Monday, October 01, 2007

WPA\C Announces Separation from The Corcoran

The Washington Project for the Arts is leaving the Corcoran and returning to its independent roots.

The separation will be formal on December 31, 2007 and the WPA will relocate to new offices in the Dupont Circle area.

More later.

When the dog bites

My wife is a retired-from-competition former uberathlete. She was once ranked fifth in the world in the duathlon, was twice the Maryland triathlon champion, swam for Colgate, blah, blah, blah.

And although she no longer competes, she still runs a gazillion miles a week, swims endless laps and road-bikes all over the place.

Recently, on a Sunday where there was an awesome flea market in downtown Media, PA (hundreds and hundreds of sellers), we made plans to meet in Media. She would bike from the University where she teaches and I would, ahem, drive to Media.

Around noon or so I get a phone call from her telling me that she's leaving the school and heading to Media - that's about four or five miles. Her cell phone reception in this area, by the way Sprint, sucks.

A little while longer I begin to get worried. And then I get a broken-up, unintelligible call from her, but I can tell that something's wrong, really wrong.

Two or three broken up phone calls, all with the same sense of urgency, and then a few more, now with male voices trying to say something, really panics me, so I run to my van and race down the street where I knew she'd be biking.

I come across an ambulance, I stop and here's what happened:

She was biking down the street, not the sidewalk, but the street, and doing 25-28 MPH, which unless you're a really good road biker, is like the speed of light to chicken bikers like me.

On a lawn ahead of her, she spots a dog. A really big fucking, scary looking dog. She's a savvy road biker, with thousands of miles under her butt, and thus she mentally checks out that there's a big dog, but also that the dog's owner is holding the dog with a leash, but she keeps an eye on the situation.

As she zooms by, the dog pulls away from its owner, pulling her onto her stomach and escaping from her leash-hold, and makes an intersecting bee-line for the bike approaching down the middle of the street. And the dog lunges and bites her on her lower calf, a few inches above her knee.

This dog weighs 138 pounds (my wife weighs 115), and it's a half (what else?) Rottweiler and half Husky.

At this point, I think that 99% of the bikers on the planet would have been knocked off their bikes, with a huge dog clamped onto your leg. In fact I would have fallen off my bike had the dog just barked.

But she stays on and keeps pedaling. Can you imagine the strength and balance needed to do that?

And I suspect that one of the wheels, or perhaps the pedal, hits the dog and the beast lets go and returns to its screaming owner, probably licking its bloody chops.

By the time I got there, the ambulance was already there, and the cops had sized up the situation, and I send the ambulance away to emergency to deal with the number two pencil-sized holes that the canine monster had left on her thigh.

The very agitated dog owner: "I am so sorry, he's such a gentle dog, he's never bitten anyone before... he just reacts like that when joggers or bikers come across his territory..."

Wanna go to a DC opening this Wednesday?

The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, together with the CUA Department of Art and Campus Ministry has sponsored the juried art exhibition entitled, Images of Justice, which explores the theme of social justice through the vision of local artists in a broad spectrum of two- and three-dimensional media.

On display will be works by Mark Behme, Linda Hesh, Emily Greene Liddle, Dr. Robert E. O’Brien, Fernando C. Sandoval, and Henrik Sundqvist.

Opening Reception, 4-6 p.m. – Wednesday, October 3, 2007.

Opportunity for artists in LA

Deadline: November 30, 2007

LA's Korean Cultural Center is seeking submissions from US artists for exhibition. Open to all media. Awards of up to $2,900. No entry fee. Send SASE to:

Korean Cultural Center
15th Annual
5505 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90036

Or call 323-936-7141 or fax to 323-936-5712(FAX) or email exhibition@kccla.org

Opportunity for Artists in Virginia

Deadline: October 29, 2007

Charlottesville's Second Street Gallery, established in 1973, seeks entries for its 2008-2009 exhibition season. Submit 10 slides or Mac CD PowerPoint presentation (not PowerPoint show), slide list, resume, statement, SASE, and $15 fee.

Second Street Gallery
115 Second St SE,
Charlottesville, VA 22902

Arlington Openings this Friday

Friday, October 5, 2007, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at the Arlington Arts Center is the opening for the seven new solos that start their fall season.

This collection of seven solo exhibitions — each distinct, and occupying its own gallery at the AAC — "encompasses everything from traditional representational painting, to wall mounted sculptural installation, to hybridized projects using video in combination with other media."

And in the case of Chawky Frenn, I predict harsh political and social commentary art, painted with an exceptionally talented hand with little irony.

From the news release:

- Gillian Brown projects video onto translucent objects, breaking evocative images apart and refracting or reflecting them onto various surfaces.

- Heidi Fowler paints images of everyday industrial objects on unconventional substrates — her recent work features networks of phone or power lines painted across collaged beds of junk mail envelopes.

- Chawky Frenn’s representational paintings are dense with art-historical allusions and violence in equal measure. His work has been formed by his experiences growing up in Lebanon, witnessing the atrocities of war firsthand.

- Laurel Lukaszewski is a sculptor who explores pattern, rhythm, and line using black stoneware and porcelain. The abstract tangles projecting off of the walls in her installation at AAC, Kaminari, playfully represent brush strokes in three-dimensional form.

- Timothy Michael Martin is an abstract painter who, in his reductive paintings, combines diagrams and schematics with oblique pulp sci-fi references. His work comments on the visual codes of modernism and on utopian and dystopian visions of the future.

- Claire Sherwood creates mixed media installations with lace, concrete, wax and coal. These materials are combined to form objects that are paradoxically both decorative and crudely industrial--or both stereotypically masculine and feminine.

- Alessandra Torres is a performance and installation artist. Her AAC project, Figure Study, draws elements from Zen painting and dance; in it, Torres presents flat, jointed, reductively rendered figures mounted on magnets that the viewer is invited to manipulate and reposition at will.

Prediction: Look for Torres, who now lives in NYC, to steal this show. All shows through November 17th, 2007.