Spring Valley residents can walk over to American University's Katzen Arts Center this month to view and bid on more than 150 artworks by local, national, and international emerging contemporary artists. The event, the 20th Annual Exhibition by innovative arts leader Transformer DC, begins November 9th and concludes with a gala benefit party November 23rd.

Transformer’s mission is to connect, elevate, and serve a diversity of emerging artists and arts leaders. Transformer develops innovative, multi-faceted exhibition and program platforms to present artists’ evolving ideas and work, advance new and best visual arts practices, and engage audiences with emerging contemporary art.

Co-founded in 2002 by Victoria Reis and Jayme McLellan (who left several years later to start Civilian Art Projects), Transformer DC supports emerging artists’ work and forges partnerships to amplify their visibility. 

Early on, Transformer identified its niche in the DC arts and culture ecosystem. Below the towering forest cover of large museums, formidable cultural institutions, and polished commercial galleries that all showcased more established and, let’s say it, establishment artists, the District lacked, according to Reis, “a consistent platform for emerging artists” to be nurtured from the ground up. Emerging was broadly defined, deliberately—as not just early in career but also new to DC, trying out a new medium or style, or never having had a solo show.  

“Transformer DC is a conduit for the artist to connect with larger communities of people and potential supporters and audiences, and also for larger cultural institutions to connect with artists,” explains 

Reis, who describes herself as an “arts-curious” Jersey Girl who first came to DC for a Kennedy Center internship, was also profoundly influenced by her time working at the now defunct National Association of Artists Organizations. “I was just obsessed with the really innovative artwork being produced, highlighted, or presented” by NAAO’s artist-centric members, she recalls. 

Transformer’s partnerships with an impressive array of actors in the DC ecosystem and further afield are another avenue to connect artists with potential resources and new audiences. Universities, museums (Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Textile Museum), and embassies, the quintessential DC culture standard-bearers, have all been collaborators. But so, too, have been the Washington Ballet School, for a performance collaboration in Transformer’s space, Adams-Morgans’ The LINE Hotel, and Comet Ping Pong pizzeria.

The annual benefit auction gala will take place on November 23. The exhibition kicks off on November 9 through the 22nd. Gallery hours at Katzen will run from Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. You can learn more about this exciting event at www.transformerdc.org.

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John Stiner (jstiner@breckdesign.com) has been a resident of Spring Valley since 1986 and is the founder of this magazine. He has been an attorney, USG official, international consultant, defense and homeland security executive, and is now an artist. He is married to Robin Breckenridge and has two adult sons.