Crosshatch: Making Networks: Seth Adelsberger, Tim Doud, Francie Hester, and Joseph Shetler
Washington, D.C
PFA is pleased to announce Crosshatch: Making Networks, a group exhibition of artists based in the DMV and Baltimore area at its Washington location. As a landmark event in PFA’s annual program, this exhibition embodies the gallery’s ongoing commitment to spotlighting the regional artistic community and its broader contemporary dialogues. Exploring line and mark Seth Adelsberger, Tim Doud, Francie Hester, and Joseph Shetler are brought into conversations of networks and systems of exchange through making.
Crosshatch: Making Networks will be on view at PFA–Washington D.C., located at 1932 9 ½ Street NW, Washington D.C., 20001, from June 20 through August 8, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 20, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM.
Extending through minimalism and abstraction across painterly and sculptural planes, the exhibition considers the patterns that map out each artists’ current practice. Positioned on, alongside and against the gallery walls, the works engage weight, stroke and finish in dialogue with industrial evolutions.
While grounded in the contemporary, the artists in Crosshatch inherit and subvert legacies of mid-century Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and continue the local legacy of the Washington Color School abstraction, creating ripples of influence and differentiation. By treating lines not merely as structural components, they expand investigations of the grid established by their canonical forebears.
Moving away from the rigid detachment often associated with early geometric art, Tim Doud adopts a self-referential approach. Based in Washington D.C., he explores painting methods that gesture towards systems of identity, integrating spliced, patterned textile swatches and loose painterly movements across abstract planes. Through materiality, Doud juxtaposes high-modernist geometry and domestic ephemera, patterning and mapping a portrait of space.
Drawing from systems of mapping, sequencing, and repetition, Maryland-based Francie Hester examines how personal and collective histories are embedded within material surfaces. Intersecting these linear trajectories, Hester’s Axis includes sculpted aluminum and plexiglass works, shaped as Xs. The work explores recollection – as an axis of reference points suspended within time, offering glimpses of spliced moments, days, and events. Her compositions at once invite and redirect the viewer through a puzzle that is collaged from other spaces. They compound through layers of pixelation and physical deconstruction, as Hester sanding and scraping creates a tension of the slight of hand, balancing precision and imprecision.
Bouncing between the works in the exhibition is a consideration of method. Through material investigations that intervene with the properties of the flat plane, Baltimore-based artist Seth Adelsberger challenges fixity and finality within painting. His works take up unorthodox approaches to surface, composing highly textured layers of gesso between dense acrylic stains, sandwiching thick, sculpted layers of gesso between vibrant washes of acrylic paint that create glowing, backlit surfaces that sit between physical color-field painting and the digital luminosity of screen technology.Through optical trickery and mimetic inquiry, the works recall Color Field Painting along with Abstract Expressionist exploration, while remaining firmly in dialogue with present-day industrial influences, evoking the backlighting of contemporary technologies.
In Joseph Shetler’s practice, line offers direction, becoming script, becoming instruction, open to scoring. Like a blank page of sheet music, revealed through the brushing away of pigment, his paintings open up space for potential and lyrical imagining. Working in Washington D.C., Shetler approaches post-minimalism through monochromatic silverpoint and graphite compositions, creating meditations on daily routines and systems of structure prescribed by contemporary labor conditions. In the work, excess is stripped away to allow for simplicity and utility, shifting towards the instrumental through hand-drawn, repetitive motions.
From varied painstakingly layered pigments to industrially-linked chemicals, the exhibition highlights artistic approaches of observation and subversion as a means of confronting contemporary circumstances. By engaging with repetitive, manual processes to slow down, the artists articulate possibilities of action and perception through making. The formal affinities between Hester, Doud, Shetler, and Adelsberger create a visual network of common explorations in the gallery. Bringing their work into one space reflects an interconnected mapping of the DMV and Baltimore arts ecology, while making space for regional dialogues that inform distinct aesthetic and formal approaches.
Crosshatch invites a reconsidering of traditional boundaries of abstraction by presenting gesture, industry and material. Through the intersection of lines or textures, the artists illuminate contemporary questions, technological evolutions, and social shifts. The exhibition proposes a view of abstraction as a means to navigate networks of making—meditating on the hyper-local and expansively interconnected worlds we inhabit.
Seth Adelsberger (b. 1981, Baltimore, MD) is a Baltimore-based painter whose experimental studio practices investigate the material limits and historical trajectory of synthetic abstraction. Best known for his Submersion Paintings, Adelsberger utilizes non-traditional methods. Adelsberger earned a BFA from Towson University, MD. He was a co-founder of Nudashank, an influential artist-run gallery space in Baltimore. His work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; 12-21 Gallery, Reading, PA; and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ. He was a winner of the prestigious Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and his work has been featured heavily in BmoreArt, The Baltimore Banner, and New American Paintings. Adelsberger lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
Tim Doud (b. 1961, Toledo, OH) is a Washington, D.C.-based painter and educator whose practice dissects the codes of identity, material culture, and high-modernist systemic design. His geometric abstractions merge found textile patterns, domestic fabric swatches, and loose gestures to challenge the historical rigidness of the grid, using painting as a means to negotiate the boundary between commercial decoration and high-art minimalism. Doud earned a BFA from the Toledo Museum of Art / University of Toledo and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, alongside formative study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME. He has exhibited extensively, with solo and group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Curator's Office, Washington, D.C.; and MC Magma, Milan, Italy. Doud has been awarded fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Skowhegan School, and the MacDowell Colony. His work has been featured in Art in America, The Washington Post, and New American Paintings. He is a Professor of Art and co-founder of the co-labproject space at American University. Doud lives and works in Washington, D.C.
Francie Hester (b. 1960, Washington, D.C.) is a Maryland-based artist whose multi-dimensional abstractions explore the intersection of memory, time, and architectural space. Her practice utilizes industrial materials, specifically intricately layered, painted, and sculpted aluminum and plexiglass, to question how geometric structures can hold personal and collective histories. By deeply manipulating her surfaces through cycles of pixelation, sanding, and deconstruction, Hester creates complex patterns where lines cut out moments of transient composition. Hester earned a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD; Susan Eley Fine Art, New York, NY; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She has received numerous honors, including a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work is held in prominent permanent collections, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the City of Kyoto, Japan. Hester lives and works in Silver Spring, MD.
Joseph Shetler (b. 1984, Goshen, IN) is a Washington, D.C.-based post-minimalist artist whose work translates anabaptist theology into reductive visual structures. Raised within a strict Mennonite tradition, Shetler filters the historical lineage of the grid through a lens of manual labor, humility, and intentional simplicity. Utilizing delicate materials like silverpoint, graphite, and raw paper, his hand-drawn lines act as sites of quiet, repetitive meditation that reject the excess of contemporary consumer culture. Shetler earned a BFA from Goshen College, IN, and an MFA from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Washington Printmakers Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Step Gallery, Phoenix, AZ; and the Goshen College Art Gallery, Goshen, IN. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, and has received grant support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Shetler’s practice has been covered in The Washington Post and Artsy. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.
Opening reception: Saturday, June 20th, 5 - 8 PM