In Conversation: Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, Eleanor Jones Harvey, and Laura Roulet

Join MoCA Arlington for a conversation with artist Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, along with the art historians and curators who contributed to the catalog for her current exhibition Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: Here the waving flag. Here the other world. 

The catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition features essays by exhibition curator Blair Murphy and Eleanor Jones Harvey, Senior Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as an extended interview with the artist by independent curator Laura Roulet.

In this conversation, Ilchi and the catalog contributors will discuss her artistic practice, art historical influences, and the life experiences that inform Ilchi’s work.

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi: Here the waving flag. Here the other world. is the first major museum exhibition to survey Ilchi’s work, featuring artwork from over the last fifteen years. The exhibition is on view at MoCA Arlington through January 25, 2026.

Preview a pdf of the catalog here. The printed catalog is available for sale at MoCA Arlington and at the Museum’s Innovation Studio + Store.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi
Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi is an Iranian-American artist whose creative practice is a navigation of her multifaceted experiences as an immigrant. Ilchi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981 and has lived and worked in the Washington, DC metro area since immigrating to the United States at eighteen. Ilchi received an MFA in studio art from American University in 2011 and a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2006. She was a resident artist at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (then Arlington Arts Center) from 2012 to 2018.

Ilchi’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and is in private and public collections including The Phillips Collection, The Federal Reserve Board, The Microsoft Art Collection, the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, and the Love, Luck & Faith Foundation.

She served as the McMillan Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2023-2024 and is the recipient of the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development Individual Grant, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship, VisArts Studio Fellowship, Charm City Fellowship, Zeta Orionis Painting Fellowship, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Painting, and the Bethesda Painting Award.

Her work has been featured in many publications including The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Washington City Paper, and New American Paintings. Ilchi has attended residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Playa Summer Lake, Monson Arts and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Eleanor Jones Harvey
Eleanor Jones Harvey is Senior Curator of 18th and 19th Century Paintings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She earned a BA with distinction in art history at the University of Virginia, and both a MA and PhD at Yale University.

Dr. Harvey studies the intersection of landscape painting and American culture. Her most recent exhibition, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (2020), considered how deeply entwined the eminent naturalist’s ideas were with America’s emerging cultural identity, grounded in an appreciation of nature. She also organized the critically acclaimed exhibition, The Civil War and American Art on view at SAAM in 2012 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013. Both projects won the Smithsonian Secretary’s Distinguished Research Prize for best single-author catalogues.

Dr. Harvey served as SAAM’s Chief Curator from 2003 to 2012 and spearheaded the museum’s reinstallation in 2006. From 1992 to 2002, Dr. Harvey was the Curator of American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Laura Roulet
Laura Roulet is an independent curator and writer, specializing in contemporary, Latino, and Latin American art. She was one of five international curators chosen for the initial 5×5, a major public art initiative in Washington DC.

Her most recent exhibitions include The DMV Collects the DMV (Kreeger Museum); The Human Flood, Ellyn Weiss + Sondra N. Arkin; Landscape in an Eroded Field; Ian Jehle, Dynamical Systems; and Foon Sham: Escape (American University Museum, Katzen Center); and A Dark and Scandalous Rockfall (Mexican Cultural Institute). She has also curated exhibitions at the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, the OAS Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, as well as exhibitions in Mexico City and Puerto Rico.

She is a regular contributor to Sculpture magazine. Her other publications include many catalogue essays, articles in American Art, Art Journal, and Art Nexus, and the

book Contemporary Puerto Rican Installation Art: the Guagua Aerea, the Trojan Horse and the Termite. She worked on the Ana Mendieta retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and contributed to that catalogue.

MODERATOR

Blair Murphy
Blair Murphy is a curator based in the Washington, DC metro area and the Curator of Exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington in Arlington, VA. At MoCA Arlington, she shapes the vision for the exhibitions program and has curated numerous exhibitions, including A Passage of Force Through Matter; An Adventure of Being; and Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy. She launched the museum’s biennial exhibition series, Assembly, in 2019 and Global Spotlight, a new series focused on international artists, in 2022.

Her previous curatorial projects include exhibitions at The Kitchen (New York, NY), Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Field Projects (New York, NY), VisArts Rockville (Rockville, MD), and with the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2014-2015 and holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MA from Georgetown University.