Mirror Mirrored: Art Meets the Monsters

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The tales the Brothers Grimm released into the world two centuries ago (as Children’s and Household Tales in 1812) are woven into the fabric of our lives. They have informed our campfire stories, Disney's iconic films, and our reflections on human nature. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that fairy tales held the key to understanding human archetypes and the collective unconscious. Today, these stories—and new readings of them—are more important than ever. Pairing fairy tales with new artwork is not only a way of reemphasizing the stories’ relevance to diverse contemporary audiences, but also a way of challenging the canned notions of beauty, good and evil, and identity that many have popularly ascribed to them. Also, as it turns out, those notions are not quite so canned as we have come to believe over the last hundred years...

For Mirror Mirrored: Art Meets the Monsters, artists from across the country have created pieces for a new Brothers Grimm compendium, forthcoming later this year. This exhibition marks the first time a selection of those pieces will be shown together.

Participating artists include: Anne Connell, Brittany DeNigris, Anna Schuleit Haber, Joseph Keckler, Margaret Lanzetta, Corwin Levi, Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, David Packer, Rachel Perry, Agustin Lucho Pozo, Pam Rogers, DJ Spooky, Debra Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, and Stephanie Williams.

This project and Washington Project For the Arts Inc. are supported by the City Fund, which works to make the District of Columbia a more healthy, stable, and vibrant place to live for all its residents. The City Fund is administered by The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region.

This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

About the Curators

Arts writer Michelle Aldredge and visual artist Corwin Levi met at an artist residency in Wyoming and together decided to reimagine classic, public domain books into a contemporary visual format. "Mirror Mirrored" is the first result of their collaboration and the WPA show is the first exhibition of collected artworks from that book. Levi has lived in the DC area off and on for the last decade and is currently travelling around the country for shows and residencies. He is the founder of Uzzlepye, which is dedicated to reimagining imagery in the public domain. Aldredge is based in New Hampshire, where she worked at The MacDowell Colony for 13 years before founding and running the arts blog Gwarlingo.com. She is a 2016 recipient of the Wampler Art Professorship at James Madison University and now shares her experiences of how to live the artistic life with makers around the world.