In an abandoned trolley station buried beneath Dupont Circle in downtown Washington, D.C., new worlds are being created and destroyed in a subterranean space filled with hundreds of thousands of translucent plastic balls.

An interactive art installation called Re-Ball!: Raise/Raze united architects, designers, and 1,400 volunteers in the inaugural project by Dupont Underground, a nonprofit organization that has transformed the derelict trolley station into an unusual arts and cultural destination. Tickets for the entire month-long run of the installation sold out before the doors, or really a grate over the street-level subway entrance, opened April 30, but more tickets have been added before the June 1 closing.

More than 650,000 plastic balls, enough to fill an “ocean” during a very popular installation called The Beach last summer at the National Building Museum, were packed and moved to the Dupont Underground, which hosted an international design competition with entries from 19 countries. To create the winning proposal from New York–based design studio Hou de Sousa, volunteers armed with 225 pounds of glue created almost 10,000 cubes, each containing twenty-seven balls, that can be combined like building blocks with Velcro edges.

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My first encounter with BALTI GURLS was during February’s All Over Street crawl, at the Copy Cat’s Penthouse gallery. BLK LUV presented visual and performative works from BALTI GURLS members as a sprawling collective homage to Black History Month.

No after-school special subjugation recollections here, though I am a strong advocate for inclusive and informed representations of history, dig Michelle Alexander, Cheikh Anta Diop, or Howard Zinn for introductory jewels, BALTI GURLS’ reflections on identity and history were nuanced, youthful, and left me with a generally warm inspired and slightly mushy feeling inside. Something akin to the feeling you get after playing Donny Hathaway’s Extensions of a Man from start to finish, or watching Bruce Leroy finally get his glow in the cult classic The Last Dragon, an affirming ancestral, “we gon’ be alright” tingle that still resonates weeks after the show has closed. I should note that I am not the type of gal to get blurry eyed over Valentine’s Day consumption or many things for that matter, but BLK LUV was pure #blackgirlmagic.

Maybe it was all the love in the air, or my general excitement about EDGE CONTROL the consistently invigorating and high energy art and music showcase BALTI GURLS presents at at EMP Collective—but I had to learn more. I caught up with BALTI GURLS founder, Jenné Afiya, to learn more about the collective.

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Photo: Kristen McWharter.

Platform Gallery, a small commercial gallery space in the Platform Arts Center on Mulberry Street, was filled to capacity with students and curious art patrons waiting to experience FlucT, the performance duo made up of Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile. Culture Is Not Your Friend, an original piece performed by Lauren and Mirabile, employs repetition, movie scores, and choreography familiarized by popular culture to offer a generalized critique and analysis of the ways in which culture informs identity.

I was one of the masses squeezed against PAC’s walls in anticipation of the show. Before the hoards arrived, the sparse gallery space allowed voyeurs access to an installation of videos, photographs from past performances, and a framed image of two soiled pairs of underwear. FlucT experiments are jarring, sharp movements occasionally segued by narratives ripped from classic films and hyper-dub/futurist or hip-hop scores. FlucT works activate archetypes and formulas of popular culture, and their live and documented performances are becoming increasingly popular in performance art spaces.

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Sterling Wells. Broken Window, 2015; installation view, Metropolitan Structures, Baltimore, MD.

Well above the tree line, inside a snug, modernist apartment, Sterling Wells’s “Broken Window” installation occupies the empty living room space. The work is composed of reclaimed auto-body parts mounted on a wooden armature, to the approximate scale of an automobile. “Broken Window” is set on the diagonal against a row of picture windows, with the car front facing the view and tilting downward. Except for a few shards of glass and debris on the floor, the work is a self-contained unit poised between assembly and unmaking, a cataloging of parts and relics held in suspended motion. I talked with artist Sterling Wells about his process and the impetus behind the project.

Jan Razauskas: Much of your work comes out of interactions with the natural environment, in pieces that position nature and the built environment within the same framework. How did this work evolve out of that interest?

Sterling Wells: Yes, the work evolved out of my interest in framing nature. The aim was to use the car to forge a link between the apartment and the landscape beyond. The apartment is dominated by two enormous picture windows that frame the landscape. Instead of viewing the landscape through two rectangles, I wanted viewers to see the landscape through the glass-shard perimeter of a broken car window. 

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