(Washington, DC) Art Enables—a non-profit art studio and gallery dedicated to amplifying the careers of artists with disabilities—is pleased to announce a new exhibition:  ALIAS at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at GW. Originally exhibited at Art Enables in 2024,"ALIAS" populates the gallery space with large-scale, abstract sculptures that stand in for the personalities and artistic idiosyncrasies of their 12 makers. The sculptures—composed of layered and intersecting 2D shapes—sprung from a collaboration between Art Enables resident artists and artist and educator James Huckenpahler. Huckenpahler invited the artists to draw shapes that resonate with them, represent their personalities, or with which the artists feel a kinship. Designed by the artists as small paper maquettes, the sculptures were ultimately cut from cardboard on a CNC cutter at 12 times their original size. Sitting on the ground and suspended from the ceiling, the final works invite viewers to interact with them at the scale of the human body—or larger. Many works stretch as high or wide as 8 feet in a given direction. Encountering each sculpture in the gallery can feel like approaching a totem, monument, entity, or towering plant. Some have cloud-like, wiggly, or rounded personas, while others take more angular and architectural forms. In every case, the work intends to share some essence of the artist—each a playful, commanding alias to be met on its own terms.

Participating artists: A.T., Maurice Barnes, Jay Bird, Calvin “Sonny” Clarke, Toni Lane, Keith Lewis, Ceej Maples, Vanessa Monroe, Gillian Patterson, Dennis Quillin, Jamila Rahimi, Eileen Schofield

James Huckenpahler is an artist, educator, curator and lifelong Washingtonian. His laptop is his studio, and his practice firmly grounded in the digital realm. While contemporary technologies are generally considered a boon, his work encourages a critical assessment of the ways those tools can expand or limit our creative choices. He has taught extensively at The Corcoran School of Art and at George Washington University, and his work is represented in Washington DC by Hemphill Fine Arts.