"One Stroke at a Time" Presented by Washington Project for the Arts (WPA)
Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) is pleased to present One Stroke at a Time, organized by DC-based artists Lorenzo Piero Holder III and Dr. Vicenzio Holder-Perkins, at WPA’s new Project Space in Dupont Circle (1350 Connecticut Ave.
NW). Nephew (Holder) and uncle (Dr. Perkins)–an artist and a psychiatrist–have formed a collaboration that operates across age, ability, and life experience to build a shared language rooted in mutual care. This is the first public presentation of their work as a collaborative duo. Holder and Dr. Perkins’ collaboration began through art therapy, following a stroke experienced by Dr. Perkins in 2018. During his recovery, Dr. Perkins started sketching, while Lorenzo responded through color, mark-making, and composition. This exchange became a practice of mutual care and creative experimentation. What started in the quiet of a living room grew into a shared exploration of impermanence, vulnerability, and interdependence. “What began as a way to support my uncle’s recovery became a way for us to understand each other differently,” said Holder. “The work is not about rehabilitation or perfection. It is about learning how to move forward together, one gesture at a time.”
As uncle and nephew who both experienced estrangement from their fathers, Holder and Dr. Perkins’ collaboration explores what it means to move and make in sync across generations shaped by trauma, resilience, and queerness. They complete each other’s drawings, sometimes in sequence and sometimes simultaneously. Their work challenges fixed roles between patient and practitioner and expands how artist-organizer relationships can function within spaces of disability, kinship, and transformation.
Exhibition dates: March 28–June 20, 2026.
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Friday, 12–6pm, and Saturday, 1–5pm.
Extended hours: First Friday of each month, 1–8pm, in conjunction with Dupont Circle Art Walk.
Public Programs
Public programming will include: a collaborative painting workshop; a panel on collaboration through art therapy; and a gallery performance by Holder and Dr. Perkins with dates and venues to be announced soon.
About the Organizing Artists
Dr. Vicenzio Holder-Perkins, MD (he/him) is a psychiatrist, educator, and emerging artist whose creative practice was born from necessity after a stroke left half of his body paralyzed. Drawing from decades of work in community mental health, HIV, and AIDS advocacy, and multicultural psychiatry, Perkins brings a rare sensibility to the relationship between embodiment, vulnerability, and recovery. A graduate of UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington University, he served as Chief of Psychiatry at the Washington DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center and directed multiple behavioral health programs across the region. Following his stroke in 2018, Vicenzio turned to drawing as a therapeutic act, developing a visual language rooted in repetition, asymmetry, and adaptation.
Dr. Perkins’ drawings are not about aesthetic perfection but about creative persistence in the face of loss. They mark a return to expression on his own terms: slow, deliberate, and deeply human. Dr. Perkins is currently working on a book titled “From Practitioner to Patient”, a deeply personal and interdisciplinary project that reflects on his transition from a practicing psychiatrist to a stroke survivor navigating recovery. Blending clinical insight with lived experience, the book examines the limits of medical authority, the emotional landscape of disability, and the transformative role of DC. Lorenzo Piero Holder III (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates how histories of power, migration, and inheritance are carried and negotiated through the body. Born in West Berlin, he works from the convergence of lineages that rarely coexist within a single narrative. Rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, Holder approaches them as generative conditions that shape his engagement with archives, institutions, and lived experience. His practice treats the body not only as a subject but as an interpretive instrument capable of reading, responding to, and transforming historical and institutional memory. This orientation has deepened through his role in caring for his uncle, psychiatrist and stroke survivor Dr. Vicenzio Holder-Perkins, whose bodily transformation became the foundation for a sustained intergenerational collaboration. Grounded in Washington, DC while completing his MFA at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University, Holder’s work integrates embodied research, collaborative art-making, and healing-centered methodologies to explore how creative practice can operate as a form of cultural infrastructure capable of engaging memory, and relational repair. Holder founded FEVR (@fevrfestival), an international art festival and residency concept supporting collaborative, interdisciplinary work beyond traditional institutional frameworks, and Atelier Proveniersstraat, a collective studio and exhibition space for emerging artists. Together, these initiatives function as laboratories for collaborative curatorial practice and community engagement.
About WPA
Founded in 1975, Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) is a nonprofit incubator and laboratory for artist-organized projects, headquartered in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC. Since its founding, WPA has presented more than 500 exhibitions; 1,000 performances; 700 lectures, workshops, and symposia; 250 screenings; and 58 public art projects. Over the past four decades, nearly every major visual artist in the District has been part of WPA’s programming. After renewing its mission in 2018, WPA has carved out a new identity with a national and international scope, uplifting values of collaboration, experimentation, and inclusivity in all of its programmatic and operational activities. Learn more at wpadc.org.
Supporters
Washington Project for the Arts is supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Hickok Cole; National Endowment for the Arts; The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; William S. Paley Foundation; MetLife, Venable LLP, ArentFox Schiff, Carl M. Freeman Foundation, Foulger Pratt, Soho House, UBS, Allianz, De Novo Projects, Emmy Squared Pizza, Shulman Rogers, Rubenstein Communications, Capital One, DAVIS Construction, HapstakDemetriou+, Occasions, Outright, HITT Contracting, and many other generous foundations, corporations, and individuals.
