Wellfleet Adult Community Center
Ellyn Weiss - there will still be joy
On exhibit: August 2 - 28
Opening Reception Sunday, August 2, 4-6 pm
ARTIST’S STATEMENT: JULY 2026
At this point in my life, my motivation to make art comes from an impulse to speak to what I see and feel in the world around me, whether it’s an eruption of rage when the Supreme Court struck down a woman’s right to control her body or the deep sorrow caused by seeing the damage that we have caused and are continuing to cause to the planet and all its living things, including our fellow humans. I am always striving to evoke the feelings and sharpen awareness without preaching.
In the past 5 years, I have made a lot of angry art. Right now, I find it it particularly challenging to see clearly without falling into despair.
We are a species capable of astonishing achievements, from Beethoven to the scientists in the Chilean desert now building instruments capable of seeing back through space and time, perhaps to the beginning. That’s why this show is called “there will still be joy.” The human urge to find beauty and feel joy cannot be ceded to despair. I believe it is this that preserves hope and feeds resolve.
I hope you enjoy the work.
ARTIST”S BIO
Ellyn Weiss is a Washington DC-based visual artist and independent curator who has shown widely in over 25 solo and many group for more than 25 years. She is committed to engagement with the most pressing issues we face, notably global climate change and the rights of women.
Ellyn has mounted collaborative installations on the melting of the polar icecaps, the destruction of coral reefs; and the movement of tropical diseases northward - all caused by climate change. The American University Museum in Washington, DC, showed her most ambitious collaborative installation,The Human Flood, in 2024. It focuses on the climate catastrophes that have forced millions of people to leave behind home regions made uninhabitable by climate catastrophes.
She co-founded an artists’ collective in 2017 called ArtWatchDC, to resist attacks on fundamental democratic ideals. The One House Project, produced by ArtWatchDC, included 300 artists building a house structure covered with 300 individual panels celebrating the journeys of their ancestors to a new world. Houses were built and shown in Washington, DC and Germantown, MD.