ARTINA 2025: Upside Down – Inside Out

Presented by The Washington Sculptors Group and Sandy Spring Museum

September 7 - November 9, 2025

Exhibition Programs

Opening Reception
Sunday, September 7, 2025 2-4 pm
Walk outdoors and explore the sculptures. The reception will be held in the Dr. Bird meeting room inside the museum.
Register for the Opening Reception

Juror & Artists Talk / Closing Reception
Sunday, November 9, 2025, 1-3 pm
Artists and Juror’s walk and talk: 2-3 pm
The reception will be held in the Dr. Bird meeting room inside the museum. Take a walk around the museum grounds for one last look at the artwork. Hear from the juror, Zoma Wallace, about the selection and curation process of this year’s exhibition. Artists on site will share insights about their work, inspirations, processes, and material sources.

All events are free and open to the public rain or shine.

Opening Reception: Sunday, September 7, 2-4pm

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS Esperanza Alzona, Joanathan Bessaci, Matthew Duffy, Gale Friedman, McCleary Gallagher, Judith Goodman, Barbara Januszkiewicz, Joshua Prince, Lynda Smith-Bugge, and James Wysolmierski. 

Juried by Zoma Wallace

The ARTINA exhibition series, now in its 9th year, is an ongoing partnership between Washington Sculptors Group and the Sandy Spring Museum that invites social engagement with the environment through participation and collaboration. Artists are encouraged to envision interactions in the museum’s landscape by engaging visually and physically with nature.

Juried by Washington, D.C.–based artist and arts professional, Zoma Wallace, the exhibition invites artists to respond to a world that feels increasingly disoriented and unstable. Wallace's curatorial statement challenges artists to reflect on the confusion of the present moment—where what was once certain is now in flux, and societal norms seem to have flipped. Through sculpture, installation, performance, and sound, artists explore ideas of inversion and reorientation from many angles: geographic, psychological, political, and material.

The exhibition embraces the carnivalesque: a space of disorder and delight, irony and satire, surreal and absurdity. It invites interpretations ranging from playful to profound, silly to serious, uncanny to critical. Upside Down, Inside Out offers a space for artists and viewers alike to question the status quo, challenge fixed positions, and navigate shifting paradigms with creativity and curiosity.

Past exhibitions include: A Point of View, juried by Nehemiah Dixon III (2024); Queering Nature, juried by Stephanie Mercedes (2023); A Space in Place, juried by Natalie Fulgencio-Turner (2022); Balancing Acts, juried by Twylene Moyer (2021); Light, A Sculptural Solar Dance, juried by María Gabriela Mizes (2020); Introspective, juried by Cecilia Wichmann (2018); (Re)Use and Abuse of the Land, juried by Ursula Achternkamp (2017); and Art in Nature, juried by Martine Van Kampen (2016).

About the Juror

Zoma Wallace is an artist and independent curator raising a family in her hometown of Washington, D.C. For the past 20 years, Zoma has charted a unique path as a creative, earning respect and recognition for her aesthetic instincts, adventurous ideas, and thoughtful critical insights. Many in the D.C. arts community know her from a decade of public service as the curator for the DC Commission of the Arts & Humanities, where she changed the municipal art landscape; expanding the agency’s art collection with diverse contemporary acquisitions, instituting a gallery exhibition program, and creating a new grant to fund emerging D.C. curators in realizing compelling exhibition concepts. Zoma holds a BA from Spelman College, an MFA from Howard University, and is a PhD candidate in Art Theory, Aesthetics, & Philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).

Sandy Spring Museum

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“… At Sandy Spring Museum, it’s all about the community. Everything we do—every milestone we celebrate, every program and exhibit—is here for the community and because of the community.”

Founded in 1981 in the basement of a bank in nearby Olney, the museum today stewards a 7-acre historic site featuring an archive, artist studios, ceramic workshop, community gathering spaces, exhibition galleries, library, nature trails, picnic areas, museum shop, and more.

Sandy Spring Museum connects diverse communities and advances social equity through shared and inspiring experiences of our region’s cultural heritage. The museum envisions an equitable Montgomery County that leverages the rich and diverse cultural heritages of its residents as a vehicle toward increased empathy, cross-cultural understanding, and coalition building.

17901 Bentley Road, Sandy Spring, Maryland 20860