With Spring comes a whole variety of new shows opening all over the Greater DC area, and none are more interesting and more revealing about the progress, growth and even character about an artist than the amazing young career of area artist Amy Lin, whose solo show “Interaction” was the feature show at the Art League Gallery in Old Town Alexandria last month.

It was one of the Art League’s best shows of the year, but the real meat to this story is the story behind the artist herself.

A couple or so of years ago, not too long ago, I first noticed Amy Lin’s works at a group show in the same Art League space. They were different, minimalist and memorable, and struck a chord with me.

Then in May of 2006 Lin had her first solo show at the on-campus gallery at the Northern Virginia Community College; she kept working hard and also had exhibits in group shows at the Abington Art Center in Jenkintown, Pa., and Duke University’s Louise Jones Brown Gallery in Durham, N.C.

Then, in the summer of 2006, Dr. Anne Collins Goodyear (who is the Assistant Curator of Prints & Drawings at the National Portrait Gallery) juried a show at Touchstone Gallery and selected one Amy Lin's pieces for the show.

And in December of 2006, Collins Goodyear juried the All-Media Membership Show at the Art League Gallery in Old Town Alexandria and gave one of Lin's drawings an Honorable Mention.

Lin and Dr. Collins Goodyear met at the gallery reception for this show and Lin invited Anne to a group show that she was in at the Pierce School that month. Lin tells me that "not only did she want to come, [but also] she wanted to make an appointment so that she could see the work and talk to me about it at the same time!"

In January of 2007 Anne and Amy (who – by the way - is one of the DC area's hardest working artists) met at the Pierce School and Dr. Collins Goodyear looked at Lin's art and discussed it with the artist.

Then in May of 2007, Lin was offered a solo show at District of Columbia Arts Center. Since Lin needed a curator for the DCAC show, and since she knew that Anne was interested and familiar with her work, she asked her to curate Lin's solo at DCAC and Dr. Collins Goodyear agreed to do it.

Several studio and gallery visits (as well as an essay about the show) later, they hung the show together, had a great reception, quite a few sales and a curator's talk.

Now this is what I call a curator who is willing to spend part of her precious time working and looking in her own backyard and who exemplifies (above and beyond) the sort of interest that we would expect, once in a while, from our area museum curators as part of their job. Most of them tend to ignore DC area artists and would rather take an airplane to Los Angeles or New York to look at a promising artist’s work, than a cab to Alexandria.

And Lin began to get noticed in the newspapers and the area’s art blogs, and even the Washington Post, notorious for its lack of interest about its city’s artists and galleries, gave Lin a glowing review and the newspaper’s art critic wrote that “her rise through the art world has been, if not meteoric, at least steady, with a series of increasingly high-profile shows. In the May issue of Washingtonian magazine, she was chosen as one of the magazine's "40 People Under 40 to Watch."

The review was about Lin’s first solo in an independent commercial fine arts gallery. The show was titled “Silence” and the gallery was Heineman-Myers in Bethesda, Maryland. And seldom have I seen an artist’s works create such a buzz in such quick time. It paid off, with a flurry of sales.

So it can be safely stated that Amy Lin, in a very short period of time, and after a huge amount of work in her part, has very rapidly become one of the District’s art stars.

And two years ago she had been selected for a solo in 2008 at the Art League, as that organization’s sharp-eyed jurors detected something in her works. And thus, about two years after it all began, Amy Lin is back, triumphant, to the place where she got started. Keep your eyes on this young artist and buy an Amy Lin now.