Lou Haney: Window Dressing
Lou Haney: Window Dressing brings Lou Haney’s vibrant, pattern-saturated paintings to MoCA Arlington’s Experimental Gallery on the lower level, on view from June 27 through September 13, 2026. The exhibition centers on Haney’s embrace of excess, combining bright colors, busy patterns, and densely layered interiors that celebrate nostalgia’s pleasures while acknowledging its risks. Drawing on mid-to-late-twentieth-century patterns and color schemes, Haney builds interior landscapes that feel alive with energy, packed with objects, patterns, and visual layers. Her work engages questions of taste, trends, consumption, and domestic economy, and takes inspiration from the Pattern & Decoration Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, with particular attention to florals, vivid color, and patterns culturally associated with femininity.
The centerpiece of the show is a new installation, also called *Window Dressing*, which pushes further the artist’s recurring tension between flatness and depth, interior and exterior, and organic and synthetic. A set of oversized, handmade curtains frames multiple layers of imagery that alternate between indoor and outdoor scenes. At once a window and a stage, the installation highlights the theatricality of Haney’s work and treats the domestic sphere as a place of performance and aspirational fantasy. The exhibition is part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 2026, the latest edition of the museum’s SOLOS program launched in 1988, which highlights solo exhibitions by contemporary artists based in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (MoCA Arlington), 3550 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201; Experimental Gallery, Lower Level.
When: June 27 – September 13, 2026.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 12 PM – 5 PM, or by appointment.
Opening Reception: Art After Hours on Saturday, June 27, 2026, from 5 PM to 8 PM.
Tickets: Free.
Exhibition Program: Presented as part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 2026, part of the museum’s long-running SOLOS exhibition series launched in 1988.
About the Artist: Lou Haney is a native of Decatur, Alabama, with a BA from Rhodes College and an MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University. Her residencies include MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in 2008 she received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Mississippi Art Commission. She has shown widely across more than ten states, including features at the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City in 2022, 2023, and 2025, and a recent solo exhibition at IA&A Hillyer in Washington, D.C. Haney is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Art at Hollins University in 2027. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, she teaches Studio Art and Art History at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Sweet Briar College, and Charlottesville Middle School.
Getting There: The museum is accessible via Metro’s Orange and Silver Lines at Virginia Square Station, with Metrobus Line 24P and ART Line 41 service nearby.
Contact: (703) 248-6800.