E14 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020
MIKE DU JOUR BY MIKE LESTERone to take it on, then allow him
that, of course — his family. But if
he asks you to keep letting things
go, then please hold firm. Say
you’ll bend on how you do it, but
not on what needs to be done.Hi, Carolyn: M y wife is from the
other side of the country, where
all of her family still live. Her
family is extremely tightknit —
she’s the ONLY member who lives
out of state and one of few outside
a two-town radius. I applaud her
in her ambitions and willingness
to leave her home state to find a
great job.
In the four years she’s been
here, her siblings have come out
to visit her on a few occasions, but
never her mom, despite my wife
asking her to. I know it’s not an
easy trip, but her mom has gone
on five-plus-hour plane rides
before, so this comes across to me
as rude.
My wife is very close with her
mom so I see this as an even
bigger slight. Is there something
that can get her mom out here?
Something my wife can say? Or
should I pass this off as a hopeless
cause?
— AnonymousAnonymous: I love that you’re
backing your wife.
But I doubt you’ll help if your
way of backing her is to start
banging your head against the
same wall she is.
Instead, be the one with the ice
pack. Listen to your wife, make
sympathetic sounds, say you’re
sorry her mom won’t come. Say
out loud that you don’t
understand why and don’t think
it’s right. Ask her directly if she’d
like you to get involved or if she’d
prefer that you just listen.
The impulse to fix her
relationship for her is natural and
understandable, but it’s her mom,
her relationship, hers alone to fix.
So it’s your impulse to tamp
down.
If your wife does invite you to
offer ideas and talk about what’s
going on, then please consider
that her family unity is one “2,”
her breaking out is the other “2,”
and the mother’s absence equals
the “4”: If a daughter “very close
with” her mom broke hearts and
precedents to execute an
unheard-of departure from the
nest, then the mom might be
absent in passive-aggressive
protest. Not to say that’s true — or
mature, if true. Just possible.
Fingers crossed this is as bad as
things get, and the mother drops
her boycott as soon as pandemic
conditions permit.Write to Carolyn Hax at
[email protected]. Get her
column delivered to your inbox each
morning at wapo.st/haxpost. Join the discussion live at noon
Fridays at washingtonpost.com/
conversations.Hi, Carolyn: I
have suspected
since Day One of
meeting my
husband’s family
that my sister-in-
law did not care
for me, but I get
along with the
others just fine.
She is gushing when she sees us,
but will talk about anyone who
leaves the room. She gossips
about everyone and says things
about others I know not to be
true.
My brother-in-law’s wife
recently shared a boatload of
gripes this sister-in-law has about
me, including horrible things she
said about my children. The
person who told me what she said
about my children was upset and
thought I should know, especially
since she said these things as she
was holding court at a family
event we did not attend.
Preferring not to start drama
for my husband’s sake, I have
gone with the flow for many
years. The comments about my
kids hit a nerve, though, and I
want either not to see her again
or to let her know what I heard.
Advice?
— H.H.: You’re probably right that she
doesn’t like you, but that’s also
beside the more important point:
that she treats everyone
abysmally, not just you or your
kids. And apparently no one is
calling her on it.
As someone who often
discusses the value of
peacekeeping in extended-family
situations like this one, I hope
you’ll trust me when I say this
peace is not worth keeping. It’s
the peace of enabling,
appeasement and rot.
The wife who tipped you off
did sort-of the right thing in
getting upset and calling the
meanness to your attention. The
entirely right thing, though,
would have been to summon the
strength to stand up in the
moment, before the whole court,
to say: “Stop saying these things
about X and her children.”
So that’s what I’m going to
advise you to do about this, above
all. You know the sister-in-law
trashes people behind their
backs, so you’ve witnessed it
firsthand, yes? Bystanders have
enormous power to call out
cruelty, to identify it as
unacceptable, to stop it — when
they have the courage to. Your
impulse now is to stop the abuse
directed at you and your children,
rightly, but stopping the abuse on
others’ behalf as well as your own
is the side the angels are on.
For your husband’s sake, talk to
him about what you’ve witnessed
and what you were recently told.
Explain why you have let it go all
this time, and why you won’t let it
go anymore. If he asks to be theNo need to be a tongue-biter
around the family backbiter
Carolyn
HaxNICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTIN THE GALLERIESKeravuori is indebted to abstract
expressionism, which extolled
the spontaneous and the
immediate. In her paintings,
there’s as much now as then.Pamela Keravuori: Painting While
Barefoot Through Nov. 29 at the
Athenaeum, 201 Prince St.,
Alexandria.MEG @ Mosaic
There’s a certain tension
between the photographs in
“MEG @ Mosaic” and the show’s
location. An overview of work by
11 members of Alexandria’s
Multiple Exposures Gallery, the
exhibition includes more than a
few views of battered structures
and no-hope towns. Yet the
pictures hang at Torpedo Factory
Artists @ Mosaic, a satellite
gallery in Fairfax County’s so
fresh, so clean Mosaic District.
Not all of the entries focus on
places that are weathered and
seemingly forgotten. Soonin
Ham offers overlapped
contrapuntal images that
conjure a fading past, while Alan
Sislen and Van Pulley
contemplate vast landscapes
veiled by, respectively, mist or
sunlight. Also, the architectural
studies include both Fran
Livaditis’s upbeat and akimbo
close-ups of bright-hued
building details and Fred
Zafran’s “Small Town Empty”
streetscapes, which inventory
19th-century edifices that are
simultaneously modest and
grand.
Empty small towns manifest
much less dignity in Timothy
Hyde’s photos, made in
evocatively derelict Ohio
locations. The centerpiece is just
as dilapidated, but the landscape
more sweeping, in Matt
Leedham’s picture of a low-slung
Irish ruin. Sandy LeBrun-Evans
took her camera inside a tattered
room for a double exposure that
combines the ghostliness of
Ham’s style with the poignancy
of Hyde’s. Shoppers may prefer
pristine surroundings, but
cracked walls and broken
windows tell more compelling
stories.MEG @ Mosaic Through Nov. 29 at
Torpedo Factory Artists @ Mosaic,
2905 District Ave., Suite 105, Fairfax.Julie Wolfe
Flora, fauna and rustic
landscapes feature in the five
handsome prints in Julie Wolfe’s
“Wildfires and Dreamfields,” but
the natural world is not the
primary concern of the Hemphill
Artworks show. While Wolfe is
perhaps best known for turning
polluted-water samples into a
sort of rainbow in jars, lately the
D.C. artist has probed the human
psyche. The screen prints revisit
images from a handmade book
(also on exhibit) that juxtaposes
clouds and eyes, a snake and a
Rorschach-like blot. These found
elements are overlapped to
evoke dream states and the
subconscious mind.
The book arrays random but
potent images in a way that
recalls surrealism, which was
keen on dream logic, but also
mid-20th-century pop culture.
Flying saucers hover here and
there, red spirals echo the poster
for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie
“Vertigo,” and the general
trippiness is a flashback to acid-
rock light shows. If such
references suggest quaint
nostalgia, that’s not all that
flourishes in Wolfe’s dreamfields.
These visual pileups also convey
a sense of anxiety that’s
altogether up to date.Julie Wolfe: Wildfires and
Dreamfields Through Nov. 29 at
Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW.
Open by appointment.
[email protected]dynamic 1968 stripe painting by
Gene Davis, whose best-known
work is the hardest-edged of the
period’s D.C. painters.)
The least-expected painting in
the selection is “Diagonal,”
whose inky black surface is the
result of overlapping streaks of
many colors, notably an oblique
slice of almost submerged
orange. The picture was made in
1958, the same year that the
better-known Morris Louis
painted most of his multilayered
“Veils.” Mehring and Louis were
pursuing similar ideas, but
Mehring’s picture looks darker
and thicker — more allover —
than Louis’s. If the show’s other
allovers are vaguely floral,
“Diagonal” is tectonic. Its
translucent strata coalesce into
something formidable.
Also at Connersmith is a
geometric color-field canvas by
another of Mehring’s D.C.
contemporaries, Paul Reed, as
well as provocative paintings,
sculptures and conceptual pieces
by such current artists as J.J.
McCracken, Jessica Maria
Hopkins and Wilmer Wilson IV.
None of the latter works, which
address gay, female and Black
identity, is likely to end up on
display at a federal agency.Howard Mehring: Brilliance
Through Nov. 30 at Connersmith,
1013 O St. NW. Open by
appointment.Pamela Keravuori
Like Howard Mehring before
her, Pamela Keravuori makes
nonrepresentational pictures
that usually lack a central focus.
But there’s a lot more variety, of
both gesture and material, in her
“Painting While Barefoot” at the
Athenaeum. Charcoal, pencil
and oil-pastel scribbles wheel
across acrylic and spray paints in
this show, the Virginia-based
artist’s first solo exhibition since
1989.
Keravuori’s compositions
appear improvisational, yet with
repeated motifs. She contrasts
areas of soft, smudgy color with
sketchy gray lines and,
occasionally, robust blacks. A few
paintings include hints at
narrative: Stenciled numbers
punctuate “Traveling the Silk
Road,” and irregular 3-D blocks
at the bottom of “Following the
Yellow Brick Road” loosely
resemble cobblestones.
Keravuori has lived in Europe,
the United States and the Middle
East, so the references to road
trips suggest autobiography. The
gallery’s note calls her work “a
delicate unhurried response to a
memory, a place, an experience
that has become abstract with
time but still reveals a story.” YetBY MARK JENKINSI
t’s not an official secret, but
the CIA’s collection of
Washington-colorist
paintings is a bit mysterious. The
abstract pictures by Howard
Mehring, Thomas Downing,
Alma Thomas and others were
initially loaned by the late
Vincent Melzac, possibly a more
colorful figure than any of the
local artists he championed.
Eleven of the paintings were
eventually bought by the CIA —
whose website depicts only two
of them — while others were
recalled by Melzac’s estate. These
include four of the seven
Mehring canvases in
Connersmith’s “Brilliance.”
Made between 1957 and 1962,
all of the paintings employ
Magna, a then-new acrylic paint.
Mehring (who died in 1978)
diluted the pigment into watery
shades and poured and dripped
it onto absorbent canvas. The
two earliest works here, which
include the show’s namesake, are
gestural in the manner of
abstract expressionism. They
suggest motion and produce a
sense of distance between
background and foreground.
Three others are covered entirely
in gently pulsing blots in a
narrow range of colors, a mode
the artist called “allover.”
There’s also 1961’s “Random,”
made by cutting several allover
paintings into rectangular
shapes and piecing them
together. This technique allowed
Mehring to juxtapose color fields
— in this case, gold and blue —
with simple geometric shapes.
This is one of the first
appearances of hard edges in
Washington colorism, which was
known for being soft and fluid.
(The gallery is also showing aThe Washington colorists and the CIA
ATHENAEUM GALLERY/NORTHERN VIRGINIA FINE ARTS ASSOCIATIONStenciled numbers
punctuate P amela
Keravuori’s
“Traveling the Silk
Road,” one of the
works on view at the
Athenaeum through
Nov. 29. The artist
has lived in E urope,
the United States and
the Middle East, so
her references to
road trips suggest
autobiography.——Anniversaries——
Tip #8:
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get back from your honeymoon.C330 1x2Tip #1:
Just engaged? First things fi rst.
Find your ceremony and reception
locations 9 to 12 months before
your wedding date.C330 1x3——Anniversaries——
Suritz50thAnniversary
—November23, 1970—Penelope JaneWest (Penny) and MichaelJoseph Suritz of
Arlington,VirginiaandOceanView,Delawarewillcelebratetheir
50thweddinganniversaryonNovember23,2020.Theywere
marriedinSanJuan,PuertoRico.Theymetatagatheringatthe
apartmenthousewherebothlivedandontheirfirstdateMichael
forgothiswallet,leadingtomuchlaughterandsomeconcern!
MichaelisagraduateoftheUniversityofSouthCarolinaand
themajorityof hiscareerwas atIBM whereheretiredas
FederalContractsManager.Pennyisagraduateof Bucknell
University(Pennsylvania)andretiredfromtheAmericanCouncil
onEducationwhereshewasanAssistantDirectorspecializingin
militaryeducation.Aftertheweddingthey returnedtoBoston,Massachusettes
andthenbacktoVirginiawheretheystayed.Thehighlightof
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soon-to-be-brideMeghanDeWitt.Theywillcelebrate,asisthe
waytoday,athome.Announce your Engagement, Wedding or Anniversary in The Washington Post’s
Sunday Arts & Style Section. (Birthdays, Graduations & other Special Events
have moved to Thursdays.) You may provide text and photos. Color is available.
Many packages include keepsake plaques of your announcement.To place an order and for more information, including rates:
Contact The Weddings DropBox at: [email protected]
Or call 202.334.5736, toll free 877.POST.WED, fax 202.334.7188All materials must be received by Monday at 1 p.m.Declare Your Love!
——Anniversaries——
Mendoza-Banion
1stAnniversary
—November21,2019—Mr.NathanBanionand
Mrs.ElsaBarrazaMendozaOn Saturday,November 21,
2020, ElsaBarraza Mendoza
andNathanBanioncelebrated
theirfirstweddinganniversary.
Theyfeasted onIndianfood
athomeinWashington,D.C.
with theircatDiego(whois
moreofakibbleguy).Elsais
completing her doctorate in
history,andNathanworksin
datascience.Engagements | Weddings
Anniversaries
To placean announcement:
email: [email protected]
phone:202-334-573 6
fax: 202-334-7188