Rush to the Kennedy Center - Lisa Fairchild Jones-Gentry Artist, Harvard College Harvard Law Grad, Producer and more!

https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/g/ga-gn/lisa-jones-gentry/

I want to share the exciting news that Lisa's artwork is being shown in an exhibition at the Kennedy Center. The exhibition is in connection with a smash New York play called the Gathering A collective Sonic Ring Shout that is opening at the Kennedy Center. The piece that Lisa is showing is called BLACK GIRL MAGIC and it's a large piece 6' x 8'.

https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/explore-by-genre/exhibits/2024-2025/people-who-used-the-shout-exhibit/

Lisa Jones Gentry first began showing her work professionally in Los Angeles in the late nineties through the mid-2000s. Her first show was a group show at the M Hanks Gallery in Santa Monica California. That exhibition was followed by several other group shows, including at Loyola Marymount University. Her initial solo show was at the Vanek Collection Gallery in Venice California. In addition to gallery shows, Gentry’s work has been featured in television and film. Three large abstract pieces from Gentry’s collage and acrylic on board series Lost in Space; Sacred Geometry in Art, were in all five seasons of the Fox sitcom Living Single. Placement in films and television continued, with four pieces from her mixed media watercolor and pen and ink series Shadow Boxing featured in the independent film Making Mavis. Three pieces were also in the Showtime Television film Circle of Pain. Two of the pieces were from her abstract expressionist acrylic series Faces of the Universe, and the other large piece also acrylic on canvas, were from her series Angels Among Us. Gentry moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. and now works out of her studio in Georgetown. Recently, she was part of a group show at the Featherstone Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard in August 2022, curated by Adrienne Childs. The show was entitled Imagine: Celebrating Black Female Creativity and also included work from artists Nanette Carter, Emma Amos, and Della Martin. Ms. Gentry’s work is primarily abstract, both acrylic on canvas and mixed media on canvas. She considers herself to be part of the Contemporary Afrofuturism movement in art, described as “an evolving concept expressed through a Black cultural lens that reimagines, reinterprets and reclaims the past and present for a more empowering future for African Americans.” Afrofuturism is reflected in her work as a way of looking within, to see a world that is beyond that which can be seen with our physical eyes. Her belief is that one is able to transmute and neutralize some of the pain that is part of the historical and present-day experience of African Americans and other descendants of the Diaspora, as well as Africans on the continent who suffered under the chains of colonialism. Ms. Gentry’s work represents a look inside out, a deconstruction of the unspeakable to reveal the inner peace and love that is always there even in times of despair. Her belief is that our world within is awash in brilliant color and abstraction that transcends pain in a way that allows us to hopefully move beyond it into a new present-day reality where it can no longer define or limit us. She believes that in abstraction there can be peace, because we are able to overcome that which has kept us in emotional shackles even after the removal of the physical restraints. She paints and creates that new reality that has been opened up to us as individuals who have overcome and now can fully claim a new future.