Crosshatch: Making Networks, 2026
Extending through minimalism and abstraction across painterly and sculptural planes, the exhibition considers the patterns that map out each artists’ current practice. Positioned on, alongside and against the gallery walls, the works engage weight, stroke and finish in dialogue with industrial evolutions.
While grounded in the contemporary, the artists in Crosshatch inherit and subvert legacies of mid-century Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and continue the local legacy of the Washington Color School abstraction, creating ripples of influence and differentiation. By treating lines not merely as structural components, they expand investigations of the grid established by their canonical forebears.
Drawing from systems of mapping, sequencing, and repetition, Maryland-based Francie Hester examines how personal and collective histories are embedded within material surfaces. Intersecting these linear trajectories, Hester’s Axis includes sculpted aluminum and plexiglass works, shaped as Xs. The work explores recollection —as an axis of reference points suspended within time, offering glimpses of spliced moments, days, and events. Her compositions at once invite and redirect the viewer through a puzzle that is collaged from other spaces. They compound through layers of pixelation and physical deconstruction, as Hester sanding and scraping creates a tension of the slight of hand, balancing precision and imprecision.
