As its lushly designed 20th anniversary commemorative book transformer20 documents, the nonprofit has an enviable record of serving more than thirty five hundred artists though more than five hundred fifty exhibitions and programs over two decades. Transformer hosts about six exhibitions every year, transmogrifying its 14th & P street shoe-box space each time as far as these artists’ imaginations can push it. Shows in 2023 typify both its curatorial appetite for boundary pushing and its inclusive programming.
bay sick: an excursion of perversion, the first solo exhibit for Baltimore-based Felipe Pereira Gonçalves, featured mixed-media wall sculptures whose refracted views on the coming-of-age experience “offer the possibility of transcendence,” per the Washington Post’s review of the show. Double Rainbow: PRISMMMs spotlighted video work and archival materials from the collaborative performances between two DC’ers, veteran Holly Bass (who first showed at Transformer in 2007 and appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale) and up-and-comer Maps Glover, that drew on the Black experience and diversity of cultural modes to offer up alternatives to the traditional art history canon.
Bass and Glover also participated in the 31st edition of Transformer’s community-facing Framework Panel (started in 2002), intended to both educate audiences on contemporary visual arts practice and to give a platform for artists to share about their work. Transformer added to its programs Exercises For Emerging Artists, a cohort-based peer critique and mentorship series, two years later. Siren Arts, a summer residency and public performance art platform in Asbury Park, NJ, where Reis (and her DC punk guitarist legend husband, Brian Baker) now live part-time, was launched in 2017.
“Transformer is such a North Star for DC artists,” commented Mary Ryan, Deputy Director of leading DC patron of the arts S&R Evermay. “What artists need are at the center of everything they do… They center artists through [their] years of experience and knowledge in the DC arts landscape and beyond.”
Jaimes Mayhew is one of the artists who has experienced how Transformer’s artist-centric principles manifest in real time. Mayhew had been working on a project called A Different Horizon Atlas, a series of collaborative maps of imaginary queer utopias. Although Mayhew had his pieces in Transformer’s Annual Benefit Auction Exhibition & Gala several times, he didn’t really know Reis. “But I just sent her an email and asked her if I could have a show,” the UMBC graduate and former long-time Baltimore resident said. “She said I’ll do you one better. Why don’t we get a cohort of artists together from an international level to make new maps?”
And so Mayhew is leading a group of queer and trans artists through the 21st edition of the Exercises mentoring program, with his current five maps plus the new ones produced together to be on display at Transformer from June 1-July 13, 2024. Thinking back on that initial exchange with Reis “gives me goosebumps,” said Mayhew. “It was exactly what I wanted to do with this project. Victoria is being so generous and trusting and really helping me to push the project in a direction that it naturally wants to go in, but I didn’t have the resources for.”
The need to access resources to support artists producing some of the most forward-thinking contemporary art, but also not in obviously commercially packaged forms, has Transformer regularly iterating fundraising strategies. After all, artists still have to pay the rent in rapidly gentrifying DC. (As do nonprofits: Transformer’s rent has gone up six-fold since 2002).
“Transformer has always been dedicated to paying artists the most equitable rate we can,” Reis noted, and about a decade ago, the organization received W.A.G.E. certification in recognition of its commitment to voluntarily paying artist fees that meet minimum payment standards. In 2007, it started its FlatFile program, a collection of smaller works on paper by 40+ artists at any given time that are priced at $500 and below. Its yearly auction gala, “the one moment where we’re entirely sales oriented: sell, sell, sell!,” Reis quipped, has become a tentpole event in the DC cultural calendar. Still, Reis finds she spends considerable time grant writing and courting individual donors.
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.
Ryan of Evermay, which hosted the transformer20 book launch, noted “Every Transformer event, because they center artists, is always more than just a DC happy hour. It has an element of art.”
That kind of deft stewardship behind transforming Transformer’s tiny square footage to outsized contemporary art presence is its own genre-defying artistic practice. Reis claims she “just wasn’t brave enough” to become a performance artist herself, instead making her “professional life’s work [about] supporting artists’ bravery and supporting the messages that they’re putting forward.”
Fair enough, but it also underplays how to advance those goals Reis has made Transformer her own mixed-media performance art by alchemizing elements of cutting-edge curator, committed activist, savvy arts administrator, networker extraordinaire, and artist whisperer. “I have always thought of Transformer as an ongoing art experiment,” Reis acknowledged. “That’s served us well in terms of being able to stay fluid and on the pulse of what artists are needing and seeking from us and being able to be responsive to artists.”
“That Transformer has managed to have its space for such a long time while preserving that freedom, that spirit, and all of that energy” of its upstart start-up origins, artist Mayhew marveled, “is pretty incredible.” Opening night of his and fellow map-makers’ exhibition A Different Horizon Atlas: Collaboratively Mapping Queer Utopias, which falls during Capital Pride, will continue that exuberant legacy, he promises. “It’s gonna be the hottest place to be in DC.”