Meet Your Neighbors updates: The artists of Forest Hills and Van Ness

Rose Mosner

Rose Mosner, collage artist, teacher and lifelong learner, died in February. She was 95 years old. Mosner taught art at a Queens public middle school for decades, and later, she taught collage art classes to adults through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at American University. Mosner once described her adult students as “vibrant, intelligent and ready to live.” The same could be said of her.

Not even the pandemic could stop Mosner from sharing her love and knowledge of her craft. According to her obituary, she created and led a collage group on Zoom until the very end.

Pete Seligman

One man’s trash is another man’s artistic expression, as we learned when we met Pete Seligman in 2019. Back then, he was incorporating odds and ends he was picking up in his Rock Creek wanderings into his artworks. His more recent work, a collection of collage paintings, is featured in a solo show at Foundry Gallery (2118 8th Street NW) through May 29th. The gallery is open Friday-Sunday from 1 to 7 p.m.

We are especially partial to Apartment Building Listserv, an examination of “social media disgruntlement and the rudeness of some online conversations.”

David Cohen

Since July 2021, David Cohen has photographed birds and other wildlife in Iceland, Germany, the Big Island of Hawaii, and the Bay Area of California. His next Zoom talk about birds, focusing on the Big Island and California, will be on July 14th at 4 p.m. for the Bethesda Metro Area Village.

Information about the talk will go up on the Village website in June.

One of David’s earlier Zoom talks (this one for Northwest Neighbors Village) was “Bring the Wild Beauty In! How I Came to Photograph Birds from North America to Australia.”

David also collaborated with John Burwell of the Pinehurst Project, who used David’s photos to create identification posters of birds and butterflies for Rock Creek Park trailheads; exhibited in the Glen Echo Labor Day Art Show and Tenleytown Art All Night; and has posted more than 850 bird and wildlife photos from around the world at On Instagram.

Deborah CC LaCroix

Deborah CC LaCroix’s work “Edible Forest” was selected for the Hill Center Galleries’ 2022 Regional Juried Exhibition, which can be viewed online or by appointment through June 4th. (Call Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital at 202-549-4172.)

“The inspiration for this painting was a combination of my inability to host models in my studio due to Covid, my weekly trips to the farmer’s market with all the lovely green produce and my love of trees,” LaCroix told Forest Hills Connection. “It proceeded like a giant puzzle in my head over the course of last spring into summer.”

Max Hirshfeld

From @maxhirshfeld's archive: "On 18th Street in the heart of Adams Morgan in the mid-1970's." pic.twitter.com/xRYCUCdIGx

— Old Time DC (@OldTimeDC) March 15, 2022

Max Hirshfeld, a documentary and portrait photographer whose work spans five decades, has spent the pandemic digitizing much of his early work. Some of those images, snapshots on people and life in Washington, DC in the 1970s, were featured in Blind Magazine in December 2021 and Washingtonian in February this year.

In addition, images from Hirshfeld’s very personal 2019 book, Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime, won a Gold Award in the Graphis Photography Annual for 2022. Hirshfeld is the son of Holocaust survivors who met in Poland while awaiting deportation to death camps, and were reunited after the war. In 1993, he accompanied his mother as she retraced her journey in Poland. The images he captured became Sweet Noise.