Sarah Godfrey has a very informative and well-written profile of Iona Rozeal Brown in the current issue of the City Paper.

Brown's newest work (based on Japanese erotic prints) will be on exhibition locally at G Fine Art this coming October. She also has shows coming in New York and Los Angeles and is clearly an artist developing a major (and well-deserved) reputation. She's also a "former local artist," who graduated in 1991 from Maryland before heading out West.

Brown's success, in no small part, has been through the niche use of her imagery depicting the Japanese ganguro subculture, where Japanese youths associate with African-American culture though the use of clothing, signs, and makeup or visit tanning salons to keep their skin artificially dark.

It has been her main thoroughfare to artistic success, and over the future years, could also become her Achilles' heel if she allows her unique artistic theme to dominate her arts vision and thus expose her work to becoming Mondrianized.

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And last week in the WCP, someone named Gadi Dechter had an extraordinarily informative profile of Andrew Krieger, whose work is currently on exhibition at the Corcoran.

As Dechter points out, Krieger has been relatively anonymous and quite unknown for the last 25 years, and it is only through curator Eric Denker's intimate and personal knowledge of Krieger's work (the two have known each other ince the mid-1980s, when they were working at the National Gallery of Art bookstore), that this exceptional artist's works have come to a brighter light and more focused scrutiny. Read Jessica Dawson's earlier review in the Post here.