In 2026, it has been a real effort to keep moving forward and progress our creative lives. Focusing on the hyper-local: People living in the city of DC, the DMV, and the Mid-Atlantic region have been hit hard this year.

DC and the surrounding region have been in the trenches as our spaces and stages have been under siege, spearheaded by reductions in funding, armed military presence, and overall politicization of how we live here. 

• A crushing job market.

• Reductions in funding and wages.

• Federal interventions in Home Rule.

• Data-center ecological and social impacts. 

• Economic uncertainty impacting the creative sector and service industries.

• DEI gutting across the private and public sectors, disproportionately impacting Black women and families.

• Armed military and police forces occupying our streets, neighborhoods, and school grounds.

• International atrocities and their impacts on our city.

We’ve been feeling so low. We’ve also been actively putting in the effort to keep it all together while major questions loom over us all. 

Artists, organizers, and creative thought-leaders in the immediate geographic area, and throughout the nation, have been holding onto our creative lives in an effort to remain fortified alongside one another. A creative life is an active rebellion under authoritarian leadership, and that rebellion looks different for everyone. 

SO/LOW SHOW, the 2026 Sparkplug Collective Group Show,  is a physical representation of perseverance, transformational effort, and is a manifestation of what is possible on the individual and communal level when facilitated support among peers is actively pursued. 

Throughout the year, these artists have engaged in the contiguous rigor of critique and creation: processing perception as observation-based conversation progressing through productive disagreement, constructive creative conflict, vital peer-to-peer support, and practical development. 

There are two primary constructs that are foundational to the way I support artists; they are: 

• Art is Concept in structural form. 

• Artworks both posit and theorize.

To support the arrival at Concept in clarity, this cohort received mentorship beyond the compulsory Sparkplug Collective Program. This year, artists had access to multiple proprietary modules, frameworks, and office hours informed by applied neuroscience and personal identity fortification. Beginning with sustaining values, mindset shifts, and scaling to energy-based strategies supportive of creative dynamism.

Through the process, developing clarity not just in thought, but in how thought may be rendered. Manifesting in multidimensional forms that pose query and offer response.

With these questions, you are invited into the conversations to contextualize throughlines in the exhibiting artist's work: 

• Envisioning a Venn Diagram of identity, personal history, cultural parable, folklore, and colonialism: In what ways might iconography and design depict intersections?

• In what ways do exhibition, taste, and a fluctuating market impact creative individuation? 

• How does the structure of our environments inform the presence of material and visual language in visual art? 

• What is the function of the artist when political entities, nations, and global powers weaponize religion to stake unlawful claims on resources?