Transformer’s Annual Exercises for Emerging Artists
Comics, et cetera
E23: DWIGHTMESS COMICS LAB
Exhibition presented as part of
July 25 - September 12, 2026
Featured Artists:
Art Hondros, Tia Wilson, Linda Kuo, Yuki Clarke
Lead Mentor: Adam Griffiths
VISIONARY LEADERS CIRCLE PREVIEW:
Friday, July 24 | 5 - 7 PM
OPEN HOUSE RECEPTION:
Saturday, July 25 | 12 - 6 PM, ARTIST TALK: 1 - 2 PM
PROGRAMMING DETAILS BELOW!
Media:
Press Release
Postcard
In the 23rd iteration of Transformer's annual Exercises for Emerging Artists program, E23: DWIGHTMESS Comics Lab explores comics and illustration as a medium for storytelling, world-building, and visual invention. Spanning biweekly mentorship sessions from mid-March through the end of June, E23: DWIGHTMESS Comics Lab brings together 4 DMV based artists – Yuki Clarke, Art Hondros, Linda Kuo, Tia Wilson – with lead mentorship by Adam Dwight Griffiths to create new comics-based work presented in the culminating summer exhibition, Comics, et cetera, on view July 25 through September 5, 2026.
“Serving as lead mentor for Transformer’s 2026 Exercises for Emerging Artists program was an absolute honor. E23: DWIGHTMESS Comics Lab is the culmination of a warm friendship rooted in trust of Transformer's mission, their commitment to building community and fostering the arts. Being selected for E7: Tetrad in 2010 was a milestone for me in understanding what I was pursuing. The hard-working staff and board of Transformer demonstrate a sophistication in pushing artists to go further, do more - it's their efforts in the Washington, D.C. area and beyond that buoy the bold and inventive expressions from artists that every community deserves. Jubilation and gratitude for this outstanding peer-critique program." – Adam Dwight Griffiths, Cartoonist, Illustrator, and Lead Mentor, E23: DWIGHTMESS Comics Lab
"It's an honor to have this full-circle moment with Adam Griffiths leading this year's Exercises for Emerging Artists. Transformer and I have had the pleasure of working with Adam for nearly 20 years, including as a featured artist in E7: Tetrad, along with multiple exhibitions and international cultural exchanges over the years. Adam exemplifies the fulfillment and advancement of Transformer's mission — supporting artists as they emerge in their careers and building community so that artists can help each other grow, nurturing future generations of contemporary artists."
- Victoria Reis, Founder, Executive & Artistic Director, Transformer
The E23 artist cohort began their expression through comics and expanded the language of the medium throughout the course of the program. Whether experimenting with storytelling, world-building, animation, or sculpture, an underlying devotion to the sequential becomes palpable — yet among these artists there is a textured, creative differing in the logic of ordered story composition: how the body can experience order in space, how a personal history can be redesigned through conventional comic form, how an understanding of narrative can be renegotiated by interacting with a technological diorama, and how original characters conceived beyond gender participate in traditional stages of life.
E23: DWIGHTMESS Comics Lab is led by Adam Dwight Griffiths, a DMV based cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and community leader, and the Founder and Director of DWIGHTMESS, a comics compound based in Silver Spring, MD. This year's Exercises was coordinated by Transformer's Exhibitions & Programs Manager, Camille DeSanto, with guest mentorship by Corinne Halbert and Dana Jeri Maier.
Launched in March 2004, Transformer's Exercises for Emerging Artists program supports a select group of DC area based artists at critical points or crossroads in their professional and creative development. Concentrating on a different artistic discipline each year, the goal of the Exercises is to advance participating artists' creative careers through rigorous peer artist mentorship. In addition to peer critique sessions, participating artists receive mentorship, critical feedback, and professional development insights from guest artists, curators, gallerists, and critics.
Exhibition programminG
Community Open House Reception:
July 25 | 12 - 6 PM
Artist Talk Moderated by Adam Griffiths:
July 25 | 1 PM
Comic Reading with Tia Wilson
August 4 | 6 - 8 PM
A 1-800-DYKE Comics Reading featuring Tia and friends of the 1-800-DYKE. A select few comics from 1-800-DYKE will be projected slide by slide and read in front of an audience with original pages out for display.
Q&A with Art Hondros
August 15 | 1 - 2PM
Join Art Hondros, the creator behind the Dot comic book series for an artist talk that will explore project inspiration, research, creative process, and how stories can be altered from biopic to fiction.
Comic Zine Workshop with Yuki Clarke
August 27 | 6 - 8 PM
It doesn’t take much to tell your story, even with just a folded piece of paper! Join illustrator Yuki Clarke in learning how to make your own comic zine and the story structures you can use to tell a narrative in just 8 tiny pages.
Sequential Constellations: Stories of This Moment workshop led by Linda Kuo with guest facilitator Shreya Basu
September 3 | 6 - 8 PM
This 90 minute workshop explores the potential of sequential art as a collaborative process of response and connection. Beginning from marks and patterns created from a partner, participants will pair up to create an interpretive zine, enfolding into a project of collective authorship unique to this group and moment.
Introduction to flipbooks with Adam Griffiths
September 10 | 6 - 8 PM
Illustrator Adam Griffiths will lead an introductory lesson to flip book animation, sharing samples from his own collection, outlining several basic techniques for simulating movement in sequence, and tools for best practices.
Lead Mentor
Adam Griffiths is a cartoonist and arts administrator based in the Washington, DC area. Between exhibiting his art at various DMV region galleries such as transformer, Rhizome DC, Strathmore Mansion and Washington Project for the Arts, and sharing numerous conceptual illustrations, webcomics, animations, sketches, and photography series online, he authored "Washington White," a surrealistic graphic novel reimagining his grandmother's landmark Civil Rights case as a science-fiction spy thriller.
In 2022, Griffiths opened DWIGHTMESS, a comics 'compound' in his Silver Spring, MD home that includes several gallery spaces, Risograph studio, screen-printing workshop, an extensive library of comics, zines and periodicals, and a 'video vault' collection of hard-to-find films.
DWIGHTMESS has mounted over 30 exhibitions since opening, sponsors an annual artist residency program, hosts a regularly-convening comic book readers' club, organizes an artists' summer retreat program in West Virginia and for the past four years has organized the StoryBox Comics Fair, a 2-day mini-convention for area comics creators & Illustrators to showcase their artwork to the general public.
participating artists
Yuki Clarke is the mastermind behind “Rita and Josey,” a sapphic-sci-fi-mystery/adventure comic series set in 1974. However, at this stage in the characters’ development, Clarke as an author has begun to experiment with the form of their characters and has since reverted them to the mid-century, in shape and age, for an innocent backyard rocket-building project. Clarke’s multimedia display of Rita and Josey’s iterations showcases this moulding of ‘self,’ and life’s great evolution beyond expectations.
Clarke is a self-taught cartoonist and illustrator based out of Maryland creating original comic series and strips, including her flagship sapphic sci-fi adventure series Rita & Josey. She is the Outreach Chair of the Cartoonist Cooperative, helping build community and spearheading in-person connections and new media such as podcasts and magazines in her role. She also is an educator and organizer, hosting panels and cartoonist meetups both online and in Washington DC.
Art Hondros is a straight comics artist completing his fourth issue of “Dot,” a comic series about his mannequin-builder aunt. Hondros at first wanted to retell her history verbatim through his comics, until he discovered there was sparse documentation of her life and career - at which point he resorts to fictionalizing her story; not only are her mannequins repurposed as physical fodder for the Cold War expansion of atomic bomb testing, he then further reimagines aspects of her character against the backdrop of other mid-century historic upheavals.
Hondros received wrist slappings for his renderings in both high school and the U.S. Navy. He attended the Colorado Art Institute in Denver. He has authored the graphic novels “I’ll Take Lagerhead” and “Legion of the Condemned” which is based on a lost 1928 silent film. He collaborated with fellow artist Scott Mills on a comic about Tsar Ivan the Terrible in medieval Russia. He is currently working on “Dot”, based on his great aunt who once had a mannequin repair business in mid century Baltimore.
Linda creates comics, zines, and illustrations to express personal experiences and explore the transformation that happens in close relationships. Her work is informed by an academic background in science, Chinese art, as well as scholarship in the humanities. Fictional forms of alchemy, ontology, and biochemical mechanisms are examined through a philosophy of interdependence and contemplation of (un)natural phenomena, monstrosity, primordial elements, and the life cycle of organisms. She also hosts local workshops on bookbinding and zine-making, to uplift artistic, material, and cultural practices in community settings. She has published comics with WildStar Press and JESSJESS Press, contributed zines to the National Museum of Women in the Arts Library, and is a member of a local figure drawing collective. As a graduate student in Social Work, Linda also collaborates with the Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project in Washington, DC to lead healing spaces using creative modalities.
Linda Kuo begins her creativity with a DIY ethic that spans into her comics about creature characters, personal experience, and “the interdependence and contemplation of (un)natural phenomena.” Whether she is teaching bookbinding, building community through arts-based programs, or hand-making ‘zines, Kuo’s work ends up being about interactions and unexpected combinations. Her piece, “Secret Garden,” is a “cyberdeck” that invites explorers into a mossy and magical landscape, showing that participation and attention can create meanings beyond discovery. The visitor’s act of witnessing and contributing (wish-making & star-choosing), is the mechanism of uncovering the puzzle of the space, allowing its playful creature inhabitants to come flying into life. Making “inputs” into the system unlocks its confessions and wonders.
Tia Wilson makes comics that revolve around concepts of queerness, such as her ongoing (and hilarious) Substack and printed minicomic, “1-800-DYKE.” Anonymous submissions provide the basis for ‘sapphic comics,’ where stories awkward or horrendous, sad and happy all collide. In her new sculptures, Wilson investigates motion beyond the traditional-paneled comic, featuring bodily mechanical and paper-scrolling actions as a means to interact with the viewer in physical space.
Tia Wilson is an artist, illustrator, printmaker, and cartoonist from Maryland. They hold a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Tia enjoys creating work through physical means, including risograph printing, screen printing, painting, and traditional dip pens. Tia enjoys exploring the everyday in their work by documenting personal experiences through art. They focus on queerness, blackness, and their own culture/identity through many different mediums. Tia has self published many zines and small works, and runs an ongoing comic on Substack titled '1-800-DYKE'. They currently work as a Screenprint Associate at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.