Frida Kahlo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Seldom does an art review need a little context from the perspective of the reviewer's own historical involvement with the work being reviewed, as this one does.

In 1975, I visited Mexico City and discovered the works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Almost immediately, I developed an artistic obsession with Kahlo's image and over the years I have created hundreds of works on that subject, including dozens of art school assignments at the University of Washington School of Art (1977-1981).

Although the vast majority of those works were sold over the years, a few years ago I had a solo show in Washington, DC that chronicled 27 years of preparatory drawings, etchings, oil paintings, watercolors and sculptures about Kahlo.

In 1975 my parents took their first vacation ever, at least in my memory. As Cuban exiles, the American tradition of yearly vacations was as removed from their routine as the Cuban tradition of Nochebuena is from American Christmas holiday customs.

Anyway, they decided to go to Mexico City for a week with another couple from New York, which is where my folks had been living since leaving Cuba as political refugees in the early 60s. In 1975 I was finishing my first year in the US Navy, where I had enlisted right after High School, and stationed aboard USS Saratoga, homeported in Mayport, Florida.

I had turned down a New York State Regents Scholarship, a Cornell University art scholarship and a Boston University art scholarship to satisfy my desire to see the world before I went to college.

Mexico City and its nightlife and food (and how far a dollar went) made such an impression upon my parents and their friends, that the one-week trip became two, and eventually they spent nearly a month in that huge, dirty city, enjoying the food, scenery, clubs and markets. They also asked me if I'd like to join them for a few days, and since they were paying for it, I got a few days leave and flew to Mexico City for about five days of my own, unexpected vacation.

I hardly spent any time with them. As a 19-year-old teenager, my interests were more focused on girls, cheap booze and plenty of great things to do. It was while visiting a museum during the last few days of my visit, that I accidentally discovered Frida Kahlo.

I remember walking into the museum salon where the Two Fridas hung. It was love, or more like witchcraft, at first sight. This large, spectacular painting swallowed my visual senses and attention as no work of art would do again until I first saw Velasquez's Las Meninas at the Prado in Madrid eight years later.

At that first exposure, and the ones that followed over the years, as I tried to absorb as much of Frida Kahlo as I could in my remaining Mexico City days, I became an addict for the work and imagery of this Champagne Communist Mexican virago. I recall sitting down in the room where the Two Fridas was hung, and copying the painting through a pencil sketch done on gift wrapping vellum paper from an earlier touristy purchase of a huge, saucepan sized solid silver belt buckle and brown cowboy etched leather belt that I wore for years and that thankfully has been now lost.

Kahlo left me gasping for knowledge about her and her work. Her imagery was like nothing I had seen before, even in my childhood's New York atmosphere that often included day-long trips to the Brooklyn Museum, the Met, MOMA and many other New York museums.

The more of her work that I discovered, the more I became obsessed with learning about her. In 1975 and the first few years that followed, this wasn't exactly an easy task. In those years, at least in Mexico, Kahlo was still just Diego Rivera's wife; a wife who also happened to paint.

And thus my burning interest in visiting the massive Frida Kahlo exhibition which opened a few weeks ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA).

PMA is the only East Coast venue for this major exhibition, the first in nearly 15 years to be devoted to Kahlo's work. It includes more than 40 of Kahlo's paintings, including many that have never been exhibited before, and others which have never been seen in the United States. You can see the exhibition in the video below:



The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center working with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and curated by Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera, whose brilliant Kahlo biography is a must read for Kahlophiles worldwide, and by the Walker's associate curator Elizabeth Carpenter.

In addition to the Kahlo works, the curators have included over 100 photographs from Kahlo's personal collection, some of which have been annotated and drawn on by Kahlo.

Among them are images by Tina Modotti, Nickolas Murray, Gisele Freund and many others. They truly help to create a sense of place and time and aura around some of the most iconic imagery from 20th century art.

The PMA show also adds some additional materials from the museum's own collection. These works, mostly ex-votos works, really add a brilliant insight to Kahlo's influences. The PMA additions were curated by the PMA's Michael Taylor and Emily Hage; more on that later.

A proper Kahlo primer demands the reading of Hayden Herrera's Kahlo biography or at the very least the viewing of Selma Hayek's Frida movie.

The film was the most recent of a curious worldwide Kahlomania that shows little sign of slowing down. It is especially curious in the sense that the artist who now represents "Mexicanity" to its most profound depth, was essentially ignored in her own country for many years, both during and after her lifetime (Kahlo died in 1954), and only had one exhibition of her works in Mexico (in 1953), just before she died.

Kahlo was born in 1907, and in 1929 she married Diego Rivera. At the time he was perhaps Mexico's best-known artist and womanizer, and their relationship was turbulent, to say the least. It also provided the subject matter for some of Kahlo's best-known works.

Almost upon entry we see "Frieda [sic] and Diego Rivera," painted in 1931. Painted while Kahlo and Rivera were living in San Francisco, this work was first exhibited at the 6th Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. It's a rather sad double portrait, where Kahlo paints Rivera's profession as an artist, and depicts herself as a traditional Mexican wife, even taking Rivera's last name when she signs the work "Frieda [sic] Rivera." Their hands barely touch each other.

Kahlo was a woman of multiple identities, but this one is far from the Frida Kahlo who has become an unexpected icon to the world's feminist movement. And yet this early work provides a seminal entry point to Kahlo's deep debt to Mexican folk art, and what Herrera calls "Mexicanidad" (or Mexicanity), a post-revolutionary idea formulated by Mexico's intelligentsia to carve out a Mexican identity based upon its own rich indigenous history and its mestizo culture.

And over the years a distinct and very Mexican icon would emerge. An artist who has also become a separate icon not only to the same Mexicans who mostly ignored her while she was alive, but also to the new culture of Mexican-Americans once known as Chicanos who have since adopted her as an iconic cultural leader of their re-discovered Mexicanity.

A genetic and iconic paradox emerges in this latter deification of Kahlo. In 1936's "My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)," Kahlo has depicted her own family tree proudly reflecting her own mestizo heritage, exhibited by her maternal grandfather's indigenous blood.

She also showcases her three Caucasian grandparents, and even depicts herself being sustained inside her mother and we also see the moment of creation as an European sperm enters her mother's mestizo egg. Kahlo shows herself as a small child in her Blue House, perhaps sadly stating the end of the line, as Kahlo was unable to bear children.

Kahlo's Mexicanity would grow and progress over the years, and she embraced the traditions of Mexican folk art and the colonial religious paintings known as "ex-voto" with a ferocity that is a perfect example why the post-modernist war cry of "it's been done before" fails immediately no matter how often repeated.

"So what?" would have answered Frida Kahlo as she used the ex-votos as guides for some of her most successful works.

In "The Suicide of Dorothy Hale," we have an opportunity that no one else got to see at the Walker or will see in SF. An opportunity to see, side by side, how Kahlo embraced an older tradition and brought it forward to her own painting dialogue.



Commissioned by Clare Booth Luce in 1939 (while Kahlo was living in New York as a bit of a Champagne Communist) to commemorate the suicide of her friend Dorothy Hale, I was told by Hayden Herrera that it "horrified" Luce when she first saw it.

It is a painting executed in the direct style of the ex-votos, and somehow the PMA has found in its own collection an ex-voto that almost matches the storyline of the Kahlo painting.

An ex-voto is a votive painting commissioned by someone to celebrate or record an event where someone has survived a dangerous event. In Mexico, it was generally painted on tin sheets. Often the ex-voto has a narrative style that shows the progression of the event, in a timeline, in the actual work.

In the Kahlo painting we see Dorothy Hale jumping to her suicide, first as a small figure jumping off her apartment building, which is surrounded by clouds echoing El Greco. We then see Hale's body in a close up of her fall, and finally the broken and bloodied woman on the ground. A banner at the bottom of the painting tells the story in Spanish, and Kahlo has bloodied her signature and even the frame.

In the PMA's ex-voto, titled "Fall from a Balcony," we see a Nanny and child falling through the floor of a balcony, which has given way under their weight. We also see them on the ground, having fallen and miraculously survived the fall. The banner at the bottom relates the story of the fall.

It's a brilliant juxtapositioning of two unrelated works that cement the powerful influence of ex-voto upon Kahlo's own work as no words can describe.

Brilliant artists borrow from all sources around. The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" borrowed from the morning newspaper headlines that Sir Paul was reading over his beans on toast:

I read the news today oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes
it takes to fill the
Albert Hall

Kahlo's horrific "A Few Small Nips," painted in 1935, is a revelation in many ways. As Herrera tells the story, Kahlo was inspired to make this gruesome painting, which depicts a man in a bloodbath of an assault on a naked woman who has been stabbed many times, from a newspaper story relating the crime.

The killer, while being reprimanded by the judge, was quoted as responding that he had only given the victim a "few small nips."


The work came at a difficult time in Kahlo's own life, when her marriage to Rivera was on the rocks, because Rivera had an affair with Kahlo's younger sister Cristina. The painting is a visual bloodbath itself; Kahlo's misery is projected onto victim lying naked on a bloodied bed. There's blood everywhere, including the frame, which Kahlo has used to extend the bloodstains.

And there's something else that even a Kahlo expert such as Herrera first discovered when she saw this painting for the first time during this exhibition: Kahlo has also stabbed the frame repeatedly, extending her own anger onto the wood, giving it a few small nips of her own.

This is why sometimes even a familiar work of art yields new clues when examined for real; those angry stabs on the frame had not been revealed in the countless reproductions of this work.

This revelation alone is worth a trip to see this exhibition. See Hayden Herrera discuss the work below:



Another incarnation of Frida Kahlo was her ability to paint her own pain. Starting with a horrific accident in her youth, which left her body broken and subject to pain throughout the rest of her life as well as countless operations, Kahlo borrowed from her own physical pain to deliver images that makes us wince from a different place than the images of a suicide or a stab victim.

Physical pain that comes from a deep moist place inside us all, and which Kahlo has exposed via her painting many times.

It's there in "The Broken Column," (c. 1944) and also in "Without Hope," and perhaps in one of her best-known paintings "The Little Deer," where the pain becomes arrows on the deer's body.

There are surprises in this show as well. Even for a Fridaphile like me and I suspect for most acolytes of Fridamania. Such as "The Circle," a round work that is undated and look nothing like any Kahlo work that I have ever seen.

And then there is "The Two Fridas" just as I remember from my first exposure to it back in the mid 1970s. This is her largest work, painted in 1939 and occupying a place of honor in the exhibition.

Two gigantic Fridas sitting against an El Greco sky, holding hands and sharing a bloodline. One is a Mexican Frida in her Tehuana dress; the other Frida is bloodied and the dripping vein paints small red flowers on her white dress; perhaps a contemporary European wedding dress of the times.

See curators Herrera and Carpenter discuss the work below (the video is part 1 of 3; the rest are at YouTube):




I hope that this exhibition will kindle new interest not only from her legions of fans, but also from art scholars and researchers, as there are still many holes and gaps that need to be identified and expanded in this amazing life.

Kahlo's influence on contemporary art also needs serious examination by art scholars and researchers. Kahlo's obsession with her own image has been reflected in the work of many important contemporary artists and photographers who use their body and image as the canvas for their work.

And even as Fridamania continues to expand and her images commodified into Chinese made Mexican souvenirs of all kinds, Frida Kahlo is a major 20th century artist, perhaps even eclipsing her husband's place in art history.

Like Picasso, Kahlo refused to be labeled and refused to produce one style or genre of work. “God is really only another artist," once said Picasso, "He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the ant. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things."

Frida Kahlo is at the PMA through May 18, 2008. See a quick walk-through the exhibition below:

Kirkland on Kehinde Wiley

JT on Kehinde Wiley at the SAAM/Portrait Gallery's Hip Hop show. Read it here.

Words that count, or counting... period?

Earlier this week, GrammarPolice scribe and Washington City Paper gallery critic and good friend Kriston Capps and Washington City Paper museum art critic (and Arlington Arts Center curator) and also good friend Jeffry Cudlin -- joined in a little by the dynamic Philippa Hughes) -- hashed out the significance of Capp's words and counting skills in Capps' CP piece on "Collectors Select" at the Arlington Arts Center.

Specifically, the online chatterfuss is about the parts of Capps' review that deal with Philippa Hughes and Tim Conlon; Capps wrote:

[Daniel] Lavinas shows [the work of León Ferrari] without pretension: His biggest intervention is to have the gallery painted a deep shade of cherry-lambic red to match the heliographs. Philippa Hughes went further. The least experienced collector in the group, Hughes invited some graffiti artists—Tim Conlon, Bryan Conner, RAMS, and the Soviet—to tag her room. The intervention is the work here. But Hughes is bursting through a door that's been open for nearly three decades. There's still room for innovation in graffiti, but graffiti in a room isn't innovative alone (even if it shares the room with floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, as it does here). Context notwithstanding, the work by Conlon (which takes up most of the room) is dull in any formal sense. As tags, they're not particularly intricate or witty; as abstraction, they don't offer much.

Regardless of how you feel about Capps' words, opinions, advice, and counting skills in the review, this discussion is interesting to me because (a) it shows the blogsphere ability to challenge a writer's words and if needed correct his errors and (b) because it puts my good friend Jeffry Cudlin on the receiving and thus defensive end of a review which may not be in synch with what he perceives to be the real story or guts of an exhibition.

It tears me a little in both directions, because I am of the opinion that any review is a good review, and considering the dearth of art criticism in the Greater Washington DC area, Cudlin does give his colleague props for making his way to Arlington (Capps doesn't have an automobile, and it's a nice walk from the Metro stop to the Arlington Arts Center).

In the past, whenever someone has reviewed either my own work or a show that I have curated, even if there have been glaring mistakes, I have nearly always resorted to biting my lip and thanking the critic for the review.

On the other hand, when in reviewing someone else's show not-my-own, and a critic makes a mistake, or just gets something about the artist or exhibition plainly wrong, as a third party I'm glad to call them out on it.

But most gallerists, and a large percentage of artists and curators, have learned the hard way to just bite their lip, sigh and maybe bring up the error or the real "mark" - if the missed mark or error is egregious enough - in private to the writer.

I'm sure that Cudlin, in his capacity as a critic has received his fair share of complaints about his own writing - I myself have both chided and praised his words in the past -- but now it is interesting to see him react when he feels the criticism has missed the mark when the words are aimed in his own direction.

Was the substance of the complaint big enough to merit the fuss? I'm not sure, but it's a brave and interesting teen-aged world out there, where both valid and sock puppet commenting all add their own weird dialogue to the discourse and leave a new digital footprint for art exhibitions, artists, critics and opinions about their opinions.

Mellema on Moser

Kevin Mellema writes an interesting review of the current Lida Moser show at Fraser Gallery.

Moser's work often depicts motion and displays an unusually strong depth of field. Some of her best works include foreground objects that go hopelessly out of focus yet retain all the information we really need. A photo of two Tennessee girls standing beside the road includes the interior car door and window frame. Another shot out the front window of a bus shows a motion blurred man crossing the street before the bus. Both photos would be greatly diminished were they shot in a more typical fashion.

Likely to her detriment, Moser never shot fashion work, but was asked to shoot a fashion portfolio for a young head strong aspiring model named Judy. Moser agreed, as long as she could shoot it on a truck loading dock. During the shoot the two ladies encountered a band of irrepressible, and equally headstrong boys. Not quite being able to shake them off, Moser used them to her advantage and made a wonderful series of shots with Judy posing while the boys mocked her poses. No doubt it wasn't exactly what Judy had in mind, but since Moser was doing the work as a favor she didn't have much choice but to go along with it. Moser recalls that images from the series sold to several magazines, and Judy went on to model ... then setting her sights on marrying a millionaire, did that as well.

Read it here.

The Shaping of Color Field

by Rosetta DeBerardinis

I departed the island of Baltimore last week to attend the preview of “Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975,” the new exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

After some lovely pastries and Dean and DeLuca coffee poured from boxes we ventured upstairs to its third floor gallery. Once you emerge from the elevator you become captivated by the large scale chroma-stained canvases which are so imposing that you feel child-like staring up at them. Signage on the walls with names we have all heard or seem before like: Frankenthaler, Louis, Olitski, Motherwell, Gottelib, Davis and Gilliam. But, this is not a block-buster exhibit for the masses intended to draw record numbers of crowds; it is a significant documentation of 39 works by the early pioneers of American art.

Due to limited government funding for museums and art institutions, there is now greater reliance upon garnering private donors to underwrite exhibits. This exhibit is organized by the American Federation of the Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, Gene Davis Memorial Fund, Golden Artists Colors and several individual donors, and few of the works are from the Smithsonian’s own collection.

But, if this exhibit is an example of what can be done without the government, I say ‘thank-you’ now we can really have first-class art shows which are thought-provoking, scholarly and challenging. No, there is no audio-guide with snippets of history or narrative story-telling. This show is intended for those well-versed in the subject-matter, so if you are not, I suggest that you dust off an art history book or Google ‘ColorField’ to ensure that you won’t miss the importance of this historical exhibit.

And, if you negate the importance of the abstract expressionist and chant along with the masses “even my child could do this” then you need to purchase the easy reading color-illustrated exhibition catalogue, written by its guest curator Karen Willkin, a specialist in 20th century modernism.

The post-war Color Field painters abandoned the gestural strokes, the all-over painting and pouring inaugurated by Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists, and instead concentrated on color, spatial ambiguity and process. Their aim was to unify a colorful abstract image or shape on a large surface. This 1950s movement was more about color than form; however, both movements sought to reveal the unknown -not to report just on the visible.

Artist Helen Frankenthaler led the way by applying thinned oil pigment to stain the unprimed canvas. After visiting her studio in New York City in 1953, artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (both then teaching in the District of Columbia) returned there to experiment with their newly found technique.

My favorite painting in the show is Frankenthaler’s large scale, ‘Off the White Square’ done in 1973 because it exemplifies the new power and presence of acrylic pigment -- which had just become available when she began using ten years earlier.

And, as they say "the rest is history," because America now had its second artistic movement, the Color Field school, which included Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Friedel Dzubus, Sam Francis, Jules Olitski and later Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Ronald Davis and Sam Gilliam. These are artists who elected to concentrate on pure contrasting hues of color rather than light versus dark. In the words of Frank Stella “what you see is what you see.” However the significance of this exhibit extends beyond what the viewer sees on these colorful canvases. It is a historical event documenting the difference, similarity and distinction between abstract expressionism and color field painting along with the progression of American art.

The exhibition is in three-parts: an introduction to the origins of Color Field painting, its pioneers, and its later practitioners who pushed its further. It begins with Rothko, and the Abstract Expressionists, then to Frankenthaler’s departure from Pollock and the color field artists who followed with a new abstract form based on expanses of radiant unmodulated hues by staining, painting and spraying. And it concludes with the later generation often linked to the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who curated the 1964 exhibit “Post Painterly Abstraction” and is credited along with art historian Michael Fried for defining and establishing the framework for interpreting the art form known as field of color, later coined "Color Field."

This exhibition is the first major examination of color field painting, and the District of Columbia is the only East Coast city to host this landmark exhibition. After its debut there it will make its final stop at the First Center of Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. in June.

On exhibit thru May 26th, 2008 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily (202) 633-1000\ (202) 633-7970 (recorded museum information).

Sedona Art Scene Part III

Yesterday I used the example of Sedona's huge Exposure Gallery to discuss what I call the Southwest gallery model -- a gallery packed to the gills with art in a riot of color and fear of empty space -- as opposed to the more standard gallery model of a minimalist white cube for a gallery.

There are a lot of art venues in the Sedona area, nearly all of them, with one notable exception, follow this Southwest model. Most of the better spaces are listed in the Sedona Art Gallery Association website.

Of these, Kinion Fine Arts seems to offer a blend of the two gallery models. They recently moved from the Hozho Center (located at 431 Hwy 179 and home to several galleries) to uptown Sedona, relocating the gallery to a former bank building, safe room and all. The Kinions have divided the gallery into two rooms; at the entrance the Southwest model is in place, but the bank's vault is used for solo shows apparently hung in the cleaner, less cluttered style of the white cube. They're also one of the few art spaces in town where not everything is Southwest art centric.

A new gallery just up a few steps from Kinion Fine Arts, located at Hyatt Pinion Point, is the very beautiful space of the Vickers Collection (there are three of these galleries in total and the one in Sedona is called VC Fine Arts), opened just a year ago and by far the only gallery in the area that fits the cleaner white cube model.

Vickers uses the white cube model, and also offers the most diverse set of artists, not just a heavy-handed focus on Southwest art (as most Sedona galleries do, driven by the tourist art market).

It will be interesting to see if Vickers can survive as the sole Sedona gallery (at least that I've seen) that offers a diverse set of artwork; the type of art that could easily be seen in New York, or Philly or DC.

At VC I quite liked the bronze sculptures of Bill Starke, a refreshing change of pace from all the bronzes of horses, bears, javalinas, Indians, deer and cowboys that inundate most of this beautiful town's galleries.

I also liked Chris Nelson's smart and intelligent reverse paintings on plexi, which upon further examination are more than just paintings, since the artist also routes the verso of the plexi so that the textured reverse plexi interacts with the acrylic paint to actually create grooves and channels that on the front of the work create smart landscapes. As interesting as this work is, this artist has to be careful that he doesn't fall into a repetitive pattern in his work.

Since I have been in the advice-giving mood, an artist that would be a perfect fir and would actually sell like gangbusters all throughout the Southwest are the amazing storm paintings of the Washington DC area's Amy Marx, who recently had her first solo in New York and whose breath-taking, hyper realism captures massive storms and weather patterns like no artist that I have ever seen.

Another East Coast artist who would be an instant hit in the Southwest is Alexandria's Susan Makara, whose beautiful stacked stones series sell as soon as she is finished with them from her studio in Alexandria's Torpedo factory.

Still in uptown, the Sedona Art Center rounds up a very good artists' run membership gallery of local artists.

There are also quite a few galleries located in a faux Mexican village called Tlaquepaque; after two trips to Sedona, I still can't pronounce it. From there you can cross Oak Creek by foot and visit a whole bunch more galleries on Hwy 179, although the ongoing construction on 179 seems to be really hurting the gallery business on that road.

Later: A big surprise! why nearby Jerome has more interesting and diverse galleries than Sedona does.

Sedona Art Scene Part 2

When you drive up Highway 179 into Sedona, one of the first galleries that you come across is the huge Exposures Gallery, which is located on the right side of 179 as one approaches the city.

Over 20,000 square feet, not including the outside sculpture gardens (I assume) make this the largest art gallery in the state, and probably one of the largest in the nation.

Exposures is a perfect example of what makes most Southwestern art galleries so different from most other fine art galleries in the world; galleries which follow the white cube example of white walls and minimalist hanging styles, coupled with total lack of information about prices, etc.

Not so in the Southwest gallery model, and Exposures is a perfect example of this model for Southwest galleries.

Upon entering the huge spaces, the East Coast gallery sensibility is immediately assaulted by a riot of colors and by a fear of empty space that yields a huge gallery space filled to the brim with art, photography, sculpture, crafts and jewelry.

This is 21st century salon style presentation married to the joy of colors that is the Southwest.

There are probably a few thousand pieces of art hanging and displayed in this gargantuan space. In fact, so much artwork, and so much variety, that the snobbery of the art world would immediately tend to dismiss this gallery as another "art store" filled with "wall decor."

Not so fast.

There are plenty of art galleries in Sedona that offer wall decor, and the same in the Southwest, and for that matter all over the nation.

Don't be fooled by the sheer scale and invasion of the senses that Exposure offers. This is a very successful galleries which offers some very good artists, some so so artists and some mediocre artists. In other words, just like any other reputable art gallery, but definitely not a cheesy art store. This is a very good Southwestern gallery working flawlessly on that model.

Exposures' success is clearly evident not only in its size, but in the small army of people that it employs, as well as its history, which essentially repeats the usual gallery story: art-loving couple moves to Sedona, open a small gallery; they do well and open a huge one.

And because Sedona's art buying market is comprised mostly of visitors, this gallery has to operate on the model of exhibiting everything that it has to offer all at once.

It works for them.

So once we get past the fact that this overcrowded gallery space has found its formula for success, and we begin to look at the artwork itself, as I stated before, we find the same mix of great, good, average and mediocre that one finds in any gallery in the world because art truly is in the eyes of the beholder -- or in this case the husband and wife team that picks the artists that they choose to represent and sell.

And sell they do...

On exhibit are works by more than 100 artists; yep, 100... and prices, I was informed, range from $29 to $290,000.

The catchy price range seems to have done wonders for both the artists and the owners.

Not everything is about money and sales; but money and sales make most artists, and definitely most gallery owners happy.

About the artwork itself...

Nearly all of it shares a flawless technical skill and delivery that would make most postmodernists elitists raise their noses a few inches higher. As an admirer of technical skill, I have learned to respect technical skill, but also have learned to then look past it and see content, ideas, context and intelligence in the work.

But before I get to the few artists that stood out for me, I must note that the one thing that, in spite of over 100 artists, the gallery lacked was monochromatic or black and white works in this wildly colored universe of art. It could really use a few drawings here and there to break up the dominance of color and painting. But I am biased.

As far as I could see there were only two artists working in drawing. Of the two, the two delicate small graphite drawings by Charles Frizzell stood out like little orphans in an ocean of color.

The charcoal and watercolor pieces by an artist named Yuroz also could mostly be qualified as drawing, but the works themselves were rather forgettable, as Yuroz seems to be channelling several of Picasso's periods -- including a rather mediocre stab at cubism -- in his paintings and drawings. There is too much Picasso in Yuroz, but there is also too much of Yuroz in Exposures, which in economic terms means that someone must be buying lots of his work. I didn't like any of it.

Let me tell you what I did like.

There was some very good photography by Scott Peck, and yet I personally test all flower photography to the spectacular work of Andrzej Pluta, or Joyce Tenneson, or Amy Lamb. In fact if Peck's work is doing well in Exposures, then the art dealer in me is sure that Tenneson, Pluta and Lamb would do even better at Exposures.

Upon entering any business in Arizona that sells imagery, one is bound to find photographs of the desert rocks and formations. By the time that you visit a dozen galleries, one is sick and tired of desert photography.

And yet, one of the most memorable artists in Exposures is a photographer named Martii, whose spectacular desert shots, coupled with superb presentations, make his or her photography one of the best finds in the gallery. And in writing this, I think that another photographer whose work would do well here, would be the split reverse image digitally manipulated split desert photographs by John DeFabbio, who works out of the Washington, DC area. For years DeFabbio has been trekking around the world photographing nearly everything that he sees, then digitally mirroring each half of the image to discover amazing new images in the manipulated work.

But back to Exposures.

The best work in this amazing gallery are beautiful abstract pieces by a Brooklyn-born artist named Eric Lee, one of the rare non-representational artists in the space. Lee creates wonderful reverse paintings in glass that are standouts of skill and delivery. They are fresh and beautiful and add a calming effect to the gallery's riot of color.

There are two galleries in Sedona claiming to have been voted the best gallery in Sedona. I'm not sure who the voters were, but of the two, Exposures is by far the best and certainly one of the most amazing art spaces in the entire Southwest.

Am I Still Shouting to the Wind?
Glass3 in Georgetown

This is the story of a new arts movement -- what is usually called a "school" in art history books -- taking place right here in the Greater Washington, DC area. Allow me to refresh your memory a little and provide some background. Bear with me.

Point One: The British sister city to Washington, DC is Sunderland.

Why Sunderland and not London? After all, most other sister cities to DC are the capitals of other countries - but Sunderland is George Washington's ancestral hometown, so that's why!

Sunderland is also where the United Kingdom has their National Glass Centre and, by the way, glass has been made in Sunderland for around 1,500 years.

When most people think of glass in the art world, they think of craft. A few decades ago, a similar reaction occurred with photography.


Point Two: George Koch is one of the District's true art icons: he's a talented painter, the founder of A. Salon, Ltd., a board member of the Cultural Development Corporation, a founding board member of the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington, a Commissioner of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, board member of Hamiltonian Artists, and the Board Chair of Artomatic.

They don't get much bigger, influential, or harder working for the District's artists and arts organizations than George Koch.

DC area artists and DC's arts scene owes a lot to George Koch.

And George has been working very hard to get the British to bring the United Kingdom's premier glass artists to an exhibition in the US, while at the same time bring some attention to the many and talented glass artists working around the Greater DC region.

I think that Koch recognizes that something special is going on in the DC area with glass.

So Koch has been orchestrating the process to bring the Brits to DC in a major show, somehow tie it to the Artomatic organization, use it to showcase Washington area glass artists, and also tie the whole effort into a nascent Toledo, Ohio Artomatic-type organization.

Yes Artomatic haters... that open, no curators allowed, artist-run extravaganza is growing in other cities!

Point Three: If you paid attention in art school, then you know that Toledo, Ohio is also historically one of the glass centers of the colonies, and an important placeholder in art history.

In 1962, Harvey Littleton, Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin, (and DC gallerist Maurine Littleton's father) and Dominick Labino (a glass scientist with the Johns-Manville Fiber Glass Corporation), presented a glass workshop in conjunction with the Toledo Museum of Art.

These men are recognized internationally as the "fathers" of the American Studio Glass Movement and certainly the first two to take the seminal steps to bring glass from the high end crafts to the fine arts world.

Convinced that it was finally possible for an individual artist to undertake glass art by working entirely alone - as compared to being part of a glass factory, Littleton and Labino provided information on furnace construction, glass formulas, tools, techniques, etc. They sowed the seeds that eventually sprouted thousands of individual kilns, furnaces and glass studios and schools around the United States and the world.

The Toledo workshop was the beginning of the American Studio Glass Movement. Since then, American glass artists are acknowledged worldwide as the undisputed leaders in creativity and originality and the continuing battle to bring glass to the fine arts dialogue.

Point Four: The final key player in this showcase of three glass centers is the Washington Glass School, bringing to the show about 15 area glass artists who are either instructors of the now nation wide famous content-driven art glass facility, or curated into Glass3.

For years now I have been shouting to anyone who will listen that something new and different has been cooking in the kilns of the glass artists around our area. We have in them artists who are bringing narrative and context to glass, and slowly dragging it away from the vessel and the bowl and towards the fine arts end of the rarified upper artmosphere of the art world.

And now to the actual review... start by looking at part one of a short video on the exhibition below; the second part is at the end of this post.

This show, titled Glass3 since it involves three cities, easily shows why DC area artists are doing something new with glass.


But before we get to that, there are some standouts in the works by the Brits and the Ohio artists.

First and foremost, Vanessa Cutler from the Sunderland visitors almost steals the show with her gorgeously minimalist pieces in this exhibition. Cutler uses a high technology water jet that can be programmed to cut and shape glass using high pressure water. Her elegant work fits in the dialogue of the minimalists, using as little form and shape to deliver deliciously complex – and thus a paradox – pieces that are the bright leaders of the new British works.

I am not a big fan of vessels and bowls and all of the non-descript “pretty” glass things that always seem to suffocate a glass show – and there are plenty in Glass3 by the way – and yet I was drawn to Kathy Wightman’s (also a Brit) “I am touched” pieces, which are beautiful glass objects wrapped or covered in a truly sensual black, velvety material that almost makes them sexual objects to be desired and touched.

Rounding up the British artists, the also minimalist neon works by Sarah Blood stood apart from the sea of bowls and platters and vessels. Impossibly delicate, Blood married them with objects such as crates to offer us something clean and elegant and different.

Among the Ohio artists, Kristine Rumman’s “War at Home,” stood apart from the rest. Using clear glass as the delivery mechanism, Rumman offers us a rifle firing clear glass bullets. The bullets float away from the wall, casting delicate and watery shadows onto it. It’s a fascinating marriage of the delicate with the heavy and dangerous and works well as the best piece from the Ohio artists.

I found too much of Dale Chihuly’s influence on Homer Yarito’s otherwise technically brilliant work, and unless James Maskrey and Danny White are going for some sort of irony that escapes me, I found their work too cutesy and a little saccharine to enjoy it besides their odd prettiness.

Glass is undergoing a revolution, but unlike most revolutions, there's room for all: both artists and crafts people.

Among the locals Syl Mathis’ elegant boat forms continue to evolve in the right direction and represent some of the best abstracted forms in the show. I also liked Sean Hennessey’s and Kirk Waldroff's wall pieces, where both artists excel at using glass as a mean to deliver complex visual works that demand interpretation, rather than just admiration.

Hennessey and Waldroff at Glass3
Evan Morgan also stands out – he is able to flex his technical skill muscles (always a needed requirement in the world of glass), but also offer up pieces that immediately fit into a modern dialogue and make us not care or ignore that it’s a glass show. Morgan is going places; mark these words. I don't know if Morgan is represented by any DC area gallery, but this guy will be up there one day; pick up one of his pieces now.

“Green” artist leader Erwin Timmers makes his by now solid point about green art with his re-used and recasting of discarded glass and other elements to also deliver abstract works that are as contemporary and new as the art movement that Timmers leads in our area.

Enough has been written and said about Michael Janis and Tim Tate.

Their contributions to this show, a life-size scraffito puzzle-like piece by Janis and three of his newest video and technology sculptures by Tate, stand apart from the rest of the show as a Jackson Pollock must have stood out in a group show in the 1950s.

These are leaders in a movement to bring glass to a new place in the arts world, and their explorations of the narrative, biography, technology and skill continue to deliver nothing but success. If you collect DC area artists and have yet to add these guys to your collection, price wise you're almost too late; the get-a-small-piece-for-a-few-hundred-bucks days are long gone and now you better be ready to dish out $8500 for a Tate, and I wouldn't be surprised if those prices double by the end of the year.

Bottom line: a historic art event is taking place Washington, DC (though March 9, 2008). Three educational leaders in today's Contemporary Art Glass movement have joined forces to present a representative survey of the exciting artists and techniques surfacing at these three facilities.

Two of these institutions, the Toledo Glass Pavilion and Sunderland Glass School together represent centuries of a rich glass-making tradition while the Washington Glass School has emerged as a new and vibrant player on this field and is perhaps leading the way to a new future for glass.

The show is at the lower level of Georgetown Park Mall in Washington, DC through March 9th, 2008 and this "International Glass Invitational" was presented as a partnership with Art-O-Matic, and the Sister City Program, with help from the Georgetown Business Improvement District (BID).

By the way, once this show closes, the Mall's management should continue to offer this great space to arts organizations for free on an ad hoc basis until they can find a permanent renter for the space. They have not been able to rent it, and it's quite an eye sore (empty) in this tony mall - it looks great now and I am sure that if they allowed arts organizations to use it for free until rented, it would (a) make the mall look better and (b) make a perspective renter more eager to rent it.

But I'm just the cheerleader-in-chief. Video Part II of the exhibition is below.

Christine Bailey's new inventions

"After the mini-controversy stirred up over artist Christine Bailey's exhibition of faux Cara Ober paintings at a downtown office building last month, we were eager to check out Boundary Crossings, the current show at School 33 Art Center that Bailey curated.

The show presents three artists -- Ariana Wol, Nadine Freund and "the international digital collective" A.N.N.A. -- who, on closer inspection, all turn out to be creatures of Bailey's own fertile imagination. During a phone conversation yesterday it only took a little prodding before she admitted that the show's trio of "artists" are, in fact, completely fictitious identities invented by her."

More details here.

By the way, that's the Sun's art critic, Glenn McNatt, who blogs in a Sun blog for the paper's critics.

Closer Reviewed

Dr. Claudia Rousseau reviews Closer at Gallery Neptune in Bethesda. Read the review here.

Buy Michael Janis now.

McNatt on African American Portraits

The Baltimore Sun's chief art critic Glenn McNatt reviews Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits, the National Portrait Gallery's monumental survey of nearly 100 photographic portraits of black leaders past and present.

McNatt was also present at the Deborah Willis Salon Talk at Millennium Arts Salon in DC on February 2nd. which features ongoing exhibit of photos by Denee Barr, Barbara Blanco, Adrienne Mills, Michael Platt, Michael Parker, Henry Ferrand, and Jonathan French through February 28th.

Good to see the Sun's art critic popping into DC once in a while.

Closer

I am hearing and reading good things about "Closer" at Gallery Neptune in Bethesda, MD.

Read about it here.

Images of Children at Widener University

"A Photographic Treasury: Images of Children by Master Photographers from the Reader's Digest Collection," currently at Widener University Art Gallery in Chester, PA (through March 1, 2008), is not only a very focused exhibition on the thematic subject of the title, but also an exhibition that really merits the use of the word "Master Photographers" in its title.

Disclaimer: My wife teaches at Widener, and I often eat at the school cafeteria, which makes really good cookies and has a top notch salad bar. I also own a Widener coffee mug.

Curated by Nancy Miller Batty, this 105-work survey includes many classic and familiar vintage photographs of children by major American, Latin American and European photographers from the late 19th century to the present.

The works are arranged thematically to present views about childhood that have existed over the last century or so. It begins with a romantic view of childhood, and then progresses to the relationships between children and adults.

This is definitely a Who's Who in world photography, and there are pre-WWI early works by Edward Sheriff Curtis, Alfred Stieglitz, Heinrich Kuehn and others. Post WWI photographers are also full of all the major names, such as Andre Kertesz, Imogen Cunningham, Henri Carrier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Aaron Siskind, Weegee, Paul Strand and many others.

The post WWI and contemporaries are equally well-represented by the likes of Sally Mann, Adam Fuss, Ilse Bing, Gary Winograd, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Nicholas Nixon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carry Mae Weems, Sebastian Salgado and many others.

Adam Fuss' blank untitled photogram of a child in profile is one of the few failures in an otherwise show full of jewels in every frame. The minimalist white photogram, comes across like a collegiate art school assignment when surrounded by the works of the other masters; it just fails visually from the first glance and through the second and third opportunity for redemption.

Across from it is one of the reasons for its failure: the gorgeous "Pamela" (Plate 23) from Joel Meyerowitz's odd and highly successful series on redheads. The subject is radiant and full of color, smiles and the essence of happy childhood - it casts a bright and bold set of sunrays all over the room, essentially eclipsing Fuss' blank experiment.

It's tough to pick the brightest diamond when you are surrounded by the best photographic gems of the last 125 years, but some works stood out even among giants.

One such piece was Frederick Sommer's "Livia," a 1948 sensitive treatment of a very pretty child, where the girl's luminous blue eyes are like magnets not only to the camera but also to us. It delivers the sort of hypnotic quality that recent digitally enhanced shots sometimes offer.

I also like Robert Mapplethorpe's "Bruno Bischofberger's Daughter," a cousin photograph to Sommer's earlier work and a work that shows the occasional pornographer's talent as a portraitist of all ranges and types.

I was less interested in Tina Barney's claustrophobic "Marina's Room." Maybe there is some compositional success in delivering a photograph with fear of empty space.

But neither scale (48 x 40 inches), nor its horror vaccuii saves this piece from being a little puerile.

Marina's Room by Tina Barney

Carrie Mae Weems' untitled triptych depicting a tense mother-daughter-homework scene, whether posed or true, is powerful as a narrative piece can be - full of tension and questions. On the polar opposite of this internal spectrum is Sally Mann's "Virginia Asleep," from 1988.

On the way out I was dragged back in by Seydou Keita "Untitled (Man with Baby)" from 1949, in which a giant of a man tenderly holds a baby. The man sits massive and Earth-like like a male African version of Michelangelo's Pieta.

His enormous circumference dwarfs the world and threatens to overfill the camera's lenses. It is a photograph heavy with fatherhood, happiness and presence.

Overall this is a very strong show and definitely worth a stop for anyone traveling through the I-95 corridor, as Widener is just a couple of minutes off exit 6 on I-95.

Hess on Sex

The WCP's Amanda Hess has a fascinating review and discussion of the Sex Workers’ Art Show, a "traveling pastiche of cabaret, spoken word, and performance art put on by prostitutes, porn stars, burlesque dancers, and drag queens."

At the Sex Workers’ Art Show, exploitation is the real fun, and I’ve snagged the best spot in the house. The sold-out crowd has pushed me flush against the stage, setting my sightline precisely at crotch level. Over the course of the night, I come face to face with Dirty Martini’s patriotic vagina; burlesque comedienne The World Famous Bob’s pink-tasseled and rhinestone-decalled vagina; ex-stripper Erin Markey’s American Apparel gold lamé-pantied vagina; and Krylon Superstar’s self-described “duct-taped, dick-back, transsexual queen” package.

Read the review here.

"Frida and Me - Common Threads," at Projects Gallery

"Frida and Me - Common Threads," currently on display through February 23, 2008 at Projects Gallery in Philadelphia, showcases the work of four contemporary Philadelphia area artists of Latina/Hispanic heritage.

Organized by Helen Meyerick, Project's director, as a prequel and inspired by the massive Frida Kahlo exhibition which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Feb. 20, this interesting exhibition gives these four local artists an opportunity to display work which although not executed in a "Kahlo style," nonetheless touch on many of the issues of culture and identity and iconic portraiture that Frida Kahlo so successfully delivered through her own work in the last century.

The exhibit features work by Doris Noguiera-Rogers, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Marilyn Rodriguez-Behrle and Marta Sanchez. All four artists work in radically different styles and media, but all four manage to find -- at least in their words -- a thread back to Kahlo as a source of inspiration.

Marilyn Rodriguez-Behrle mixed media works on found objects -- and paper bags affixed in some cases to what appears to be some form of tree bark -- at first appear to fit neatly the category of "outsider art."

That is until one starts gathering information about the artist and her environment, and we find out that there's more than that.

Sacred Haunting Images VI, Mixed Media on Paper Bag
by Marilyn Rodriguez-Behrle
The images, such as Sacred Haunting Images VI, are harsh and disturbing, and often done in the iconic portraiture composition of Kahlo's best-known works. But that's where the visual relationship ends and Rodriguez-Behrle's talented vision takes over. In this artist's works, everything matters and everything tells a story and is related to itself -- like a recursive sequence of art.

Rodriguez-Behrle works in a psychiatric medical environment, and the imagery of her works is directly influenced and stamped by her experiences with patients and co-workers. Even the substrate is related to her environment: the bags upon which she paints are the bags given to patients when they check in and out to contain their personal property.

It's a fascinating mixture of additional hints that she offers the viewers; in her work there are clear signs of religious portraiture, evidenced by the gold leaf background of several of the images. The use of bark immediately reminded me of some of the Santeria pieces of Ana Mendieta, and together the two seemed to cement the fact that perhaps Rodriguez-Behrle is subconsciously (or on purpose) elevating her subjects to a higher place in her canon.

Although the cultural backgrounds of the four women on this show are different (as I recall Puerto Rican, Colombian, Argentinean and Mexican-American), it was easy to pick the powerful influences of Mexican art upon Marta Sanchez.

La Virgin y Las Corpus Oil and enamel on metal
by Marta Sanchez
Painting on metal is a traditional Mexican media, and for many years Mexican artists painted -- and continue to do so -- religious retablos on tin, often by taking a tin can, cutting it open, hammering it flat and then painting or cutting it into a religious portrait.

Sanchez carries the retablo tradition to the 21st century, elevating it both in scale and in imagery. Raised on the Texas side of the Mexican border, her works are full of narrative imagery and powerful colors influenced both by her childhood memories and the cultural ties to a Mexican palette. In La Virgin y Las Corpus we are flooded with narrative imagery: we see the iconic Virgin as the central focus of the piece, surrounded by a swirling world of color, information and history. The train that goes back and forth between Mexico and the US is there; so is a man dancing at a wedding - or is it a young girl's "quince" celebration? Is that Diego Rivera poking his "El Sapo" face at the top of the painting?

It has been said by many that Argentina, as a nation, belongs more in Europe than in South America, and that complex and diverse nation is home not only to the largest Italian migration in the world, but also home to more Cymri people than Wales. In Doris Nogueira-Rogers' works more of an European footprint -- than a Latin American one -- emerges.

It's OK; Frida Kahlo was three quarters European and one quarter Mexican, but no one has ever worn her Mexicanity more furiously and proudly than La Kahlo.

Of Lace and Layers VII, mixed media on paper
by Doris Nogueira-Rogers
Doris Nogueira-Rogers' contributions to the exhibitions are coolly crafted and beautifully presented - they also walk a different path from an already diverse group, perhaps aiming more to an interest in pattern and color than in narrative and information.

Let me not mix words here: the stand-out in this exhibition is Michelle Angela Ortiz.


La Madre, La Hija, Esperito Buscando Acrylic on wood
by Michelle Angela Ortiz
In her large triptych La Madre, La Hija, Esperito Buscando, Ortiz flexes not only superbly honed painting skills, but also succeeds in bringing together a marriage of the already discussed religious and iconic portraiture that tie her work to both Kahlo and a Latin American culture, to a contemporary dialogue.

The generations of her family are represented: we see her mother and her grandmother and also Ortiz. The older generations offer gifts to the viewer in their hands, while Ortiz's hands, held in the same position, await her gifts or perhaps her destiny.

It's also a story of family strength and power; these are not supplicants, but strong women with strong faces, and Ortiz's face, more than the others, also show a proud footprint of native indigenous bloodlines taking over, through the generations, from the invading European genes.

She awaits her gifts, but will not beg for them; she will make her own destiny.

Digital Sequences

The WaPo's art critic Michael O'Sullivan had an interesting review here of an exhibiiton over at the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland that sounds really interesting as well, and perhaps a new page in the ever growing "green art" movement which seems to have found an epicenter around the Greater DC area region.

Read the review here.

Digital Sequences: Chris Jordan, Running the Numbers, and Gail Rebhan, Room and Jessica Braiterman: Veneer runs until February 29, 2008 and on Saturday, Feb 23 at 3:30 pm there will be a lecture by Shannon Perich, Associate Curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American History on the Emerging History of Digital Photography from the curator's point of view. Free.

Bell on Frida and Me - Common Threads, at Projects in Philly

Jessica Bell is a student in Colette Copeland's critical writing class at the University of Pennsylvania, and in artblog Bell reviews Common Threads at Projects Gallery in Philadelphia.

I'll be visiting this show soon; read her review here.

McCabe on Bailey

The Baltimore City Paper's Brent McCabe closes the chapter on the recent furor over the Bailey-as-Ober appropriation issue and writes that "Bailey's outright copying of a local artist in her peer group is the first of many undercooked choices that makes New Work a brilliant idea with atrocious execution."

Bret makes some excellent points on the issue. Read the review here.

Sonya A. Lawyer at GRACE

About three years ago I came across the work of DC area photographer Sonya A. Lawyer and included her in a massive exhibition titled “Seven” that I curated for the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran. Then I lost contact with Lawyer's artwork.

And then last week I was invited to speak on contemporary art at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, Virginia and came across the new work by Lawyer, which was on exhibition in GRACE’s beautiful new gallery spaces.

To say that I was simply impressed with the new directions in her work would be the first great understatement of 2008.

I was taken, absorbed, seduced, educated, revitalized and convinced that this talented photographer had accomplished a very intelligent marriage of her photographic skills, her gender and her culture, all succinctly wrapped up and presented for comment and absorption in this exhibition.

On view was a 21st century marriage of Mondrian design, African-American history, vintage photography, online appropriation, race relations, enviable presentation and well-honed artistic skills, and also a lesson on power and vision.

Oh yeah... and also an imaginative American photographer perhaps liberating the work of those earlier photographers on whose shoulders she stands, and also the subjects of their work.

Joanne Bauer, GRACE’s hard working curator told me that Lawyer had began collecting vintage photo albums of imagery of people of color from a variety of sources such as online auctions and antique stores.

Later Lawyer told me that after a couple of months of watching the online auctions, she realized that some participants would buy an album and then split apart the images in the album and re-sell them individually to make a larger profit.

She also told me that “the women, men, and children are for the most part nameless and only now known by their auction ID number and their seller’s quirky sign-on. The thought of families torn apart, albeit figuratively, and then sold to the highest bidder is very disturbing and repeats a very troubling part of history. Although I recognize my own complicity by participating in the auctions of my ‘ancestors,’ I do feel that I am rescuing the albums (people) I can, from further disturbance.”

Enter the power of art, as a healing process perhaps, for the artist and even for the nameless faces in Lawyer’s growing collection.

But this is not an easy step to take. She then struggled and says that as she looked over the albums for the past couple of years, she was never quite sure how to, and if she should, incorporate them into her own artistic practice.

At the GRACE show we now know that she did. And she succeeds triumphantly, and a key to the success is her presentation.

Lawyer has incorporated the vintage images into a very modern, Mondrianesque quilt-like presentation on fabric that manages to bridge modern ideas with the historical perspective of the Gee’s Bend quilters to deliver something new and refreshing and geometrical in contemporary photography.

She says that “In a quest to work with new materials, and because I never felt as I if was finding the right colors in fabric stores, I began hand-dying cotton fabric. The texture and the process finally felt right.”

The individuals chosen by Lawyer say something about her and about her focus. There are no victims in these images of a people who perhaps were being victimized by history when these photos were being taken almost a century ago. Instead, in the works on display are beautiful, empowered, and proud people, and one hard-looking individual that has known little fear of others in his hard life.

MR 096 (Cerulean Blue) from "Finding Authenticity (does anyone remember?)"
24" x 18", 2007, photo transfer on fabric by Sonya A. Lawyer

And curiously, as Lawyer says, except for the tell-tale signs of clothing and hairstyle, some of the photographs may have been taken “eight days ago instead of 80 years ago.”

Beautiful, empowered, and proud... not the kind of images that Hollywood and popular culture generally uses as historical references for people of color from decades in the past; not caricatures and stereotypes, but human and authentic. Lawyer notes that “their eyes twinkle with insight and intelligence as they gaze at the camera, dressed in their best, with hair perfectly coiffed.”

When one looks at old portrait photographs discarded to the bins of antique shops or the digital world of online auctions, we all seem to come up with the same questions about these long-forgotten and abandoned people. And Lawyer asks “What were their names? How long did they live? Where did they work? Were they religious? Who were their friends and lovers? And who were their enemies? Who disappointed them and discarded them like trash? And who did they truly trust and believe in?”

Unfortunately, we will never know the answers to those and many similar questions. But I submit that in rescuing them from the bins of discarded history, and incorporating them into the substrate of a new art process, and consciously marrying them into a historical presentation brought forth into a contemporary dialogue, Lawyer has not only rescued, but also liberated these images and given them the potentially infinite lifespan that great artwork delivers.

The exhibition at GRACE goes through February 16, 2008 and it is the kind of exhibition with the impact deserving of a trip to Reston, by both the public and Washington Post, Washington Times and Washington City Paper critics alike.

GRACE, under the leadership of John Alciati and Joanne Bauer has made a noticeable turn-around in the last couple of years after a handful of years of being slightly out of focus and even in confusion, and kudos to the current board, curator and President/CEO is well deserved.

Go to Reston and see this show.

New Art Blog

Bethesda Art Blog is a new colleague on the Greater DC area artblogsphere and they've already delivering much needed art writing focused on Bethesda art galleries.

Here BAB mini-reviews the "Committed" show at Fraser Gallery and then here BAB says good stuff about Fiona Ross in the same show.

And here is a review of Ivan Depena at Heineman Myers.