A while back I posted a bit about a fiery DC area artist (Marsha Stein), who decided that the reported woes of the City Museum of Washington, DC deserved some hands on action.

So she's taking some action.

Stein has come up with a project to revitalize what the City Museum of Washington, DC does to leave a significant footprint on our city.

Here it is, in her own words:

This project will bring together artists from the Washington, DC area to form "artistic teams" and create collaborative pieces that convey ideas about Washington, DC.

The works of art created by the teams will be displayed in a feature exhibition at The City Museum of Washington, DC.

Visitors will be invited to vote on their favorite piece, as well as describe why they made this choice. The artists will be documented on film while they are in the creative process for educational purposes. These pieces will be auctioned at the close of the exhibit.

The goals of the project are to:

1. Bring the artistic community together
2. Empower DC artists to create an artistic movement
3. Integrate artists with the community

A jury panel will select the teams. The call will invite individuals as well as those who can form teams of two or three to send slides as well as describe why they want to do "team art."

All artists, newspeople and visual art lovers who are interested to participate, learn more, or put in their two cents are invited to:
Karma Restaurant
1919 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
(19th and I, NW)
On Monday, October 18, 2004 from 6 - 8 PM
I'm curious as to what can develop; So.... see you there.

Good week in Washington if you are a lover of the visual arts.

This Friday is the second Friday of the month and thus time for the Bethesda Art Walk with all these art venues participating from 6-9 PM.

We will host the fourth solo show by David FeBland, who has become our best selling artist (and whose solo debut in Europe a few months ago sold out in Germany).

FeBland paints what the New York Times dubs "urban realism" (the Times called him "the leading edge of the new urban realists") and the Washington Post has called "a revival of the Ashcan School."

And Calder Miró, which opens at the Phillips Collection on October 9, 2004, showcases the emergence of a new type of abstraction in the work of these two giants of modern art as seen in the context of their five-decade friendship. That same day, at 11:00 AM, the eminent Spanish art historian Victoria Combalía, will discuss Alexander Calder’s art in the context of Calder's travels to Spain in the early 1930s when he was Miró’s guest in Catalonia. Contact Mary Ann Bader (202) 387-2151 x4235 or Mela Kirkpatrick (202) 387-2151 x4220 for tickets to the lecture.

I have been astonished by the re-emergence of Catalonia and the Catalan language in the last few years. The last time that I was in Barcelona, there wasn't a single ad or street sign in Spanish! Everything was in the native language (again)!

That same day, the Corcoran opens "Inventions: Recent Paintings by Caio Fonseca", which will run until February 14, 2005.

The LA Times discusses"Reporting the Arts II," a study conducted for Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program and released Saturday at a conference of newspaper editors in New Orleans. The report looked at arts journalism in 13 American cities in October 2003 and compared the findings with a similar analysis that had been done five years earlier.

The findings: "In all the cities our researchers visited, they found evidence of growing vitality in the arts. But when it comes to journalism, the opposite is true."

DC was not included in this study, but doesn't this paragraph describe the Washington Post's coverage:

"Our findings reveal an alarming trend: During the last five years, none of the papers we looked at increased the amount of their arts criticism and reporting. Editors at many dailies are filling smaller news holes with more and therefore shorter stories. Pieces on "high" arts, as well as those with hard reporting about cultural institutions, continue to take a backseat to soft-focus features on the latest movie star, CD or rock concert... Now many art sections have become viewer guides, devoting the bulk of their efforts to calendars, the daily TV grid and tiny thumbnail reviews."

In DC, under the leadership of its Arts Editor Leonard Roberge, the Washington City Paper continues to take over the void created by the Post's tiny visual arts coverage. This trend is apparently also common in other cities, as the piece discusses that:

"The alternative press, once derided by mainline news outlets, has also proved so successful at covering local arts events that media giants such as Tribune Co. and Gannett have started publications that mimic those brash competitors."

And the article closes with a key prediction:

"The greatest hope of quality arts journalism is the Internet. By going online, a reader can gain access to what seems like the work of every news organization and blogger on the planet. But there's a problem with the Web: The information is there, but you have to go looking for it. Articles and ideas are not placed at the reader's front door or local newsstand. The Internet cannot form the kind of connective tissue for our cultural life that newspapers offer.

We don't know where the talented cultural writers of tomorrow will come from and what type of art they will champion. They may choose to ply their trade outside newspapers, feeling too hemmed in by old routines and space constraints."

You can order the actual report here.

Thanks AJ!

Tyler Green does a tiny DC gallery walk-through.