Lou Haney: Window Dressing

EXPERIMENTAL GALLERY, LOWER LEVEL
Lou Haney’s paintings embrace excess. They combine bright colors, busy patterns, and dense interiors in compositions that embrace nostalgia’s many pleasures while acknowledging its risks. Haney draws on patterns and color schemes from the mid to late 20th century, using them to create interior landscapes that are buzzing with energy. These spaces are dense with objects, patterns, and layers.

In her use of patterns, Haney explores questions of taste, trends, consumption, and domestic economy. Inspired by the Pattern & Decoration Movement of the 1970s and 80s, Haney’s practice draws heavily on florals, bright colors, and other patterns associated with femininity. These patterns speak to the creative possibilities of the home-based craft traditions that acted as personal and economic outlets for generations of women, but also signified the social restrictions that bound their creativity to the domestic sphere.

Through skewed perspective and exaggerated scale, Haney creates surreal spaces from familiar patterns. In Window Dressing, she presents a new installation that further exaggerates the play within her work between flatness and depth, interior and exterior, organic and synthetic. In the work, a set of oversized, handmade curtains frame multiple layers of images alternating between inside and outside. Evoking both a window and a stage, the installation asserts the theatricality of Haney’s work, embracing the domestic sphere as a site of both performance and aspirational fantasy.

Lou Haney: Window Dressing takes place as part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 2026, part of the Museum’s long-running SOLOS exhibition program. Launched in 1988, SOLOS features solo exhibitions by artists based in the Mid-Atlantic region who are working at the forefront of contemporary art.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
A native of Decatur, Alabama, Lou Haney has a BA from Rhodes College and an MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University. Her career has been marked by residencies at MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2008, she was recognized with an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Mississippi Art Commission.

Haney’s exhibition history spans solo shows in over ten states. Notably, her work was featured at the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City in 2022, 2023, and 2025. Following a recent solo exhibition at IA&A Hillyer in Washington, D.C., Haney is preparing for upcoming features at MOCA Arlington in the summer of 2026 and a solo exhibition at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Art at Hollins University in Southwestern Virginia  in 2027.

Haney currently teaches Studio Art and Art History at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Sweet Briar College, and Charlottesville Middle School. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, she continues to explore the psychological depths of domesticity, bridging the gap between historical memory and the present day.

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