Alice Neel

I'm looking forward to "Alice Neel’s Women", which will be opening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on October 28.

Not just because I am a huge Neel fan, but also because the exhibition features a portrait by Neel of our own Lida Moser.

Neel did four portraits of Lida Moser in her lifetime. I am not sure which one(s) is included in this exhibition. I've been writing and calling the NMWA for the last two years (to find out), and so far they've ignored me.

Lida Moser was one of Alice Neel's closest friends, and I love to hear her stories about how in the 40s, 50s and 60s Neel's work was ignored by the critics and art world because she refused to change her work to "fit" the prevailing abstract styles in vogue during those years.

Lida Moser also recalls how, when Neel began to get recognition in the 1970s, especially after her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, male artists in the NY art scene openly resented her success because she was a woman.

Moser also experienced this same form of resentment (from male photographers) when she was given photographic assignments by Vogue, Look, Life and other such magazines that she worked for.

Today's female artists stand on the shoulders of both these wonderful women.

See work by Lida Moser here and by Alice Neel here.

The Power of the Web

Thanks to the several lawyers who contacted me offering to help the local artist being ripped off by a NYC gallery.

I'll keep track of the issue and report as warranted.

Sunday openings

"Human Containers" at Target Gallery in Alexandria is having an opening reception and talk by the juror Twylene Moyer (managing editor of Sculpture magazine) this Sunday from 4-6 PM. Tim Tate, Alison Sigethy and Mark Jenkins are among the local artists who will have works on display there. All together there are 20 artists from the US and Canada in the exhibition.

Before you get there, you can also walk across the hall and visit the Art League's opening for their International Landscape Show. That opening is Sunday from 2-4PM.

Both galleries are on the ground floor of the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria.

Friday openings

Loads of gallery openings tonight, mostly around the Galleries of Dupont Circle where neighbors Conner Contemporary, Irvine Contemporary and Washington Printmakers all have excellent group shows.

In Georgetown, our neighbor Anne C. Fisher also has an opening for an excellent show: Beyond Synergy.

All these openings run from 6-8PM.

New Gallery in Town

The fair Zoe Myers has been hunting for a gallery space around DC and surrounding areas for a long time, and now she has finally settled into what I am told is a great new space in Bethesda.

The Heineman Myers Contemporary Art gallery in Bethesda is now under construction (website too) and when finished will be the largest gallery in the Greater Washington area and will also add a powerful new presence to Bethesda's ever growing gallery scene.

Heineman Myers Contemporary Art will be located at 4728 Hampden Lane, Bethesda, MD 20814.

Welcome!

Secrets on TV

Tonight's Fox Five News at 10 will carry a segment about Frank Warren's Post A Secret Project.

And this and all the recent success of his project couldn't happen to a nicer and harder working artist.

Congrats!

Watson on Seven

Amy Watson of The Artery, reviews Seven at Thinking About Art.

Read the review here.

Lawyer Needed

A very good artist is in the process of being ripped off out of over $50,000 worth of artwork. This artist desperately needs a lawyer to assist the artist with legal help to get the artwork back. It appears to be a very simple case where legal correspondence from a lawyer threatening legal action if the work is not returned will probably do the trick.

The artist is willing to trade art for legal assistance, as the artist is unable to afford paying one (mostly because most of the artist's money was spent preparing the art now being held by the gallery).

For anyone interested: Please email me and I'll expand further privately.

P.S. And yes, I know all about WALA. This artist still needs a lawyer.

One of my favorite poems

La Rosa Blanca

I grow a white rose
In July as in January
For the sincere friend
Who offers a hand frankly.

And for the cruel person who tears out
the heart with which I live,
I grow neither nettles nor thorns:
I grow a white rose.

By Jose Marti

Beyond Synergy

Beyond Synergy opens with a Reception on Friday, 5 August, 6-8pm at the Anne C. Fisher Gallery, in Canal Square in Georgetown.

The exhibition features nine area artists working in a variety of media selected from submissions to the public arts competition Synergy. The exhibition continues through 8 September.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: September 2, 2005.

Abington Art Center Gallery and Sculpture Park 2005 Slide Review Program.

A full prospectus is available on the gallery page at www.abingtonartcenter.org and needs to accompany all submissions.

Abington Art Center invites professional artists to submit proposals for consideration to participate in their Gallery, Sculpture Park and community venues. Each season the exhibition program consists of several exhibitions in their galleries featuring national and regional artists, and the installation of large scale sculptures in their outdoor sculpture park.

For both indoor and outdoor exhibitions, the Center provides artists with professionally produced documentation, invitations, catalogues and promotional materials. Related educational programs such as lectures, public forums and workshops are designed to stimulate and involve audiences in the experience. The focus, criteria and eligibility for each venue is different, so please read the prospectus carefully before completing the application. Artists from the mid-Atlantic and New England are most likely to be selected, others may be considered. For more information, visit: www.abingtonartcenter.org.

Send 6-10 slides, a slide list with name, title, medium, date and dimensions. Current short resume. A one page artist's statement. For return of submission materials, enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope. Application/Entry Fee: $10.

Abington Art Center
ATTN: Curatorial Review
515 Meetinghouse Road
Jenkintown, PA 19046

Bader Fund

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund invites visual artists (excluding filmmakers, video artists, and performance artists) to apply for grants. Artists must be 40 years of age or older, live within 150 miles of Washington, D.C., and demonstrate that they have the potential to benefit as artists from a grant.

Last year three grants were awarded, one for $20,000 and two for $15,000.

Applications must be postmarked no later than September 30, 2005. To obtain a current application form, please visit the Fund's website: www.baderfund.org, or write to the Fund at:

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund
5505 Connecticut Avenue, NW #268
Washington, D.C. 20015

Send email inquiries to grants@baderfund.org.

New DC art Blog

Samantha Wolov, whose work is one of the more noticeable photographic entries in Seven (she takes photos of her friends having sex), has a new Blog: Nekkid with a Camera.

I love that title!

Visit Sam often. Her Blog is here and her website is here.

Openings This Week

The Art League’s American Landscape show is now global!

Last year in honor of the Art League’s 50th Anniversary, the annual American Landscape Show expanded to include both American and international landscapes. As their artists and visitors travel internationally, the show was a resounding success and will, from now on, be known as the International Landscape Show.

This All-Media Membership Show will be juried by Timothy App, an award-winning and well-respected abstract painter. The show opens August 3rd and runs through Sept. 5th. The opening reception and awards ceremony is this coming Sunday from 2-4PM.

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Washington Printmakers Gallery presents the National Small Works 2005 exhibition featuring works from 23 artists nationwide.

The show runs from August 2 - 28, 2005, with an opening reception and awards presentation this coming Friday, August 5 from 5 to 8 pm. A gallery talk with the artists is next week, Thursday, August 11 from 12 to 1 pm. The juror for the show was Krystyna Wasserman, Curator of Book Arts at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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Conner Contemporary has Academy 2005 opening on August 5 from 6-8PM and running through August 27.

The exhibition, this year being curated by Jamie L. Smith, takes the pulse of new work being created by recent graduates and students from our area's art schools. It is one of my favorite shows of the year and it is now in its fifth year.

Go see some art this week!

Talking Done

Just back from the curator's talk at Seven. A nicely sized crowd showed up, which was a little surprising to me, since usually it has been my experience that these curator talks only attract the artists involved. Thanks to all the DC Art News readers who came by and said howdy.

Bailey has a nice photo storyline of the talk here.

He also managed to fall in love in the subway on the way to Seven and on the way back! The two photos below are courtesy of Bailey:

Me outside Warehouse discussing Seven

Me discussing Tim Tate's work
And the below photo courtesy of Mark Cameron Boyd:


Alessandra Torres discusses her installation
After the talk Alessandra and her family took me out to dinner to Lauriol, where I had some excellent Cuban food.

And Bailey also managed to whip out a monster letter to the Washington Post editors taking Jessica Dawson on for her dismissal of Seven.

It's OK; it's her right as a critic.

And yet, a bad review is better than no review at all. Jessica's expected dismissal of the show has nonetheless resulted in one major sale to an important DC collector.

In addition to Jessica's and John Blee's review, there are three separate other reviews being written right now, and hopefully they will be published soon; let's see what some other observers think.

Curator's Talk

What: Curator's Talk on Seven, an exhibition of 67 WPA/C artists.

When: Today at 2PM.

Where: The seven spaces that make up the Warehouse Theatre and Galleries complex. Located at 1021 7th Street, NW, across from the new Washington Convention Center. We'll start at the top gallery on the third floor.

See ya there!

Mid Year Report

As much as I bitch about lack of dedicated art buyers and collectors in the DC area (especially considering the huge amount of wealth in our region), I was surprised to find out when the fair Catriona recently told me that so far this is our best year ever, and that we've already sold more artwork by the end of July than all of last year.

But I am still amazed at the large percentage of non-Washingtonians buying art from us: New York, LA, Floridians, Irish and Brits!

Why?

Waste newsprint space on this?

Directory Assistance

Let me start by saying that the first thing that I usually read when I open my copy of the City Paper is Chris Shott's most excellent "Show & Tell" column. It is usually witty and interesting, and in fact I have contributed to some of them in the past.

But at the risk of pissing off Chris, I think that this week's Directory Assistance (scroll down) piece in "Show & Tell" is much ado about nothing.

Taking one artist's complaint about the WPA/C's Artist's Directory creating a "tiered membership", with more "services going to those who pay for them," is giving an audience to a complaint that is simply economically ridiculous!

It costs $70 to get into the Artist's Directory. In my opinion, that is an excellent adverstising and marketing opportunity for the buck. To expect that your $45 annual WPA/C membership will also cover the cost of printing and distributing the book is immensely naive.

And those directories move!

We sell them (they also get stolen quite often) at our galleries (we turn all proceeds over to the WPA/C) and they sell well, and in the past visiting Sotheby's personnel have acquired them as reference materials. And I know of several artists who have had their exposure in the book create further opportunities (including myself).

Chris writes that "members who failed to come up with the extra cash for the forthcoming 2006 edition of the WPA\C artist directory are missing out on more than just seeing their names, contact info, and sample works in print," referencing the fact that the WPA/C’s latest exhibition, titled "Turning the Page: Artists Selected From the 2006 WPA\C Artist Directory," only looked at those artists who had purchased a page in the book.

So?

The WPA/C also maintains a slide registry. Many of the WPA/C past exhibitions have have their birth in this registry. And yet a lot of member artists do not have any slides in it.

My point is that inclusion in the slide registry and inclusion in the Artist's Directory is open to all artist members; it costs an additional $70 to get into the directory, but that's an economic non-debatable issue.

The alternative would be to raise the annual fee to $115 a year and open the directory to everyone. Were this to happen I suspect that a wail of complaints (more than one solitary voice) would be raised, from artists who do not wish to add the additional expense just to be in the book.

And on a final point, Chris writes:

Yet paying for a page in the directory doesn’t exactly grant you a great shot at showing your work at "Turning the Page." The series, presently curated by WPA\C Project Manager Ingrid Nuss and summer intern Ding Ren, will showcase only nine artists out of about 375 who paid for a listing, or 2.4 percent.

Well, that's what happens when one has a curated show - it is after all a "selection process."

All inclusive shows abound in our area, such as Wall Mountables and Artomatic.

And guess what? A lonely artist voice here and there also routinely complain about those shows, usually the small financial cost associated with them, or requirement to help with gallery sitting, etc.

The WPA/C has had some valid hiccups in the past, but in this case though, this squeaky wheel shouldn't have received any WCP grease.

Wall Mountables at DCAC

Around this town, anytime that you have an open show (meaning a show without a juror or curator), the critics tend to immediately savage it. This seems to be a predictable critical analysis somewhat unique to our area's visual arts and artists as viewed by most of our area critics.

Once a year, the District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC), through a show called "Wall Mountables," allows any and all artists to hang anything they want, so long as it fits within a two square foot space. That exhibition opened last night to a huge crowd, and hangs at DCAC until September 4, 2005.

And in my opinion, after having seen several years' worth of "Wall Mountables," and after having participated in several of them myself, and after having purchased art in some of them, this is the best "Wall Mountables" so far.

The show is hung salon-style, as every precious inch of wall space has been claimed by artists. A prize, for best use of the space, was awarded on opening night by DCAC Executive Director B. Stanley as selected by several "Best Use of Space" jurors: Michael O'Sullivan, one of the the WaPo's art critics, DCAC Board members Philip Barlow and Marc Cohen and someone else whose name I cannot recall.

The winner was the fair Kathryn Cornelius, who's riding a hot streak recently, including receiving lots of attention for her video piece in the Warehouse's "Seven" show. Cornelius intelligently employed her two foot square by installing a glass-encased swing gate, inside which she created an installation of written words on a collection of matchbooks.

The buzz artist of the night was Ben Tolman, whose superbly weird little paintings and drawings were selling like hot cakes (I bought three of them). Tolman, who recently graduated from the Corcoran, and who has an impressive piece included in the Warehouse's "Seven" show, is represented by a dozen or so small paintings and drawings, which although showing a tremendous influence by the works of the equally odd Robert Crumb, nonetheless show young Mr. Tolman's own unique views and creative hand at work in his weird world of three breasted women, space aliens and sad girls.

I also quite liked Todd Gardner's series of works focused on clowns; really odd and somewhat scary clowns - more like a Stephen King version (such as in his masterpiece It) than a Red Skelton kind of clown.

Gardner's works are frenetic and full of information, and in his own clown infested world, almost make sense in some oddly familiar way, cleverly dragging us into these intimate-sized works that then bring the viewer into Gardner's Stephenkinguesque macabre clownland.

I also liked Natalie Marcy's resin and plaster wall sculptures.

They are (I assume) dipped images of Natalie's face; there are three of them in the exhibition.

In the sculptures in the show, Marcy has employed the same multiple portrait approach, to deliver interesting, if slightly surreal, imagery, as if we're looking at the artist's face from an underwater perspective.

Kristin Freeman, who is DCAC's departing gallery manager, also has several handsome mixed media drawings in the show. And the fair Candace Keegan has several of her sexy portraits on exhibit, drawing the usual attention from everyone.

Peter Gordon has a singularly brilliant painting in the exhibition titled "Easy Does It." It is one of those clear paintings with an unexpectedly mundane subject (a salt and pepper shaker) that delivers a good lesson in what a good painter can do to keep the "ancient medium" alive and fresh.

Study this painting and you'll soon discover, in the elegant way in which Gordon has handled the paint, what a dab of white can do to create the illusion of light and a third dimension on the confines of a two dimensional canvas. No matter how many times I see this painting trick effectively accomplished, it still takes my breath away. That is why a thousand years from now, art galleries all over the universe will still sell paintings.

There's also one of those beautifully fragile laminated plywood wall sculptures by Nancy Samson Reynolds that are sensual and minimalist. It stands out both visually and figuratively.

On the same wall as Nancy's sculpture there are four mixed media pieces by Anna V. Davis, whose recent show at Gallery Neptune was quite good.

The works are colorful and visually attractive and also demand closer attention, as one discovers the craft of Davis' hands at work.

Initially giving the appearance of a very complex mosaic, we are fooled by Davis into thinking that her work is just sort of a square pointillist genre of painting.

Bring your nose closer to the work, and discover that in addition to painting, Davis has secured thousands of tiny paper pieces, to in effect create a mixed media of collaged paper and paint, to in reality created a paper mosaic of her unusually contemporary figurative work.

It is colorful and intelligent (and obviously enormously time consuming), and marries the ancient tradition of inlaid mosaic work, with a new fresh interpretation and look.

My final mention goes to a really nice photograph by Jennifer Dorsey, titled "Diversity in Monotony." It is one of those photographs that stands out by its clarity and starkness, although I wondered how it would look about ten times larger than the two foot space given to it.

Go see this show and buy some artwork.