Remnants of 7th Street

By Rosetta DeBerardinis

A few years ago, Seventh Street was a hub for the local Washington, DC art scene, that is until David Adamson moved to 14th Street, and eklektikos gallery moved to Delaware, and then Cheryl Numark relocated around the corner; then Apex and Marinart (and Numark) all closed.

Today, this major downtown DC artery, a stone's throw-away from the city's major museums, and an area bristling with commerce and traffic, hosts only two visual art galleries: Zenith and Touchstone.

Zenith, one of the oldest galleries in the city, has had somewhat of a face-lift. The once cluttered walls are much hipper now with lots of white space around the works. The large representational oil on linen paintings called “Altered States” by the young and talented artist, Drew Ernst, fills the space with adventure scenes from in a place like Maine depicting boating and rubber goulashes.

The oversized show announcement reads:

“The world has changed drastically in a very short period or time. These works are a reaction to those changes... The work can be viewed through the eyes of the artist whose personal intent was to make paintings of alternate states of reality or escape.”

I remember the first showing of his massive paintings about two years ago, which only remained on the walls for a few hours before being sold out. So, if you’re pining because you missed a chance to scoop up work by new talent at Art Basel Miami Beach this month, there is still time to make it to downtown DC.

And, while you are there, stop by Touchstone Gallery for its 30th Anniversary Show. In art gallery years, this is quite impressive, even for a gallery whose member fees keep its doors open.

After you’ve recovered from climbing the building’s high mansion-like staircase, you will discover original art work by local artists from $300 upwards. Part of the proceeds from the sale will be donated to the charity: So Others Might Eat (SOME).

Through January 14, 2007
Drew Ernst
Altered States: Recent Paintings
Zenith Gallery
413-7th Street, N.W.
www.zenithgallery.com
202-783-2963

Through January 7, 2007
Touchstone Gallery
30th Anniversary Show and Sale
406-7th Street, N.W.
www.TouchstoneGallery.com
202-347-2787

Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice's Cash Awards

Deadline: February 15, 2007

The Astraea Visual Arts Fund aims to recognize the work of contemporary U.S. lesbian artists by providing support to those who show artistic merit and whose art and perspective reflect a commitment to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice's mission and efforts to promote lesbian visibility and social justice.

This year, Astraea will give three cash awards of $2,500 each to lesbian visual artists. At least one of the three grants will be awarded to a lesbian artist who is based west of the Mississippi.

Visit the foundation's Web site for complete program information and application procedures.

Job in the Arts in Chicago

The Photography Department at Columbia Collge Chicago has one of the nation's largest photography programs with over 750 undergraduate majors, 25 graduate students, 15 full-time faculty, and approximately 60 part-time faculty and 10 full-time staff. Columbia College Chicago is an urban, open admissions institution of over 11,500 undergraduate and graduate students emphasizing arts and communications in a liberal education setting, and currently they are looking for not one but three tenure-track faculty positions in Photography, beginning August 16, 2007.

Applications should include a letter of application, C.V., 20 slides (or CD) of personal work, slides (or CD) of student work, statement of teaching philosophy, names and contact information of three references, and a SASE. Please send application materials to:

Search Committee
Photography Department
Columbia College Chicago
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60605

Job in the Arts

The National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) is a private, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the presentation and documentation of folk and traditional arts in the United States, and they are located in Silver Spring, MD and are currently looking for a Development Manager.

Compensation is commensurate with experience. Send a cover letter, resume and writing samples to: Search Committee, 1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 200, Silver Spring, MD 20910. Applications may be submitted via email to: info@ncta.net or faxed to: (301) 565-0472.

Creative Capital for Visual Artists

Creative Capital Foundation is a national not-for-profit organization that supports artists pursuing adventurous and imaginative work in the performing and visual arts, film/video, innovative literature, and emerging fields. In 2007, Creative Capital will be considering proposals in the visual arts, as well as film/video.

Far from a traditional funder, Creative Capital is committed to working in long-term partnership with the bold and ground-breaking artists they fund by making a multi-year financial commitment as well as providing advisory services and professional development assistance. Creative Capital has a special interest in projects that transcend discipline boundaries and reveal something new about the moment in which we live.

Artists interested in learning more about funding opportunities through Creative Capital are invited to join Kemi Ilesanmi, Associate Director of Grants & Services, Creative Capital Foundation for a grant information session at 5 pm, Friday, January 12, 2007 at Maryland Art Place: 8 Market Place, Suite 100, Baltimore, MD 21202.

This session is made available to the public free of charge. To reserve a space, please email: map@mdartplace.org or call (410) 962-8565. To find out directions to MAP, or to learn more about their programming, please visit their website at www.mdartplace.org.

For more information about Creative Capital, please visit their website at www.creative-capital.org.

Erotica Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: Jan 31, 2007

MOCA DC is currently accepting submissions for Erotica 2007, to be shown from Friday March 2 to 31, 2007.

Erotica 2007 is a national juried show. 1st prize valued at $1,000 ($250 cash plus a show in the Annex that is for the winning artist do with as they like: your own Solo Show, invite a friend to show with you, or curate your own show). $200 cash 2nd prize, and $100 cash 3rd prize.

Erotica 2007 accepts erotic art in any form. Work may be drawings, paintings, sketches, sculpture, mixed media, conté crayon, charcoal, photography, etc. 2-D Entries may be a maximum of 30" x 40."

More details and entry form here.

New co-op in Arlington

Bardia is developing a new artist's co-op in Arlington, Virginia. He has his sights set on taking over the old Wilson School and is looking for several artists and teachers and studio artists to be included in his proposal.

Find more info in this post here, and if you're looking for studio space in Arlington, please reply here with a link to your information on the internet. He's searching for a number of emerging and established artists. If you have teaching experience that's a bonus!

One Day DC Art Event

On Friday January 5th, 2007 Art Outlet, Walnut Street Development, artdc.org and Arlington Independent Media (AIM) will partner together and produce a really cool art event for the Greater DC area.

They will have fire juggling, live bands, aerial dance performance, video projections and improv theatre lined up and yes, visual artists can participate as well.

Starting Jan 5th, they will have a sign-up button on their website www.artoutlet.org. For a very modest fee of $12.99, you can hang and display your art. No sales commission; no jurors.

It will be on the first come first serve basis. They will accept 100 artists. The art will be displayed salon style.

Read more here.

Job in the Arts

Browne Academy on Telegraph Road in Alexandria, Virginia is looking for a "long term" sub for their middle school art program (grades 5 - 8) beginning mid January. There are two classes each of grades 6, 7, and 8 and one of grade 5. The classes for each grade are back to back (8 am-9 am and 9am -10 am) on the same day.

Browne has a six day rotation schedule, with art classes on four of the six mornings. The days are designated on the school calendar. This is an ideal position for a working artist because it leaves most of the day for your own studio practice. If interested, please call Stephanie Kozemchak at 202.431.6447 or e-mail skozemchak@browneacademy.org or Alex Clain, head of the middle school, at AClain@browneacademy.org.

Melissa Ichiuji at Irvine

Opening January 13, 2007 is DC area artist Melissa Ichiuji's first solo at Irvine Contemporary in DC with a show titled "Nasty Nice: New Sculptures" from January 13 - February 18, 2007.

I'm a big fan of her work and thus I am really looking forward to this debut!

At the Hirshhorn

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has announced its exhibitions schedule through 2009 and it includes two well-known DC area artists no longer with us: Morris Louis and Anne Truitt.

"Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited" will be on exhibition Sept. 20, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008, and then the first major exhibition of Truitt's work since her death in 2004, "Anne Truitt" , from Oct. 2008–Jan. 2009, is a full survey of the sculpture and two-dimensional works made during the artist's 40-year career. The exhibition is organized by assistant curator Kristen Hileman and will be accompanied by the first complete monograph on the artist.

Dorkartistry

The WaPo's Rachel Beckman Arts Beat column reports on the most recent Dorkbot DC meeting.

Beckman writes mostly about Paras Kaul, the DC area electronic artist known in the art scene as the "Brain Wave Chick."

A reader who was present at the last Dorkbot meeting tells me that the stuff that Kaul does on computers "is totally over my head, but she said her father was a hypnotist and took her into altered states then he died when she was 14 — she said 'he programmed me.'

So at the age of 14 she started studying altered states and brain waves because she desperately wanted to get back to 'these places' that her father took her. She then met the dolphin man John Lilly and did work with him (the movie Altered States is about him).

Brainchick can do remote viewing when she's in sensory depravation tanks but she claims she has only ever remotely viewed the planet Mars, and she says she knows there is life there but it is inside the planet and she has gone down into these tunnels and catacombs.

Brainwave chick also says she was taught to envision the future and most of the stuff she is working with today -- like her presentation at Dorkbot gets actualized 10 years in the future.

I was really curious when she said she 'envisions' the future -- did she mean she does remote viewing or was she just talking about the law of attraction and feeling and creating her future? She said she only does 'remote viewing in the sensory depravation tanks.'

In her presentation she said she envisions the future and she said we need to learn how to be better humans or learn how to enhance our undeveloped human qualities in three areas: non verbal communication, remote viewing, and self-healing"

The next Dorkbot DC meeting is at 7 p.m. Jan. 24 at Provisions Library, 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. or call 202-299-0460 for more info.

Practice, practice... practice

"Art is all about craftsmanship"

Federico Fellini

Artful Evening At the Warehouse

Warehouse Gallery in DC invites all of you to ring in the New Year at ArtRomp 19. Come by anytime on December 31st and or spend the evening. See the work of 35 local artists featuring painting, sculpture, video, photography, performance, and music (exhibit through Jan 27, 2008). There will be an early free picnic in the parking lot and late ArtRomp snacks.

Son of a Bush and Lobsterboy will perform later in the evening. Tickets required - see their website for info.

Art Romp: 19
Dec. 31, 2006, 7-2 am Free
Warehouse
1021-7th Street, N.W.
Washington, DC
www.warehousetheater.com
(202) 783-3933

And yet another congratulations

To DC area artist Rochleigh Z. Wholfe, who was was awarded first place in Transforming Identity, the Women's Caucus for the Arts, Annual Regional Juried Show. The show presented at the Third Floor Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri, and was juried by Evelyn Astegno from Venice, Italy.

Art Donors Balk at Tax Changes

Arts benefactors and institutions are disgruntled about a tax provision they claim will discourage donations of art, and they blame Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), outgoing chair of the Senate Finance Committee, for changing a rule that had benefited donors and museums alike...

Read the entire post from the Foundation Center here.

Congratulations

To DC area artist and writer Rosetta DeBerardinis, who has been selected as the Liquitex Artist of the Month for January 2007.

From personal experience, let me tell you that this is one of the toughest all-around painting competitions out there!

WOW!

Application process is ongoing and it offers an opportunity for painters, working primarily in acrylics, to be featured on their website. Artists' work and bio are prominently featured. Any sales are handled directly with the artist, no commissions taken. No entry fee. For details, contact:

Liquitex Artist of the Month
Liquitex Artist Materials
11 Constitution Ave.
P.O. Box 1396, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1396

Update on Eakins

CultureGrrl's blog is without a doubt one of the best national source for insider info on a lot of museum news, and she reports that:

Jeffrey Snyder, major gifts officer of the Philadelphia Museum, told CultureGrrl today that the $68-million fundraising campaign for Eakins' "The Gross Clinic" is "well over 50% there."

That still leaves a lot of cash to raise in one week. So why is Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the museum, so "optimistic," as quoted in today's Philadelphia Inquirer? She herself has been coy in answering press questions about how much has been raised---a strange posture for someone trying to build up a sense of public urgency about the Dec. 26 deadline.

But Snyder told me her confidence is based on the museum's discussions with "a lot of our nearest and dearest" (translation: "big donors"). The campaign, he said, is in the process of "closing some gifts."

Read the entire post here.

Congratulations

To Bailey, whose photograph Theodore Roosevelt - An American Terrorist has been selected as the photo of the day by the British newspaper The Guardian.

The Picts and the Power of the Web

Some of you are aware of my deep interest in the artwork and culture of the original people of Scotland, known to history by their nickname (given to them by the Romans): The Picts.

This interest started in childhood when I used to devour sword & sorcery genre books authored by Texan pulp writer and poet Robert E. Howard.

It reached a burning interest when I lived in Scotland from 1989-1992 and discovered the real culture of the Picts.

In 1994 I created the internet's first website dedicated to Pictish culture, and three years later, as a result of that website, I was a "talking head" in a television special on the art of tattooing called "Women of the Ink" and done by TBS. I discussed, and proved on the air, the written (and apparently unknown to most scholars) third century evidence of Pictish tattooing.

Between 1993 and 2000 I visited Scotland regularly, and studied the many remaining Pictish standing stones and stone circles, and associated Pictish art, and in 1997 I created a series of drawings based on the symbols depicted on many of the stones.

Those drawings and prints from the drawings were then placed online here, and over the years I've been selling a few here and there.

In 2003 I had a solo show at Fraser Gallery titled "Pictish Nation," which married my interest in figurative drawing with Pictish symbology.

"Pictish Warrior" Charcoal on Paper by F. Lennox Campello
A few days ago, I bitched about the National Geographic's apparent lack of interest in anything Pictish, and now, suddenly I have been contacted by the National Geographic Society's television people, which is apparently filming a documentary, and wants to use some of my 1997 Pictish drawings in their documentary.