School 33 Art Center presents the 2019 Studio Resident Biennial, Crisis of Connection and Tongue Puddles on view Thursday, May 9 through Saturday, August 24, 2019. Visitors are invited to an opening reception on Thursday, May 9 from 6pm-9pm. The reception is free and open to the public.
School 33 Art Center’s 2019 Studio Resident Biennial (Main Gallery) 
School 33 Art Center’s bi-annual exhibition highlights the art of artist-in-residence Mary Baum, Lynn Cazabon, Cheeny Celebrado-Royer, Rachel Guardiola, Taha Heydari, Luke Ikard, Tiffany Jones, Lauren R. Lyde, Sylvie Van Helden and Stephanie Williams. Since 1979, the Studio Artist Program has provided exceptional workspace to more than 150 artists working diverse areas of contemporary visual art.
In 2008, School 33 established the Studio Mentor Program, which facilitates in-studio critiques and professional development for resident artists. Prominent practicing artists and arts professionals from the Mid-Atlantic region provide support and constructive feedback, helping artists to fulfill their creative goals. Every two years, a chosen mentor also serves as curator for the “Studio Resident Biennial.”
The 2019 curator and mentor George Ciscle has mounted groundbreaking exhibitions, created community arts programs, and taught courses in fine arts and humanities for close to 50 years. He was the founder and director of The Contemporary, and from 1997 to 2017 served as curator-in-residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). There, Ciscle founded and directed the Exhibition Development Seminar, Curatorial Studies Concentration, and MFA in Curatorial Practice.
Crisis of Connection (Members Gallery) 
Artists Markele Cullins, Alexander D’Agostino, Darius Johnson, Ian Lewandowski, Alexis Reehill, Matthew Savitsky, Xavier Schipani and Kurt Simonson explore the visibility and acceptance of queer, non-binary and trans men in connection with the traditional notions of male identity. The paradigm reinforces a crisis of interpersonal emotional connection among male-identifying people, hampering society as a whole. Curated by Alexander Jarman, the exhibition expands the geographies of gender by creating and highlighting images of male-identifying people that allows viewers to see men as tender, vulnerable and nuanced.
Tongue Puddles (Project Space) 
With “Tongue Puddles,” Danni O’Brien populates the Project Space with an ensemble of hard and soft objects suggestive of jewelry, flora, playground equipment, and road signs to form a frolicsome and unabashedly feminine installation. Her studio practice revolves around latch hook rug making, a kitschy and nostalgic craft technique with which she builds fuzzy, fibrous “paintings” of abstracted motifs from her adolescent girlhood. O’Brien employs this process to grapple with notions of femininity, domesticity and craft, also exploring the material’s redolent and tactile qualities. She constructs and incorporates twisting, bulbous forms from found objects, wood and cardboard coated in paper pulp, arranging the resulting series of cheeky, off-kilter objects into an immersive landscape that encourages touch and play.