Art Gallery | Potters House DC

The Mary Cosby Art Gallery presents...

The Homeless Children's Playtime Project

featuring the faces of last families in DC Village,
taken by photographer

Tony Brunswick

May 1 to May 31, 2008

United States and in the District of Columbia.....
There are as many as 1.35 million homeless children nationwide. –Urban Institute, 2001

Reasons for homelessness include rising rent costs, landlords selling property, family crises like job loss, parental incarceration, domestic violence, medical problems, mental health problems, fire, and often a combination of factors. – Homeless Children’s Playtime Project

Prior to closing, DC Village was the largest homeless shelter for families in our nation’s capital where more than 50 families and 150 children called home at any given time. – Homeless Children’s Playtime Project
DC lost 2,400 affordable rentals and 9,400 affordable homes in just the period between 2003 and 2004. DC gained 4,600 high-cost rentals and 10,800 high-value homes over the same time period. –DC Fiscal Policy Institute, 2005

Poverty in the District is at the highest level in nearly a decade. One in five DC residents — 110,000 people — live in poverty. – DC Fiscal Policy Institute, 2007
Washington, D.C. has the widest income gap between rich and poor of any city in the country, with the poorest fifth of D.C. residents earning an average of $6,126 a year, while the richest fifth earn an average of 31 times that much, $186,830 – DC Fiscal Policy Institute, 2007

Since with the late 1990s, some 27,000 more DC residents have fallen into poverty.
Many DC workers earn poverty-level wages. The bottom fifth of working DC residents earned $10.81 per hour or less in 2006. This wage level is barely enough to keep a family of four with a full-time worker above the poverty line of roughly $21,000. – DC Fiscal Policy Institute, 2007

Most Recent Shows....

Anne Brink, February thru April 2008

Milagros Phillips, December 2007 thru January 2008

History of the Gallery

Our Mission

Young Mary Cosby,
speaking

Honoring the co-founder of The Church of the Saviour, whose vision, forty years ago, was to include exhibitions of art work in a faith context as part of the mission of hospitality to the community, the gallery's mission is to nurture the capacity to experience meaning and beauty through the visual arts, and to be drawn to a deeper appreciation of beauty in all that is and of the depth of mystery in all that has been given.

Seeing As Believing

Quilts made by a fabric Arts class
taught be artist Lee Porter, in the
Seeing As Believing mission group.

The "Seeing As Believing" mission group of Friends of Jesus Church currently supervises the exhibitions at the gallery, presenting artwork which is an expression of and response to the artist's relationship to God. By exhibiting faith-sourced artwork, the Gallery hopes to invite viewers to dialogue visually with, and to be nurtured by images of a God-penetrated world.

Religious Art

John Booty writes "At its best, religious art represents a way of knowing which is different from mere verbal communication ... The finest examples of art are revelatory, opening a window to eternity, engaging the spectator in a kind of communication which is holy communion, in which the spectator becomes a participant not only in the work of art, but in the meaning, the essence the work reveals, so that as a consequence the spectator—now participant—experiences some further understanding, previously unknown."