Renee Stout @ HEMPHILL Sept 15 - Oct 27

If you ask Renee Stout about her work she might tell you first that she is a "healer" or a "medicine woman" and in the same breath she might say she is a big picture woman seeking music and metaphor to give voice to the communal energy and exchange that she is a witness to every day of her life. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Stout has been in Washington DC since 1985. Although she may be quick to tell you about all that she has gained from living in the area, her modesty will not allow her to talk about the many seeds that she has sown in the same community she draws from.

In 1993, she was the first American to exhibit at the National Museum of African Art, in that same year the Smithsonian published the catalog Astonishment & Power: The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi / The Art of Renee Stout by MacGaffey Wyatt , Michael D. Harris, Sylvia H. Williams, and David C. Driskell.

In 1997 she along with a group of poets, called The Black Rooster Collective (Brandon D. Johnson, Gary Lilley, Ernesto Mercer, and Joel Dias-Porter aka DJ Renegade) published a book of her art and their poems, called this is the place; and another in 1998 entitled Hoodoo you love: Prose, poetry, and art from the Black Rooster Workshop. These two books proved to be seminal works in terms of the influence they would have on the next generation of visual artists and poets in the Washington Metro Area, as they started out in their careers.

In 2002, The Belger Art Center for Creative Studies (University of Missouri-Kansas City) exhibited Readers, Advisors, and Storefront Churches: Renee Stout, a Mid-Career Retrospective, which took all elements of Stout's influences from her early realist days to her recent African and African American folklore, religious symbols, text and iconography.

Stout has been very tight lipped about her new exhibition Journal: Book One at Hemphill Fine Arts, one can only speculate: will it be in the vein her last group show The Book as Art (2006, The National Museum of Women in the Arts)? or will her fictional alter ego Fatima Mayfield shows us more "Fragments of a Secret Life" (2005 and 2006 Hemphill Fine Arts, Washington, DC and Hammonds House Galleries, Atlanta, GA respectively)?

Either way Stout's new work is sure to conjure something in us that will inspire.

Renee Stout
Journal: Book One
September 15 - October 27, 2007

Hemphill Fine Arts
1515 14th St. NW Washington, DC 20005
(202) 234-5601