To understand Maggie Michael’s paintings, start from the bottom.
Washington, D.C
Review | Maggie Michael may be D.C.’s most vital, volatile painter
In “Understory,” a show of Michael’s recent works on view near Union Market, motion is always key. Tall vertical paintings such as “Boulder Monument (Orange)” (2020/2022) and “Moon Fall (Mt. Hood, Mt. Sopris, Clay)” (2024) evoke the volcanic action of an idea rising to the surface and spilling over. The latest works by Michael — perhaps the most vital and visible D.C. painter since Sam Gilliam — unfold as a series of volatile discoveries.
Michael’s lyrical painting is a reminder of the power of pure abstraction as a lens for finding the world, as it is and as it could be. That Michael’s first major solo show since 2016 arrives at an all-time nadir for abstract-expressionist painting only makes the show more riveting.
Ten years ago, things were different. An overheated market was fixated on highly abstract post-minimalist painting, inviting a craze by collectors for “zombie formalism.” But abstraction is no longer top of mind for curators and dealers. Instead, museums and galleries across the country are deeply engaged with figurative painting, tackling urgent issues about identity and representation. Some critics say the rebound has gone too far, subbing a fad for abstraction with a fever for “zombie figuration.”
Michael’s style recalls mid-century ideals about the value of painting. Objects make frequent appearances on her canvases. A small grid-like device shows up in “Pink for Kiefer, Homage to Midgard” (2023-2024) and other works, a way of mentioning the hard-edge geometric tradition in abstract painting while also toying with the notion of the surface. The snakeskin that Michael pins to “Night Studio” (2024) is a casual quotation of Robert Rauschenberg, whose sculptural combines stretched the notion of painting with taxidermy and tires. She has an arsenal of abstract-expressionist strategies at her disposal, but as a stylist, she makes them all her own.
Michael produced 15 of the paintings in “Understory” while working as an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. During her residency, Michael says, she tried to produce a diptych or triptych in tribute to Mitchell, the New York School artist who relished large-format paintings, but it didn’t happen. That’s not so surprising. Michael is a tighter painter, and her style is much more densely plotted. For “Understory,” which occupies a space that once served as a Lululemon store, Michael uses the former fitting rooms to showcase a rotation of more than a dozen small paintings, some as little as 10 inches square — small in scale but not in scope.
With its epic sweep, “Chagall’s Horse Lands in Utah” (2021-2022) could easily take up an entire wall. In the painting, the loosest figure of a horse charges under an ocher orb that might signify a setting sun. Michael frames this circle with a stencil from player-piano print roll, another one of the artist’s signature marks. This painting summons the vast reaches of a twilight dreamscape, but the actual production is quite condensed. Michael delivers novellas that read like myth.
“Chagall’s Horse Lands in Utah” could be a fitting title for Michael’s entire project. Her approach to drafting abstract sagas draws on a rich and distinctly American painterly tradition. One of her own paintings tests the rule: “American Seance for CoBrA (Malachite)” (2022) stands apart from the others, with a muddled, primitive, almost Crayola-like brushstroke. Both the title and style nod to CoBrA — a collective of postwar European painters from Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br) and Amsterdam (A) — and specifically within this group Karel Appel, the founder from Amsterdam. Nestled within this very non-American and un-Michael-like piece is a section of painting that resembles malachite, a mineral whose radial copper banding is prized by Navajo and Hopi tribes in the Southwest.
These vivid undercurrents bubble up in one painting after another, although the sheer size of “Understory” means that viewers might miss such moments. The show, assembled by Michael herself, features nearly 50 paintings staged on multiple levels. At 3,000 square feet, the space is vast enough that it doesn’t feel cramped or forced; in fact, only an especially prolific artist could hope to fill it. But “Understory” risks being overwhelming. Two or three subsets of paintings in this show could easily stand on their own.
The most difficult painting on view might also be the most figurative. The composition of “Olympia’s Odalesque” (2017/2018) speaks directly to Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863), the reclining nude Venus whose hand rests on her thigh like a tarantula. In Michael’s composition, a hard-edge rectangle intersected by a chevron conveys the thrust of a chaise longue within a frame. But the figure-ish shape inside that frame is cramped, its head missing, with only a nipple-like protrusion to suggest any feminine identity — a bleak reading of the original.
It may take another biennial or two for expressionist paintings to come back into vogue. Abstraction has lost its place, perhaps, but none of its power. Swoops of texture and gesture in a painting such as “Antelope Falls, Nude Descending” (2024) can unlock a primal feeling, as poetry or music manifests goose bumps or heart palpitations. Michael’s paintings dwell in that rush of blood, that sense of sensation.
If you go
Maggie Michael: Understory
1256 Fourth St. NE. unionmarketdc.com.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – Seventy-two veterans took a trip Saturday to our nation’s capital to visit memorials honoring their service in the armed forces.
This year marks the 12th trip to Washington, D.C. for Honor Flight Tallahassee.
Early Saturday morning, veterans and their guardians met to take a charter flight up to D.C.
Throughout the day, veterans were taken to the World War II memorial, as well as the Korean and Vietnam War memorials. The veterans also visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
More Tallahassee news:
The day ended with a wonderful welcome home celebration.
Our Jacob Murphey, Julia Miller, Taylor Viles, and Grace Temple accompanied the veterans, capturing moments from throughout the day.
The team will have live coverage from Washington, D.C. on Monday to share more from the day’s events.
We will continue to have coverage throughout the month of May, leading up to our Honor Flight special on Memorial Day.
To keep up with the latest news as it develops, follow WCTV on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Nextdoor and X (Twitter).
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4 things to know about the weather:
- Chances of rain in the morning
- Gusty Sunday
- Chilly Monday
- Temps will rise again through the work week
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.
The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.
Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.
However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.
QuickCast
SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s
MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
Washington, D.C
‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington
The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.
In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.
“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”
Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.
Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.
“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.
“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”
Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”
A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.
Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.
Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.
But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.
“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”
At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.
The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.
Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.
For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.
“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”
For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.
In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.
Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.
“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”
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