I'm going to bring about 30-40 original works on broken Bisque to New York in a couple of weeks - now experimenting with breaking them further one the drawing is done.
This is "Monroe sees her last visitor." It will be at the Affordable Art Fair New York City in a couple of weeks in Chelsea.
It was my distinct and unique honor to serve as the 2022 Paint the Town juror for the Montgomery Art Association, which together with the town of Kensington, Maryland stages this annual visual art exhibition and competition each year in beautiful Kensington, just outside of the District.
This was a very difficult show to juror - both the open exhibition at the Kensington Armory and the plein air competition which took place yesterday all over this beautiful Maryland town outside nearby Washington, DC. Below are the award winners selected by me - congratulations to all of them... it was a really difficult competition!
Let me repeat myself: as all great shows are, this was an immensely difficult show to judge, which is a good thing! The quality of entries was uniformly superior in almost every category, and the difference between first, second, third, and even some honorable mentions was minimal. The Portrait category in particular was tough to judge as there were so many really outstanding entries. And I was especially surprised by the Kensington category – there was not a single bad entry! As always, I am honored to be able to judge and comment on work of my fellow artists.
Kensington Category
1st Place & Best in Show (Bertha Clum Award): Historia Est Magistra Vitae by Dora Patin
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| Historia Est Magistra Vitae by Dora Patin |
2nd Place: The Hard Work by Paula Zeller
3rd Place: Early Morning on the MARC by Barbara Mandel
Honorable Mentions: Light Remains by Virginia Browning; At the Station by Susan Fitch Brown; Cedar Lane, 3 am by David Sommers
Landscape Category
1st Place: Golden Cloud by Sarah Clayton Davis
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| Golden Cloud by Sarah Clayton Davis |
2nd Place: Vaison La Romaine, France by Mary Vinograd
3rd Place: Water Meadows, Woodfield Road by Benita Kane Jaro
Honorable Mentions: Time Out by Margaret Ingram; Winter by Rajendra KC; Isle of Capri by Deborah Pollack; Tempest by Ting Rao; The House Before the Storm by My-Linh Rouil; Nature's Sculpture by Yik Chek Phan
Portrait Category
1st Place: I Will Conquer by Isabella Martire
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| I Will Conquer by Isabella Martire |
2nd Place: You Are Gone and That Scares Me by Ally Morgan
3rd Place: Summer Morning by Ting Rao
Honorable Mentions: Glow by Jennifer Lynn Beaudet; Gaby Is Musing by Nan Dawkins; Playing the Blues by Karen Merkin; Weathered by Ellen Yahuda; Stock Up Time by Vicky Zhou
Still Life Category
1st Place: Veri Peri Macaron by Jennifer Barlow
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| Veri Peri Macaron by Jennifer Barlow |
2nd Place: A Bear Necessity by Amanda Coelho
3rd Place: Waiting for Wings by Christina Webber
Honorable Mentions: Chatty Onions by Nan Dawkins; Roses Ride by Jack Hammond
Abstract Category
1st Place: Metamorphosis by Sandra Pérez-Ramos
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| Metamorphosis by Sandra Pérez-Ramos |
2nd Place: Rhapsody of a Hug by Martina Sestakova
3rd Place: Crows by Nancy Randa
Honorable Mentions: Composition 29 by Mari Craig; Coastal Dreams by Rosemary Fallon; Happy Wave by Raya Salman; Exploration by Jenny Wilson
Sculpture Category
1st place: Patchwork of Promise by Peijisan Art
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| Patchwork of Promise by Peijisan Art |
2nd Place: A Much Needed Break by Samantha Hecox
3rd Place: Ice Bucket by Nadia Hewchuck
Honorable Mention: Fort! by Anastasia Walsh
Photography Category
1st Place: The Gymnast by Arindam Dasgupta
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| The Gymnast by Arindam Dasgupta |
2nd Place: Warbler House by Julie Steinberg
3rd Place: Snow Day by Regina Boston
Plein Air Competition
1st place: Saturday Market by Vicky Zhou
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| Saturday Market by Vicky Zhou |
2nd place: OK Morning! by Robert Pearlman
3rd place: Water Fountain by Carrie Adler
Honorable mentions: Professor by Holly Buehler; Outdoor Seating, Kensington by Garine Magary
Student Invitational
Winner: The Bearer by Elielle Kayomb
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| The Bearer by Elielle Kayomb |
2nd Place: Hammer Brooch by Nadia Hewchuck
3rd Place: A Gazelle in the Water by Stephanie Fernandez
Chief Executive Officer, International Arts & Artists
International Arts & Artist's Board of Trustees is immediately seeking a dynamic, skilled, experienced leader to become IA&A's next President and Chief Executive Officer when our founder David Furchgott retires this fall.
Ideal candidates will have:
To learn more about this great opportunity, download the full job description. To apply visit DRi Waterstone.
IA&A at Hillyer | 9 Hillyer Ct, NW, Washington, DC 20008
(202) 338-0680 | | atHillyer.org
The 2022 Paint the Town Labor Day Show starts tomorrow in downtown Kensington, MD. Enjoy artist demonstrations, yummy food trucks, amazing art, live music, and more!
Come enjoy the art of over 200 members of the Montgomery Art Association. The event is free and open to the public. Stop by September 3-5 at the Kensington Historic Armory at 3710 Mitchell Street, Kensington, MD. Also over 175 artists painting on the streets of Kensington! Plein air painting at its best!
https://montgomeryart.org/labor-day-2022/
Dream Forest: Chance Meeting - Monoprint Collages by Rosemary Cooley
October 1 – 30, 2022 at at Washington Printmakers Gallery
1641 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Washington DC
Opening reception: Saturday, October 1 from 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Washington Printmakers presents artworks of Rosemary Cooley, in her fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Her painterly monoprints and collages reflect thoughts from the unconscious mind, a personal archeology based on a lifetime of world travel and cross cultural experiences, coupled with a love of art history and the materials of art making.
As a printmaker who has long honored process as a road to product, she now delves into the Jungian concept that one must disentangle from the Ego, and work intuitively, to reach a more powerful path.
In this exhibit, the artist celebrates notions of Individuation, of finding one’s unique personality apart from societal expectations. The Celebration of the Collective Unconscious, in which there are symbols which mankind has repeated throughout ages and over countless cultures, also plays a strong role.
The artworks are created from torn and cut monoprints, all hand pulled from an inked polymer plate onto various archival papers, ranging from thick to thin. This is where the Dream Forest begins, and where certain unexpected, even disparate entities come together to form a new sensory reality.
Unconscious thoughts spill into the real world in the form of landscapes, still lifes and abstract designs as monoprint pieces combine with old script, found in world markets, are transferred onto thin Japanese papers and added to the works. Often the work is sharpened with watercolor painting. And as a final step, Cooley's fascination with medieval manuscript illuminations is reflected in accents of 23k gold leaf.
This chance meeting of unrelated entities somehow creates a new reality when pasted down. As Jung said, “Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.”
This recent work by Andrew Wodzianski will be in booth D15 next 22-25 September at the Affordable Art Fair in Chelsea, NYC!
Star Trek rocks!!!!
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| Celebrate Diversity by Andrew Wodzianski Acrylic on Vintage Star Trek blueprint |
From PG County:
Dear Artists,
We will be displaying Hope and Healing: The 2022 Prince George's County Juried exhibition at Montpelier Arts Center this winter, from November 2, 2022 through January 6, 2023. The artwork will be selected by the juror, Leslie Pelzer, and then will be installed and displayed in the gallery space.
We would like to encourage you to apply to the call for entry for this exhibition. Artists may submit up to 3 samples of work for consideration in relation to the exhibit's title and theme. All media are welcomed, please refer to the size requirement information in the call for entry text.
The deadline to apply will be October 7, 2022 at 11:59 pm. All applications must be submitted online through Submittable. Please create a free account, if needed. https://m-ncppc.submittable.com/submit.
Please send any questions to Stuart Diekmeyer (stuart.diekmeyer@pgparks.com) or Sara Caporaletti (sara.caporaletti@pgparks.com)
This original homage to the great master of horror will be at the Affordable Art Fair New York City in booth D15 at the Chelsea Pavilion in Chelsea in NYC 22-25 September!
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| Homage to H.P. Lovecraft |
Inspired by James W. Bailey...
.JPG "When Big Haired Roamed the Earth - Graphite and Conte on Bisque by Campello") |
| When Big Haired Roamed the Earth Graphite and Conte on broken Bisque by Campello but inspired by Bailey |
When I first wrote the below post a few years ago, I then printed it and mailed it to Nikole Hannah-Jones.... hopefully she's better educated now, although dogma is a pretty harsh mistress.
New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of that paper's controversial 1619 Project recently showed a spectacular lack of background knowledge on the Cuban dictatorship's well-documented racist history and abuses of its black population by her statement that “If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” and then proceeding to cite socialism as her reason to make the statement.
Ms. Hannah-Jones' rosy-eyed view of the Marxist dictatorship's oppression of its citizens, especially its Black citizens not only reveals loads about her own political leanings, but also serves as a brilliant example of suspicious lack of research skills about a subject as widely discussed as Cuba's oppressive and racist government.
Had Ms. Hannah-Jones - who visited Cuba in 2008 - bothered to look past her clear admiration for the Marxist government, and bothered to take a quick tour of the facts, she would have discovered that much has been written and documented about racism in Cuba, and it was even one of the earliest subjects addressed by the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson upon his arrival to the DMV a few decades ago from his various Latin American postings.
In his article a couple of decades ago, Cuba Begins to Answer Its Race Question, Robinson, also clearly and openly a very extreme left-wing oriented writer, tried hard to find excuses for the dictatorship, but nonetheless admits that:Academics say that black Cubans are failing to earn university degrees in proportion to their numbers--a situation to which Castro has alluded publicly. The upper echelons of the government remain disproportionately white, despite the emergence of several rising black stars. And while perceptions are difficult to quantify, much less prove true or false, many black Cubans are convinced that they are much less likely than whites to land good jobs--and much more likely to be hassled by police on the street, like Cano's husband, in a Cuban version of "racial profiling."But how about some Cubans inside Cuba discussing the subject?In primary [Cuban] education, skin color is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention color in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.A lot of hopes have been pinned by many people (who know little about Cuba and the repressive nature of its government) on President Obama's monumental decision to re-establish diplomatic relations with the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:
Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.
Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."And thus, it is curious to me that in his attempt to re-establish diplomatic ties, our socially conscious President (and his cadre of advisors) back then also - like Ms. Hannah-Jones - appeared to know little or nothing about the way that Afro-Cuban citizens are treated in their own country.
Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana
In reference to the President's visit to Cuba, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Connecticut and a scholar at Harvard University, and writing in Ms. Hannah-Jones own newspaper, noted in the New York Times that“The images of the meetings, the agreements, they’re all shameful for many black Cubans — I’m including myself in this — because it’s difficult to feel represented.”Was the projected flow of American tourists expected to help Black Cubans in a pre-COVID Cuba? Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban expert in Afro-Cuban identity, race and literature based out of Havana wrote in his 2013 New York Times article that:Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.Zurbano was subsequently punished by his Marxist government for daring to express that opinion on the pages of Ms. Hannah-Jones employing newspaper. Because that's how Communists roll!That "not long ago" is still the case, as anyone who has been to Cuba recently can testify to and which Ms. Hannah-Jones could clearly see during her 2008 visit to the island - it is very rare to see a black face in any of Havana's "tourist only" hotels and nearby beaches. Discussing those lucrative jobs, Yusimí Rodríguez López, an Afro-Cuban independent journalist, said in a 2016 New York Times article that there were job listings in Revolico — sometimes called Cuba’s underground Craigslist — “where they say they only want whites.”
In the same NYT article we read:One would hope that Ms. Hannah-Jones' exploration of Cuba, a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public, could at least have educated her on the disturbing status of blacks in their own island nation.“They talk a lot here about discrimination against blacks in the United States. What about here?” said Manuel Valier Figueroa, 50, an actor, who was in the park on Monday. “If there’s a dance competition, they’re going to choose the woman who is fair-skinned with light, good hair. If there’s a tourism job, the same.”He added: “Why are there no blacks managing hotels? You don’t see any blacks working as chefs in hotels, but you see them as janitors and porters. They get the inferior jobs.”
Fact: Twice as many African slaves were brought to Cuba than to the United States... twice!
And what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how often historically and socially clueless American academics, journalists, activists, etc. make spectacularly ignorant statements - as Ms. Hannah-Jones did - about the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships (a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own Black population) without even mentioning the issue of racism... or is Ms. Hannah-Jones' case praising the socialist dictatorship!Ms. Hannah-Jones should learn about the Cuban version of the 1619 Project, which in Cuba's case would have been called the 1511 Project, as that was when Spanish Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out from Hispaniola to establish the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, and brought the first African slaves to the island.
Since then and to its present day, Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.
Cuba even had its own race war.
In 1912, Black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.
As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically and although 65% of Cubans self-identify as white in recent censuses, many experts estimate that today the island is actually about 60% black or biracial.
But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd.In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population.""I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism on paper, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper. They would have told Ms. Hannah-Jones during her visit to Cuba in 2008 - but she probably didn't notice that nearly everywhere that she visited, the presence of the Cuban government was not far, and people fear that presence.
Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana
The harsh Cuban reality today, Black Cubans will tell you, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants' atrocities should be dealt with in silence? -- especially in view of our nation's own racial history and what Ms. Hannah-Jones so expeditiously attempted to document in her controversial 1619 Project?
Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban ParliamentWe have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight.What would she say if she had discovered the "permanent and shameful police harassment of young Cubans of African descent in our streets..." as noted by Leonardo Calvo Cardenas, the Cuban National Vice-Coordinador of the Citizens' Committee for Racial Integration (Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR))?
Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.As Omar López Montenegro, the Black Cuban director of Human Rights for the Fundación Nacional Cubano Americana recently stated in the Panama Post:The situation for Black Cubans worsened after Castro assumed power... even though there were always racial issues, before Castro in Cuba there had been Black governors, a President of the Senate, Martín Morua Delgado, and also many Congressmen such as the labor leader Jesús Menéndez, a member of the Socialist Party.When Cuba became a Communist dictatorship, and democracy was lost, the advance of Black Cubans came to a halt.
And this is what makes it even more maddening to a pedantic Virgo like me -- when even the lackeys of the Cuban dictatorship like Alarcon Quesada and Black voices from within the brutalized island speak out, knowing that there will be consequences - as Zurbano discovered after his New York Times opinion piece - why does Ms. Hannah-Jones live in this rose-colored atmosphere where she perceives the poor jailed island as an example of equality?Does she know that even though about 60% of Cubans are Black or brown, that 94.2% of the students at the University of Havana are white? Is she aware - as evidenced by the hundreds of videos one can see at #SOSCuba, that the epicenters of the demonstrations in most Cuban cities during this historic uprising are in the Black neighborhoods? Does she know about Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, a young Black Cuban from La Güinera who was arrested and then murdered by the Cuban police? When notified that her son was dead, his mother committed suicide. Does she know that her own newspaper, The New York Times documented a few years ago how Black Cubans are routinely discriminated in Cuba? Is she aware that while 48% of white Cubans have an annual income of less that $3,000 USD, a whooping 95% of Black Cubans fall below that incredible line?By the way... In 1959 Cuba had the third-highest per capita income in Latin America, exceeded only by Argentina and Venezuela (around $550 a year back then which is about $5,170 in today's dollars). In 1959 that was also higher than Italy, Japan, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and every single Eastern European nation in the Soviet bloc.Nikole Hannah-Jones now has an opportunity to clear the air, clear her mind, clear her perception and gain instant respect from Cubans of all races. All she has to say is that she's learned a lot since the statements that she made in 2019 surfaced during the current Cuban uprising - which as video evidence clearly shows, appears to involve Cubans of all races - and state that she was wrong and is now aware of the sorry and sad state of the Marxist government's deeply rooted racism.Boom! Case closed.
I'm sooooooooooo excited to jury this show coming up Labor Day weekend!
The three-day Paint the Town Labor Day Show & Sale. This is one of the longest-running and largest art shows in the region, with hundreds of works by 175 local artists, all members of the Montgomery Art Association. The event is free and open to the public.
All works are for sale. In addition, the Artist Marketplace will have small works, prints and notecards available for purchase. A portion of all sales proceeds goes to support MAA's arts mission.
Walk around Kensington on Saturday, and you'll see dozens of artists painting and drawing. Those are participants in our annual Plein Air Competition!
From 7 am-3 pm, adults and children complete paintings with a Kensington theme and submit them for prizes. The competition is open to all adults and children. It's free for kids under 18 and current MAA members; adults pay $10.
Full three-day schedule here.
