Step two

A while back I told you about my new commercial ventures in the Philly area and my ideas about how to proceed.

That "venture" was nothing but a website back then... but thanks to a great 2007 as far as sales of my own artwork, step two is now ready for implementation and I will now participate in some art fairs and try to sell some of the art by the artists whose work I believe in and try to really promote here...

Wondrous people like Tim Tate, Marienela de la Hoz, Sandra Ramos (and a huge assortment of other Cubans) and all the good folks here.

Using the "war chest" of Samolians from sales of my own work, I have saved enough work to pay for the exhorbitant fees for three major art fairs, plus insurance, plus shipping, plus hotels, etc.

Plus pushing them to collectors on this blog! Thank God that my instincts have been dead on! Not just focused on "my" artists but all others on my "buy now list," most of which I don't represent.

But... I should have bought more Tim Tate and more Marienela, and more Amy Lin, and more Scott Brooks!

Anyway... here's my next art venture in its present form.

Step three: Enough $$$ to pay rent for a year in advance and open a new Philly space!

Comments invited!

MFA Show in Philly

Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art in Philly will have Dirt Made My Lunch, a group exhibition guest curated by Todd Keyser. The exhibition highlights the work of Philadelphia’s first year Master of Fine Arts students featuring Erin M. Riley, Kurt Freyer, Michael Treffehn, and Robert Scobey.

Robert Scobey, Miss February, 2008
Dirt Made My Lunch opens on Thursday, May 8, 2008 with an opening reception from 6-9 pm. The exhibition includes video, textile weaving, photography, sculpture and installation. The show closes on Saturday, June 21, 2008.

Over at Bethesda's Neptune Gallery

AOM Panels

The Pink Line Project will be presenting a series of panel discussions to educate the emerging and experienced art collector at the soon to open a Art-O-Matic. Click on the image below for details.


I have been asked to participat on a panel which will be held on Wednesday, May 21 at 7 pm in the 7th Floor Education Room. It is the "Information Overload: Finding Reliable and Useful Information About Art Collecting."

It will be moderated by DC ubercollector Dr. Fred Ognibene and will include JW Mahoney, Sharon Burton, Martin Irvine and yours truly.

See ya there!

Gallery critic and Washington City Paper part ways

I was very surprised to find out about a few minutes ago that Washington City Paper galleries critic Kriston Capps and the WCP have parted ways in what sounds (from Capps' side of the story) a very silly issue.

Something doesn't make sense here, but I'm sure that regardless of why (in Jeffry Cudlin's words) "the City Paper has given him the boot," Capps will continue to write for plenty of other outlets. He is an erudite, word-savvy, opinionated and educated writer and a budding curator.

Bailey on the subject here.

Cudlin on the same subject here.

The Surgeon and I



Dr. C. Everett Koop and I at a recent art panel in Baltimore. He's in his 90s; I want to look that good when I'm in my 70s! Photo by Keith Weller.

(In)Between Opening Video

A quick video of the opening night for the (In)Between exhibition at Philadelphia's Wexler Gallery.

Job in the arts in a beach town

Delaware's Rehoboth Art League is looking for a new Executive Director. This is a membership-based arts organization and exhibition center; the ED is to "provide overall leadership, direction, and management of the Rehoboth Art League's projects, programs and operations, including staff, volunteers, finances, curatorial, educational and outreach activities, membership, fundraising, and grant writing." Requires ten plus years management experience, ability to building strong community relationships, success in developing and implementing funding strategies.

The mission of the Art League is to provide arts education, promote and enccourage artists,maintain and enhance permanent collection. Founded in 1938, the Art League is on an historic three acre campus featuring an 18th century farmhouse. Rehoboth is a terrific beach town with fine restaurants and a vigorous art community. Email resume and cover letter to mhelms@coachwise.com.

Wanna go to a Tyson's Corner Opening on Thursday?

Noi Volkov opens at Tyson's Corner's Habatat Galleries on May 8 with a reception from 7:00 - 9:30 pm. The exhibition will be on display until June 14th.

Memorial to the medium

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but “Polaroids: Mapplethorpe,” opening this week at the Whitney, has become a memorial to the medium. Several weeks ago, the diminished Polaroid Corporation announced it will, in 2009, quit the instant-film business.

Read the article by Christopher Bonanos in New Yorker here.

Friday = Artomatic

Artomatic, the art show that art critics love to hate and everyone else loves to visit; the capital area's homegrown art extravaganza, opens to the public at noon on Friday, May 9, with art, performances and special events, including the fire-dancing troupe Flights of Fire and performance art in the form of a new TV game show, “The Road to Success!” in just the first weekend.

From past experience, there will be dozens of parties going on throughout the spaces. This is the DC event this week.

“NoMa is ready to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to Artomatic so they can see the transformation that is under way in NoMa,” said Elizabeth Price, President of the NoMa BID. “NoMa is currently a hotbed of construction activity and now, thanks to Artomatic, the neighborhood will be bursting with the energy and excitement that only the artistic community can create.”

Highlights of Artomatic’s opening weekend include:

• Unveiling of nine floors of 2-D and 3-D visual arts presentations by more than 700 local and regional artists.

• Flights of Fire – a fire dancing performance to be held outside at 9 p.m., Friday, May 9.

• “Electro-acoustic psychedelic world dance music” by Baltimore’s Telesma at 9 p.m., Friday, May 9.

• A Latin dance workshop with professional dance instructor Ibis Villegas, featuring salsa, merengue, samba, and other styles at 2 p.m., Saturday, May 10.

• Progressive rock by Guardians of Iridescence at 8 p.m., Saturday, May 10.

• “The Road to Success,” performance art by Carolina Mayorga in the form of a new TV game show at 8 p.m., Saturday, May 10.

• New wave/indie rock by Plastiq Passion, an all-girl band from Union City, New Jersey at 11 p.m., Saturday, May 10.

• An expressive drawing workshop with Giliah Litwack at 1 p.m., Sunday, May 11.

• "In-your-face" jazz/jam music "with a touch of funk" by Bethesda, JD-based Bassment Breaks at 4 p.m., Sunday, May 11.

A full schedule of events is available at www.artomatic.org/event.

Held regularly since 1999, Artomatic transforms an unfinished indoor space into an exciting and diverse arts event that is free and open to the public. In addition to displays and sales by hundreds of artists, the event features free films, educational presentations and children’s activities, as well as musical, dance, poetry, theater and other performances.

Who will be this year's AOM emerging star? Let's get those "Top 10" lists going!

May 9–June 15 at Capitol Plaza 1
1200 First Street, N.E., (Corner of First and M Streets)
Washington, D.C. 20002
(New York Avenue Metro station: Red line)
Free, but donations accepted

HOURS
Wednesday–Thursdays: 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Fridays–Saturdays: Noon to 2 a.m.
Sundays: Noon to 10 p.m.
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays
Directions- here.

Looking for studio space in Arlington, VA?

Immediate availability! Reeb Hall Studios has an opening for a fine artist in need of a small studio available June 1st, 2008. Rent/size approx. 12x18'/$230/month. 24 hr. access.

If interested, please send 1 to 3 small jpgs of recent work of yours and/or your website address and a really short letter of interest to: reebhallartists@yahoo.com

Click!

Click! is a photography exhibition that invites Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public and artists to participate in the exhibition process.

Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

The audience evaluation period has started but will close on May 23! So if you know everything about art or nothing at all, create an account, log in and evaluate some of the works that have been submitted during their open call for Click!

Evaluation can take a while, but you can do as little or as much as you want and you can log in anytime throughout the evaluation period. They need evaluators with a range of knowledge about art (including none!) and varied geographic locations (including outside of Brooklyn!) to log in and have their say.

Click! culminates in an exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks are installed according to their relative ranking from the juried process. Visitors will also be able to see how different groups within the crowd evaluated the same works of art.

The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory. The exhibition is organized by Shelley Bernstein, Manager of Information Systems, Brooklyn Museum.

Click here.

MoMA exhibit dies

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

Read the story by Helen Stoilas in the Art Newspaper here.

Tim Tate sets new auction record

I'm pretty sure that a new auction record for a work of art by a living Washington, DC artist was set last night in Philadelphia when two mixed media glass reliquiaries by Tim Tate were auctioned off for $82,000.

That's right boys and girls - Eighty two thousand Samolians.

Buy Tim Tate now.

In the Greater DC area Tate is represented by Fraser Gallery. In Philadelphia you can currently get his work at Wexler Gallery (where's he's currently in a group show). In Chicago his work is available through the Marx Saunders Gallery (where he's currently in a group show). In Charlottesville go to Migrations Gallery. In London his dealer is the Steps Gallery. In Santa Fe he's represented by Jane Sauer (where he currently has a solo show). In Norfolk you can get it through Mayer Fine Art Gallery. In San Francisco it's the Donna Seager Gallery. In Berlin it's Gallery 24, and throughout the US at art fairs and such through the Maurine Littleton Gallery.

See the auction in the video below...

Today: Zoe Strauss Photography Installation Under I-95

Philly photographer and installation artist Zoe Strauss will exhibit 231 new and selected works today, Sunday, May 4th, 2008 from 1pm to 4pm under I-95 at Front St. and Mifflin St. in South Philadelphia.

The exhibition is free and open to the public. Selected pieces of Ms. Strauss's art will be available as color photocopies for purchase at five dollars each. The event will happen rain or shine.

This is the 8th year of Ms. Strauss's ongoing 10-year photo installation in South Philadelphia. Within the last 8 years Ms. Strauss has shown in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, had an acclaimed solo show at Silverstein Photography, is shooting for a book of her photography to be released in October 2008, has been commissioned to create a ramp project at the Philadelphia ICA, had eight prints purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their permanent collection, received a Leeway grant and became a member of the Leeway advisory council, shown a slideshow at the Philadelphia ICA and won the "friends of Arcadia award" for her piece in the Arcadia Works on Paper Show.

Zoe Strauss is also the executive director of the Philadelphia Public Art Project. For more information on the May 4 exhibit or on the Philadelphia Public ArtProject please visit this website or contact Zoe Strauss at info@zoestrauss.com or 267.250.4158.

Only two years left in the project! Don't miss it!

New one on me

"Art day trading" is what I am going to call this curious happenstance.

Gallerist tells me of selling a work of art to a collector during a preview of a show. Buyer pays around $30,000 for the piece and then says to the gallerist something along the lines of: "keep it for sale during the show and see if someone buys it for $40,000 by the end of the exhibition."

Never seen this before

We went gallery hopping around Philly's Old City section and the streets were packed with people, performers and artists. All the galleries were packed.

In fact, the opening at Wexler Gallery was so crowded last night, that the owners at one point had to regulate traffic flow into the gallery as people came in and out.

I've never seen a gallery so packed for three solid hours and when they finally closed the doors there were still tons of people outside.

I'll have a video of the openings and the artwork later...

Art for Obama

On Friday, May 23, 6:30-9 PM, Duality Contemporary Art, a new gallery located in Arlington, Virginia, near the Shirlington area, is hosting an "Art for Obama Benefit Reception."

Art for sale is priced from $100 to $800 and there's a silent auction as well. Work by: Deborah Coburn, graffiti artist Tim Conlon, Joy Every, John Gascot, Dirk Herrman, Elizabeth Grusin-Howe, Lucy Herrman, Beverly Ryan, Nancy Sausser, Langley Spurlock, Paula Wachsstock, Angelika Wamsler, and more.

Details here

Healing Arts Gallery Grand Opening

DC's Smith Farm will be hosting the grand opening of its new Healing Arts Gallery on Friday, May 9th from 5:30-8PM.

The Gallery is a first-of-its-kind exhibition space in the US, innovatively designed to provide each visitor with a unique experience of how the arts can enhance wellbeing.

Smith Farm Center, a renowned leader in combining art with health and healing, has leveraged its decade of experience at the forefront of this emerging field to design and construct the facility in the heart of the U Street historic art district in Washington, DC.

The Gallery, recently featured at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA’s) “Value and Importance of Art in Health Care” Conference, is supported by the DC Commission on Arts and the Humanities for its groundbreaking approach. The public is invited to attend the grand opening events.

It’s also a “green” gallery – and I believe it may be the first in the nation. Whenever possible, Smith Farm has chosen to incorporate environmentally sensitive choices into the rehabilitation process. These choices include: compact flourescent lights throughout the space, No-voc paint, a donated, reclaimed brazilian cherry wood floor, low-water flow toilet and energy efficient HVAC system. The Gallery has a "green roof" and two living walls of plants that actually oxygenate the facility. The Gallery’s tenant is a store that focuses on green products.

Details here.