Openings and ongoings...

DMV area artists openings around the DMV and the nation:

Carol Reed at Susan Calloway Fine Arts on February 23 - March 23

Felicia Avalos, Irene Clouthier, Anthony Gongora, and Giselle Ruzany at Little Salon on  February 23

Maida Withers and Annika B. Lewis at Arts Club of Washington - Monroe House on February 28

Fran Abrams at Foundry Gallery on March 2 - March 27

Anna Demovidova at Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital on March 3 - May 1

Roxana Alger Geffen and Fabiola Alvarez Yurcisin at Olly Olly on March 5 - March 31

Richard Paul Weiblinger at 47th Annual LAG Open Juried Exhibition on March 6 - March 27

Amy Hughes-Braden at Montgomery College's Open Gallery on March 23 - May 2

Alexandra Chiou at Vivid Solutions Gallery on March 25 - May 13

Carol Barsha at Nesto Gallery on April 1 - May 6

Ongoing: 

Dafna Steinberg and Jenny Walton at Flashpoint Gallery to March 19

Jung Min Park at District of Columbia Arts Center to March 20

Nara Park and Dane Winkler at Hamiltonian Gallery to March 26

Mike McConnell at Strathmore, curated by Adah Rose Bitterbaum and Harriet Lesser, through February 21

Gail Rebhan at Lentos Art Museum through February 21

Stephen Schiff at ARC Gallery through February 27

Catherine Day at BlackRock Center for the Arts through February 27

Marc Robarge and Alex Porter at Hillyer Art Space through February 27

Gordon Binder at Studio Gallery through February 27

Stephanie Firestone at Salzland Museum through February 28

Linda Larochelle at 1st Stage Theater through February 28

Becky S. Kim at Foundry Gallery through February 28

John M. Adams, Barb Januszkiewicz, and Jennifer Lillis at 34zero9 Art Studios and Micro Gallery through February 29

Richard Weiblinger at Marymount University's Barry Gallery through March 3 and Maryland House of Delegates through April 6

Fabiano Amin, Joel D'Orazio, Sylvia Gottwald, Oenone Hammersley, Kathryn McDonnell, Elba Molina,and Helen Zughaib at Watergate Gallery through March 5

Lilian Hoover at Honfleur Gallery through March 11

Cedric Baker, Daniel T. Brooking, Edward Savwoir, Eric Celarier, and Gloria C. Kirk at Pepco Edison Place Gallery through March 11

Cianne Fragione at AU Museum at the Katzen Arts Center through March 13

Athena Tacha at Marsha Mateyka Gallery through March 19

Alexandra Chiou and Mike McConnell at Maryland Art Place through March 26

Jarvis Grant at Walton Gallery through March 3

Rebecca Clark, Joan Danzinger, David D'Orio, and Rachel Schmidt at Arlington Arts Center through April 3

Brian Dailey at Curator's Office through April 16

Lillis Werder at cove through May 12

Brian Feldman at Chinatown Friendship Archway through December 31

Artomatic is coming to Frederick!

The amazing artistic spectacle that is Artomatic is returning to Frederick, Maryland! Official announcement, dates and venue coming soon.

Here's my review of the last Frederick AOM.

NASA plans to send art to asteroid Bennu

And you are all invited to submit work!

You have until March 20 to submit your artwork. It would join the 442,000 other entries submitted through NASA's "Messages to Bennu" campaign.

Details at http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/21/us/nasa-art-asteroid/

Fields of Inquiry

Fields of Inquiry

Mei Mei Chang  Pat Goslee  Kathryn McDonnell February 27 – March 27, 2016 Opening Reception: Sunday, February 28, 2016  3 pm to 5 pm The Popcorn Gallery  (1st floor, Arcade Building)  7300 MacArthur Blvd.  Glen Echo, MD 20812 Gallery Hours:  Saturdays and Sundays, 12 pm to 6 pm or by appointment

In early December Mei Mei Chang, Pat Goslee and Kathryn McDonnell began working on two donated canvases. They moved the large canvases into Kathryn's studio and using paint that was also donated they began collaborating. They had to contend with busy work schedules, the holidays, travels, snowstorms, ice storms, blizzards and the pressure of a deadline, as well as unique artistic sensibilities. Will they be able to complete the paintings in time? And which one will they choose for the exhibition Fields of Inquiry? The gallery space at the Popcorn gallery is limited and will hold just one of the paintings. So they must choose. Please join them and see this unique collaboration.

State of the Art/DC - Part 3

By now you should all be aware of the three part "State of the Art/DC" conversation events sponsored by the DC chapter of the national professional women in the arts organization ART TABLE.

 

In the first two events (held at the NMWA and at Long View Gallery) they gave the floor to about a dozen DC based artists/art administrators/educators/organizers/thinkers each night for about 6-7 minutes to share thoughts about what they are doing now and their thoughts about the DC art scene in five years. 

 

There have been significant presenters and the event has been sold out both times.  

 

They are currently  accepting proposals for presenters for their last event, which will be late spring/early summer. You can submit a presentation proposal to programdc@arttable.org.  There is a jury involved.

 

Just so that you can get an idea, here are the presenters from the second session:

• Holly Bass, Artist and Director, Holly Bass 360
• Rhea Combs, Curator of Film and Photography at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Head of Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA)
• Tim Doud ( Artist and American University, Director, Studio Art) and Caitlin Teal Price (Artist and American University, Adjunct professor, Studio Art)
• Jarvis DuBois, Director, J. Dubois Arts
• Arthur Espinoza, Jr., Executive Director, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities
• Philippa Hughes, Writer/speaker/flâneur/provocateur
• Brandon Morse, Artist and professor, University of Maryland, Dept. of Art
• Andrea Pollan, Founder/Director, Curator’s Office
• Tony Powell, Artist, dancer, composer, choreographer, writer
• Victoria Reis, Co-founder, Executive & Artistic Director, Transformer Gallery

Moderator: Elizabeth Blair, Senior Producer, Arts Desk, NPR

Opportunity for Artists

Going home

Going home today! This is my hospital allegory to Frida Kahlo's "What the water gave me."

The Baltic Sea Anomaly

Baltic Sea Anomaly - Image courtesy of

www.disclose.tv

Peter Lindberg, Dennis Åsberg and the Swedish “Ocean X” diving team are the Swedish folks who originally discovered this curious object in the Baltic in June 2011.


They also reported that this gigantic object was at the end of a 300-meter “runway” and that they had also found what looked like a staircase and a hole leading to the interior of the object.

More images here and lots more here.

For TBT: Teen paintings

Memories of Baracoa, Cuba
circa 1973, 20x16 inches
House paint on cardboard by F. Lennox Campello
In the collection of Ana Olivia Cruzata, Viuda de Campello, Hialeah, Florida

Memories of Cuba
circa 1972, 16x40 inches
House paint on found board by F. Lennox Campello
In the collection of Ana Olivia Cruzata, Viuda de Campello, Hialeah, Florida

For TBT: The fish drawings

As I've noted before, between 1992-1993 I was lucky to have lived in wondrous Sonoma, California, the real queen city of the wine country.

While I lived there, I used to drive down to Monterey and do an art fair there... one year, a local seafood restaurant owner who collected my work proposed to me to do a few drawings of some of the fish that he served in exchange for a lifetime free food at the restaurant (which had been on the Monterey Fisherman's Wharf for years, and it's still there to this day.

I agreed, and later on I drove down again, checked in, ate lunch and then went into the kitchen area, where they brought out the fish, nicely laid on a bed of ice.

I used a Sumi brush and ink to capture the images of the fish that they served... some of them are shown below:

Trawick Prize

The application for The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards is now available. They are accepting entries until Friday, April 8. The application and additional details can be found at www.bethesda.org. 

The prizes are as follows:

Best in Show - $10,000

Second Place - $2,000

Third Place - $1,000

Young Artist (must be born after April 8, 1986 to enter this category) - $1,000

The jury will select up to 10 finalists who will be invited to display their work in a group exhibition in downtown Bethesda in September 2016. Applicants must be 18 years of age or older and permanent, full-time residents of Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. All original 2-D and 3-D fine art including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, fiber art, digital, mixed media and video will be accepted.

The 2016 jurors are:

• Stéphane Aquin, Chief Curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• Hasan Elahi, Associate Professor, Department of Art at the University of Maryland
• Rebecca Schoenthal, Curator of Exhibitions at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia

Survived!

Nothing is ever easy! Last night's ice rain made for an interesting drive to the hospital this morning.  Since I knew that the ice rainfall was coming, I put my van inside the garage and laid out plenty of salt. Around 4am I got up, sprinkled more salt and pulled the van out and warmed it up.

The walk from the van back to the house was quite an event, as I hugged the walls to try to make it back in one piece, slipping and sliding all over the place.

The drive out of my neighborhood was almost surreal. To start, the start itself took two tries to get the van pointed in the right direction. I then crunched my way out via an interesting new path that avoided most hilly streets in my very hilly neighborhood.... I slid a few times, but made it out and eventually to the hospital.

Under the knife

I'll be out of commission today, going under the knife for a major, somewhat urgent and quite unexpected surgery procedure with a substantial recovery period. Surgery starts at 0730; as I type this the main worry in my mind is getting from my house to the hospital (arrival time 0530) with all the ice still all over my neighborhood's twisty and windy streets.

Not looking forward to the next 2-3 weeks. But like Clint Eastwood once famously said: "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all..."

There are lots of things that I am afraid of, but weirdly enough, death is not one of them. I think that the fact that if I were to croak today I'd still be leaving behind around ten thousand pieces of artwork which have been sold, traded, given away, left in hotel rooms, inserted into Goodwill stores and/or otherwise left to leave an artistic footprint, is rather a calming feeling.

This is a major, multi-hour, robot-not-a-human-in-charge operation, which I am told has an 80% success rate where the John Doe doesn't bite the bucket (and frankly, I picked the robot over the human, because of something called "tremors" when it comes to a surgical scalpel), soooooooooo.... If I do bite the bucket, I'd like a tombstone that looks like a Pictish Stone, sort of like this one that I did in Scotland in 1989:

Clach Biorach Pictish Standing Stone
Edderton, Ross, Scotland
circa 1989 by F. Lennox Campello
Pen and Ink wash on paper, 9.5 x 6.5 inches

Noah Charney on art fakes

Noah Charney is an adjunct professor of art history at the American University of Rome and the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit research group on issues in art crime. His most recent book is The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers (2015). He writes:

That evening, art forgery was the subject of conversation in the museum’s stylish black marble restaurant. The patrons of the Leopold lamented that they could show their best Schiele drawings (the ones that drew pilgrims) only for a few months at a time. The rest of the time they were in darkened storage, to minimise their exposure to light, and reproductions were displayed in their place. Someone from the Albertina sympathised. She explained that Dürer’s marvellous watercolours, Young Hare and Tuft of Grass, are shown to the public only for three-month periods every few years. Otherwise they reside in temperature-, light- and humidity-controlled Solander boxes in storage. Had I had the chance to see them? 

Indeed I had, and while I had been suspicious that something wasn’t quite right about them, I would be flattering myself to say that I immediately knew they were reproductions. Today’s printing technologies make it difficult to distinguish high-quality facsimiles from originals, at least not without taking them out of the frame and examining the back (which holds a wealth of clues about an object’s age and provenance), or looking at the surface in detail, without the interference of protective glass. In an intentionally shadowy alcove I could sense that something was off, but not exactly what.

Read the whole thing here. 

Idiots of the week: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center

It's nowhere near the DMV, but the idiocy of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center all the way in Texas reaches all the way to the nation's capital.

You see,the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (GCAC) has announced that it has withdrawn as the host for something called the San Antonio’s CAM (Contemporary Art Month) 2016 Perennial. 

Here is the statement released by GCAC Executive Director Jerry Ruiz:

The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center will be withdrawing as the host for the CAM 2016 Perennial. While the GCAC recognizes the talents and merits of the artists in this year’s Perennial, we have determined that CAM is simply not a mission-fit at this juncture. The Guadalupe remains firmly committed to the values of inclusion and access to the arts. The lack of diversity in this year’s group of artists, specifically the lack of representation of Latina artists in this year’s edition of the perennial, has forced the organization to make this difficult decision after much deliberation and dialogue with CAM’s leaders.

Are you fucking serious? You're removing yourself as the host from an art show because of the "lack of representation of Latina artists"?  Was the juror or curator (this year's curator is Laurie Britton Newell from Colorado, not Texas) directed ahead of time that she should include Latina artists in the exhibition? If so, how was the curator to identify and segregate the Latina artists? Was there a check box in the entry form to ID the entry as coming from a Latina? Or was the curator allowed to see the names of the artists so that he/she could give extra merit to anyone whose last name ended in a vowel or a "z" (at the risk of missing the millions of Latinas all over Latin America and the US with non-Hispanic last names); Or given a list of Latina artists? Any direction at all?

This year's selected artists are Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Marlys Dietrick, Emily Fleisher, Jasmyne Graybill, Jessica Halonen and Leigh Anne Lester... all women. Should someone be pissed because there are no males included? Or is this always an all female show (thus somewhat destroying the concept of diversity and inclusion from the very beginning)?

By the way, at least one of the artists (Jennifer Ling Datchuk) is Asian; one appears to be Jewish (based on the dangerous practice of identifying people by last name; this is also a mine field for "Latino" names), and I don't know or care what Jasmyne Graybill's ancestral DNA background is, but her work is spectacular!

There is no issue with this show, because a curator (hopefully) always should select artwork for an open show based on the fucking art itself, not the racial, genderl, or as in this case, ethnic background of the artist. Unless the curator is told ahead of time: "You have to have some Latinas in this show and this is how you identify them" then this all stinks of idiocy.

As a Latino, all I have to say to the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center is: "You are all a bunch of comemierdas."

Call for Photographers

Deadline: March 19, 2016

Del Ray Artisans and Union 206 Studio present Surrealism: A Photography Exhibition. This exhibit pushes beyond accepted conventions of reality by representing – in photographs – irrational imagery of dreams and the unconscious mind… disorienting realist imagery often based on fantasy, nightmares, hallucination, and the imagination. The work’s disassociated nature leads to stunning compositions requiring the artist to see past what’s physically there to create pictures of the imagination, inviting all to slip out of the shackles limiting our vision. 

The opening reception is on Friday, May 6 from 7 to 9 pm at Del Ray Artisans gallery in the Nicholas A. Colasanto Center, 2704 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia 22301. 

For more information, please visit http://thedelrayartisans.org/cfe/2016-Surrealism.html or contact curator David Heckman at dheckman@cox.net.