DATES

September 4 – November 6, 2026

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LOCATION

COL Gallery
Ghirardelli Square
San Francisco

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ARTISTS

Antwoine Washington

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Antwoine Washington transforms memory, family history, and the Black American experience into vivid acts of remembrance.

 

There is a phrase people reach for when the week has been too long, when the good news and the bad news arrive in the same breath, when they have run out of tidier language for simply being alive: life be lifing. It is a shrug and a testimony at once. It does not ask for sympathy and it does not pretend nothing happened. Antwoine Washington has borrowed it for the title of this exhibition, and his new paintings are a description of what it costs to keep going and of the strange grace that keeps arriving anyway.

 

Washington paints the way the phrase sounds. His surfaces are thick to the point of relief, built up in oil stick, acrylic, and ordinary house paint until the canvas becomes a small landscape of ridges and troughs. Color is troweled on and dragged, nothing is smoothed over. You feel as if they were made by a hand pressing hard and that the labor of building the image is inseparable from the labor of the lives inside it. This is not incidental. Washington knows what it is to have the body falter and have to be rebuilt. In 2018 he suffered a stroke and the recovery that followed turned his practice into something closer to necessity. "Creating art became my rehabilitation, my way of reconstructing myself. Each piece is a testament to survival, to transformation," he has said.

 

Faith runs throughout the show and Washington treats it without irony and without sentimentality. In Meeting you in the water two men stand chest-deep in a churning blue river at sunset, one bracing the other for baptism. Washington allows the the raw canvas show through unpainted; the human figures left literally bare against the built-up world around them and exposed at the moment of surrender. A robed figure stands at the edge of a small boat in Walk on Water remaining impossibly calm inside a storm of color. The Weight of Grace highlights a figure from behind facing a rough-hewn cross. We can't see his face, only what he is staring at and the weight the title names — grace as something carried, not simply received.

 

Washington doesn't ignore heavy themes and how they weigh on the body. In Joy doesn't cancel grief a figure lies curled inside a red vessel, half boat and half cradle, floating on a pool of blue, while beneath it enlarged teardrops fall. The piece refuses an easy resolution. It insists that both things are true at the same time — that you can be held and still be weeping, that the presence of joy does not erase sorrow. Pray for Me and Harmonica are two intimate portraits that catch their subjects mid-feeling, one bowed as if in supplication, the other lost in music. Emotionally Somewhere else is nearly abstract with white doves scattered across a broken field of pink and blue, thought and spirit taking flight while the body stays behind.

 

Born in Pontiac, Michigan and now based in Cleveland, Washington has spent years painting family life and that commitment remains in this new body of work. Holding Space shows two figures leaning into one another, a small boy in a baseball cap folded against a taller companion, the whole canvas organized around the simple architecture of an embrace. From Within stages a scene of care so close it verges on the sacred, a stained-glass glow burning at its edge. Even inThis Situation…a man stands in a pale suit, meeting your eye with an expression that hovers between weariness and dignity. These portraits are in the tradition that Washington loves, one that runs from the Harlem Renaissance painters he claims as forebears, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and through Ernie Barnes, whose exuberant scenes of Black life he first met as a child. Washington's people are never archetypes. They are somebody's family.

 

Taken together, these paintings do not argue that life is easy or that faith makes it so. They argue something harder and more generous: that the difficulty and the beauty are not opponents, that they arrive braided together, and that the honest response is to keep building layer over layer, joy alongside grief, until the surface is thick enough to hold it all. Life Be Lifing is that lesson made visible. Life keeps happening and Washington keeps answering it in paint.