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The Art of Staying the Same and Always Changing: Transformer DC

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Is BOPA Okay?

On a recent spring afternoon, the artist MK Bailey hosted a casual “luncheon on the grass” at her Bucolia immersive installation at the Transformer DC art space. Large-scale acrylic gardenscapes tinged with a sense of mystery and slight menace, inspired by her six-week long residency at the stately Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, hung on walls painted with silhouettes of equally eerie vegetation and picnic-goers enjoyed their repasts on the artificial turf floor.

Over the exhibit’s six-week run, Transformer DC’s unprepossessing physical space near Logan Circle—essentially a covered alleyway wedged between a smoothie store on one side and a barber shop on the other, with slightly wonky floors and a large window protruding over the sidewalk—became a portal into what seemed the troubled psyches and melancholy dream states of heroines of gothic novels set on remote country manors. 

At an artist’s talk at Hillwood several days later, Bailey described how the residency, facilitated by Transformer, and the resulting installation helped her explore artistic practices entirely new for her. “Having a space where I was allowed to come in and do whatever I wanted,” the thirty-year-old said of the experience, “is pretty rare and extremely important for the development of an emerging artist like myself.”

L-R: Camille DeSanto, Autumn Banner, Hanna Thompson, Victoria Reis, Sadie Varhall, and Madeline Usdan
Victoria Reis at Transformer with Bucolia exhibit and installation by MK Bailey

Transformer DC, co-founded in 2002 by Victoria Reis and Jayme McLellan (who left several years later to start Civilian Art Projects), has supported emerging artists’ experimentation and forging partnerships to amplify their visibility since its inception.

“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, the organization’s Executive and Artistic Director since 2006.

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.  

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 remembered. Plus, Reis noted, “I grew up very much a punk rock kid and was always interested in the alternative and what was different, what’s on the fringe?” So Transformer likewise committed to foregrounding the needs of artists and encouraging their creative risk-taking in experimental, multidisciplinary, and collaborative directions. In doing so, Transformer purposely set out not to simply add to the DC ecosystem but to alter it. “We were seeking to transform the arts landscape,” Reis recalled. Hence, the name. 

It’s a moniker to which it has largely lived up to in the years since. Despite its small size by many conventional measures—two hundred fifty square feet of gallery space, only a handful of staff, and an annual budget that hovers around half a million (slightly more in flush years)—Transformer has earned big player status in the DC arts scene and respect from all quarters, without losing its indie DIY vibe. Rachel Bers, Program Director at The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a long-time supporter of Transformer DC, described the organization in an email as “a vital hub of experimental creative energy in the DC community.”

For Playhaus DC, one of the District’s newest experimental art spaces, “Transformer has been blazing the trail. We look up to them,” said its co-founder and creative director Maria Bastasch in an interview. “They’ve just been doing this for so long and doing it so well. The quality of artists that they have featured within their gallery is top notch.” 

Victoria Reis at Transformer with Bucolia exhibit and installation by MK Bailey
Victoria Reis at Transformer with Bucolia exhibit and installation by MK Bailey

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.”

Header Image: Victoria Reis outside Transformer with Bucolia exhibit and installation by MK Bailey

This story is from Issue 17: Transformation, available here.

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