June, 2025
Washington — When the annual Group 93 exhibition goes up at the Katzen Arts Center rotunda this August, it will note the end of one era and the beginning of another. The show recaps the group's origins and recognizes a multitude of artists in its mix.
Group founders Luciano Penay, Joan Birnbaum, and Myrtle Katzen have recently passed away after decades of dedication to their visions of artistic creation and interpretation. They actively advanced a distinct approach both to creating visual art and to presenting it, joined by other artists located in the greater Washington DC area (especially former faculty and graduates of American University).
Under the guidance of Chilean-born Professor Penay, the group met regularly for many years in rigorous, collaborative critique of new works. Annual exhibition hangs were customarily two and three day efforts of artists to install up to two hundred works, assisted by faculty colleagues Michael Graham and Marjorie Hirano, along with Claudia Vess, Lucy Blankstein, and other Washington-area founders and regulars of the critique sessions.
The next era continues the legacy created by the original founders. "What is our manifesto?" Luciano Penay once asked Claudia Vess, whom he entrusted with Lucy Blankstein to select and hang group shows in recent years and going forward. "Every work must speak for itself, and every work must be hung to bring out the best in those around it."
The 2023 show included ekphrastic poetry that accompanied the visual works, including poems by DC based poets and poet laureates of the United States (Ted Kooser), Maryland (Grace Cavalieri) and Takoma Park (Anne Becker). The 2024 show, "Jamming," featured QR music links paired with the art and performances by an AU music ensemble.
The 2025 show will transition the eras under the title "Ward Circle Faction," to capture the sense of place and spirit of past critiques and exhibitions, first at the Watkins and later at the Katzen classrooms and spaces, both located off Ward Circle. The term faction distinguishes the group from other art movements that center on artist identities or temporal artistic fashions.
Featured in the 2025 show will be works by Luciano Penay (1921-2023), Joan Birnbaum (1927-2024), and Myrtle Katzen (1927-2025) along with representative works by artists who participated through the group's thirty-five years of meetings. They include Penay works on paper never previously exhibited, Birnbaum's ambitious Evergreen, Katzen's audacious Red Still Life, and works by Claudia Vess and Lucy Blankstein, independent curators of The Cabinet and previously of the Washington Women's Arts Center, Gallery 10, and Wonder Graphics.
Appropriately, the show will again be hung in the Katzen rotunda, in the Arts Center named for Myrtle Katzen and her husband Cy. Myrtle Katzen began her career as an illustrator, but developed into a noteworthy artist in her own right. Her creations rival those of more famous artists in her own private collection.
The 2025 Group 93 show "Ward Circle Faction" will run August 20 to September 26.
