Portrait of the Artist: Another Side of Barry Margeson
by Larry Janezich
Posted June 3, 2026
Barry Margeson
Back in 2007, Barry Margeson was selling art on the playground of what was then Hine Jr. High School – now the Residences at Eastern Market. He says, “I’ve always loved
Eastern Market and when I returned to DC after getting my MBA I started making art in a sort of autodidactic way.” He said he talked to Carol Wright, who was operating the Eastern Market Flea Market on Saturdays, and signed on as one of her vendors.
The first three images below illustrate the style and techniques he was using during this period. Asked about the genesis of the pieces, he references Alexander Calder, Joan Miro and Henri Matisse and says, “Their colors and shapes inspired the art that I started making. I was painting acrylic onto watercolor paper and then cut out shapes and glued them to the surface to create a piece of art.”
When fire destroyed Eastern Market in 2007, he moved to Italy for a year and had two shows in Milan. He returned to DC and was hired by DGS as the manager at Eastern Market.
Asked how art fits into his life, he says “It’s something I’ll always do and then points to how he has almost unconsciously designed his living space to reflect what he was creating in his pieces.
He especially missed the presence of a detail in this piece which he sold and then recreated a full sized piece of the detail shown below to hang in his home. He says, “If you took a photo of that wall of my house where the detail hangs, it could easily be one of the interiors from my early pieces.”
Untitled. Painted, cut, and glued paper. 18” X 24”
In the early 2010s he stopped making art for a while, then began experimenting with alternate styles but says he “struggled figuring out where to go with that. I used spray paint for a bit and then got back into acrylic about a year ago and began making something in the style I’m working in right now and added the LED component recently and really like that. I think that’ll be part of my art for a while now.”
Untitled. Canvas, acrylic, LED lights. 26” X 35”
Untitled. Canvas, acrylic, LED lights. 26” X 35”
Asked about the source of his inspiration for his latest pieces, Margeson talks about a “beautiful piece of art he bought from an Eastern Market weekend vendor, Cherif Mamadou.” He says, “Cherif is from the Ivory Coast and has a large variety of styles. I bought one of his pieces and it was up in my home for probably three years before I began to riff on it and began to develop this new style that I’m working with now. There’s paint on paint – there’s texture. There are colors that I love together – orange and light blue.”
Asked about the LED element, he says, “I’m of the light bright era – anyone born in the 70s is probably familiar with the little boxes with light patterns in them, and I always wanted to do something like that. When I finished the acrylic stage of the first piece, it just didn’t feel finished and so I started doing that and I liked it.”
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