October 31, 2026 - March 6, 2027
In Small World, Art Enables artist Michael Haynes and visiting, self-taught artist Estéban Whiteside offer 16 small-scale, diorama-like tableaux. Cut from wood and painted and/or finished with drawings on paper, these scenes feel like mini theater stages as much as children’s toy sets. Characters and objects are arranged to conjure pleasantly familiar, collectively shared stories and experiences.
Both artists draw on media and activities familiar to those who grew up in the 80s and 90s. Michael Haynes brings a crew of Sesame Street characters together for a charming picnic, complete with a gingham blanket and a line of invading ants. In one of Whiteside’s works, a family gathers around a living room TV to watch TGIF sit-coms. His other works show wholesome activities like fishing, hide-and-seek, and a Little League game–all fond childhood memories. Borrowing characteristics from classic, handmade wooden toys, these good-natured scenes bathe the viewer in the glow of an archetypal childhood.
Threats do encroach on some of these little worlds, but where they rise, they are instantly neutralized. In Haynes’ work, both a dinosaur chasing a car and the driver inside it are smiling, and the title assures us the dinosaur is a friendly one. Two superheroes are on the scene to save a train from an approaching monster, and even the actors in “Bear in the Yard with the Brothers” all seem pleased with their meeting, which might be frightening in the real world. All the “bad guys” are either actually “good guys” or safely ensnared in our hero's net.
The sense of play that informs the works’ subject and format was also part of each artist’s process in making the show, each influencing the other to experiment. Haynes’ portfolio is a profusion of paper cut-out characters, seemingly waiting to be cast and combined in their own stories. Inspired by Whiteside’s work, Haynes experimented for the first time with building these narratives using three-dimensional wooden forms. And Whiteside, whose work often deals with heavier subjects, was inspired by Haynes’s to linger on themes of sincere joy.
These works both are and are not of the “real world.” In their isolation, they are memories and they are fantasies in which we can see everything will turn out okay. In fact, we feel we could reach in and move pieces around to ensure that they will. Despite the goings-on of the larger world, these small worlds preserve pockets of reverie and comfort, kind and earnest resting places for weary eyes.
Michael Haynes (b. 1990) is a self-taught artist based in Washington, DC, and has been a resident artist at Art Enables since 2014. Haynes’s practice has manifested in hundreds of cut-out illustrations of vehicles, people, animals, and other characters. He uses his signature style—heavy layers of graphite and colored pencil—to create bold fields of color in some places and smudged, scratchy texture in others, lending a weathered and tactile look to the work in which his hand is ever-present.
Estéban Whiteside (b. 1985) is a self-taught artist based in Durham, NC. Whiteside’s typical work depicts hard truths through childlike, reductive forms that reveal the difficult realities of American society. Boldly colored, these paintings initially allow for an aesthetically playful escape however, upon further investigation reveal a sharp and critical insight of today’s world.