Ellyn Weiss is a Washington DC-based visual artist and independent curator who has shown widely for more than 25 years in the DMV as well as Massachusetts and New York. She is committed to engagement with the most pressing issues that face us, environmental and political.
Ellyn has mounted a number of collaborative installations focused on the effects of climate change, including on the melting of the polar icecaps (National Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC and the McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA); the destruction of coral reefs (Artists and Makers, Rockville, MD); and the movement of tropical diseases northward as the climate changes (Otis Street Arts Project, Mt. Rainier, MD).
The Human Flood continues that series. It is focused on the migration of millions of people globally caused or exacerbated by the climate catastrophes – drought, floods, excessive heat, sea level rise – that have made their homes uninhabitable.
Ellyn co-founded an artists’ collective formed in 2017 called ArtWatchDC, to use visual tools to resist attacks on fundamental democratic ideals. As part of that mission, she conceived the One House Project, a collaboration of 300 artists, building a house structure covered with panels documenting the journeys of each of their ancestors to a new world. Houses were built and shown in Washington, DC (Touchstone Gallery 2017) and Germantown, MD, (BlackRock Center for the Arts, 2018-9).
Ellyn and Sondra N. Arkin curated a series of four group shows beginning in 2009 called the Zeitgeist Exhibitions, each themed around an issue that was of particular salience at that moment in time, ranging from pervasive surveillance to the effects on the human brain of endless streams of digital information and the meaning of the election of America’s first African American President.
Ellyn serves on the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national environmental and science organization and is past President of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. She was founding Board President of the Touchstone Foundation for the Arts in DC, which provides fellowships to local emerging artists and exhibition opportunities for nontraditional artists. She was one of the founders of Artomatic, an episodic artistic free-for-all begun in 1999.
