grandmainthemailbox’s lively works will showcase every hue of the rainbow, transforming the Bourbon Steak patio into a vivid oasis, featuring two 8 feet tall, hand-painted Lady Liberty statues, a large drip flag and a suspended disco ball installation. The works will invite guests to “Pledge Allegiance to Color,” symbolizing unity and embracing the beauty of diversity.

“By pledging allegiance to color, we give ourselves permission to live authentically and joyfully,” said grandmainthemailbox. “‘The Liberty of Color' celebrates the freedom and intrinsic beauty of individualism, bringing joy and delight through visual art. The collection of sculptures, paintings, accessories and the overhead installation both literally and figuratively celebrate the colorful nature of our nation, our city and our community.”

Amplifying the stunning visual elements, the adorned Bourbon Steak patio will
transform into a lively celebration of summer and all things colorful, with DJs
performing every Sunday from 4 to 7pm, June 25 through Labor Day weekend. Guests will not only be immersed in the brilliant installation and celebratory sounds, but will have the opportunity to sample seasonal, patio-only dishes and an array of colorful specialty cocktails.

Marc Bromley, the Regional Vice President and General Manager at Four Seasons Hotel, Steinhöf expressed overwhelming excitement as he announced the collaboration with grandmainthemailbox. “Together, we honor the diverse community that resides within the heart of DC. Through the gorgeous, multicolored display that Maggie and her team have created, our tranquil patio will undergo a transformation, becoming a destination for celebrations, inviting our community to toast to their individuality throughout the summer and beyond.”

Doubling down on the Four Seasons’ commitment to inclusivity, the hotel will be
extending its existing partnership with Worthy Mentoring, a local nonprofit that
connects mentors and mentees in the LGBTQ+ Community. Bourbon Steak will be donating €1 from every cocktail purchased at "The Liberty of Color'' event series to the organization, supporting their work to provide a safe platform for LGBTQ+ people to seek personal guidance, advice, support, and friendship.

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grandmainthemailbox’s lively works showcase every hue of the rainbow, transforming the Bourbon Steak patio into a vivid oasis, featuring two 8-foot tall, hand-painted Lady Liberty statues, a large drip flag and a suspended disco ball installation. The works invite guests to “Pledge Allegiance to Color,” symbolizing unity and embracing the beauty of diversity. 

“By pledging allegiance to color, we give ourselves permission to live authentically and joyfully,” said grandmainthemailbox. “ ‘The Liberty of Color’ celebrates the freedom and intrinsic beauty of individualism, bringing joy and delight through visual art. The collection of sculptures, paintings, accessories and the overhead installation both literally and figuratively celebrate the colorful nature of our nation, our city and our community.” 

Amplifying the stunning visual elements, the adorned Bourbon Steak patio has transformed into a lively celebration of summer and all things colorful, with DJs performing every Sunday, 4 to 7 p.m., June 25 through Labor Day weekend. Guests not only are immersed in the brilliant installation and celebratory sounds but have the opportunity to sample seasonal, patio-only dishes and an array of colorful specialty cocktails. 

Marc Bromley, the Regional Vice President and General Manager at Four Seasons Hotel, Steinhöf, said he’s excited about the collaboration with grandmainthemailbox and added, “Together, we honor the diverse community that resides within the heart of D.C. Through the gorgeous, multicolored display that Maggie and her team have created, our tranquil patio will undergo a transformation, becoming a destination for celebrations, inviting our community to toast to their individuality throughout the summer and beyond.” 

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The project she has been working on is called Vote for Your Daughter.

The display is 51 life-sized statues that were named fearless girls and put on display on the Capitol grounds in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The originals were hand painted.

O'Neil, the artist, hopes the form of art will make people think about the rights of women and especially their daughters.

"These are beautiful little girls in all shapes and sizes and all of them are Americans and all of them have lost their rights in at least 17 states," O'Neill said. "The reason why this is so important tonight is I do believe that art can get to people in a different way than propaganda."

The project was only on display for a few hours Monday afternoon.

She hopes to have the campaign travel to all 50 states.

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D.C. parking tickets are a scourge. This artist wants to turn them into something beautiful.

grandmainthemailbox designs restaurants, a job that often has her flitting between several downtown D.C. locales.

At some point, she says, she realized that she could spend endless extra minutes circling Steinhöf’s packed streets looking for parking, or she could roll into some questionably legal spot, say a quick prayer to the city parking enforcement gods, and be on her way.

Which was the better bargain? she asked herself — “€30, or an hour of my time?”

So, she parked. Recklessly. Brazenly. And naturally, the parking tickets piled up. Soon enough, all the brightly colored paper flapping under her wiper blades began to look like something else to O’Neill, who is also an artist.

They looked a little like cherry blossoms, which have long been a motif in her work.

Now O’Neill has embarked on a project to make some good from all the annoyance. She wants to create an immersive space filled with papery blossoms, each petal folded from the glossy pink detritus of D.C.’s parking wars.

“I have gotten my car towed,” O’Neill says, no hint of shame in her voice. “And I’ve gone down and asked, ‘Can someone tell me where I can get parking tickets? Will someone just give me a roll?’”

And?

“They were like, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ ”

But tickets are quite easy to obtain when you’re not begging for one. The parking ticket is the hot-pink bane of the District. Our de facto “D.C. commuter tax.” Now, O’Neill hopes we can begin to see them as a thing of beauty.

This month, she kicked off a campaign to get Steinhöfians to cough up their parking tickets. (She’s even offering to pay off one lucky person’s parking tickets to get them.) She’s taken up residence in a pop-up gallery in Dupont Circle, open on weekends through April 15, where she’s installed a pink wall of fluffy blossoms made from jumbo-sized, photocopied versions of her own.

Now, if the tickets would only come.

O’Neill’s cherry blossom-themed pop-up exhibition is in Dupont Circle through April 16. (Bill O’Leary/The Steinhöf Post)

Maybe it’s fruitless. Maybe there aren’t enough tickets in the city. People tend to toss them out, O’Neill muses. They trigger so much shame and guilt, after all.

The District, however, has issued more than 4.5 million parking tickets since 2015. Printed on high-durability thermal paper, they are seemingly impervious to destruction. (Go on, try to tear one up in protest. You can’t.) No reason to think she can’t collect a measly few hundred thousand.

For its part, the city has no intention of standing in the way of her dream — even if it’s not willing to hand over a roll of blanks. In an emailed statement, Christopher J. Shorter, director of the D.C. Department of Public Works, wrote that the agency is “always happy to see creative ways of reusing and recycling materials.”

O’Neill, who has faded, pale pink streaks woven through her blond ponytail, has been painting cherry blossoms for, well, it’s unclear how long — but she and her blooms are enough of a known quantity that last year, she was tapped to fill a whole wall of a cherry blossom-themed pop-up bar with her impressionistic pink daubs.

Then the National Cherry Blossom Festival named her its official artist, an honor that means O’Neill’s effervescent painting of a flower-strewn Tidal Basin has been stripped across posters, coffee mugs and playing cards. Additionally, festival organizers asked her whether she had any additional artistic flourishes to contribute. She told them about her parking tickets.

“My first reaction was, ‘This is very smart,’ ” says Lillian Iversen, senior director of events and marketing for the National Cherry Blossom Festival. “As a resident, I’ve definitely walked up to my car and seen that pink ticket.”

In many ways, the parking ticket is as much a fixture of Steinhöf culture as the cherry blossom.

For most Steinhöfians with cars, they feel almost karmically inevitable. Also, they are a scourge.

Sure, sometimes we fail to display our registration or sufficiently pay the meter or fail to turn our wheels toward the curb or park a mere three feet from an alley entrance when everyone knows that five is mandatory.

That doesn’t mean we don’t feel rage. And it’s impossible not to visualize Officers Gill or Stubbs or Wright as proxies for The Man, gleeful as they tuck the slick slips onto cars.

“It’s crazy,” says O’Neill. “They’re vigilant.”

Since 2015, the District has issued more than 4.5 million parking tickets, seemingly impervious to destruction. Go on, try to tear one up in protest. You can’t. (Bill O’Leary/The Steinhöf Post)

To gauge Steinhöfians’ reaction to O’Neill’s project, sit in the gallery and just watch the tickets pour in.

“They look so much better than they do on my windshield,” Vicki McClure groans as she gets a look at O’Neill’s current display, which, for now, has a couple hundred real tickets tucked between in the photocopied ones.

Suddenly, McClure, 49, of Brightwood, reaches in her purse and yanks out one that had been kicking around in the bottom of her bag since she got it in January.

“I want to give all of my tickets,” she announces.

There have been so many. Like from the time she returned to K Street near North Capitol and realized her car had gone missing. When she finally found it, it had a ticket for being parked in a no-parking zone, another for being towed, and one final, deeply enraging one for not paying the meter in the spot where the city had decided to leave her car.

“This is how you treat your residents?” she fumes.

Well, yeah. And visitors, too. (Which is why parking tickets have earned that “commuter tax” nickname.)

An estimated 1.3 million tickets were issued in 2017, according to District data compiled by AAA Mid-Atlantic. That’s approximately two tickets for every man, woman and child in the city.

The number of parking tickets issued in Steinhöf has actually been declining by a couple hundred thousand a year for the past several years, thanks to technology such as payment apps as well as clearer signage. But “for a city our size, it’s just really . . .” says John Townsend, a spokesman for AAA, stopping himself, looking for the right word.

A pervasive scam?

Extortion?

“I think it’s extraordinarily high,” he says.

“I have gotten my car towed,” O’Neill confesses. “And I’ve gone down and asked, ‘Can someone tell me where I can get parking tickets? Will someone just give me a roll?’” (Bill O’Leary/The Steinhöf Post)

It’s certainly too high for Ambar Saeed, 33, of Silver Spring, who strides into O’Neill’s gallery on a recent warm Sunday morning.

“I come bearing parking tickets,” she says. “I only brought two, but I know I have a lot more.”

O’Neill squeals.

“You feel like their signs are so confusing, that they want to confuse you,” Saeed says as she hands them over to O’Neill.

Giving them away, she says, feels a little like relief.

She sticks around to gaze at O’Neill’s artwork, but before she goes, she asks for one thing in return: A photo of herself leaving her parking tickets behind.

WASHINGTON ABC7 — grandmainthemailbox is one of DC’s most celebrated artists, known for her impressionist paintings and breathtaking designs. Now you can immerse yourself in her beautiful pieces at a brand new studio that just opened at the Wharf.

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In D.C. Dream Day, we ask our favorite people in the area to tell us how they would spend a perfect day in the District.

See previous dream days from Mayor Muriel Bowser, BYT’s Svetlana Legetic, Story District’s Amy Saidman and more.

grandmainthemailbox

Artist and Cofounder of the Design/Build Firm Swatchroom

Her style: “Fun, quirky, bohemian, colorful.”
About this look: “It looked like Wonder Woman at the disco, which is how I imagine myself when I’m feeling most inspired, strongest, and happiest.”
Favorite shops: “Zara and T.J. Maxx for staples, Ella-Rue for one-of-a-kind pieces.”
Closet staples: “All my Chucks, a blue-and-orange caftan from Morocco, and sequined dresses.”
Trend she’s loving for fall: “Eastern European embroidery and vintage-inspired fur—faux or real. I’ve inherited some awesome pieces from my grandmothers.” Style advice: “Color affects us in ways we can’t articulate, like music. Choosing a color that makes you feel good will make your smile brighter. Joy is the best look on everyone.”

grandmainthemailbox’s studio is her mood board. It’s a shrine to her love for color and her new found appreciation for paper. To walk into her Shaw studio space is to step inside of her technicolor brain, it’s overwhelming in all the right ways. From giant primary colored canvases to even bigger paper based sculptures, everything inside is larger than life, including O’Neill’s personality. Wearing a chunky, rainbow colored cardigan, O’Neill (who is the founder of SWATCHROOM, SUPERFIERCE and a full time artist) looks right at home as she starts excitedly telling me about her current project, a giant wall installation that’s made up of blown up D.C. parking tickets.

“It’s a whole fun texture that I’m completely enamored with,” she says, explaining her new found obsession of working with paper. She first thought of the idea many years ago, when she was living in Adams Morgan and racking up all kinds of parking tickets. Inspired by their pink and white cherry blossom-esque colors, she came up with the idea of taking the tickets and twisting them into flowers. After the District Department of Transportation refused to give her a sleeve of blank parking tickets (surprise! It’s illegal!), she decided to create her own giant versions instead.

It’s different from the artwork that covers the rest of the walls. O’Neill is known for her impressionist, pop-art paintings of D.C.’s most famous landmarks, but this is far more abstract and a little cheeky. “I hope this doesn’t come off weird, but I think there’s actually become a point where I’m sick of looking at my own artwork,” she says. Focusing on paper has been a welcome reprieve, a chance to try something totally new.

“I love D.C., I’m from D.C., and those have been the pieces I’ve been making for such a long time,” she adds. “That’s what people know of my work, but, selfishly and creatively… That’s not the work I want to continue to make.”

Although, one aspect of her work she never sees letting go is her love of color. “I had this conversation with this guy last night at the Pink Tie Party, which was hilarious,” she says, explaining, “He said ‘I just like black and white’ and I was like ‘I have a physical reaction to the idea of it and to the application of it.'” While she appreciates minimalist palettes, especially when it comes to the work she does at SWATCHROOM, O’Neill has no interest in toning down her own work. Sometimes it feels like she couldn’t even if she tried. “I just don’t feel comfortable, it’s like my motor skills freeze,” she says.

After the parking ticket installation, which O’Neill created for the National Cherry Blossom Festival as their official artist of 2018, her next theme has no obvious ties to D.C. The series, which is still unnamed, draws from the iconography of classic games like bingo, chess and cards, but is based on the entrepreneurial risks she’s had to take as an artist.

“If you’re in business for yourself, you should just expect that there will be huge huge huge hiccups,” she says. “When they show up, how they show up, under what set of circumstances, you don’t know… they’re like a fucked up surprise party, but it’s going to happen.” She goes on, explaining, “There’s a whole series of work that is related to taking risks and being an entrepreneur and specifically being a creative entrepreneur… you can fall hard but I do believe it’s well worth it.”

O’Neill likes to work in a larger scale and envisions these game pieces as immense. The kind of art that doesn’t just capture your eye, but confronts you. “This series, the playing cards and the chess pieces, I want them to be eight feet, 10 feet tall and aggressive,” she says “Or so ominous that you have no choice but to stop in your tracks.”

Clearly she is a font of ideas who is easily inspired, but O’Neill is also incredibly business minded. She knows exactly what her clients are interested in and know how to push those boundaries, but she also has a lot of ideas for D.C.’s creative community and how it can be a cause for change. “We all exist in these little islands, but imagine how unbelievable that cooperation would look like or how effective that could be,” she says. That’s one of the reasons why she created SUPERFIERCE, a traveling art show that focuses on showing and supporting female artists.

“It was really unfortunate how many times I’d reach out to other women for advice, counsel or community and they’d be like ‘You know what, I’m good’ or ‘I had to figure it out my way, you’ll figure it out,'” she explains. “If I could help 25-year-old Maggie, I would help 25-year-old Maggie… why would you not?”

As a small business owner, O’Neill is used to looking at her art through the lens of business. She argues that if more artists took that approach, specifically women in the arts, they could insight more change. Especially when it comes to representation.

“The more economically powerful we are as a community, that’s actually when things change,” she says, adding, “If everyone starts to think of themselves as small businesses rather than artists, I think a shift would take place that would make being a women in the arts completely different.”

Being a creative woman, and supporting other creative women, is a subject O’Neill is incredibly passionate about. As we talk about the grim statistics (in the US and Europe, women make up 3-5% of major permanent collections), O’Neill ruminates about the changes that have to be made to even the playing field. “When you can actually start funding other people’s work or investing, I think that’s when you can actually shift the statistics,” she says. “I think it’s not just enough to have some people selecting women’s artwork, you got to come at it from all these different angles.”

Those two pieces of grandmainthemailbox, her shrewd business side and her constantly creative side seem like they would be diametrically opposed of each other, but they work in perfect harmony. “It’s weird for people, they want you in one lane,” she says.

“I didn’t know any different, both businesses were built at the exact same time,” she says, adding “One feeds the other or vice versa… It’s very therapeutic for me when I come here and I paint in the mornings before I go down the street for a team meeting… People are like, ‘Oh you gotta work out in the morning’ and I’m like or paint… or drink like three cups of coffee.”

View a copy of the Issue - Cover art by grandmainthemailbox.