Away at the Fair

Still in Richmond for a weekend of trying to sell some art. In spite of the rain, it was a surprising good start today, with a few nice sales.

Also ran into an old friend, the fair Rebecca D'Angelo, who photographs for the Washington Post and others and was covering the fair.

Kirkland on Art Blogging

JT has a good piece on the state of the art (Blogging) in DCist. Read it here.

New Art BLOG

Alexandra Silverthorne has a new art-focused BLOG. It is called Solarize This and you should all visit often

P.S. See... I didn't mispell your last name!

NNE Gallery

A new (at least new to me) gallery is NNE Gallery, located at 1312 8th Street, NW, Washington DC 20001 and phone is 202-276-4540.

NNE Gallery had an opening reception tonite (I wish I'd had the press release earlier) for Washington DC artist, Nooni Reatig.

Per the release, Reatig first gained recognition in 1998 at the age of seventeen for a series of controversial paintings entitled, Red Alert. It was reviewed in The Washington Post, "A Young Artist's Naked Ambition," where Nooni claimed that she would "make a difference" (in the art world).

Upon graduation from The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2002, and then a brief stint at The Corcoran College of Art and Design, she has been working on series of sculptures showcased in this exhibition.

Welcome aboard!

Airborne today

Hellooooooooo Betty!

I'm heading home late tonight; on the redeye to Dulles.

On the flight home I will be finishing Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

Busy weekend, as I arrive early tomorrow morning and then immediately drive south for an art fair over the weekend.

Should be fairly exhausted by Monday...

2005 Lucelia Award Announced

A few days ago the Smithsonian sent a news release to everyone announcing the winner of the Lucelia Award:

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today that Andrea Zittel is the fifth annual winner of its Lucelia Artist Award, established by the museum in 2001 to encourage leading contemporary American artists. This award is part of the museum's commitment to contemporary art and artists through awards and acquisitions.

An independent panel of jurors chose Zittel for the award in recognition of her ability to "create objects and total settings that reconsider the relationships between art and life. A utopian yet rigorously formal sensibility dominates."

"The timing of the Smithsonian American Art Museum couldn't have been better," said Zittel. "I have been working on a number of new ideas recently and the Lucelia Artist Award will really help me continue with the projects."

"Andrea Zittel has shown a sustained commitment to distinctive work that challenges conventional thinking and expectations about the nature of art, which is exactly what the Lucelia Artist Award is intended to celebrate and support," said Elizabeth Broun, the museum's Margaret and Terry Stent Director.

The jurors continue in their statement, "Zittel's art is shaped by a serial-based comprehensiveness in which discrete works are part of ongoing experiments and the continuous development of ideas. An investigatory attitude prevails. Her practice embraces the recycling of materials and large-scale, public-art projects as much as the creation of custom-made objects and an extreme attention to personal, particularizing details. She has become a leading figure in the international art world and a strong influence on generations of artists worldwide."

Locally, the three jurors are now in the second phase of downselecting from the first set of semi-semifinalists for the $14,000 Trawick Prize.

Ms. Trawick has also added another $10,000 for the Bethesda Painting Awards, also being selected now.

Today Bake Gopnik in the WaPo has a nice story about the award. It would be nice if Gopnik also did a piece on whoever gets selected as the Trawick Prize winner; this would give Gopnik a chance to actually focus some of his printspace on an area art event of some significance.

Congratulations

To our own Tim Tate (represented by us), who recently signed on with WeissPollack Galleries in New York, which will represent his work there.

Tate will also create an installation for WeissPollack Galleries for SOFA New York, this coming June.

Important Opening this Weekend

"I really want to see..." a group show of new work or work never shown in the area by Laura Amussen, Maria Anasazi, Noah Angell, Ken Ashton, Mark Behme, Natalia Blanch, Margaret Boozer, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Noche Christ, Lynden Cline, John Dumbacher, Joseph Dumbacher, Susan Fenton, Thom Flynn, Inga McCaslin Frick, Marc Ganzglass, Francie Hester, Jason Hughes, Berta Koltenuik, Maggie Michael, Galo Moncayo, Brandon
Morse, Lee Newman, Foon Sham, Claire Sherwood, Richard Vosseller and John Winslow.

Reception to meet the artists: Saturday, April 30, 2005 6 - 9pm. Free and open to the public. Gallery Four, 405 West Franklin St. 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD, or call 410/962.8941.

San Diego

Spent all day indoors lecturing... but last night I visited my usual secret dining spot, Ortega's again for my fix of poblano mole and of Carnitas.

Tuesday Arts Agenda

The DCist Tuesday Arts Agenda is here.

Anderson on Flynn

Thom Flynn at Osuna Gallery
By John Anderson

For some the talk of collage in art receives a yawn and a "been there, done that." And though their applications have probably been beaten like a dead horse well throughout the last hundred years - since Picasso glued the caned backing of a chair to a canvas and framed it with rope - there is still something intriguing about a bunch of trash glued and stapled together into something. Or, at least, when it is done well it is intriguing, and sometimes seductive.

This seems to be the case for Thom Flynn, who currently has work on display at Osuna Gallery in Bethesda, MD through May 12, 2005.

Though ample work is not on display throughout the space, it does command the gallery well enough to attract attention at the very least from the simple curiosity of the people, if not some time for reflection.

While initial glances at Flynn’s work might evoke the work of artists like Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villéglé, the relationship ends with poster material and some method of adhesive. Whereas Rotella and Villéglé were prone at times to treat their décollage as found objects, Flynn’s compositions involve both additive and subtractive elements of collage and décollage until so much of the image is lost in the development that what remains is a series of rips across the picture plane.

Flynn’s work reads as drawing. The rips are gestural across the surface with their varied thicks and thins. And, like the master draftsman he is with these rips, Flynn mixes it up just enough to keep the eye moving throughout the composition, yet controlling enough to maintain our attention in the gallery.

Sometimes the rips repeat, piling up one after the other. They intersect, lines lost in the overlap. Flynn lets us know just how much control he has over the compositions, and the compositions do not lose intensity and fall apart with a shift in scale.

The other point of major interest is the thickness of his pieces. They are constructed like topographical maps, with so many peaks and valleys the surface is begging to be touched. Guests of the gallery can often be seen looking from one side of the piece to the other to determine just how thick the pieces are, and how many layers back they can see.

Where things become problematic is twofold. First is the simple way the pieces are unified.

Constructed with staples adhering layer to layer, the final piece is shellacked with a gel medium that provides additional bonding strength to the staples, and arguably holds the whole piece together. While this act of preservation offers an interesting dialogue in contrast to the deteriorating condition in which these posters were found, as a solution it feels "too quickly arrived upon" and not as well planned in consideration to additional issues of texture, variety of surface throughout the composition.

Secondly is a more pressing issue, where does the work go from here? In the last few years Flynn has demonstrated his ability to work in this method throughout several exhibitions. While some might be frustrated trying to "read" the piece through the fragmentary images, it is obviously not necessary, as it is not the artist’s intention. Unfortunately, in the quest to see what information is peering around the tears becomes akin to a Where’s Waldo game, searching for what might be some random body part. In addition, without this style moving forward, it is likely to be relegated as furniture.

Airborne Today

Heading to the Left Coast once again... come back later and I should have some postings once I get to California.

Wanna Ask John Currin a Question?

Do you want to interview John Currin? Is there something you'd like to ask him?

With Flash Art, now you can.

This spring, Flash Art is giving you the opportunity to interview John Currin. Flash Art is now soliciting questions from anyone, the readers of Flash Art and the Flash Art newsletter.

They will present the best of these questions to John Currin, and he will respond to them in an exclusive interview published later this year.

Please e-mail all questions to Matt before the deadline - Wednesday, 4 May, 2005.

Gopnik on Steinhilber

Gopnik doesn't pay too much attention to DC galleries, so make sure that when he does, we do as well... read it here.

Jenkins on Steinhilber

Guest Review by Mark Jenkins

I work beside Numark Gallery and have been passing by this exhibit daily and so thought to contribute a brief piece about my reaction to it in this blog -- just for fun.

The first work that grabbed me in this show is a large canvas on the ground tilted against the wall with a small orange ball centered on its edge that seems to light up the wall behind it. The friend I was there with wondered if it was a light as I’m sure many will.

I won’t ruin the secret of it, but if you can jump as high as me -- I barely dunked a basketball some years ago, but that was some years ago -- you’ll see it too. It was this act -- perhaps a reward for my effort and for not caring if I looked a little bit like a fool -- that enabled me to begin to understand the way Steinhilber’s mind enjoys reality. He does so by creating or uncovering simplistic enigmas of the everyday item.

I remember in one of the Dune books Frank Herbert said something about a character The Changer: "He illuminates the banal in a way that terrifies."

While Steinhilber hardly terrifies he certainly illuminates the ordinary in a way that gets you thinking. The caterpillar made from forks and plates, the cardboard boxes that seem like a family of acrobats, the sorrowful kite riled by a fan like a chained canary, and a small tape metropolis with one tower deconstructing itself, all share this Changed spirit.

One other thing to mention or rather advise -- go to the show on a full stomach or you’ll find yourself seriously considering taking a bite out of the giant cheeto.

Kirkland on Steinhilber

JT's review can be read in DCist here.

For next week...

Creating from Within by Tricia Ratliff, Silvia Santiago and Shannon Chester is an exhibition of original paintings, collage and photography to create awareness about EP's innovative public art project- Synergy!

The opening is this coming Wed. April 27 , from 6-8 p.m. at Karma Lounge (19th and I Street in DC). Artwork will be on view through May 14th.

This showing is a fundraiser for Synergy. With each purchase, you'll receive free ($40) tickets to The Artists Reality Show, a very unique performance event to be held on May 14, at The Dennis and Phillip Ratner Museum, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Tickets and information about The Artists Reality Show will be available at the opening.

Katzen Arts Center

American University's Katzen Arts Center is about to open, and it includes a new gallery with 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, which is certain to become one of the key exhibition venues in the whole Eastern seaboard.

This will be a great new addition to our area's art scene, and lucky for us, it will be guided by a steady and experienced hand in the person of Jack Rasmussen, who as most of us know, is a highly experienced arts professional with a very deep knowledge of the DC area and Blatimore area art scenes.

And Jack steps into the new job with a brand new BLOG! Is that cool or what?

Visit the new BLOG here.

The Thursday Reviews

In the City Paper, Louis Jacobson reviews Barbara Probst at G Fine Art and also Maria Friberg at Conner Contemporary.

In the WaPo, Jessica Dawson has her usual third Thursdays set of mini reviews. Also in the Post, Jacqueline Trescott has a story on The National Endowment for the Arts' "scaling back" their initiative to "send the best of American culture around the country and is starting with only a tour of visual arts." Trescott reveals that the "NEA announced yesterday that it is giving the Phillips a grant of $100,000 to support a traveling exhibition of 20th-century painter [and my former art professor] Jacob Lawrence."

In DCist, Kirkland reviewed Victor Schrager at Adamson and JT tells me that later today DCist will have his review of Dan Steinhilber at Numark.

In the Gazette, Karen Schaffer has an article on Sandra Pope's Colour Art Studio and Gallery, a new art space in Silver Spring.

Also in the Gazette, a byline-less article discusses that as part of the Montgomery College annual Holocaust Commemoration program, Montgomery College Professors Jon Goell and Brian Jones, former Montgomery College students John Hoover and Susan Maldon Stregack, and Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin will discuss their participation in the exhibit "Portraits of Life."

Goell and Jones acted as project leaders and chief photographers of the exhibit, photographing and interviewing local Holocaust survivors in their homes. The professors were assisted by Montgomery College adjunct faculty member Rollin Fraser, students and former students, who acted as photo assistants, interviewers and photographers. Jane Knaus, the college's creative services director, designed the exhibit and coordinated its production.

More than 30 Holocaust survivors have been photographed for "Portraits of Life," creating a lasting legacy of their lives and their stories of survival.

The "Portraits of Life" photography exhibit will be on display at the college's Communication Arts Technologies (CAT) Gallery. It will officially open at the Holocaust Commemoration event and will remain on display through the end of April.

Arts Talk Today

Curator Susana Torruella Leval, Director Emerita, El Museo Del Barrio, New York, will lead a roundtable discussion on "Latin American" Art: Expectation and Reality, today at the Arlington Arts Center starting at 7PM. Free and open to the public.

The exhibition "Art with Accent: Latin Americans in the Mid-Atlantic States," which was curated by Torruella Leval, is currently on exhibition at the Center and showcases work by Aldo Badano, Juan Bernal, Gute Brandao, Mark Caicedo, Ana Cavalcanti, Irene Clouthier, Pepe Coronado, Gerard de la Cruz, Felisa Federman, Luis Flores, Eva Holz, Tamara Kostianovsky, Rosana Lopez, Carolina Mayorga, Lara Oliveira, Alessandra Ramirez, Victoria Restrepo, Helga Thomson and Maria Velez.