Blogger Show Reviews

The Blogger Show in Pittsburgh and New York has been getting quite a few reviews both in the printed press and the artblogsphere. The show closes today.

In the spirit of me, I wanted to point out the nice things that the Pittsburgh City Paper's Lissa Brennan wrote about this blog.

Blake Gopnik at his best

We all know a few things about Blake Gopnik, the Washington Post's Chief Art Critic:

- He doesn't like painting.
- He especially doesn't like representational painting.
- He very, very rarely reviews his hometown's art galleries, and focuses his reviews on museums all over the nation, biennials, etc.
- Some of his fellow newspaper critics don't think much of him.

But the Anglocentric, Oxford-educated Gopnik is also sharply equipped to skewer, debone and consume his visual art victims when he wants to make a point, and is especially effective when he has a valid one.

And Blake Gopnik makes a very valid point in "The Overripe Fruit of John Alexander's Labors," his current review of the John Alexander retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (the show will then go on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston - remember that).

After decimating Alexander's paintings during the first few lethal word descriptions of some of the work at the exhibition, and after re-channeling some often repeated Gopnikisms about painting and the tired "someone has already done this," or the "masters did it better," blah, blah, blah, Gopnik delivers a superbly clear message about one of the cornerstones of art throughout the ages: it's not just talent that gets ya there, it's also who you know! Gopnik executes the show when towards the end of the review, in discussing Alexander he writes:

I'd place him somewhere up there among the 5,000 or so best artists in the country. Which is more than enough to justify his continuing to paint and collectors' continuing to buy him. What I don't understand is why our national art museum, with such limited exhibition slots and an already iffy reputation for its contemporary programming, would want to highlight such a secondary figure. Alexander has barely had a significant museum show since the early 1980s, when his good friend Jane Livingston first displayed him at the Corcoran, where she was a talented chief curator. Livingston, now working freelance, also organized this show; her boss at the Corcoran, and again for the current survey, was Peter Marzio, now director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

By curating Alexander into our national museum, Livingston is billing him as one of our next Gilbert Stuarts, Edward Hoppers, Jackson Pollocks or Jenny Holzers. That's more than his modest talent can bear.

Bravo Mr. Gopnik!

Read the whole review here.

More on Amy Lin

The Amy Lin avalanche continues; not only has her commercial solo gallery debut has received heaps of critical press coverage, and sold well, but as several of you pointed out to me, it was covered by the rare television coverage as well.

Check out Amy Lin’s work on Maryland Public Television’s program “Artworks This Week” in the “Salon Highlight.” The show will broadcast again on Saturday, December 22 at 8:30am .

The Amy Lin show at Heineman-Myers in Bethesda closes this Sunday. Hurry!

Rousseau on Lin

I've been telling you all about Amy Lin for a long time now. And now Dr. Claudia Rousseau, writing for the Gazette newspapers reviews her current exhibition at the Heineman-Myers Fine Arts in Bethesda, a takes an indepth look at the sources for Lin's works:

"The work of emerging regional artist Amy Lin, now on view at the Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda, presents something of a conundrum. The interest it has generated, and the sales, threaten to make it suspiciously too popular to be taken seriously. Couple that with a widespread fascination with the artist’s technique — hundreds of small circles of varying sizes hand-drawn in curving strings with little tail-like ends — discussions of Lin’s work tend to be on the level of a ‘‘temple of toothpicks” rather than the kind of analytical response usually accorded abstract compositions. What passes for commentary on her work has tended to focus on the amazing number of dots, the sort of thing that could be done with a computer in short order, but which Lin tediously, obsessively, draws with colored pencils. But does this emphasis on the ‘‘wow” effect do it justice? If there were no more interest here than the dazzlingly meticulous way they are made, would they really be worth looking at? The fact is, once past that level, there is much to be seen and thought about here, and the artist’s much overlooked serious intent, particularly in terms of self-expression, deserves some attention."

Read the review here and you can meet Lin on these two dates at the gallery:

Friday, December 14, 6-9pm (Bethesda Arts Walk)
Sunday, December 16, 2-4pm (wine/cheese reception - artist talk at 2pm)

Buy Amy Lin now!

McQuaid on Campello

The Boston Globe's Cate McQuaid reviews "Ozspirations" at The New England School of Art and Design Gallery at Suffolk University in Boston and has something nice to say about my drawings, although she pretty much dismisses the rest of the exhibition.

Read her review here.

Congrats!

Multiple congrats to former DC area artist (now living somewhere in Atlanta) Jiha Moon, whose work was recently acquired by the The Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, which also (a while back) acquired a work by DC artist Tim Tate.

Second congrats because Moon is also having her European debut at the Miki Wick Kim Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland.

Third congrats because there's a review of her recent show at Curator's Office is in the December issue of ArtForum; read it below (click on it to get a larger image):



Jiha Moon has also been in my "Buy Now" list for quite a while...

Update: The Mint Museum has advised me that Jiha Moon will have her first solo museum exhibition at the museum February 2 through July 6, 2008!

The WaPo on Amy Lin

Amy Lin's current commercial gallery solo debut (at Heineman Myers Contemporary Art) is not only selling well, but also receiving the critical attention that it deserves.

The Washington Post has the very rare double mention today. Read the first review here and then a second article here.

Amy Lin has been on my "Buy Now List" for a long time now. Don't wait much longer. The show goes through December 23, 2007.

You don't see this very often...

My good friend Kriston Capps not only delivers a review of Lucy Hogg's current exhibition at Meat Market Gallery in DC, but also adds something that is seldom seen in art criticism these days: humor! Read Capps here.

Three years ago I reviewed an exhibition by Hogg in Georgetown's Strand on Volta Gallery. Other than the declaration of "painting being dead," (feh!) and since the attempt at photography is dismissed by Capps, it sounds like the below review somewhat still applies to the painting part.

And I find it ironic that my review has a causal effect from her work of being a revival of painting, when Hogg now apparently has joined the ancient crowd demanding painting's death.

Substitute the names of the masters below with George Stubbs and Diego Velázquez... and by the way, I think that Hogg will continue to paint.

There’s such a dichotomy in this name; such a contradiction of stereotypes: Lucy, soft, feminine and flowing.

Hogg: heavy, masculine and powerful. And once you discover her artwork, you'll realize that seldom has a person been so aptly named.

Hogg is a tiny person, almost elfin-like; a complete reverse of what pops into the mind when it tries to visualize someone named Lucy Hogg. My mind came up with two characters: The first was as a sister or close kin of that big, fat, greasy character (Boss J.D. Hogg) in the Dukes of Hazzard TV series.

Because Hogg is Canadian, the other image was that of a secondary character in Robertson Davies’ fictitious small Canadian village of Deptford. A village that he creates superbly in The Fifth Business (part one of the Deptford Trilogy).

And this dichotomy, this Ying Yang of words and mental images, translates well to Hogg’s American solo debut currently on exhibition until October 30 at Georgetown’s Strand on Volta Gallery.

Hogg recently moved to Washington from her native Canada. She has exhibited widely in Canada, Asia and Europe, and in a town [DC] where most critics and curators continue to preach the death of painting as a viable contemporary art form, she brings something new and refreshing, pumping some new energy to the ancient medium.

Let me explain.

Salvador Dali once said that "those that do not want to imitate anything produce nothing." This is the Ying of Hogg’s exhibition.

And George Carlin added that "the future will soon be a thing of the past." This is the Yang of her show.

Titled "Sliding Landscapes," the exhibition consists of nearly twenty paintings segregated into two different canvas shapes: oval shapes on the gallery’s left main wall and rectangular shapes on the right wall. Each set of paintings deliver individual ideas, and although tied together by the subject matter, they nonetheless express superbly two sets of thoughts and impressions that I think Hogg wants us to see.

Hogg’s imagery are copies of Old Master paintings, "sampled" (a new word introduced into art jargon from rap music’s habit of using other people’s music or someone else’s lyrics in your music) from a series of capriccios, or fantasy landscapes by 18th century Venetian painters Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and Marco Ricci.

"Fantasy" in the sense that the landscapes only existed in the artists’ minds until created by them and re-invented two centuries later by Hogg.

I must clarify from the very beginning that these paintings are not "copies" in the same sense that you see people sitting in front of paintings in museums all over the world, meticulously copying an Old Master’s work, stroke by stroke.

Therein lies another dichotomy in this exhibition: Reading a description of Hogg’s subject matter brings that image to mind; seeing them destroys it. This is one show where the most erudite of news release spinmeisters will be challenged to separate the two visions.

So what are they?

Hogg starts with a capriccio painting that she likes. I suspect that she works from a reproduction, even a small one, or from an art history book or catalog, and thus cleverly avoids the pitfall of becoming a true copier rather than a sampler.

She then re-creates the capriccios in their original format (rectangular), but completely replaces the color of the original with a simple tint or combination of tints.

Simple enough... Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

It isn’t simple at all.

What Hogg has cleverly done again is to offer us two visual main courses. Sure, she's recreating the original painting, overly-simplified and yet still complex with the seed of great painting and composition planted by the original Masters. But she has also provided herself with a radical new vehicle to flex some very powerful painting and creative skills of her own.

The overly simplified paintings offer her ample room and opportunities to bring a 21st century perspective to these works. Not just her very modern colors (cleverly incorporated into the titles such as "Fantasy Landscape (pthalo green/chrome oxide green) 2004"). Her scrubby, energetic brushwork is everywhere, especially the open skies of some of the works, and where 18th century masters would have reacted in horror, a modern audience takes their middle age glasses off so that we can better try to absorb the quality of the brushwork and peer at the under layers, often left exposed, that reveal the virtuosity of being able to deliver an exciting painting with a very limited palette.

Even within these rectangular recreations, Hogg has a Ying Yang thing going. A group of the pieces are truly monochromatic, using only ultramarine blue or yellow ochre.

In these, the simple associations of cool and warm colors mapping to respective emotions is what anchors our responses to them. But there are some pieces where she has ventured into two distinct colors (such as violet and burnt sienna orange). In these, the opposite position of these hues on the color wheel, and their well-known association with eye-brain responses in creating tension and movement, position these works as a very successful venture into the exploration of color, never mind the landscape that is the vehicle.

Vision two of the exhibition are the oval paintings. Here we again see the same explorations in color and painting that Hogg offered us in the rectangular pieces. But then she opens a new door for us; perhaps even a new door for contemporary painting.

I would have dared to write that she has opened the lid in the coffin of painting, but that would lend tacit approval to the claim that painting is like a "vampire that refuses to die." So I won’t.

In the oval paintings Hogg introduces us to a combination of two (again with the two) elements: the re-visualization within a limited, psychological palette plus a new methodological visual cropping and angling of compositional elements within the original paintings, placed in a new format (oval) and haphazardly hung at crazy angles on the gallery’s left wall. By the way, at the risk of becoming too pedantic, I didn’t like the tilted, askew, haphazard hanging of these pieces. It was a bit heavy handed and went too far to push the fact that they are indeed "sliding" landscapes.

Suddenly we discover two effects (i.e. she has another duality thing going here for the dimwits in the audience): Combine the psychological effect of color with a reorganization of the actual image's presentation and you have suddenly changed the entire character and effect of the painting!

This is the punch to the solar plexus that every artist hopes to accomplish in any exhibition. It is the moment when you stand in front of a piece of artwork, riveted to a sudden discovery that this, whatever "this" may be, has never been done, at least not this well, before.

Here is what I mean.

In the oval pieces, Hogg repeats the paintings from different perspectives or angles; suddenly her choice of colors is not the main driving force; but the relationship between the choice and the subject and the perspective and angle is the new driving force(s).

For example, in one oval piece she offers a calm, cool agrarian view, somewhat disorienting us by the angle and crop, especially when we try to find her source on the left wall's rectangular paintings. Within this painting, a horseman rides up an incline. He is deftly rendered in cool, quick brushstrokes to deliver a placid Sancho Panza character before he had the misfortune of meeting Don Quixote.

Slightly above and to the right of that painting there's another painting, which although it is exactly the same scene, and because it is offered from a slightly different perspective and in a completely different palette, it takes us a minute or two to realize that it is the same scene.

But what a different scene it is! The sky is now a turbulent hellish nightmare of cadmium red and quinachrodne red exaggerated so that the clouds have almost become flames, and the happy farmers of the companion piece are now haggard, beaten figures toiling in a new Dantesque level of hell, where the Sancho Panza horseman is now tired, beaten and barely staying atop his poor horse.

And this is all happening in our mind. Because all that this gifted painter has done is change the perspective and offer us colors that complete different neural paths that create different reactions in our brain.

And the best thing of all is that she didn’t need a video, or an installation, or dioramas of two-dimensional works, or ten pages of wall text to explain the concept. And in these pieces, the finished works are as interesting and successful as the concept itself; not a trivial accomplishment by the way.

All she needed were superbly honed painting skills, a deep understanding of the relationship between color and emotions, an intelligent perspective on composition, and a grab at art history to offer us (yet again) something new and refreshing from that never ending source of surprises: the dusty coffin of painting.

Bravo Lucy! ... Well Done Hogg!

Dawson on the Black Panthers

The WaPo's Jessica Dawson does a really good job in reviewing "Black Panther Rank and File" at the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

She also makes a good point when she writes:

"The exhibition was organized by San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in conjunction with Claude Simard, a curator associated with New York City's Jack Shainman Gallery. Shainman represents many of the contemporary artists on view; the gallery also supplied a number of historical pieces.

Though Shainman is a well-known source for African American artists and ephemera, Yerba Buena's association with a commercial gallery raises questions about conflict of interest. The show favors Shainman artists, who gain exposure on this small museum tour -- "Black Panther Rank and File" originated at nonprofit Yerba Buena, traveled to nonprofit Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and now hangs in a university gallery. That kind of exposure can translate into higher earnings for Shainman artists, casting a shadow over this otherwise strong show."

And Dawson also hits the mark dead on when she questions:

"But what of the Panthers' critics, of which there were many? For the most part, this is a pro-Panther project. Yerba Buena worked closely with former Panther Bill Jennings to construct the show; he's even credited for suggesting the project."

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, one of my first jobs was in a store on Belmont Avenue that used to have a sidewalk stand outside its doors. My job was to stand outside, freezing my buns in winter, broiling in the summer, and watch the stand and either send people into the store when they bought something and needed change, or to take their money if it was an exact amount. I was also the "chaser," when someone grabbed something from the stand and ran away with it.

Usually, if the gonif was being chased, he'd drop the merchandise and keep running, and I would return it to the stand.

But back to the Panthers.

During that time the Black Panthers were big in Brooklyn, and about once a month they'd come by Belmont and Pitkin Avenue hitting all the stores for "contributions" to their various programs. They were one of three such groups that demanded, not asked for, but demanded, some sort of cash flow in order to assure some degree of safety.

In addition to the Panthers, my employer (a Cuban Jew named Simon, who was fluent in Spanish, Yiddish, Polish and German and who used to smoke huge cigars all day long) had to grease the hands of the local Brooklyn cops and the local Mafioso. Of the three, the cops came by most often.

Dawson finishes with "...the only overtly critical work comes from the painter John Bankston, who points out Panther homophobia in his 2005 canvas 'The Sermon.' In it, two latter-day Panthers have seemingly strong words for a transvestite and his companion."

A really good review for what sounds like a very interesting exhibition. The show is up through Dec. 16. Read Dawson's review here.

PS - Museums, non profits and commercial art dealers have been dancing together for a long time and will continue to do so. Here's something I wrote in 1995 (do forgive the 1990s style website) about the Gene Davis legacy to the museum where he was a Commissioner. When that piece was published in the WaPo back then, I actually received a couple of hate phone calls.

Danielle O'Steen on DC

Danielle O'Steen pens a really good over view of what's going on the DC area for artinfo.com.

Read it here.

Shauna Lee Lange on Andrea Reed's Sweet Struggle at The Target Gallery

Power Seeks a Vacuum

By Shauna Lee Lange

Years ago when I was working in Newport, Rhode Island, I had a mentor with whom I could safely share some of the idiosyncrasies of working with certain personalities. And I still remember what he said.

Power seeks a vacuum.

Meaning that power goes to where there is a void, to where the void can be filled by a personality larger than itself, and to where there is no competition.

And so it is with artwork that arrests us in its riveting, shocking, and disturbing elements. Powerful artwork causes one to shift entirely. And when that powerful artwork is directed at a subject that exists in everyday life, that we all walk around living with, but no one seems to really want to squarely address, well that's power seeking a vacuum.

Andrea Reed's problem, if she has one, is that she does not yet fully recognize the potentiality for the vacuum sucking up the her work or its message. If I had her here with me at this moment, I'd be doing some serious career planning with her and not just career planning the art world.

She's Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson reincarnate. She's Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and Grandma Moses and Salvador Salgado, but she doesn't know it.

I wonder what's more dangerous: having the power, hitting the mark, daring to speak the communication, or doing all of that and not having any inkling of what you've accomplished.

I imagine it's kind of like sitting at a slot machine when you're an inexperienced gambler and then you hit the jackpot and you're not really sure what actually happened or what comes next. It's amazing, you're happy, you're thinking about the money; but you have no clue what it is you've actually done or how rarely it happens.

Several times during last night's opening reception at Alexandria's Target Gallery, one could hear the words, “powerful,” “disturbing,” “brave,” and “raw.” And all those adjectives are all true.

Reed seemingly does not completely recognize the timeliness of her black/racism/social condition message in a day of Duane Chapman, Don Imus, and Michael Richards and the controversies over demeaning language, its use, its application. Nor does Reed realize the power of an introspective and respectable examination of black stereotypes, black societal problems, and the black experience. She’s timely, she’s ahead of her time, and she’s behind the times all at once, it’s incongruent and it’s fascinating.

She says it herself: "I was fearful of how people would perceive the work."

And as you age, you realize that all that time you spent worrying about what other people think was time wasted. Why should she care what other people think of her blackface images? It’s honest. It’s true. It’s presented in a nonjudgmental way, almost like a mirror. I want Reed to walk proudly. What she’s done is amazingly brave. She’s worried the black population will see her as airing dirty laundry; she’s worried whites will see her as capitalizing on negative stereotypes; she’s worried about staying true to herself; and she’s swimming in a sea of contemplation. And I want her not to give a flying frog about what anyone else thinks, because when you’re a visionary, you get to stand alone.

And it’s lonely, and it’s scary, and it’s all the more powerful because you’re the only one responding to the call, listening to the drumbeat, answering the higher cause.

And as I was walking through the Target Gallery - and there's a lot of glare from the overhead lighting there - and I was thinking about how the glare in this case actually accentuates the large scale color photographs (a series of 10 diptychs on crimson/blood red background), giving a reflective appearance. It’s sort of like passing through the Vietnam Memorial; you can see yourself looking in at the picture. How powerful is that?

Today, the morning after, I find myself still conflicted about Reed. On the one hand, I feel bad that she herself honestly says, “I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go. I don’t think the project is over and I want to continue with it.” She needs a serious mentor. She’s talent untapped. She’s it. She’s the real thing. And I’m thinking that Reed may not know where she's going to go, but I surely I have an idea.

I’m reminded of the time I saw Yoko Ono’s work in San Francisco. This is an artist! This is art!

And so it is with Reed. She has difficulty articulating what she’s trying to say, but the thing of it is - she doesn’t need to. It’s clear. It’s blackface. It’s the mask worn. It’s the clownish behavior. It’s the mask of who we are as a people and what we do. And who is behind the mask. We’re ignorant, you know, white and black, all of us – and what do we think about it? Killing each other, gang violence, fatherless homes, selling out in exchange for the big house, broken self esteem, trying to achieve unreachable ideals established by someone other than ourselves, searching through meaning in acquisition of money, and things, and respect, and acceptance. Oh Lord.

On the other hand, I’m so excited about Reed. She admits, “I’m young, I’m still growing, I’m still trying to find my voice.” One of the things about youth, and I would tell Reed this too, is that you don’t know what you had at the time you had it until much later in life. Any of us who goes back to look at a photograph of an earlier self may catch themselves saying, “Damn. I looked good.” But we didn’t really know it at the time, did we?

Reed doesn’t know what she has. She hit the jackpot, the end of the rainbow, the statement and work that takes some artists and photographers a lifetime to achieve. And she has it. She has it now. She could stop. Right here and never do another thing. She could go on tour. She could give lectures.

Commercially, she needs marketing; she needs exposure; she needs mainstream.

Personally, she needs serious representation. She needs mentors.

Reed can be the next voice of the people. Reed’s a revolutionary; she’s a seer; she understands; she gets it; she communicates it; she dares.

I go back through the gallery and I imagine the next life of these works. I’m thinking about redesigning the entire Barbie Doll Headquarters Enterprise. I’m imagining walking into a reception area with Reed’s “Barbie Girl” hanging behind a coiffed and reserved corporate greeter in front of a massively cold marble wall. “Barbie Girl” is an image that shows a young black woman, in hideous blackface makeup, squeezing the waist of a blonde, white Barbie Doll. A figure the woman will never have. A culture the woman will never relate to. And in the interim, the woman is holding her own mid-section. The smallest part of her is ever so enormous compared to the smallest part of the doll. This is what I mean by power.

Reed’s tapped into every woman’s pain. Every woman’s inability to reach Barbie Doll perfection. And it’s not enough that she points to this feminist, beauty, perfection complex, she then adds the experience of being black and being a black woman in this culture on top of it. It’s quiet, yet it yells. It’s subdued, yet it feels like being submerged.

Fear is a powerful thing. And I suspect Reed is fearful on some subconscious level of what she’s actually achieved. She has the vision of what she wants to say, yet she steps back from really standing firm in her own conviction. And this comes with age, too. She spoke last evening about how the experience of showing at the Target Gallery and the attending the exhibition was a bit overwhelming for her. She stumbles a bit as she speaks. She’s embarrassed when slide photos come up too dark on the viewing screen.

None of it matters.

You, Ms. Reed, overwhelm us! You’ve taken survey. You’ve taken a look around at the black experience. You’ve said this is what’s ugly to me and not only is it ugly to me; it should be ugly to all of us. And you’re right. Completely right.

Reed speaks about using the light in the photographs in an ominous way. And she shares the story behind “Crack Head” and her attempts in San Francisco to acquire a crack pipe for the photograph. She explains she went to several places and honestly communicated what she was trying to do and her vision for the photographs and still was met with resistance, mistrust, or disbelief. She states her own personal experience was altered from this difficult project. One attendee pointed out that the hand of the young man who is holding the crack pipe is dirty and grainy. Reed states this is a result of having each of her models apply their own blackface makeup and the residue resulting from that. And she says interestingly that once the models finished with their masks, there was a distinct transformation and a very different energy in the studio, one she tried to capture on film.

I wonder whether Reed considered not using blackface, and truly I was encouraged by the amount of research and background Reed conducted in approaching the project. The images of the elements of our culture would have been just as powerful without blackface as they are with. The blackface is an added and very strong message about the ridiculousness of such a life – who are we entertaining? Where is the enjoyment? Why is no one laughing?

Reed says she felt she needed to make a statement about how blackface started in the white community and then was an “art form” adopted by black artists. She says she struggles to portray these issues and all of sudden, the lecture space becomes electrified and a little nervous when one attendee asks whether it would have been a different viewing experience if Ms. Reed were white.

What? You have to be black to portray black issues?

You can’t understand what it is for the rich when you’re poor? You can’t understand or portray nature as an artist if you live in the city? My head started spinning; Reed handles the question with grace.

She’s young. She’s introspective. She’s from small town Peoria, Illinois, and she attended Howard University, and now lives in California. Her show features a piece entitled “The Bluest Eye.” It is inspired by Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name. And as I write this, my breathing becomes a little tight, for some reason, I still want to cry. The photograph shows a young woman removing the blue contact from one of her eyes and balancing it so gingerly on the tip of her extended finger. She has a skin condition, and she’s not Halle Berry. This is realism at its best. This is current, contemporary culture. Striving to be something we’re not out of rejection of what we are.

This is all of us, balancing some aspect of ourselves, whether its work, family, health, finances, ever so lightly on the tip of a finger, able to be blown away with the slightest wind.

Fragile.

So fragile and so fruitless this constant struggling to be something else.

Of the ten works, any one of Reed’s diptychs could stand alone. Fully alone in a one-woman show. And she’s clever, that Reed. You’re so fascinated by the semi-automatic pointed to a young man’s head that you hardly even see the weapon has the same embedded line as the young man’s wife-beater t-shirt.

Power. Care. Honesty. Shock.

Reed’s saying, I see it and this is what I do about it. I make it art so others can see it too. I ask the question. And if that’s not a leader, I don’t know what one is.

She speaks about the work from a technical perspective. The feel, the focus, the framing. She shares how she worked with people she knew to create authentic characters, used Polaroids for tests, and opted for the split frame. You see, when power finds the vacuum, power wants to fill it. So Reed split the frames into large format diptychs because she wanted to show racism’s fragmentation. The separation from the whole. And the black frame is impenetrable, a border that cannot be broken.

These are the reasons Reed won her spot on the highly competitive Open Exhibition Competition. I wanted to embrace the gallery management, and believe me; I rarely feel the urge to do that!

The Target Gallery's mission is to challenge perspective, and gallery operatives stated last night’s turnout was one of the best yet. Reed’s work was selected by a blind outside juror panel. The show runs to December 2, 2007.

Shauna Lee Lange on Going West at The Renwick

By Shauna Lee Lange

We weren't the only ones who couldn't gain admission to the Corcoran's exhibits on a late Saturday afternoon, so if you're headed for the Leibovitz/Adams shows, get there early in the day!

All wasn't lost... the Renwick is a few short walking blocks away and we comfortably strolled through the Going West exhibit without any elbow bumping. The Renwick Gallery is a fine, first rate museum in its own right; it houses a diverse collection of American contemporary craft, art, and design spanning the 19th - 21st centuries.

Featured in the Going West exhibit are about 50 rare quilts from the first quarter of the 19th century to the 1930s. If you can imagine embarking on the journey out west, and having to bring along only a few cherished keepsakes, then your appreciation for the sentimentality of these items will be right on key. Or better yet, imagine the life of a woman newly established in her prairie home, and her need to create items not available at the local Target.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the Going West quilts prove that there was a deep focus on recording family history, using available objects (see the quilt made out of neckties), the irrefutable strength of the creative spirit, and the desire to commemorate important anniversaries in the lives of community members. It's interesting to consider how these quilts might have represented efforts in journaling or even fundraising. And from a crafts perspective, well... they are just inspiring.

If you plan to visit the gorgeously detailed quilts, we'd like to suggest a method of viewing. To really appreciate the work, materials, and time invested in the craftsmanship, the trick is to stand as close to the quilt as the museum curators will allow. Isolate a six inch square, or a series of six inch squares, to really see the art embedded in the various cloths and stitches.

A quilt is a collage, a composite whole of smaller unrelated parts. And although the whole can be quite stunning, the devil is in the detail with a careful examination of the pieces. Considering assemblage, construction, color selection, and composition help to transport one back to the Wild West. Quilts from this exhibition are a fine example of a continuum along the tradition of useful textiles. They provide insight to the essential role that quilts and the making of quilts played in the lives of women on the frontier. They are a testament (in my mind) to feminism even, in their own sort-of-quasi-political-way.

The Going West exhibit runs to Jan 21, 2008. The Renwick Gallery is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and is located on 17 th Street & Pennsylvania Ave, NW. Admission is free. Hours: Daily, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., closed December 25. Tours and General Info: 202-633-8550. Special event scheduling: 202-633-8534. Be sure to check the calendar, as the Renwick hosts a series of crafts demonstrations, lectures, receptions, and musical performances in its mission to collect and preserve the finest in American crafts.

Finch peck

Artnet's art critic Charlie Finch takes a massive peck at the art blogsphere with an odd article in Artnet magazine.

More on that later, but do read the article here.

Dawson on Bethesda

Even while I was in gorgeous Niagara Falls, the anguished cries from DC's not-Brooklyn have followed me via emails from people emailing me "have you seen what Dawson wrote about Bethesda's galleries?"

Hey, it's her opinion and her style. She has a right to express it and an editor to guide it.

In my opinion, Dawson has developed over the years into a naturally snarky writer, and never too deep in her writing to explain away her snarkyness - mostly I suspect because of lack of proper newsprint space to address such a subject as a wander through Bethesda's art scene.

Dawson's anti-comparison of Bethesda to Brooklyn is just odd. I was raised in Brooklyn, and knew it well, so it's a waste of space to open up a article by taking a dig at the Bethesda Urban Partnership's efforts to create a gallery scene in Bethesda with an anti-comparison to Brooklyn.

Why does everything and everyone in the art world have to be compared to New York's art world?

It doesn't.

She seems baffled when she states that "declaring an arts district is a rare move in a post-gallery art world." It isn't - there are several art districts in Maryland alone; in fact I think that Silver Spring is also a recent arts district. Dawson declaration that we're already living in a "post-gallery art world," meaning that as fairs and and Internet grow, galleries are in a death spiral, may be the reason for the WaPo's tiny and ever reducing art gallery coverage - now we know: the WaPo's freelance art critic tasked with reviewing local area galleries thinks that we're in a "post-gallery art world."

I'm not so sure... and by the way, Peter Schjeldahl has already predicted the end of art fairs as well; let's see who time will prove right. So soon we will be in a "post art fair world."

But if Dawson says that we're already in a post-gallery world, and Schjeldahl predicts the end of art fairs - what do we have left for an art scene? The Internet only?

Campello does not think so. In fact it should be clear to the most casual observer of any art scene that the future is probably a combination of the three ingredients. Like it is now.

But getting back to Bethesda, what Dawson does not tell you, is how successful the Bethesda Urban Partnership has been in accomplishing their goals; that would somehow destroy her thesis - but I will try to tell you.

Around 2002, when the whole move started to have the county or state declare Bethesda as an official "arts district" (a move that brings special dispensations for cultural organizations and tax breaks for developers, etc.), there were but a couple of "real" art galleries and cultural spaces in restaurant-rich Bethesda.

To clarify: there were plenty of stores that sold pretty wall decor and had the word "gallery" in their business name, but other than Creative Partners, Marin-Price, and Sally Hansen's Glass Gallery (unless my memory here in airportland fails me) there were no other "real" galleries in the area.

Osuna earlier on had a space in the area, but this seasoned DC area "other Cuban" art dealer had closed up shop around that time frame and departed the area. He has done that a couple of times during his long illustrious gallerist career.

Since those seminal efforts began, Fraser Gallery, Neptune Gallery, Heineman-Myers Contemporary, the Washington Photography School, Orchard Gallery, the Imagination Stage, St. Elmo's Gallery, Landmark Theatre, Round House Theatre, Bethesda Theatre and others that I am surely forgetting have all opened up in Bethesda; and Osuna came back. Also in those years, a couple of other galleries opened and failed and one moved to NYC.

And the Bethesda Fine Arts Festival brings around 120 artists from all over the nation, and 40,000 people to the streets of Bethesda each May. And the very generous Carol Trawick has institutionalized the Trawick Prize and the Bethesda Painting Awards.

So it would appear to me that some sort of "art scene" is very successfully developing there, in spite of the article's announcement about the end of galleries.

And I leave you with this line from the freelance art critic to the world's second most influential newspaper, as she describes Bethesda's Neptune Gallery on her first and only visit there:

The gallery shows local glass artists, figurative sculpture and painting -- art that means well but rarely matters.

A lesson that Ms. Dawson should have picked up from her art history classes on the history of Ukiyo-e: Art always matters.

Fabbri on Mancini

There's a gorgeous exhibition at the PMA on Neapolitan artist Antonio Mancini (1852-1930).

This is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to an artist considered by many to be one of the most prominent Italian painters of the late nineteenth century.

And the Broad Street Review's Anne Fabbri has an equally interesting and intelligent review here.

Two Princes

Two influential art critics review Richard Prince's retro at the Guggenheim and, as if often happens, come away with wildly different opinions.

Read the WaPo's Blake Gopnik here.

Read the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl here.

Rivers on Foon Sham

I had never heard of her until this WaPo article came out, but whoever Eileen Rivers is at the WaPo, she really delivered a superbly written and intelligent article/review on sculptor Foon Sham, who is currently showing "Flow" (through Nov. 10 at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston - opening reception October 20th 6-8PM)and also exhibiting "Journey," through Nov. 11 at Heineman Myers Contemporary Art in Bethesda.

Read the article here.

Moon & Hopper

Cudlin has a really excellent review of The National Gallery’s current exhibition on Edward Hopper.

And in this review is where we see where a trained painter can sometimes deliver an insight into a painter's work than an ordinary critic sometimes can't; Cudlin notices that:

There are many subjects that didn’t suit Hopper’s approach to color and form. He was hopeless, for example, with seascapes. His 1922 etching The Cat Boat and a later oil painting, Ground Swell (1939), are half-baked attempts to represent water. In the former, a few thin lines like cramped cursive—little cartoon peaks, really—lamely indicate waves. In the latter, the sea appears to be made of some viscous blue-green substance; the stuff lies in thick furrows, holding both a buoy and a sailboat completely immobile. Only the boat in each picture seems like a decent compilation of specific shapes. Hopper clearly liked that boat but didn’t have many ideas about where to put it...

... His figures, too, were often vague and half-invented. The female nude in Morning in a City (1944) gazes out at a sharply rendered city. But she herself looks like a lumpy troll, as if she wandered out of a painting by modern primitive Henri Rousseau. Hopper typically made studies for his figures but often relied on memory while painting, and proportions could get lost in the shuffle. This woman’s nakedness lacks eroticism, and as a result seems alien, disturbing—as nondescript as Hopper’s trees and waves.

Lumpy troll... that's hilarious!

Elsewhere in the CP, Capps reviews Jiha Moon at Curator's Office. Moon is on my "Buy Now" List.

Multiple Exposures

Upstairs at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, that forbidden part of the Greater Washington area where DC area art critics seldom venture, two talented photographers share the walls of Multiple Exposures Gallery (nee Factory Photoworks) this month: Grace Taylor and Colleen Spencer Henderson (who needs to modernize her website!).

Colleen explores the landscape by turning her sharp photographer’s eyes towards the ever-changing beauties of the land. In “Three Trees” she pops a range of whites that will astound any student of the genre, and the stone fence, trees and clouds deliver a beautiful image to boot.

Grace Taylor has been amazing me for years now. She is not only an innovator who continues to push the artistic limits of the genre’s craft and vision, but also an old hand who doesn’t sit around too long resting on her laurels. In “Stone Portraits,” Taylor presents a show of images of stones that she has collected over the years. Each one has a distinct personality as Mother Nature, time and weather all combine to deliver beautiful landscapes, images and paintings within the canvas of a stone. Using Epson Ultra Chrome pigment inks, Taylor has scanned the images onto a rich black background that gives the stones a three dimensional aspect that is seldom seen in “straight” photography.

Give Taylor another notch in her string of really, really good shows and inventive ideas over the last decades.

Tuss on Janis

By Katie Tuss

Michael Janis’s latest solo exhibition, The Quadrant of Sky, opened at the Neptune Gallery in Bethesda last Wednesday.

Janis, a glass artist and Washington Glass School co-director, uses fused and cast glass to explore the nuances of the human form and the varied layers of human interaction.

Janis first explored glass as an architect, and his figurative representations belie the precision of a draftsman while the construction of his pieces, often set in steel, is sleek and exact.

“Michael’s ability to glance at an image and know how to translate it using glass is amazing,” says Neptune Gallery's director Elyse Harrison.

Janis uses powdered black glass to create his drawings. The technique is labor-intensive and requires Janis to push the pigment particles into place to create his images. These ‘drawn’ images are then fused onto the glass in a kiln.

The free-standing and hanging pieces on exhibition are contemplative transparent environments. In his Delicate Balance series, Janis layers repeating portraits on curved plates of glass. The slightly skewed placement of the faces creates a countenance of reflection and self-consideration.


In his newest series, Unguarded Lives, Janis mixes colored glass and cast faces with the fused drawings. The drawn figures are fluid and dreamlike and the intent further open to interpretation.


The exhibition goes through October 6, 2007.