery is a collection of work that dictates what living right now feels like,” said Rougeux, “and how textiles have been the lens we’re creating through that.”
We Mend in End Times centers around the idea of repair in the form of mending. But there’s much more to the textile art filling the gallery than just stitches and patches.
The group of contributing artists explore “mending” in all its forms. From a body sliced up and stitched back together surgically to a tapestry created from discarded scraps, each piece confronts nihilistic perspectives that once something is torn, it is destroyed.
The exhibition’s curatorial statement refers to mending as “a meditation on damage,” and “the renewal of an object for longevity.” Rougeux and Carney, DC residents, tie together the long history of textile arts, particularly present in community and women’s work, with the difficult state of current politics and society that they have been observing up-close in the nation’s capital. The phrase “fabric of society” comes to mind – a delicate order that can be torn, yes, but also sewed back together.
“The presence of a mended stitch is that there is damage here, there is a scar here, but we’re stronger for it,” says Rougeux. “We decided to take time to repair this – not throw it out and start anew, but understand that we want this to last, and have a newer life. And that communal idea that we can do it together.”
Community is present in a literal sense in the corner of the gallery, where three of four seats at an embroidery table are occupied as patrons contribute to a community quilt. Participants pick fabric scraps from an overflowing yellow bucket and pull needles from a plump red pin cushion before taking a seat to make their mark on the fabric. The quilt will be raffled off to a lucky winner, pulled from those who choose to donate five dollars to a local mutual aid foundation. The text on the white wall behind the stitchers reads, “Slow down, sit, and stitch.”
Carney comments to me, “There’s so much to learn from the act of sitting with something, and knowing it’s not going to be perfect, but just trying to make it usable.”
Collective growth is a defining quality of DCAC’s ethos. Beyond housing a gallery and theater, the nonprofit also serves as an education and training space for artists and curators of all disciplines. It hosts a Curatorial Initiative, which trains new and upcoming curators through apprenticeships and experiences, as well as a program known as the Sparkplug Artists’ Collective, started in 2007.
This program caters to artists outside of traditional art experiences such as art school and offers a year of critiques, workshops, and group shows. “We purposely try to form these groups out of a wide variety of experience levels and stages in their field,” said River Hansen, Deputy Executive Director. “There’s not only the professional networking, but the personal growth that happens when you take a group of people who have common goals, but different backgrounds and perspectives and mediums.” Carney and Rougeux, as well as We Mend in End Times contributing artist Milan Warner, were involved in Sparkplug cohorts.
The Sparkplug program and the Curatorial Initiative are just two of the many ways DCAC engages directly with DC’s community of artists. WallMountables, an annual exhibition at DCAC, brings together many artists (whether members of DCAC or not) for a large show that highlights each artist’s work, with no direct theme. “You walk through, and it’s chaos, but it just works in the balance of walking through the space in a way that’s a little bit magical,” said Hansen.
DCAC once grappled with their name, debating branding as “The DC Arts Center,” or just “DC Arts Center.” But as Elias told me, there is something meaningful about the adjectival quality of “the.”
“Putting the ‘the’ there references the brick-and-mortar institution. It signals that we are, and hope to remain, a stabilizing cultural force in the District,” he said. “It’s highlighted the importance of holding literal, physical space for the arts to take place in.”
Art is an abstract concept. It can be anywhere, produced by anyone, in any form. But there is something inherently special about art that has a physical presence, a tangible experience, that takes up space.
And on the second floor of that 18th Street building, the textile art of We Mend in End Times invites its viewers to take up space and time for themselves, and to treasure and learn from the scars that are left behind in transformation.
A Segment of We Mend in End Times’ Curatorial Statement:
This country is vastly diverse but fraying – with widening holes, tears, and separations that seek to divide us. We Mend in End Times reminds us that the process of repair through mending is a slow and painstaking task made easier together. Damage cannot be undone, but the accumulation of many stitches makes a new and stronger quilt.
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We Mend in End Times will be on display February 13 - March 13, 2026 (Wednesday - Sunday / 2:00 PM - 7:00 PM) in the Main Gallery at DCAC (2438 18th St. NW
Washington, DC 20009).
Join the co-curators for a Mending Night on March 4th (details)!
Featured artists in We Mend in End Times include:
Izy Carney
Eliza Clifford
Grace David
Fatima Janneh
Lucas J Rougeux
Milan Warner
Thank you to the incredible staff and artists of DCAC for bringing me into their space. If you would like to contribute to the center, see their website for more details or click this link.
So incredible and i had no idea it was there!! Need to stop by