Review of my last curatorial task

"Even in the world of visual art — where originality is routinely faked or manufactured when it cannot be had by honest means — the Cuban-American artist, critic and frequent National Public Radio commentator cuts an unusually distinctive figure.

You can hear it in the streetwise mix of Latin and Brooklyn cadences with which the former Navy man — whose career included stints as both an officer and an enlisted man — sizes up and translates high-art themes in his thoughtful videos and radio narratives. You can trace it in the muscular leaps of taste and logic found in his pioneering art blog, where the one-time student of the great African-American artist Jacob Lawrence and devotee of visionary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo shows he's capable of embracing old-school aesthetic values, a populist kind of viewer's stance and the contemporary fondness for quirkiness in the very same sentence.

You can also see it in the 19th Annual Mid-Atlantic Art Exhibition at Norfolk's d'Art Center, where Campello's online prominence and long experience as a juror drew nearly 625 entries from 17 states, then distilled them into a formidable show of 61 pieces."

Art critic Mark St. John Erickson reviews Norfolk's D'Art Center's annual Mid Atlantic Competition and has some very nice things to say about both the exhibition and yours truly. Read it here.