Three Lines

Three Lines brings together the work of artists Tina Villadolid, Paloma Vianey, and Anne C. Smith, whose paths first crossed in 2023 as the inaugural CARD Fellows (the Collaborative Arts Resource District Fellowship Program of The Phillips Collection, the Nicholson Project, and DC Public Library). Although their backgrounds and work are different, they discovered a shared sensitivity to places of origin, family, and art making that forged a bond between them. Showing together for the first time, the three artists pick up on the significance of line that underlies their work, conversations, and fellowship: 

line as length 
line as lineage 
line as border 
line as path 
line as distance 
line as time 

to line with silver 
to line with light 

Along with works from each individual artist, the exhibition will also include three collaborative pieces which the artists passed to each other through the mail. 

IMAGES (left to right): Tina Villadolid, I Am an Archipelago, 2023, Washed muslin, Rust-Oleum, bamboo timber, Manila hemp made in China, Lola’s needle and thread, chemically silvered portrait, rice, embalmed banana leaves, 11 x 13 x 5 ft., Courtesy of the artist; Paloma Vianey, Vivimos dentro de la reja, 2024, Oil on canvas, 39 x 39 in.; Courtesy of the artist; Anne C. Smith, Break, 2018, Charcoal, graphic, and colored pencil, 43 x 58 in., Courtesy of the artist

About Tina Villadolid

Tina Villadolid’s creative practice is reclamation of her complex inheritances as a Filipina American. Through temporal installation and action-based work she calls “ritual interventions,” she embodies resilience to generational trauma caused by American colonialism at historical sites where Philippine stories are diminished or erased. In reclamation of her matriarchal lineage of Filipina shamans, she regenerates a feminine iconography by layering images of herself with those of her ancestors. Playing with scale, illumination, and materiality, Villadolid’s work physicalizes a power shift. 

About Paloma Vianey

Paloma Vianey creates work about her hometown of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, challenging the single narrative of danger told in the US about her home city. Her sculptural paintings are highly detailed and sensitive to color, featuring images of specific buildings and streets captured in the absence of people. She sometimes wraps these images in a protective layer like a chamarra, or jacket, partly zipped. In other works, she disrupts the landscape at the border with brutal knots tied into the canvas or by painting over and peeling away a layer of soft tulle. 

About Anne C. Smith

Anne C. Smith makes drawings that are influenced by nighttime observations of landscape and home, and also are reflective of an internal space. In drawing, she seeks to meet uncertainty with awareness and the possibility of finding balance. As such her drawing practice becomes a practice of navigation. In these drawings, she constructs silvery architectures of line using pencil on a charcoal ground. These forms span the drawing surface and are not planned ahead, but drawn into the charcoal and emerge piece by piece, as if by feeling one’s way through the dark. For Smith, line is a path traveled, a process of continual unfolding and revealing.