Art Opening at Amy Kaslow Gallery
MARILYN GATES-DAVIS: WHERE WE ONCE BELONGED
DC'S DEVELOPMENT AND DISAPPEARANCE
OPENING RECEPTION JULY 23, 6 PM - 7:30 PM
Marilyn Gates-Davis trains her lens on Washington, D.C. to show a town, a familiar place where locals sit on stoops and walk to corner stores, where kids play basketball on makeshift courts and elders shoot the breeze. A majority of the black population that Gates-Davis depicts lives southeast of the Anacostia River.
The city is much larger, of course, and was at one time, majority black. Spurred by the decades-long Great Migration of southern sharecroppers who joined the swelling federal government labor force, blacks soon became the city’s dominant demographic. The 1970 Census registered blacks at 71%; the number dropped precipitously to 41% in 2026. Real estate development and gentrification dramatically changed the equation, and longtime homemakers had no means to stay.
At once grounded and ethereal, Gates-Davis’ creative dimensionality on canvas provides us all we need to conjure the change.
“I paint the abandoned structures in full detail, grounding them in their current state,” she says, adding “over these surfaces, I overlay figures drawn on vellum—ghostlike images of residents rendered in loose black ink.”
Using paint, she captures original row houses as they now appear, on top she deftly puts pen and ink in the form of the neighborhood’s earlier residents. Gates-Davis’ nostalgia, even tenderness in her work is fused with questions about who is absent from this scene and why. That, of course, is her point. Flux might be too delicate a word to describe the violent transformations of a place proudly coined and crooned “Chocolate City” by beloved homegrown funk band, Parliament. Native Washingtonians, and some scholars now have much to say about back in the day.
Gates-Davis’ town began as a white Federalist city with enslaved labor; two hundred years later it emerged as the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement where the March on Washington filled the National Mall, where black rioters torched white and black commercial corridors and neighborhood organizers emerged as activist political leaders driving Home Rule. “Where We Once Belonged” is an erasure of the “bad neighborhood” mark Gates-Davis says. Instead she asks us to remember and refresh with the life, the love, the legacy that remains.
Join us for the Opening, Thursday, July 23 from 6pm to 7:30pm at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland.