Current Exhibitions
Community Gallery
GTDM Art Quartet
November 24 – December 28, 2025
Reception: December 7, 12:00–2:00 pm
Four artists with different media and unique styles join together to showcase their creative visions.
Greg Holmes— Bachelor of Arts (BA): Ceramics/Photography/Drawing
Combining earth, metal, and wood with fine craftsmanship, in ways that complement each other, has become my fascination as a ceramic artist. Whether they are wheel-thrown symmetrical vessels or hand assembled triangular and convex/concave vessels, the addition of metal and wood accents to these wood-fired forms has become my signature approach. As the creative process continues to evolve, I look to nature for interesting textures, earth-tone colors, metals, and woods to create surface treatments that I find exciting and aesthetically stimulating.
Terry Pellmar— My artistic journey began after my retirement from a career in science. While I am self-taught in digital art, I trained with local artists to develop my skills in traditional media. Inspired by nature, fractals, and the world around me, I create distinctive digital art that blends traditional and modern techniques.
Dave McCann— Trees provide the inspiration for the objects found in my work. Native hardwoods, locally sourced, are the foundation of all of my efforts. Locally sourced hardwoods provide interesting variants to shine in my objects. The addition of veneers added to my pieces allow the exotic species to be used sustainably.
Marian Gliese— My art is centered on my deep passion for nature, which I explore through vibrant oil paintings of flowers, birds, trees, and all things natural. My artistic focus was shaped by botanical and anatomical studies during my training in pharmaceutical science. I describe my paintings as "intimate portraits," capturing the sensuous personality of each subject.
Inside/Outside: Expressions of Identity
September 28 – November 16, 2025
During the 2024-25 school year, students in grades 7 through 12 at Sandy Spring Friends School explored the themes of cultural and family traditions through artwork. Sandy Spring Friends School, founded in 1961, is a community that follows the principles of the Quaker testimonies: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equity, and Stewardship. These principles can be seen in the students' works.
This inspiring exhibition showcases the creative talents of high school students as they explore and express the deep, meaningful connections between culture and family traditions. Through various media—painting, photography, ceramics, digital art, and mixed media—these young artists invite viewers to reflect on the customs, values, and practices that have shaped their own identities and communities.
Each piece tells a unique story, blending personal heritage with the universal themes of love, resilience, and belonging. The exhibition offers a powerful glimpse into the diverse backgrounds of the student artists, celebrating the richness of their cultural narratives while highlighting the common threads that unite us all.
We invite you to step into this world of expression and reflection, where each brushstroke and photograph is a tribute to the strength of family ties and the beauty of cultural heritage.
ARTINA 2025: Upside Down – Inside Out
September 7 – November 9, 2025
ARTINA, the ART IN NAture sculpture garden, now in its 9th year, is an ongoing partnership between Washington Sculptors Group and Sandy Spring Museum that invites social engagement with the environment through collaborative art making.
This year, artists from Washington Sculptors Group will continue to present site specific works installed across the museum's 7-acre grounds. Juried by Washington, D.C.–based artist and arts professional, Zoma Wallace, the exhibition invites artists to respond to a world that feels increasingly disoriented and unstable.
Wallace's curatorial statement challenges artists to reflect on the confusion of the present moment—where what was once certain is now in flux, and societal norms seem to have flipped. Through sculpture, installation, performance, and sound, artists explore ideas of inversion and reorientation from many angles: geographic, psychological, political, and material.
The exhibition embraces the carnivalesque: a space of disorder and delight, irony and satire, surreal and absurdity. It invites interpretations ranging from playful to profound, silly to serious, uncanny to critical.
Upside Down, Inside Out offers a space for artists and viewers alike to question the status quo, challenge fixed positions, and navigate shifting paradigms with creativity and curiosity.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Esperanza Alzona, Joanathan Bessaci, Matthew Duffy, Gayle Friedman, McCleary Gallagher, Judith Goodman, Barbara Januszkiewicz, Joshua Prince, Lynda Smith-Bugge, and James Wysolmierski.
Upcoming exhibitions
Dinner Used to Be at 6
January 18 – April 22, 2026
"Dinner Used To Be at 6" is a group exhibition featuring Trang Huynh, Angel Jones, and Amelie Wang, three Baltimore-based artists whose practices center on memory, identity, and inherited histories. Through diverse mediums, each artist explores how personal experience is shaped by collective memory, cultural and social moments. Despite their different backgrounds, the artists share a common thread in their exploration of generational trauma and the enduring impact of colonial violence within the context of the Western world.
Rooted in traditions yet reshaped by modern realities, the artwork reflects on what it means to carry the past while navigating the present. Each piece serves as a conversation between cultures, timelines, and geographies-where ancestral patterns and family stories are reimagined through contemporary practices. In doing so, the exhibition speaks to the complexities of living between worlds and holding space for both grief and joy.
Speaking in Symbols:
A Dialogue on Masterworks of Uzbek Traditional Ceramics
January 25 – April 22, 2026
This Speaking in Symbols exhibition features the extraordinary and intricately decorated ceramic works of Alisher Nazirov, a renowned Traditional Master Ceramist from Rishtan, Uzbekistan. Each of his creations – ranging from small intimate drinking vessels to large ceremonial urns and platters -- reflect longstanding symbols and ornamentation drawn from a deep and rich Uzbek cultural heritage, which actively link his modern creative practice to time-honored traditions that date back well over a millennium. Each handcrafted vessel is coated with local clay engobes, then exquisitely hand-decorated in botanical/biomorphic figures and arabesques, delicately carved with a sgraffito technique, and lastly glazed and fired using local plant materials and minerals. Each vessel’s decorations are intended to convey specific good wishes and blessings – from maker to user, or from giver to receiver – via a canon of traditional abstract/biomorphic symbols, or “islimi”. Nazirov dubs this canon of symbols his ‘Alphabet of Uzbek Ornament’, which create a visual language to convey these good wishes from the artist to the vessel’s final home. His hope as a maker is to spark joy and satisfaction amongst end users and to lighten their hearts, even if for just a moment. This show represents Nazirov’s first opportunity to share his extraordinary work with the U.S. public.
The exhibition has been co-curated by Mr. Nazirov and Ms. Dee Harris, a local DC-area ceramic artist. During an artistic exchange in 2023, the co-curators discovered a mutual sense of aesthetic synergy and the idea of a joint exhibition involving the two artists was born. They note: “In honor of our serendipitous meeting in Uzbekistan and our ongoing conversations in clay, it felt only natural to include in the show a few works that sparked our collaboration in the first place. We both hope the creative synergy is palpable to all.”