Manon Cleary Tonight
Tonight, from 6-8PM, is the opening for the Manon Cleary retrospective at the Edison Place Gallery located at 701 9th Street, NW (enter from 8th and G).
Without a doubt the leading realist painter in the Greater Washington region, and made nationally famous by HBO a few years ago, Cleary's retrospective is long overdue and it's a huge black mark on the conscience of DC area museums and curators.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
At the Corcoran Tonight
The WPA/C is having their first All Members' meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the auditorium.
Paul Greenhalgh, the new director of the Corcoran will be there to meet the WPA/C members and invites them and see the current show: "redefined: Modern and Contemporary Art form the Collection."
Details here.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Robin Rose at Hemphill
Robin Rose, one of the District's most influential painters, opens this Saturday, Sept. 16 at Hemphill Fine Arts. This will be Rose's first solo at Hemphill since he switched galleries from Numark Gallery, where he used to exhibit in prior years. The opening reception for Rose is Saturday, September 16, 2006 from 6:30 - 8:30 PM.
This is shaping like the week to see two of the District's giants of paintings, as Manon Cleary, easily one of the most technically gifted and creative painters that I have seen in all my years of looking at the visual arts, also opens this week, in her case Cleary opens on Thursday at Edison Place Gallery.
Opportunity for Artists
Deadline: September 22, 2006
The Arts Council of Fairfax County announces Arts Council @ GRACE, a juried art exhibition offering $2,000 in prize monies.
This year’s exhibition will mark a first time collaboration with the regional visual art center GRACE in Reston, VA. Artists from DC, MD, or VA are encouraged to apply. Artists working in any media can submit up to four (4) images on CD, or video totaling no more than five (5) minutes on DVD.
Juror: Jack Rasmussen, Director and Curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen. Cash prizes totaling $2000. Entry Fee: $35 (waived for Arts Council and GRACE members). Exhibition will take place November 3 – December 1, 2006.
Information is available on their at website at www.artsfairfax.org or contact Angela Jerardi, Visual Arts Coordinator at ajerardi@artsfairfax.org.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Art Narratives
WOW! Check out the kind of artwork presentation that Paradise Studios has done for Bailey.
It's about 2MBytes - Click here.
Gopnikisms"One of the things that drive me crazy is that there's this notion, especially among younger artists, that to make serious art some woman has to get naked. I see it in performance art all the time."
UPDATE(s):
- Blake Gopnik
1. Capps polices Gopnik here.
2. Bailey... ah "Baileys" Gopnik here.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Opportunity for Artists
Deadline: October 6, 2006
The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities' Art Bank Program has a call for entries as they are purchasing artwork to be part of the District of Columbia's 2007 Art Bank Program.
Works in the collection are owned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and loaned to other District Government agencies for display in public areas. Deadline: October 6, 2006.
For more information and an application, please visit their website to download the Call for Entries application, or call 202-724-5613 to have one sent to you.
The City's Art Bank is a growing collection of moveable works funded through DC Creates Public Art, the District’s Art in Public Places Program.
Works in the collection are owned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and are loaned to other District government agencies for display in public areas of government buildings. This collection helps preserve the city’s past and is an important legacy for future generations. Currently, approximately 1,600 artworks are on display in more than 100 agencies.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Wanna go to an opening tonight?
The place to go tonight in the DC area is the opening reception at the Katzen Arts Center at AU.
The Mid-Atlantic's best looking arts venue will host the opening receptions from 6-9PM to welcome:
Life After Death: New Leipzig Painters from the Rubell Family CollectionJust the fact that Don and Mera Rubell may be there (they will be at the Katzen on Sept. 19 to discuss "their very personal process of selecting and collecting art") probably means that every art dealer within a 200 mile radius will probably show up.
Eberhard Havekost: New Works from the Rubell Family Collection
Hungarian Revolution, 1956
Mindy Weisel: Words on a Journey
Athena Tacha: Small Wonders
I am particularly interested in Life After Death: New Leipzig Painters from the Rubell Family Collection. In 1989, the seven artists represented in this exhibition: Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Neo Rauch, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer — all rejected the trendy genres of today's art critics and museum curators: video, photography and installation art, and instead chose to study figurative painting at the Leipzig Art Academy.
The resulting work goes completely against the grain of what a lot of art writers, critics and curators try to force-feed us as the only viable contemporary art forms, and reflects the fact that as long as talent is given room to grow, there is room for all genres and visual interests, including the much maligned realism.
It will be interesting to read what the chief art critic of the Washington Post, a leading town crier for the "painting is dead" mob, writes about this show. However, if his review of fellow German painter Gerhardt Richter's 2003 show is an indication (which Gopnik should have hated), Gopnik won't step out of line and will conveniently join the international applause chorus to the Leipzig boys.
Kudos to the Katzen for bringing a top-notch show to the capital area.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Wanna go to a DC opening this weekend?
The read Heather Goss over at DCist as she has a list of the top shows opening this weekend as the "arts season" kicks in with a bang at the Greater DC area's top galleries.
Read the openings list here.
Signs
I don't know if it is true or not, but a friend of mine told me a while back that some of the subjects in Trawick prizewinner James Rieck send hidden signals/messages via their hands' depictions.
If you know how to read that sort of stuff, go here and tell me if the top two paintings of the little girls are "messaging" anything.
Is it just me or...
This recent Zippy comic strip looks influenced by like Mark Jenkins' "Embed."
When Zippy references something -- like Mark Cline's Foamhenge out in the Virginia country, there is a tiny "Tip of the Pen" credit of thanks to the person who made the reference. There is no tip of the pen here so he probably came up with idea without knowing about Mark Jenkins' tapework. Nonetheless, the Tapedude rocks!
Update: The Tapedude informs me that the Zippy comic "is a drawing of a bronze sculpture that exists in LA... and when I did my 'embed,' I had people asking me if that piece had inspired mine (it hadn't)." Jenkins just had a show in Rotterdam, Holland last week and the below piece is from that show.
Trawick Prizewinners
The winners of this year's Trawick Prize were announced yesterday and they are James Rieck of Baltimore, MD, who was named as the Best in Show winner of $10,000; Kristin Holder of Washington, D.C. was awarded the Second Place prize of $2,000; Molly Springfield of Washington, D.C. was honored with the Third Place prize of $1,000 and Jason Zimmerman of Washington, D.C. was given the Young Artist Award of $1,000.
The work of fourteen finalists will be on display at Creative Partners Gallery from September 5-29, 2006.
The 2006 Trawick Prize was juried by Ashley Kistler, Director of the exhibition program at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond; Dr. John Rasmussen, Director and Curator of the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center and Gerald Ross, Director of Exhibitions at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Rieck has won a ton of money from Ms. Trawick this year, as he was also the Second Prize winner in the Bethesda Painting Awards, which this amazing lady also sponsors.
As a quick search shows, this is a widely exhibited artist, with a solid gallery record in New York and other major markets (and apparently seldom exhibiting in the Greater DC area). I'm not too familiar with his work, other than what I saw at the Bethesda Painting Awards exhibition, but it was clear to me that this was the work of a very gifted artist, both technically (which is so easily dismissed by those that can't accomplish or understand how difficult it is to do) and in its intrinsic sense of delivering mental ideas and messages through intelligent composition and dramatic cropping of imagery.
What impressed me the most about the work, once we get past and recognize the enviable technical expertise (which was also shared in this year's prizewinning crop by the amazing and also technically-gifted Molly Springfield), was the sense of questioning (and foreboding) that his paintings planted in my mind. This is an artist whose work is intended not only to impress with technical finesse, but also reach deep into accepting minds and plant the seeds of understanding how the power of visual art can make the chemical connectors in our brains cause us to gasp at the realization that we are truly being awed by a master artist.
A good choice and well-deserved, and had I been the juror, I'm pretty sure that he would have won a prize, although I would have given the Trawick to Molly, who shares nearly all of the same attributes, skills and subtle bravado as Rieck, but whose work I know better and understand on a deeper level.
And that's how prizes are won or lost.
PS - Capps on the Trawick.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
New art charity
This is such a great and generous country.
A new organization called United States Artists, announced yesterday an plan to offer support to working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence and a brilliant example of what can happen when the private side of our society takes over from what the public side fails to do.
50 American artists will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4. They will be chosen by "panels of artists, critics, scholars and others in the arts [that] are reviewing the applications of 300 artists who were nominated by 150 anonymous arts leaders around the country."
Fellowships will be awarded across a broad array of disciplines: Architecture, Design, and Fashion; Crafts and Traditional Arts; Dance; Literature (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry); Media Arts (film, media, and radio); Music; Performing Arts (performance art and theater); and the Visual Arts (yay!).
According to the NYT story:
Four foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential and the Alaska-based Rasmuson— have put up a total of $20 million to create the organization and seed its initial operations, but the goal is for it to become a conduit between artists and individual donors.Read the story here and visit United States Artists here.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Wanna go to an art event tonight?
Go to The Common Share located at 2003 18th St. NW (in Adams Morgan), DC (upstairs). Featured artist is Barry Bishop and music by DJ 2-Tone Jones. 8pm - 1am and no cover charge.
D A N G L I N G
Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, in Silver Spring, MD, will be hosting D A N G L I N G (as in suspense), an exhibit by 20 artists from the Washington region "commenting on critical challenges to the global human condition including militarism, economics, environmental degradation, and personal, philosophical, and political conflicts."
The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 8th from 6:30-8:30pm and will feature remarks by participating artists as well as performance art and poetry. The exhibit is on display through September 29th.
Exhibiting artists include Anonymous, iona rozeal brown, William Christenberry, Graham Boyle and Alex Curtis of the Submissive Generation, Richard Dana, Joan Danziger, Behnam Farahpour, Susan Firestone, Dalya Luttwak, Nan Montgomery, Adrienne Mills, Brian Petro, Michael Platt, Wendy Ross, Renee Stout, R.L. Tillman, Kelly Towles, Genna Watson, Jamie Wimberly, and Jason Zimmerman.
The show is curated by Carolyn Alper and Helen Frederick, who in early April invited artists to Pyramid Atlantic to discuss ideas for an exhibition that might grow out of the DADA movement that had influenced most of them during their lives. There was agreement that although the DADA exhibition (presented this spring at the National Gallery of Art) made a huge impact on them, Dada could not be "re-created."
"I thought that artists should have the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the current state of our world. It seems that such a show would be not only interesting but essential," stated curator Carolyn Alper.
Although I am not "disillusioned with the current state in our world," I am nonetheless looking forward to seeing this exhibition.
I am especially looking forward to seeing the living paintings of Adrienne Mills, who (in addition to her work on the gallery walls) will have two "living paintings" at the reception. Spoken word artist Charisse Carney-Nunes will be covered in her words and Mills' model Jaye will be on display as well.
I am also looking forward to seeing the new work of Jamie Wimberly, who in addition to his piece for the show (titled "Art History," and which is a direct comment on contemporary art) is also contributing an essay on contemporary art.
Jamie tells me that his "intention is to start a dialogue." To that end, he has created a blog: Provocations, where "people can be as nasty or nice as they want to be."
See ya there!