Artists' Websites: Zoe Strauss

Philly-based photographer Zoe Strauss was one of the few bright presences in an otherwise bleak 2006 Whitney Biennial. She's one of the coolest photographers working in the nation, and you can own her work for as little as five dollars a photo!

Visit her website here.

Wanna go to a DC opening on Thursday?

How about the National Society of Arts and Letters’ 2007 arts competition?

Washington DC’s Nevin Kelly Gallery will host a traveling exhibition of works by the winners of The National Society of Arts and Letters’ 2007 arts competition. The 2007 competition was open to young artists ages 18 to 29 working in water media on paper. Local artist Jenny Davis, a previous exhibitor at the gallery, won this year’s $10,000 national first prize for her watercolor “Portrait of Tess.” The winning painting and works by the winners of 18 other local chapter competitions who competed for the top prize will be on display. The gallery will host an opening reception at 1517 U Street, NW on Thursday, February 28, from 5:30 until 7:30 pm. The public is invited.

The NSAL was established in 1944 as a non-profit, philanthropic, volunteer organization of art professionals, art educators and patrons of the arts. Its mission is to encourage and assist promising young artists through scholarships, career support and arts competitions. NSAL’s competitions rotate annually through six categories: fine art, dance, drama, literature, music and musical theater. The 2007 competition was NSAL’s first painting competition in 20 years (the 2008 competition will focus on voice). As winner of the Washington, DC Chapter’s local competition, Ms. Davis, was invited to Tempe, AZ in May 2007 to compete with other regional winners for the top prize: the $10,000 Nicholson-Nielsen Memorial Award. Jenny’s watercolor “Portrait of Tess” captured the award.

“We are very pleased to have been asked to host this very impressive exhibition and to welcome Jenny Davis back to our gallery,” says gallery director Nevin J. Kelly. “This exhibition provides an ideal fit with our goal of introducing talented emerging artists to the local art community.”

Other regional winners whose works will be on display (and the NSAL chapters whose competitions they won) include Carrie Tompkins, (Birmingham), Maureen Forman (Bloomington), Vanessa Monot (Boca Raton), Ryan Rocha (Central Illinois); Erin Saladino (Clearwater-Tampa Bay), Alfred Perez (El Paso), Tawni Shuler (Greater Arizona), Morgan Canavan (Greater Chicago), Danielle Trejo (Evanston), Will Anderson (Kansas City), Gerren Dugger (Kentucky), Amber Carraway (Little Rock), Adrian Lyjak (Mid-Michigan) Mattias Lanas (New Jersey), Kelsey Berkley (North Florida), Mark Bush (Ohio River Valley), Thommy Controy (Pittsburgh) and Timothy Rusterholz (Virginia-North Carolina).

Christine Bailey's new inventions

"After the mini-controversy stirred up over artist Christine Bailey's exhibition of faux Cara Ober paintings at a downtown office building last month, we were eager to check out Boundary Crossings, the current show at School 33 Art Center that Bailey curated.

The show presents three artists -- Ariana Wol, Nadine Freund and "the international digital collective" A.N.N.A. -- who, on closer inspection, all turn out to be creatures of Bailey's own fertile imagination. During a phone conversation yesterday it only took a little prodding before she admitted that the show's trio of "artists" are, in fact, completely fictitious identities invented by her."

More details here.

By the way, that's the Sun's art critic, Glenn McNatt, who blogs in a Sun blog for the paper's critics.

27th Annual WPA Art Auction

The Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) has announced the 27th Annual Art Auction Gala to be held Friday, March 7, 2008 from 7:00 pm until midnight at the Katzen Arts Center at American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.

The 2008 WPA Art Auction Gala is a full evening of activities that include a cocktail reception, seated dinner, a silent auction of more than 130 original works of art, and an art party. Held in the rotunda of the veautiful Katzen Arts Center at American University, this event draws young collectors, art enthusiasts, established and emerging artists, as well as leaders from the regional corporate, social and cultural communities.

Artists selected for the exhibit this year include painters, sculptors, illustrators, photographers and street artists, from Greater Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Australia, Italy, and Russia.

Attendees each receive a bid number to vie for the original works of art featured in the auction, which have been selected from the following group of curators:

- Heather Darcy Bhandari, Curator and Artist Manager, Mixed Greens, NYC

- Andrea Douglas, Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, VA

- Sarah Kennel, Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, DC

- Erin Chase Mackay, Principal, Chase Contemporary Art Consulting LLC, DC

- Dennis O’Neil, Director, Hand Print Workshop International, Alexandria, VA (who brought a ton of Russians to the auction)

- Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective, NYC

- Emily Smith, Curatorial Fellow, Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

- JD Talasek, Director, Exhibitions and Cultural Programs, National Academy of Sciences, DC

- Kathryn Wat, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC

Some of the DC area artists selected for the 2008 Art Auction Gala include: Amy Lin, Maxwell MacKenzie, Foon Sham, William Christenberry, Steven Cushner, Eric Finzi, Bridget Sue Lambert, Joseph Mills, Renee Stout, Scott Hutchison, Akemi Maegawa, and Noelle Tan and many others. For a complete list of artists please visit www.wpadc.org and for Reservations and information: www.wpadc.org or contact the WPA office at 202.234.7103.

The preview for the gala is this coming Thursday, Feb. 28th, from 6-8:30PM; click on the below image for more details.

See ya there!

Art for Obama is tomorrow

Art for Obama III takes place tomorrow at Heineman Myers in Bethesda starting at 6:30PM.

Details and directions here.

S.548

Congressional alert: The artist deduction bill (S.548) would give artists the right to deduct the fair market value of their work when donating it to a charity.

Right now artists and artisans can only deduct the material costs of creating their work.

Please follow the link below and support this bill. It allows you to fill in and send on-line to your congressmen.

Click here.

Identities in extremis

Last week my desktop, after many faithful years finally gave up the ghost; a new one has been ordered.

Yesterday we drove down to DC to visit Glass3 in Georgetown - a gorgeous exhibition that once again shows that Washington, DC area artists are doing and creating something new in the genre. If you don't believe or understand my words to this effect over the years, go visit the exhibition and you'll see what I mean -- It stands out to the most casual observer. DCist has reviewed the show here and Heather Goss immediately picked up on the visual revelations of a three city international exhibit; let's see if the WaPo and the WCP get it.

Then we also wanted to see, and did swing by the opening for the talented new minimalist works by Akemi Maegawa at Irvine Contemporary. Akemi used to be my wife's neighbor in Bethesda for many years, and we walked away from the Irvine show with our second Maegawa original!

We then planned to swing over to Heineman Myers in Bethesda for their 10PM-10AM art party. We did get there eventually, but around 1AM, because we had an unplanned DC incident when we returned to our car. Heineman Myers was packed to the gills at 1 Am and still packed at 2:30AM when we left; full of music and dancing and booze.

In all the old movies, when the main character drives somewhere, he or she always finds a prime parking spot close or right in front of wherever they are going. I call this curious Hollywood effect "Doris Day parking," since in all of her movies she always managed to drive right up to and park right in front of wherever she was going.

So we had found an almost Doris Day spot on our visit to Irvine Contemporary, about a block away, almost corner of P Street and Kingman Place, in a nice, quiet residential neighborhood one block away from busy 14th Street, and right under a bright street light.

When we got back to the car around 9:30 PM, the rear passenger window had been smashed in and my laptop and my wife's travel bag were gone.

And so was my remaining computer, and my back-up to the dead desktop, which now has to make a visit to the expensive PC surgeon to see if they can somehow reclaim its files from its tired innards.

DC Police Officer Negron was on the scene within ten minutes, and in my mind has given the DC police department a huge positive checkmark in my book. He was friendly, helpful, made us feel a little better and was very detailed. We were also surprised when a crime scene expert then showed up (Officer Negron had called him) and did a CSI routine on the scene, including looking for fingerprints, etc.

I am thankful and impressed by the professionality, but more than anything else I want and need that damned computer back!

"They usually pawn it," said Officer Negron.

My laptop is useless to most people. Unless you are able to defeat 128-bit double encryption, no one will be able to log on without my 16 character alphanumeric password.

But, who knows, maybe pawn shop owners have the help of seedy SysAdmin experts who can bust through anything, and I suppose that you can always wipe out the computer OS and reload a new Windows OS and start from scratch.

But if any of you see a veteran (3 years at least) dark gray Hewlett-Packard laptop with a Verizon Wireless Card sticking from the left side port, anywhere around the 14th Street corridor, in a pawn shop or anywhere else... give me a shout.

Things happen for a purpose, and one reaps what one sows, and maybe I shouldn't have busted Mr. Molinari's window when I was a kid playing basketball in our backyard in Brooklyn and my shot went really wide.

Life moves on and I will go through hell over the next few weeks with a new desktop and a new laptop and waste weeks trying to reorganize my Virgo life; and calling all the credit bureaus, and the social security administration, etc. as inside the PC bag were also 4-5 really important pieces of ID cards for various things.

That worries me more than the loss of the laptop.

"In the worst case scenario," said Officer Negron, "those can be sold and used to start bank accounts, credit card applications, etc."

Identity theft; but life moves on and so does that window-smashing thief.

Motherfucker....