Artist Talks with Andrew Barco and Elliot Doughtie

Join artists Andrew Barco and Elliot Doughtie for conversations about their solo exhibitions currently on view at MoCA Arlington.

Andrew Barco will discuss his solo project Understory, which incorporates sculpture, projection, and hand-drawn texts to tell the fictional story of a Chicago theater group creating a live-performance version of The Cave (2019), a real-life documentary about a subterranean hospital during the Syrian civil war. Elliot Doughtie will talk about his installation Tomato, which transforms industrial materials into metaphors for the human body and the experience of inhabiting one.

Andrew Barco: Understory and Elliot Doughtie: Tomato take place as part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 23-24, a series of solo exhibitions by artists based in the Mid-Atlantic taking place at the Museum throughout 2023 and 2024. The exhibitions were selected from an open call by a jury that included artist Nekisha Durrett, Betsy Johnson, assistant curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Jova Lynne, director, Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

ANDREW BARCO
b. 1979, Durham, NC
Lives in Manassas, VA

Andrew Barco’s work is concerned with the often strange and improbable ways ideas and habits can be transmitted across cultural landscapes and through time. With an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he researches intellectual, cultural, and craft histories and takes his viewers on philosophical detours. Barco has exhibited professionally since 2003 with his work featured in group shows in many US cities including Chicago, IL, Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA, Durham, NC; Hartford, CT; and New Orleans, LA. Major performance works have been presented at venues in Chicago, and Boston, and he was a featured artist in the Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival (2013) and Rapid Pulse Tour (2018). Recently, the primary audience and participants of his work have been his amazing students from the SkyArt youth art program in Chicago, IL with whom, for example, he staged public interventions erecting temporary monuments to historic Black female Chicagoans. Barco has presented solo exhibitions with Threewalls Gallery, Chicago, Il (2014), FiveSevenDell Boston, MA (2010), and in Durham, NC with WestVillage (2006) and Transom Gallery (2004). Born and raised in Durham, NC, Barco recently relocated from Chicago to Northern Virginia.

ELLIOT DOUGHTIE
b. 1985, Dallas, TX
Lives and works in Baltimore, MD

Elliot Doughtie is a Baltimore-based artist originally from Dallas, TX. His drawings, sculptures, and installations engage in a desire to form close relationships between objects and the body in proximity to intimate or vulnerable situations. Doughtie received his BA from Tulane University and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been exhibited throughout North America including L’OEil de Poisson (Quebec City, Quebec), Basketshop Galley (Cincinnati, OH), LangerOverDickie (Chicago, IL), Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX). He has been awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant recipient.