Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Glenn Hardy Jr.: Building Identities Through Style, the Washington, DC-based artist’s third exhibition with the gallery. With this show, Hardy examines how identity is read, evaluated, and negotiated through appearance—how clothing, hair, and presentation become social shorthand for character, belonging, and value. Rather than treating style as a site of self-celebration alone, Hardy is interested in the pressures that arise once identity becomes legible, and in the subtle negotiations individuals make within systems of judgment. His figures move through systems that reward conformity and measure difference, revealing how belonging is often conditional rather than assured. Hardy not only interrogates the manner in which Black bodies are seen and assessed, but also the ways in which stylistic excellence has become both reputational armor and a source of joy, experimentation, and play.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the wall-spanning diptych Window Shopping. The painting depicts the outside of an upscale department store, with window displays for elaborate men’s and women’s fashion and stylish passers-by making their way along the sidewalk. Hardy’s brilliant use of color brings a vibrancy to a scene dominated by richly opposing red and green. Each fold, crease, shine, and pattern on the clothing is lovingly rendered, recalling the work of Kerry James Marshall or Derek Fordjour in its rendering of a kind of Black utopia. The scene evokes leisure, aspiration, and elegance. Yet beneath its surface ease, the painting raises questions about access and desire—about who is invited to imagine themselves inside the window and what kinds of presentation promise entry. The young girl pressing her face to the glass embodies both hope and distance, underscoring the fragile line between visibility and exclusion.

Soar Thumb features a group of men in an elevator, all of whom save one are dressed in dark suits and ties. They wear short-cropped hair, their faces controlled and expressions restrained. One figure stands apart in a white tank top, his locs and posture drawing immediate attention. Rather than framing this contrast as a simple narrative of rebellion versus conformity, Hardy treats the scene as an examination of legibility within shared space. The suited figures are not antagonists but participants in the same system of social evaluation, using uniformity as protection. The outlier is neither hero nor foil; he is exposed. The work asks not which presentation is more authentic, but what each form of visibility costs.

Elsewhere, Hardy presents a series of dressform portraits, which place realistic heads onto bare, or nearly bare, dressform busts. The figures’ direct gazes challenge viewers to recognize how quickly identity is projected onto surfaces, and how standards—often silent and inanimate—shape expectation. They are a kind of test, given by Hardy and by the figures themselves, of the viewer’s preconceived ideas about what the appropriate presentation might be for a person they’ve never met, and or have no background knowledge about.  In this, Hardy riffs on ideas from the 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, whose play-within-a-play ponders the relative authenticity of the created characters and the actors creating them – which is more real? Hardy applies this question to the concept of stylistic code-switching. These paintings also mark Hardy’s movement toward more abstract psychological space, where environment recedes and pressure concentrates within the figure itself.

Rather than offering conclusions, Hardy’s work invites viewers into unresolved situations that mirror their own habits of looking. The paintings do not instruct; they implicate. By foregrounding the tension between connection and isolation, visibility and protection, individuality and expectation, the exhibition asks viewers to consider how they participate in the judgments that shape social life—and what it means to be seen before one is known.