I cant wait to read this book

"A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, [her name was] Loreta Janeta Velazquez, fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford.

As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man.

In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find 'the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent' — Velazquez herself."

This is sort of a Cuban-Southerner-Confederate "Fidelio." I will do some more research on this subject which is sure to become my next series of drawings.

Loreta Janeta Velazquez hereby displaces Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio José Gonzales by Antonio Rafael de la Cova and the definitive biography of a Cuban and Confederate rebel; as my next obsessive subject.

Get the book here.

Online statistics are a tremendously valuable tool for anyone trying to do business on the Internet. They can also be seductive and maddening.

For example, our gallery website gets about 525,000 hits a month, but this last October it received a whooping 1,048,825 hits (our first month over one million hits) and 48% of those hits came on October 7, 2004.

I called my ISP to verify that this was correct and not a blip in their stats program, and the stats are correct.

So now I'm going crazy trying to figure out what happened on October 7, 2004 to cause nearly half a million people to come to our gallery website.

And the closest answer that I can come up with, is the fact that on October 7, 2004 I was on the Kojo Nmandi show!

But that fact alone cannot equate to 458,448 hits in one day, and in reviewing the show's audio files, the website is never given out or mentioned. And most of the hits came during hour three of that Internet day, whatever that means. And 36% of the hits that month came directly to the gallery URL, which means that those people knew our website; only about 5% of the hits came through referral from search engines.

Next is for us to review our October sales and see how many Internet sales we had in October.

For Women Photographers

Secondsight's next meeting will be held on Friday, January 28, 2005. The guest speaker will be Connie Imboden.

Secondsight is an organization dedicated to the advancement of women photographers through support, communication and sharing of ideas and opportunities. Secondsight is committed to supporting photographers at every stage of their careers, from students to professionals. Each bi-monthly meeting includes an introductory session, a guest speaker, portfolio sharing and discussion groups. Each photographer will have the opportunity to present their work within a small group of other photographers, ask for constructive criticism, gain knowledge or simply share their artistic vision and techniques.

For more info visit Secondsight's website.

More Questions for our WaPo critic art test

My DC Art Test seems to have raised some interest among some of you.

DC area artist Rosetta DeBerardinis adds the following questions:

1. What is Gallery magazine?
2. Who was DC artist Alma Thomas?
3. What is the group Americans for the Arts?
4. Where is Penn Quarter?
5. Which DC artist is known for his hearts?
6. Which was the first contemporary art museum in America?

While James W. Bailey (as it is to be expected) submits one of the longest questions ever devised for an DC Art SAT:

"If you found yourself being extradited to permanent life-long exile on a remote non-populated island (Navassa Island near Haiti comes to mind) because of a perceived subversive piece of art criticism printed in the Washington Post that severely disturbed the national security interests of the United States, and you could choose to take with you one work of art from any living contemporary artist, or any one work of art from any private or museum collection in the world (including the Mona Lisa from the Louvre), what piece would you choose and why?"

That's an easy one for me. I would take Adam Bradley's lifesize sculpture Please. There's enough knives and hardware in that piece to help half a dozen people survive and even start a small war on that island.

New Gallery in Town

Emma Mae Gallery, founded by Sandra Butler-Truesdale, opened last month in Washington. The new gallery is located at 1515 U Street, NW in Washington, DC. For further information call 202-667-0634 or 202-246-6300

Currently on view there are works by Sandra Butler-Truesdale, John Zaire El-Badr, Afrika Midnight Asha Abney and many others.