View selected exhibitions by Anthony Le, including solo shows, duo exhibitions and curation.

Golden Looking Hour

Solo exhibition: March 11 – April 15, 2023 at Transformer (Washington, DC)

Golden Looking Hour at Transformer features paintings by Anthony Le at his first solo exhibition in Washington, DC. The exhibition features portraits of fellow DC artists that questions the social construct of identity and how it can be limiting from the outside looking in but be expansive from the inside looking out. The portrait series celebrates the diversity of local artists but also subverts the cultural expectations that come with that.

“DC artists are expected to be political activists and to represent the racial and/or gender groups they may be part of. Although artists can make work about these issues, the assumption that they should is intrusive and can limit a fuller understanding of their art. For this series, I asked fellow artists to take photos of themselves as a response to being put into boxes due to their outward identity. The portraits are based on these photos, and I am excited about how the paintings look back at you in subversive ways, ranging from ambivalence to a conscious confrontation to being looked at,” explains Le.

The painted figures bask in golden hour light that Le describes as “imbuing a restorative energy of contemplation, autonomy and self-determination.” The portraits express an intimacy conveyed through life-sized scale, a warping of interior space and a limited color palette that gravitates around golden hour yellow.

The paintings are situated within a site-specific installation at Transformer featuring a trompe l’oeil brick pattern as a framing device to reinforce the construct of access into identity and a visual metaphor between interior and exterior personhood. The trompe l’oeil, made with linocut prints on paper, creates the illusion of being surrounded by two-story buildings where the paintings are windows to peek into voyeuristically. The trompe l’oeil covers three sides of the gallery, creating a sense of enclosure like a panopticon, and the two floors of paintings reinforce the feeling of you being observed as much as you’re observing the paintings. The installation is especially apropos to the Transformer space which previously was an alleyway. This alleyway history was also explored in Rebecca Key’s 2010 exhibition Archetype in the same space.

Twin Snakes in the Ameri-Cognitive Dissonance

Duo exhibition with Ashley Jaye Williams: February 24 – April 20, 2024 at Culture House (Washington, DC)

This show is about the duality of what America stands for. It’s an influx of corporate investment into Pride Month while an historic number of anti-trans laws are being codified. It’s being the world’s largest economy from the military industrial complex while actively degrading the quality of life for the most vulnerable people. The cognitive dissonance is the attempt to control women’s bodies despite the majority of people opposing this harassment.

Ashley Jaye Williams presents works that expands upon identities that have been flattened by society for capitalistic convenience. Anthony Le presents works about nonconformity to unethical power structures.

Both artists speak to the reality of having incompatible identities and forcing them to try to coexist creates an uncanny valley of liminal space. These paintings and sculptures are an attempt to unpack modern society’s many Frankensteins — with their giant cacophonous vision boards for the modern hellscape.

50 Years of HOPE and HA-HAs

Group exhibition presented by Vagabond, curated by Anthony Le and Philippa Hughes and funded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities

January 16 – March 1, 2025 at DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Gallery (Washington, DC)

Vagabond presents “50 Years of HOPE and HA-HAs,” the DMV’s first Vietnamese American art exhibition, celebrating the expansiveness of the diaspora. 2025 marks the 50-year anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. The mainstream perception of Viets has remained unchanged for decades, rooted in the suffering of war, yet nothing about our community is static. In the 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the importance of understanding the Viet experience in saying, “we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.” The exhibition features visual art, poetry, video art, zines and music by over 20 Viet artists including four zine collectives, offering counter narratives from the 1.5 and 2nd generation while uplifting the multi-cultural intersectionality of the diaspora. The theme of resilience is interwoven through joy, memorial, heritage, catharsis, solidarity, representation and community.

The exhibition title comes from Ocean Vuong’s poem, “The Last Dinosaur,” which asks how we can live better despite a destroyed past:

Oh wind-broke wanderer, widow of hope & ha-has… I was made to die but I’m here to stay. —Ocean Vuong