Overview & Events

Gallery Talk: Where Water Keeps Time
Saturday, June 20, 2:00–3:00 p.m.

Janis Goodman invites you to experience 25 years at Greenlaw Cove on Deer Isle, Maine, through her eyes and with her affection. Step into the landscape as she does: enter through expansive, immersive drawings, then lean in close to more intimate works that reward careful looking.

Light moving across water draws her in, but so do the cove’s finer details—marshes, osprey nests, granite outcroppings, waterfowl, and mudflats. Each demands its own visual language. Goodman responds by adapting her mark-making, even devising custom tools to capture the rhythms and textures of a place in constant flux. Every work carries a vivid sense of presence, shaped by years of returning to a landscape that is never quite the same.

Best known for her colorful abstract paintings, Goodman has been a vital force in the Washington, DC arts community, teaching for more than thirty-five years at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design and supporting the arts through public work and media, including her role as an art reviewer for WETA TV.

This exhibition, on view for the first time, is dedicated to the power of place. What begins as direct observation becomes something more layered—memory, material, sensation, and time reworked in the studio. As you move through the exhibition, you’re invited to trace that transformation. The result is a compelling meditation on how we see, remember, and make meaning of what is special to us.