Opportunity for DMV Artists

Deadline: October 30, 2010

The BlackRock Center for the Arts has a huge gorgeous gallery space and their call for artists for the 2011 art season is now up.

The 2011 Call to Artists is open to all artists residing in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC over the age of 18 for original artwork only. This call will cover exhibits in the gallery from October 2011 through August 2012. An exhibit may include on applicant or a combination of applicants, based on the judgement of jurors. The jury panel is comprised of Kathleen Moran, Jack Rasmussen and yours truly.

Details here.

Museum futures

There's no shining line separating the generations, of course. Some directors have been preaching the "populist" gospel for years, often translating that into exhibitions about guitars, hip-hop or "Star Wars" paraphernalia and live music nights with cocktails, DJs and dancing.

Current thinking goes much deeper. Many young directors see museums as modern-day "town squares," social places where members of the community may gather, drawn by art, perhaps, for conversation or music or whatever. They believe that future museum-goers won't be satisfied by simply looking at art, but rather prefer to participate in it or interact with it.

Read the WSJ article by Judy Dobrzynski here.

Ansel Adams Lawsuit

A group representing Ansel Adams sued a California man for selling prints and posters under the name of the famed nature photographer, the latest salvo in a dispute over glass negatives bought at a garage sale and purported to be Adams' lost work.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal district court in San Francisco by The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, seeks to stop Rick Norsigian and consulting firm PRS Media Partners from using Adams' name, likeness and trademark in their efforts to sell prints and posters not authorized or endorsed by the trust.

Read the article here.

Taubman Museum of Art in trouble

The new Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA is already in financial straits. Read Judith H. Dobrzynski's excellent take on the subject here and the Roanoke Times article on the subject here.

Is There an Age Limit for 'Emerging Artists'?

I'm not sure if I agree with all the points in this excellent article by Daniel Grant in the HuffPost, but there are some very good points and opinions being made and delivered:

Age, education and exhibition history are not the only areas in which artists may get into trouble. Listing published reviews of group shows they were in but which did not mention their names or artwork looks deceitful, and banking on the possibility that the dealer doesn't actually read the review adds insult to injury. On the other hand, an online review has no less significance than one seen in a hardcopy publication (there is no need to include a link; just put the article title, author, date and main URL of the site and let the reader find it). Listing the names of more prominent artists in a group in which one participated seems "lame," Winkleman said.

Read it here.

National Cell Phone Photography Exhibition

Deadline: August 30, 2010.

The Southeastern Louisiana University Contemporary Art Gallery (Hammond, LA) seeks entries for an exhibition to be held September 9 - 25. The exhibition is open to amateurs and professional artists nationally. All artwork submitted for the exhibition must have been taken with the camera within a cell phone with no Photoshop or any other manipulation or effects. Images are to be full frame, not cropped in any way. $10 entry fee if images are sent by email, due to print cost. For prospectus, please email Dale Newkirk at dnewkirk@selu.edu or call 985-549-5080.

Opportunity for video artists

Deadline: September 30, 2010.

Visual Overture Magazine is accepting submissions for a special section of the magazine called “Spotlight on Video Art,” to be included in the Winter 2010 issue, which will feature the work of one serious emerging videographer whose work is fine art. Materials to Submit: 2-3 videos, 500 word essay describing why your video work can be classified as fine art. Online Application: www.visualoverture.com/artists.htm

Benny Moré

Today is the birthday of Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré Gutiérrez (d. 1963 at age 43), known to Cubans as Benny Moré, and considered the best Cuban popular singer and Cuban orchestra leader of all time. Without any formal musical training, witness how he directs his huge band in the rare footage below, and then check him out in a scandalous zoot suit outfit singing number in a Cuban movie of the 1950s:

Go get some Benny CDs...

Pencil this opening for September 23

First Campello gallery exhibition in DC area in 4 years!

Next Sept 20 - Oct. 15 I will be having my first substantial exhibition in the DC area in four years. The show will be at the School of Art & Design at Montgomery College's King Street Gallery, located in the beautiful Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center at 930 King Street in the Montgomery College, Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus.

There will be all new drawings in my constant exploration of using the human figure to deliver social, historical, satirical, mythological and political messages. The show also includes work by the immensely talented Johanna Mueller, who was one of my top picks from the last Artomatic and whom I predict will steal the show, as well as Leah Frankel and Leslie Shellow, both of whom are new artists to me.

The show is curated by Dr. Claudia Rousseau and is:

An exhibit of works on paper depicting mythical themes, or themes connoting transformations—mythical, magical or organic.

The exhibit will include prints, drawings and installation works employing paper with wax and other media.

The opening is Thursday, September 23, 5:00 – 7:30 pm. I expect to see all of you there to make me look good...

Small scale clay sculptor needed

Are you really good at sculpting realistic objects out of clay? Do you need some extra money? The Washington Glass School has a project that requires small clay realistic objects in the two to four inch range. This would be ongoing throughout the year. Contact washglassschool@aol.com for further info.

Lenny the Insufferable

Some good Q & A's going on in the comments section here with the usual name calling making its expected appearance.

Rita La Caimana

For your listening (and viewing pleasure) two music videos singing Rita La Caimana, one of the most famous Cuban songs of the son genre. It's about a famous woman from Bayamo, in Oriente province named Rita La Caimana (Rita The Cayman - a Cayman being a Cuban crocodile).

Apparently everyone in Bayamo knew this lady, and all her life she'd go from door to door asking for alms, and whenever she heard music playing she'd break out into a dancing fever that made her famous throughout Cuba. Check out how the two versions are so different from each other and how the singer in the first version looks like American actor Michael Clarke Duncan.

Looking for new members

The Artists’ Gallery in Frederick, Maryland is currently reviewing applicants for membership.

The Artists’ Gallery has been representing emerging and established local artists for twenty years. As a cooperative gallery, the establishment affords artists both the opportunity to show and to participate in the running of the gallery. Each month, two members are featured in solo exhibitions in separate rooms, and a changing monthly show of other members work is displayed in a third space.

Sculpture, installation, photography, ceramics, printmaking and painting are among the media represented. The gallery artists hold opening receptions on Frederick’s popular “First Saturday,” which consistently draws a strong turn-out.

Members are accepted based on a portfolio review, which may then be followed by a jurying of current work and personal interview by current members.

Information and downloadable application can be found on the website
www.the-artists-gallery.org.

To speak to a gallery representative about membership and the application process, please call Johan Lowie at 571-276-6876, or by email 5thstreetstudio@gmail.com or Linda Agar-Hendrix at 301-865-5047, email: hendrix2723@gmail.com

The new Touchstone Gallery to re-open

Grand Opening: Friday, September 10, 6 - 8:30 pm

Touchstone Gallery, which is owned and operated by an association of Washington DC area artists since 1976, is re-opening in a new space on New York Avenue September 10, with a "champagne celebration." Touchstone, which has been without a home since leaving its former Penn Quarter location nearly a year ago, begins its latest incarnation with fifty members in a custom-designed, ground-floor site at 901 New York Avenue, next to Acadiana restaurant and a block from the Convention Center.

New Gallery

Art Reactor, a new artist-run gallery/workshop/studio space at 5614 Baltimore Avenue, Hyattsville, Maryland, 20781, is currently hosting its first curated exhibit. The show, entitled The Whole Plate Project, is an exhibit of photographs made in the whole plate format, using a variety of historic and contemporary materials. Whole plate as a size is defined as 6.5 by 8.5 inches - it is the original format as used by Louis Daguerre for his polished silver plates in the first photographs of 1839.

Whole plate as a format has had a long and varied history, coming in and out of fashion with each major wave of photographic innovation. The work in this show relates historic process and practice to modern issues, anxieties and imagery. Work featured includes wet-plate collodion, hand-crafted silver gelatin prints, platinum/palladium, cyanotype and silver-gelatin prints on contemporary commercial papers.

The exhibit features work by eight artists from across the US, Canada, and Germany - Scott Davis, Quinn Jacobson, Diane Maher, Chris Rini, Denise Ross, Barry Schmetter, Heather Wetzel and David William White. including two artists from the Washington DC metro area, Scott Davis and Barry Schmetter.

The exhibit runs from August 9 to September 10. Art Reactor will be open August 27th from 7-9 PM for a reception with light refreshments. Regular open hours will be held Saturday the 28th from 10am to 4pm and September 4 and 5 from 10-4. The space will also be open by appointment weekdays after 7pm or any other unscheduled time on weekends.

Martell on Gossage

Nevin Martell has a terrific piece in the WCP about DC area super photographer John Gossage.

He wasn’t yet 18 when he had his first show in New York. Since then, he’s exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Hannover, Germany’s Sprengel Museum, and shared wall space with Jasper Johns and others. In September, his well-known series The Pond, which documents an unidentified, Walden-esque body of water somewhere near Baltimore, will be displayed in its entirety for the first time at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was published as a book in 1985.

“John Gossage is the most talented and most significant photographer of his generation—a generation rich in excellence,” says Lewis Baltz, a celebrated photographer himself. “Alongside Ed Ruscha and Richard Prince, Gossage’s achievements in the book format have been an invaluable contribution to the field and an inspiration to the rest of us.”

Read Martell's really excellent article here.

Battle of Covadonga

Today (we think) marks the 1288th anniversary of the Battle of Covadonga, the historic event that stopped the tide of the Islamic invasion of Spain and turned back the Arabic armies in what became the Reconquista of Spain.

It is said by Arab historians that with Pelayo (Pelagius, 681-737) as their leader, the combined Gothic, Celtic and Asturian Christian armies under Pelayo, a son of Favila, who had been a noble at the court of the Visigoth King Egica, (687-700), and had established his headquarters at Cangas de Onís, in Asturias, united the various northern peoples of Iberia (the Celts in Galicia and Asturias and the former ruler Visigoths) and began an uprising against the advancing Umayyad Muslims, who had defeated and killed Rodrigo (Roderick) the last Gothic King of Spain.

On this day, in either 722 or 721, the ten-year-old Islamic invasion of western Europe was turned around as Pelayo defeated the Islamic armies and the battle assured the independence of the most ancient Kingdom of Asturias, and it is that kingdom's survival which eventually became the kernel of new thrust that reconquered the westernmost European peninsula and became the modern nation of Spain.

Freedom does not come easy.

Kuitca coming to the Hirshhorn

"Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008," on view Oct. 21-Jan. 16, 2011, at the Hirshhorn will present over 45 canvases and 25 works on paper, spanning the Argentinean artist's career.

"Part of the Hirshhorn's commitment to international contemporary art has always been a focus on the artists of Latin America," said Kerry Brougher, the museum's deputy director and chief curator. "The Hirshhorn acquired its first work by Kuitca back in 1995, when he was still an emerging figure, and we have watched his reputation continue to grow ever since. We are pleased to have co-organized this retrospective and to be able to present the full spectrum of this insightful artist's work in Washington, and we look forward to the upcoming year featuring exhibitions with some of the most influential Latin American artists of our time."

The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the artist's work in the United States in more than 10 years and is co-organized by the Hirshhorn, Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and Miami Art Museum in Miami, Fla.

Here's the odd thing to me. For at least five or six years I've had not one, but two art collectors who are retiring and in the process of donating most of their collection. I've tried every angle that I know to donate some of their Latin American artists, specifically Sandra Ramos, to the Hirshhorn. They continue to decline to accept the gift, and that is their right, but what puzzles me is that other museums (MoMA, Dallas, MFA Boston, Miami) have all recognized the inherent value of accepting a Ramos donation now -- before the Castro brothers finally died and Cuba returns to the list of free nations -- rather than later.

And now Kerry Brougher highlights a "focus on the artists of Latin America" (news to me), which makes their declining of a gift by one of Latin America's most celebrated Cuban artists a puzzle. Especially when other museums all over the US are jumping on the offers.

I realize that I am far from objective on this issue, but it is still a puzzle to me. By the way, the last Sandra Ramos work that I offered the Hirshhorn as a gift has now been gifted to the permanent collection of the Miami Art Museum.

If you feel like fish

It has nothing to do with art, but I've been meaning to mention this for a while. I love fresh fish and the key fish place around here is Atlantic Supermarket (7901 New Hampshire Avenue, Hyattsville, MD 20783-4609, (301) 439-7005). Loads of fresh fish in their fish department, including many species not generally available in your regular supermarket. Today I bought Mahi Mahi for $2.99 a pound and it's not frozen, but on ice and the guy cleans it right in front of you.

I also bought a fish that I'd never heard of called Basa. I got it just to try it (and because it was very cheap).

Having just come back from Miami, I was hoping to find Mamey ice cream, which (in my opinion) is the best tropical fruit ice cream on the planet. They didn't have it (in fact they don't have much ice creams).

I'll keep looking for Mamey (called Zapote in the Oriente province of Cuba) ice cream. They even sell it at Safeway in Miami, so maybe my local Safeway can order it for me.

Jessica Picks Steven Silberg as the 7th one

Jessica Dawson's Real D.C. series may completely (OK, OK, partially restore) my faith in the WaPo and the local area's visual art scene. Her 7th pick is Steven Silberg and so far she's seven for seven with me in her picks.

Whodda thunk it?

Check out all seven picks so far here. All picks will be invited by me for the next volume of 100 More Washington Artists.