What Mike sez
I didn't go to the meeting, but from what I read here, Licht has some good points...
Friday, February 20, 2009
The Washington Glass School & Studio is seeking...
WGS is looking for individuals for several positions. That studio is one of the busiest in the region, serving hundreds of students and professional artists each year.
I am told that the work will be varied, and often messy. They are looking for someone available on weekdays, not just evenings and some weekend work is required.
They will in return offer you the opportunity and access to a world class studio, and mentorship towards your own art career with three very successful artists.
Positions available:
(1) Studio Assistant. This would be a paid position which starts at $10 per hour. They will "also strive to find you additional side jobs to supplement your pay." This position is very hands on. You will be mold-making, lost wax casting, deep relief dry plaster casting, cleaning the studio, welding, etc. Experience in any of these skills is great, but otherwise you will be learning them quickly. Dependability is primary in this position, and the ability to work with a wide variety of personalities. The ideal candidate is self-motivated and can work in a multi-task arts environment, where craftsmanship and pride of work is important.
(2) Studio Intern. This is an unpaid position, but then they are much more flexible about work hours. They would depend on a schedule you agree to, but then stick to. This is a great way to learn a large variety of skills and receive mentorship in your own art career. This is a very exciting opportunity for someone who doesn't have the resources to pay for the classes offered there.
(3) Teaching Assistant. This position is also unpaid, and requires some experience in glass. This is perfect for the glass artist who wants to help out at a few classes, and learn while they assist. Its also a great way to be exposed to the energy and experience surrounding this studio, but in short time spans.
If you'd like to join their award winning and frenetic team, please email washglassschool@aol.com or call Tim Tate at 202-744-8222.
Sharp at Delaware
Photographer, Keith Sharp (who happens to live in the same little town that I do - Media), will be exhibiting work in a solo show at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Sharp is a present-day surrealist who digitally manipulates photographs to capture the uncanny or quirky in everyday scenes, combining human, urban, and natural elements to play tricks on our perception.
This exhibition runs from February 27 – April 5, 2009. The opening reception is Friday, March 6, 2009 from 5:00 – 9:00 pm. Hours are Tue, Thu, Fri, Sat: 10 am - 5 pm, Wed and Sun: 12 pm - 5 pm.
Tough times
Zach Feuer, the New York dealer with a knack for turning young art-school grads into stars, has dropped eight artists -- nearly half of his roster.Details here.
“I didn’t want to be big in this economy,” said Feuer, 30. “Now is the time to have a lower overhead and be small and lean.”
After seven heady years in the art market, dealers and artists alike are adjusting to the slowdown in sales and prices. Four Manhattan galleries have shut down since September, and a fifth -- Soho’s Guild & Greyshkul -- will join them next week. The closings are leaving scores of artists without representation.
Artists who are no longer listed on the Zach Feuer gallery’s web site include the commercially and critically successful Israeli-born Tal R, Brooklyn-based Danica Phelps and Christoph Ruckhaberle of Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts.
The gallery will continue to represent Dana Schutz, Anton Henning, Jules de Balincourt, Nathalie Djurberg, Phoebe Washburn, Tamy Ben-Tor, Justin Lieberman, Dasha Shishkin, Johannes VanDerBeek and Stuart Hawkins.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Wanna go to an opening in DC tomorrow?
My good friend and ubercurator Laura Roulet co-curated this exhibition together with Tatiana Flores at the OAS Museum and it includes Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and Cuban-American artists, working in all sorts of media and it sounds like a really cool exhibition at one of the District's most beautiful art spaces... and I will check it out later.
The opening reception is Friday, February 20 starting at 6 pm... if you've never been to the OAS Museum, go and see this gorgeous space and some really cool art.
Auction!!!
ArtDC has an auction coming up to support the development of their new studio and art space. This one is one of those auctions which really offers great art and needs your support.
Date: February 21, 2009 (rain date February 28, 2009)
Time: 5 pm until 8 pm
Where: Wohlfarth Galleries, 3418 9th Street, NE, Washington, D.C.
Details can be found here.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Fakes
A surprising recent decision by the New York State Supreme Court to allow certain motions to move forward in a suit alleging fraud against Christie’s has sent a chill down the collective spines of the major auction houses.Read the Artinfo article by Judd Tully here.
Art-In-Architecture Artist Registry
The General Services Administration (GSA) Art in Architecture Program commissions the nation's leading artists to create large-scale works of art for new federal buildings.
For more information, visit this websiteand type “art in architecture” into the search bar in the upper right hand corner.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Opportunity for Artists
Deadline: March 12, 2009
The Visual Arts Committee organizes nine solo, group, or theme-based exhibitions per year at the St. Paul Student Center's 520 sq. foot Larson Art Gallery. It also organizes four solo exhibitions at Coffman Memorial Union''s Coffman Art Gallery. To ask for a prospectus please make sure to include all of the following:
• Note which Gallery you are applying for (Coffman or Larson)
• 3-5 slides of your artwork or digital images in jpeg format
• Artists' statement and contact information
• Self-addressed stamped envelope for return of images.
Send proposals to:
Minnesota Programs & Activities Council
Visual Arts Committee
University of Minnesota
Coffman Memorial Union RM 126
300 Washington Ave SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Sondheim Semifinalists Announced
Twenty-six visual artists or groups from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia were named semifinalists a few days ago for Baltimore's fourth annual Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize.
The 26 (dominated by Baltimore area artists) are:
• Seth Adelsberger, BaltimoreMy money is on either Mary Coble or Molly Springfield. Both of them are superbly loaded with talent, and both of them are perennial finalists in all of our area's top art prizes. The judges for this year's prize are Ellen Harvey, a New York-based artist; Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
• "Alzaruba," also known as Al Zaruba, Baltimore
•The Baltimore Development Cooperative, Baltimore. The cooperative includes Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester and Nicholas Wisniewski, who are working on a community farm/art project in East Baltimore. Berzofsky and Wisniewski are former founding members of the artist collective known as Camp Baltimore.
•Lisa Blas, Washington, D.C.
• Rachel Bone, Baltimore
• Jessica Braiterman, Beltsville
• Travis Childers, Fairfax, Va.
• Mary Coble, Washington, D.C.
• R.L. Croft, Manassas, Va.
• Alyssa Dennis, Baltimore
• Liz Ensz, Baltimore
• Leslie Furlong, Baltimore
• Ryan Hackett, Kensington, Md.
• Christian Herr, Lancaster, Pa.
• Jason Horowitz, Arlington, Va.
• Jessie Lehson, Baltimore
• Kim Manfredi, Baltimore
• Katherine Mann, Baltimore
• Baby Martinez, Washington, D.C.
• Sebastian Martorana, Baltimore
• Lisa Moren, Baltimore
• Ellen Nielsen, Baltimore
• Louie Palu, Washington, D.C.
• Molly Springfield, Washington, D.C.
• "TwoCan Collective," Baltimore. TwoCan Collective consists of two women, "Emily C-D" and Jessica Unterhalter, who often make work using recycled materials.
• Karen Yasinsky, Baltimore
The winner of the $25K prize will be announced July 11 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This year's competition drew 334 entries.
Congrats to all 26!
Monday, February 16, 2009
The shape of things to come
Worldwide courts have consistently recognized the right of owners to the return of artwork which has been looted by governments and dictatorships, confiscated, sold and re-sold.
It has taken in some cases several decades for the artwork to return to the familial descendants of the original and rightful owners, but essentially international law is pretty clear on the subject that generally no government can confiscate private property.
There are, of course, many dictatorships worldwide where one of the foundations of those regimes is that private citizens under their yoke cannot own private property.
It occurred to me recently that when the current Cuban dictatorship took control of that unfortunate island on January 1, 1959, one of the first things that they did after they executed thousands of people, burned and banned books, jailed all political opposition, and closed down newspapers and magazines, was to confiscate most private property.
And there was a lot of artwork confiscated in Cuba.
We've been led to believe that in 1959 Cuba was just another Latin American cesspool, but the facts are that in 1959 Cuba had one of the highest standards of living of any nation in the Americas and a higher per capita income than several European nations and higher than Japan, as well as a positive immigration flow from Europe to Cuba, as well as the third highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere. Today the island's food rations are actually lower than the slave rations mandated by the Spanish King in 1842.
The island also had the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America and the 13th lowest in the world, ranked ahead of France, West Germany, Belgium, Japan, Austria, Italy and Spain. The average wage of a Cuban worker was higher than for workers in West Germany, France, Denmark and Belgium and in the late 50s Cuban labor received 66.6 per cent of the nation's GNP, again higher than several European nations (the US figure is 68%). And the 8 hour week was mandated by law in Cuba in 1933, five years before FDR's New Deal got to doing it in the US. And in the 1950s, 44% of Cubans were covered by social legislation, a higher percent than the US at that time.
And while we've been led to also believe that Cuban peasants and farm workers lived in a near feudal state, the average farm wage in Cuba in 1959 ($3.00 a day) was higher than those of farm workers in France ($2.73), Belgium ($2.70), Denmark ($2.74) or Germany ($2.73). In the US it was $4.06. And in 1959 only 34% of the Cuban population was rural and the nation had the lowest inflation rate in the Americas, 1.4% - the US was at 2.73%
So this was not a nation mired in poverty, as we have been led to believe, but a nation under the yoke of a very brutal dictator in the person of Fulgencio Batista.
The very wealthy Cuban upper and business class hated Batista and became the financial backers of the Castro Revolution, raising millions of dollars for the rebels. They also owned many art masterpieces from both European and Latin American masters.
As a thank you, nearly all of this work was confiscated by the Castro dictatorship and by 1961 most of the best work had made its way to government-owned museums and collections, and most of the owners had made their way to the United States in the largest proportional mass exodus in contemporary history.
When the abomination known as the Soviet Union collapsed in the 90s and Cuba's sugar daddy stopped sending billions of dollars in subsidy to the Castro brothers, the Cuban economy collapsed, and one of the results of that collapse was the mass selling, by the Cuban government, of those confiscated masterpieces, most of which found their way to European museums and European and Asian private collections via French auction houses. Thus many masterpieces once owned by the Fanjul family, or the Bacardi family, or by sugar magnate Julio Lobo (whose interest in Napoleonic memorabilia led to him amassing one of the world's largest collections of Bonaparte memorabilia such as weapons, furniture, paintings, letters, etc.) were sold to European museums and collectors.
But now I think that the end of the brutal Castro dictatorship is nigh, and one day soon, when the rule of law and democracy and freedom returns to Cuba, one of the first things that the descendants of those families should do is to go after whoever now possesses their families' stolen artwork and goods, and in some cases even copyrights.
And the details of these illegal sales have left bloody footprints. For example, according to Maritza Beato's excellent article in El Nuevo Herald titled "El Saqueo del Patrimonio Cultural Cubano" (The Looting of the Cuban Cultural Patrimony), the sale of the Julio Lobo Napoleonic collection to a French museum was orchestrated by a French official attached to the French Embassy in Havana. His name is Antoine Anvil.
And if I was one of those auction houses or museums in Europe or collectors or dealers around the world, I'd be a little nervous.
What goes around comes around.
Jury Duty
I just finished jurying the next exhibition for the D'Art Center in Norfolk, Virginia and it was a very pleasant (and hard work) surprise to find some many really excellent 3D entries in this national show.
Mark Miltz. The Game. Sculptural Installation
Usually when there's a call for artists, the 3D genre is under-represented in the submissions, but in this particular exhibition, several hundred artists from all over the country submitted work, and there were several outstanding sculptural entries.
Tonight I will award about $3,500 in award prizes.
Lesley Hildreth. Hares, multiplying like rabbits while waiting for the tortoise. Clay
Sunday, February 15, 2009
DCist Exposed
DCist will offer the third annual DCist Exposed photography show running February 20 to March 7, 2009. DCist is partnering with the Gallery at Flashpoint to exhibit nearly 50 amateur and professional photographers chosen from more than 300 entrants who submitted their work through Flickr.com. A free opening reception will be held Friday, February 20, 2009 from 5 to 9 pm at the Gallery at Flashpoint.
Flashpoint is located at 916 G Street NW, in Washington, DC's bustling Penn Quarter neighborhood. The 2007 and 2008 DCist Exposed events saw over 500 people attend each opening night, with lines forming around the block and a ton of photographs sold because of their superb quality and extreme affordability.
DCist is also bringing back last year's special event for emerging collectors, Emerge Exposed, on Tuesday, March 3 from 7 to 9 pm at Flashpoint's Mead Theater Lab. Co-hosted by DCist, Flashpoint and the Pink Line Project, a panel of experts will share tips and ideas on how to begin collecting art. There will be a $10 suggested donation at the door for Emerge Exposed. The panel will be moderated by The Pink Line Project Chief Creative Contrarian Philippa P.B. Hughes and will be comprised of FotoweekDC Founder and Chrome Imaging President Theo Adamstein, Photographer Jason Horowitz, Collector and Jackson Design Group Principle Veronica Jackson and Corcoran Gallery of Art Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts Paul Roth. For more information: Call 202.315.1310 or visit flashpointdc.org.
Opportunity for Artists
Deadline: February 23, 09, 5pm.
The City of St. Helens Arts & Cultural Commission is seeking proposals from artists interested in creating decorative street banners as part of its new multi-phase Gallery Corridor project. The first phase of the project includes artist-designed and created aluminum banners to be mounted on poles and placed along Old Portland Road, Columbia Blvd. and Gable Rd. in St. Helens. Artists selected to participate will be awarded $1,000 for their work and be provided with a 2’ by 6’ aluminum sheets, donated for the project by Pacific Stainless Products in St. Helens.
Contact: Kathy Payne, City Recorder, City of St. Helens, P.O. Box 278, St. Helens, OR 97051.
For more information about the project, contact John Walter at 503.397.4544. Requests for Proposals can be found on the City’s website at www.ci.st-helens.or.us, or can be requested by phone at 503.366.8218.
Museum Circus
A Circus Family: Picasso to Léger, on view at The Baltimore Museum of Art February 22–May 17, 2009, features more than 80 prints, drawings, paintings, and books by Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Fernand Léger, and other European artists fascinated by the extravagant spectacle of the circus and the bohemian lives of the performers outside the ring. This special ticketed exhibition brings together major works from museums and private collections to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the circus during its heyday as a form of popular entertainment.Details here.
Opportunity for Artists
Deadline: March 27, 2009 (postmark).
The Fine Arts League of Cary is seeking entries for its 15th Annual Juried Art Exhibition to be held from May 8th to June 27th, 2009 in Cary/Raleigh, NC. Show awards and purchase awards will total over $5,000. Entries can only be mailed via CD. The postmark deadline for the mail-in registration is March 27, 2009. I will be the juror for this show.
Full details and a printable prospectus are available
on the web at www.fineartsleagueofcary.org or call Kathryn Cook at 919-345-0681.
Fair Use Redux
The Stuckists, a group of anti-conceptual artist-activists that is the anti-thesis to Britain's Turner Prize exhibitions and award ceremonies, have opened their own online store, selling objects inspired by Damien Hirst and other uberartists works. Stuckists Jamie Reid (who designed graphics for the punk band the Sex Pistols), James Cauty and Billy Childish have produced a range of prints “recreated from random pixels found on the Interweb” and other products satirizing Hirst’s diamond skull and works by the Chapman Brothers and the urban artist D*Face.
“An exact copy of an image similar to an image of Hirst’s “For the Love of God,”’ from a numbered edition of 1,300, is priced at 13 pounds, said the Web site.
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