Hemphill Artworks, the longtime modern and contemporary art gallery and a stalwart of the DC scene, has closed its location in Mount Vernon Square, a sign of the challenges facing art dealers across the country. In an email to collectors and supporters, founder George Hemphill said the gallery will pivot to a different business model, continuing to represent artists and sell work but no longer hosting regular exhibitions. It’s the first time Hemphill will be without a storefront in 33 years. “In the immediate future, we will emphasize personal rather than public outreach, host artist studio experiences, and share unique acquisition opportunities within the secondary art market, while expanding our art consulting and collection management services,” the email reads. Hemphill is moving into interim office space at the former Uline Arena in NoMa, according to the email. George Hemphill said he was closing the gallery at 434 K Street, Northwest, over the Presidents’ Day weekend and was not available for an interview. Gallery director Mary Early is traveling abroad. The loss for the District is enormous: Hemphill is the sole gallery in the city that shows new work by mid-career and established artists. It’s mounted five solo shows by Renée Stout, an artist who’s been making work in DC since the 1980s about the Black diaspora, mysticism, and the occult. The gallery has showcased encaustic paintings and sculptural installations of music equipment by Robin Rose, who played in the new-wave band Urban Verbs. And Hemphill has shown younger rising stars working in the Washington area and beyond, including Melvin L. Nesbitt Jr. and Rush Baker IV. It also represents the estates and late works of several local luminaries, including Color Field painter Leon Berkowitz, Southern Gothic photographer William Christenberry, and pastel realist Kevin MacDonald. “They treat their artists like family,” says Julia Wolfe, a New York– and DC-based painter who has worked with the gallery for 18 years. There were signs of trouble: Linling Lu, whose colorful concentric-circle tonda paintings can be seen in the lobby of CityCenterDC downtown as well as in the US Embassy in Beijing—left the gallery in recent years. So did Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi, an Iranian American painter whose abstract landscapes were on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington through late January. (The artists did not return requests for comment.) Hemphill is also a defendant in an ongoing lawsuit over the sale of a painting by Alma Thomas, the proto–Washington Color School painter who was the first Black woman artist to be collected by the White House. A woman named Gwendolyn Clark claims that a painting by Thomas that she bought with her husband in 1976 and that went missing after her separation in 1981 was subsequently purchased and resold by Hemphill after she told the gallery she was searching for it. The Southern District of New York dismissed the complaint in March 2024, deciding she had waited too long to try to claim the work. But in August, an appeals court partially vacated the decision, sending it back to the district court. The court held a conference with the plaintiff earlier this month. George Hemphill opened the gallery in Georgetown in 1993, at a time when a recession and severe federal job cuts had tanked the DC real-estate market; the first Washington Post article about the gallery bore the headline “Crash Landing.” Hemphill Fine Arts moved to 14th Street, Northwest, in 2004, helping spur the corridor’s revival and joining several other galleries in a single building, which today is home to Sotheby’s. The gallery relocated to K Street in 2019 and rebranded as Hemphill Artworks, mounting exhibits by Tim Doud, Colby Caldwell, Wayson R. Jones, and others. One of the gallery’s triumphs was its discovery of the DC artist known as “Mingering Mike.” After a record collector found a cache of richly illustrated vinyl records made from cardboard at a flea market in 2004—an archive of a vibrant and completely imaginary career in soul music—Hemphill was the first to show them. The gallery helped place the collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Hemphill is the latest established dealer to fall victim to a wave of closures hitting galleries nationwide. Last year alone Blum, Sean Kelly and Tanya Bonakdar—major Los Angeles institutions—all closed their doors. Some of the galleries that shuttered have weathered decades of ups and downs. In New York, Jack Hanley Gallery went out of business in 2024 after 37 years across different locations, while Sperone Westwater ended a 50-year run in November. The art market is down everywhere: Global art sales declined 12 percent in 2024 and continued to fall in 2025, according to a market report by the contemporary art fair Art Basel and its sponsor UBS. In Washington specifically, the biggest collectors are law firms, which have been squeezed by declining demand and uncertainty under the second Trump administration. The loss of the physical gallery leaves the city without a space to see some of the region’s best contemporary artists. But the email from Hemphill pledged that the gallery will find other ways to make shows happen. “We are not abandoning our ambition to curate and mount exhibitions,” the email reads, “but we will be looking for circumstances more favorable to the changing environment.”The post Hemphill Artworks Has Closed Its DC Gallery first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less