Congratulations

To DC sculptor Dan Steinhilber, who gets a hip interview with Baltimore Sun art critic Glenn McNatt (of the kind the WaPo has never done for a DC artist), about Steinhilber's mini show at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Congratulations also to Steinhilber's next door neighbor on G street, NW, Tim Tate, and to Tate's partner at the Washington Glass School, Michael Janis, both of which will be included in the London-published 50 Distinguished Contemporary Artists in Glass edited by Lisa Hoftijzer and which will be out next month!

Congratulations to hard-working DC artist Sondra Arkin, whose solo show "Indian Summer" opens at the Blue Moon, 35 Baltimore Avenue, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on October 6 and runs through November 2, 2006.

More on remarkable confluence

"Remarkable confluence" is what I have decided to call the curious phenomenom of what happens when two artists, working in different cities and either at different times or same time frames, and completely unaware of each other's existance, seem to arrive at remarkably similar visual works.

A while back I noted how the Louis Cameron paintings currently at G Fine Art in Washington, DC were remarkably similar (in both idea, subject matter, and size) to the work that I did six years ago.

Over the weekend Virginia artist Andrew Devlin, winner of the 2004 Georgetown International Art Competition read this mini-mention of artist John Beech's exhibition (also at G Fine Art) and was also intrigued as to how Beech's current drawings are so similar, both in subject matter and presentation and delivery (with the whole "drawing under a swath of shiny acrylic paint" element) as Devlin's own work from a couple of years ago. See examples of both below.

I imagine that somewhere on the planet, at the same time that Pollock was dripping paint onto canvas, some other artist, blissfully unaware of Pollock's work, was possibly doing exactly the same thing is some smaller, less aware place.

"Remarkable confluence" also happens a lot in science, where inventors toil away at their inventions, and as soon as they are published they discover that someone else, a half world away, has been working and invented the same thing.

Sydney McGee Part II

A few days ago I discussed the issue of teacher Sydney McGee in Frisco, Texas getting fired from her teaching post after 28 years allegedly due to complaints that one of her students saw a nude sculpture during a museum trip. Read that here.

A reader from Frisco, Texas has responded to the report by offering the other side of the story. Angel writes:

I am very disappointed in the one-sided slant to the news stories regarding this Fisher Elementary Art Teacher who is being put on leave WITH pay with a recommended non-renewal of her contract next spring. Frisco, Texas citizens and one of its' largest employers - FISD - support the arts!

I do not want to have a debate on the subject of nude art at the DMA as I know very well that the district would never put a teacher on a growth plan solely for this reason. I know that the administrators, school board members, principals, and teachers support the visual arts in a very positive way.

Many districts have cut their art programs, but not FISD.

FISD’s art programs have received several award winning recognitions in the visual arts. Our district was honored for the Outstanding Youth Art Month Observance Award from the Texas Art Education Association for involvement on a state level. One can go to the district’s website at www. friscoisd.org and find several news articles on art endeavors and art student recognitions.

Each year the district puts on a district wide art show in honor of Youth Art Month which is celebrated in the spring. The district allows budget monies for the art program including not only supplies but fine art prints to share with students in the classroom. They support and allow field trips to such places as the Dallas Museum of Art, Hall Office Park’s outdoor sculptures, and the like.

Student artworks are continually displayed in our community. The City of Frisco voted to pass a proposition regarding public art being an integral part of our city. Our city has the highly regarded Hall Office Park collection of outdoor sculptures open to the public for ground tours. One can drive around various locations in Frisco and discover public works of art everywhere.

You cannot tell me that we are some culturally-insensitive group of citizens and that our school administrators are as well. It is simply not true!

I feel bad that the media attention (including forums like this, talk radio, newspapers, and television broadcasts) brought on our town has put us in such a negative light.

This is pure smoke and mirrors brought on by this teacher in an attempt to take the heat off of the real issues at hand. She was never fired, only asked to improve. Instead of trying to improve, she went straight to the media bad-mouthing her principal and her employer which is FISD. I think they have every right not to renew her contract at this point.

Thank you for hearing my opinion which is factually driven and personally driven for me to want to communicate.

By the way, her 28 year tenure was NOT all served in the FISD and not all of those years were as an ART teacher.

Some observations:

I'll agree that generally there are always two sides to most stories, but I still have some reservations with this story, the flavor of which comes to us strictly through what is published in the press. Either everyone in the printmedia is doing, as Angel alleges, "smoke and mirrors," or FISD is doing one of the worst information (lack thereof) campaigns of all times to address an obviously sensitive subject.

As a reader in Wordpress.com commented, "if Frisco ISD has been having a problem with this teacher it should have been put down in-writing on previous performance reviews. Where are they?" By the way, there are loads of good comments, both pro and con the issue at Wordpress.com.

I'd like to add that if the issue for not renewing the contract was NOT as a result of the parent complaint over the nude sculpture at the museum, then the board, or the school or FISD should have explained it immediately and come out and said "this award winning, experienced teacher's contract is not being renewed because "fill-in-the-blank" and not because of the complaints raised by a parent as a result of the museum trip."

Then we'd all know why she's being let go, and also know (at least officially) that it was not as a result of the parent's complaint over the museum trip.

Until that happens, the museum trip and the subsequent complaint, immediately followed by the events reported in the press, continue to shed a bad light on FISD.

Opportunity for Mid Atlantic Photographers

Deadline: Friday, October 6, 2006

PhotoGenesis: McLean Project for the Arts - All Mid-Atlantic artists (DC, VA, MD, PA, NJ, DE, WV) are invited to submit up to 20 slides or digital images of 2 or 3 dimensional, installation or video works completed within the last two years and not previously exhibited at MPA.

Works that spring from photographic images, ideas or techniques will be considered. Work may, but need not necessarily remain within the realm of photography to be included in the exhibit. Works that move beyond the traditional forms of the medium are encouraged.

The jurors will consider the first four images for exhibit. These four must be available. Works must fit through a 81” x 65” doorway.

Awards: Cash prizes totaling $1,500 will be awarded by the jurors.

Jurors: Stephen Bennett Phillips is currently curator at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Claudia Bohn-Spector is a freelance writer and curator specializing in American and European art and photography. Charles Brock is associate curator of American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Entry Fee: $25. Fee waived for current MPA members. Fee includes one-year artist membership to MPA. Make checks payable to: McLean Project for the Arts.

Images: Artists may submit up to twenty 35 mm slides in a slide sheet or twenty digital images on a CD or up to 10 minutes of recorded material.

For further information, visit: www.mpaart.org, email Nancy Sausser: nsausser@mpaart.org, Phone: 703.790.1953, TDD 703.827.8255.

McLean Project for the Arts
1234 Ingleside Avenue
McLean, VA 22101

Tonite in Philly

Tonite, starting at 6PM at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Print Center is sponsoring a lecture by internationally renowned camera obscura artist Abelardo Morell.

He will discuss his career and the recent work he has made in conjunction with The Print Center and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. A book signing of his recent book, Abelardo Morell published by Phaidon Press, will immediately follow the lecture. Books will be available for purchase in the Museum Store.

Abelardo Morell transformed Gallery #171 in the Modern and Contemporary wing of The Philadelphia Museum of Art into a camera obscura. Through a small hole in one of the gallery’s windows the image of the museum’s East Entrance becomes a piece of art on display along with The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) by Surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico.

When I lived in Scotland in the late 80s, one of my favorite places to visit when in Edinburgh was the 1850's Camera Obscura in the Outlook Tower, which shows constantly rotating panoramic views of one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

New DC gallery

Galerie Myrtis announces its grand opening with an exhibition featuring works by African-American and African artists including: Selma Burke, Ed Love, Folusho Akomlede, Sylvester Mubayi, Joseph Holston, William Tolliver, Edward Chiwara, Velphia Mzimba, Lois Mailou Jones, Danny Simmons, Ben Macala, Hargreaves Ntukwana, Viola Burley Leak, Charles Sebree, Thokozani Mathobela, Winston Saoli, Samella Lewis, Ellen Powell Tibernio, and David Mbele.

Date: October 20, 2006
Time: 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Location: Galerie Myrtis
500 9th Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003

RSVP: Phone: 202/548-7575
Email: collectors@creativeartisans.net

Please RSVP by October 10, 2006

Warren Craghead at GRACE

New work from Warren Craghead opens tomorrow, Friday Sept. 29 at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, Virginia, easy to find right off the Dulles Toll Road. The Opening Reception is tomorrow, Friday September 29, 6pm - 9pm with an Artist's Talk at 7PM.

Craghead likens his studio to "a bomb crater where pieces of notebook paper, cardboard, post-its, and foam lie in piles surrounded by scraps of pen and pencil drawings, string, plastic, old junk mail, and magazines."

Also showing is "The Suburban Excavation Project: Recent Work by Adam Grossi."

Kudos to GRACE, whose exhibition program this past year has been vigorously renovated and has certainly offered some exciting new work. Don't miss this show!

Miya Ando Stanoff at Ligne Roset

Bay area artist Miya Ando Stanoff's minimalist works on steel canvas make their DC area debut with an exhibition at Ligne Roset DC.

There will be a champagne reception for the artist on September 30, 2006 from 12-6PM. Ligne Roset is at 3306 M Street NW, Washington DC 20007.

Miya is a graduate of UC Berkeley and attended Yale University where she studied East Asian Buddhist Iconography. Half-Japanese and half-Russian, she was raised bilingually and in two cultures, living both in her family's Buddhist temple in Japan and in Northern California. She comes from a tradition of metalworking, as she is the descendant of Bizen sword maker Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu.

Freedom at Heliport

In an exhibition titled "Freedom," Gateway's Heliport Gallery in Silver Spring, Maryland, features the works of four artists that have left their respective countries due to socio-political strife. According to the news release, the exhibit is not overtly political, nor does it shout oppression. On the other hand, it shows four artists at different stages in their careers that have each used art and their new found freedom as a means for emotional release and chance to redefine themselves.

An example is Dr. Kyi May Kaung. While growing up in Burma, Dr. Kaung was only allowed to paint realistic images because the government could understand them. Abstract art was more or less forbidden. Conversely, now living here in the US, Dr. Kaung is now exploring the boundaries of abstract art for the first time.

The exhibit includes work by Machyar Gleunta, Dr. Kyi May Kaung, Win Pe and Hatim Eltayeb Mahmed Ali Elmaki.

The opening reception is Friday, October 6 fro 6-9 PM.

Ellyn Weiss at Nevin Kelly

The Nevin Kelly Gallery will host a solo exhibition of new works by Bethesda artist Ellyn Weiss from October 4 until October 29, 2006. The exhibition, titled "Circular Reasoning," includes two series of new works. The first is a series of oil bar paintings on wood that shares its title with the show itself. The second is a series of woodblock monoprints on paper called "Bioelectronics." An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, October 5 from 6 until 9 o'clock p.m. The public is invited. The gallery is located at 1517 U Street, NW, Washington, DC.

Sydney McGee

I've spent all day in the DC area, and when I returned home tonight I had my inbox full of emails from readers asking if I had seen this.

Sydney McGee is an art teacher (with 28 years of experience) who has been fired by the Frisco, Texas school board because this Fisher Elementary School art teacher took 89 fifth-graders on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art last April and then some of the fifth graders reported to their parents that they had seen "a nude sculpture at the art museum."

Then the parents "raised concern..."

And then she was put on paid administrative leave...

And now the Frisco, Texas school board has voted not to renew her contract after 28 years.

[Anger]

Does the Frisco, Texas school board realize that these actions appear to put them a century or two ahead of the Islamofascists that I am sure they all abhor?

According to the Dallas Morning News:

Ms. McGee, who has taught in various Texas districts for 28 years, said she visited the museum and spoke with museum staffers before the trip to ensure that it was appropriate for the fifth-grade class. Ms. McGee said she does not know which piece of art offended the parent, and the district did not identify it.

Ms. McGee said principal Nancy Lawson called her into a meeting the day after the trip to admonish her about the parent's complaint. Shortly thereafter, she received a negative review and a series of directives about displaying student artwork and creating lesson plans.

"You have to start somewhere when you've seen things you don't believe are in the best interest of the students," Superintendent Rick Reedy said.

Quick to appear to shift the blame, "board members said there were other performance issues in question beyond the trip complaint."

Aw Texas... can't take you anywhere...

Options:

1. Frisco School Board immediately should prohibit any and all school trips to any museums or any other venues where any art nudity or nudity in any other form is present.

2. All Texas museums within school bus driving distance of Frisco, Texas should immediately (a) get rid of all nude artworks or (b) cover them up whenever the Frisco kids show up.

3. Frisco voters should fire all these Friscidiots on the Board.

Here's what we can do:

Email a note of support for Sydney McGee to Buddy Minett President of the Frisco School Board. Or write to him at:

Buddy Minett
President
8548 Scott Circle
Frisco, TX 75036

If you write, be courteous and intelligent.

Tapedude in Holland

Dutch television with a really good clip on DC's Mark Jenkins' street installation in the Netherlands .

See it here.

And see Jenkin's babies first words here. The installations were curated by Fleur Kolk in Rotterdam.

I wonder when DC museum curators will "discover" Jenkins.

I've said it before

Whatever you do, never piss off Bailey.

Bailey, who has spent (and documented) a ton of time in New Orleans, does a Bailey on Robert Polidori's After the Flood.

Read it here.

Art by Students

The AP's Joan Loviglio had an interesting article in the Philly Inquirer about art by students being the latest rage.

"If there's an art to collecting art, Susan Guill just might be considered an old master.

For about 15 years, she has been attending the annual student exhibition at the esteemed Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nearly every wall in her Bala Cynwyd home is adorned with the work of an academy student; she purchased five student paintings at this year's show alone.

But in recent years, the crowds have become larger and the art gets snapped up even faster."

Buying student artwork has always been a great idea for young collectors and collectors on a limited budget. Savvy collectors and smart art dealers have always known that keeping an eye on what the art schools are delivering is a proven way to stay fresh and ahead of the game.

"Tilton Gallery in New York City has successfully brought the work of art students to its commercial gallery. Gallery director Janine Cirincione told The New Yorker that a show this year called "School Days" featuring art by 19 graduate students from Hunter College, Columbia and Yale University was 70 percent sold before the opening. Prices ranged from $2,000 to $16,000."

In the Greater DC area, over the last few years, Conner Contemporary, Fraser Gallery and Irvine Contemporary have all regularly had student shows and consistently included work by art students in their exhibition schedules. In the Greater Philly area, according to the article: "this year, the Pennsylvania Academy's 105th annual student show broke all previous sales records, raising $313,000 in its three-week run... and about 350 works of art were sold, some priced as high as $15,000."

I know of at least one major ubercollector, based in Maryland, who regularly attends students shows aroun the Mid Atlantic region, and happens to have an excellent eye (and one of the largest private art collections that I have ever seen - literally numbering in the thousands of paintings and sculptures (and lately even some videos) and who has been doing this "student art" practice for many years now.

For example, he started collecting Erik Sandberg and Andrew Wodzianski while they were both students, and has many, many paintings by Sandberg and a gigantic Wodzianski acquired while Andrew was a student at MICA.

Sandberg's latest is currently at Conner Contemporary until Oct. 28 and Wodzianski just recently had two very successful shows following his last solo at Fraser: one in Philadelphia at the Rodger Lapelle Galleries and one at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, and he has twice been a finalist for the Bethesda Painting Awards.

Needless to say, both those two young artists have gone on to bigger and better things and higher prices.

The fly in the ointment could be that:

"Some art school professors worry that early success could inappropriately influence students still defining their voice and their style to play it safe and commercial, so their works can easily sell.

"The danger is where you have critics coming into (students') studios looking for new talent; that's when it can be very disruptive," said Carol Becker, dean of faculty for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "You want students finding themselves, not trying to find what the market wants."

I would be curious to hear Dean Becker tell me and the rest of the world "what the market wants"?

Employment in the arts - Public Art Projects Curator

Closing Date: October 5, 2006.

Arlington County, Virginia Department of Parks, Recreation & Cultural Resources.

The Public Art Projects Curator structures and leads the implementation of public art and design enhancements of capital and infrastructure projects in support of the goals of the County's Public Art Master Plan and Policy.

The position entails communication and project-related activities to elevate the profile of public art and design enhancements in the County. Duties include: management of the public art design/enhancement component of capital projects; liaison to the Arlington Commission for the Arts Public Art Committee (PAC); caretaking of the Public Art Collection; education of County staff and residents; initiating/ supporting other visual arts projects such as temporary public art, exhibitions, publications and other projects. Strong organization, self-motivation and communication skills are essential. The position is located in the Cultural Affairs Division's Public Art Section, supervised by from the Public Art Administrator.

Online application required. Salary Range: $45,906 - $75,899 annually. Announcement No: 7102-7A-PRC-GW. Apply here.

The College Art Association

Deadline is ongoing

Assists artists financially in completion of MFA and Ph.D. programs. Grants of up to $5,000 are awarded to individual artists. For information, contact:
The College Art Association
Fellowship Program
275 7th Ave., New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 691-1051; or check website: www.collegeart.org

Art-O-Matic News

In 2004 Nils Henrik Sundqvist brought the DC area designers community into Art-O-Matic with AOM's first official poster show.

It was well received by the public, the artists and the designers, in fact, my good friend Kristen Hileman, Assistant Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum, recognized the effort by adding the poster exhibit to her recommended viewing list for the 2004 show.

As we all know, this year's AOM is delayed to 2007, but they already have some amazing art contributions by 23 DC area designers and I wanted to share these with you; see them here. For more info email Nils at info@fiskdesign.net.

New PostSecret Book

The worldwide phenomenom that is Frank Warren's PostSecret project continues to grow.

A new book - My Secret: A PostSecret Book - which is a collection of secrets from young people in their teens and twenties is due out next November 1, 2006.

Order it online here and save $6.32!

And yet another new gallery

New to me anyway!

A Woman Story Gallery, is an arts venue in Alexandria, VA which primarily promotes immigrant women’s art and educates foreign-born and American artists in entrepreneurial skills for the arts market.

They're having an opening this coming Friday, Sept. 29, 2006 from 6-9PM. RSVP to Marga Fripp at cfripp@aol.com.

The featured artist of this month is Padma Prasad, an Indian-born artist whose collection depicts life, figures and the human spirit in bold and powerful colors. Her Figurative Moods exhibition runs through October 28, 2006.

New Galleries

Two new galleries will open soon or have opened in the Greater Washington, DC area:

The 9th Street Gallery, owned by Zeki Fendikoglu is located in the historic Shaw District of Washington, DC, in a circa 1880 historic brownstone building. Their website is here and their address is 1306 9th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001. The gallery director is Ilknur Boray and their cuurent show is by two of the DC area's top magicians of the traditional darkroom and the digital darkroom: James Steele and Craig Sterling. The show runs through October 21, 2006.

After looking for a space for quite a while, the Randall Scott Gallery will open next November. The new gallery is located at 1326 14th street NW on the 2nd floor. That’s above Thai Tanic on the corner of 14th NW and Rhode Island in DC.

They will be working with Julia Fullerton-Batten, Larry Gipe, Margot Quan Knight, Lucy McLauchlan and Kelly Tunstall, and Josh Urso. They have also signed the super hot Amy Lin, whose minimalist work has been selling like gangbusters everywhere that she has exhibited in the last few months. Randall will also take his new gallery and artists to Art (212) in New York later this month.

They will also be developing a multiples division, Randall Scott Editions, which will publish editioned prints by various artists. Randall tells me that the first threee gallery shows will all be group shows.

Correction: Amy Lin has not signed with the Randall Scott Gallery, she was just taken to Art(21) in NYC.

Opportunity for Artists

Scrivener Creative Review welcomes submissions for art, photography, poetry, and prose. General submissions will be accepted throughout the year and considered alongside specified calls for submissions.

Email submission (in TIF format only) to scrivener.review@gmail.com. Artwork must be in black and white format and must have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. The subject line must state the department to which the submission is directed. Submissions must be included as an attachment and will not be accepted if they appear in the body of an email.

Owning It

Malena Barnhart has an online blog project in which, using a scanner, she condenses everything that she owns into one tiny spot - contained at www.owningit.blogspot.com.

She says that "it deals with the nature of possession, equalizes all my 'stuff' so that my mess is on level grounds with my medicine. Originally I created this as part of a project for a visual thinking class taught by Colby Caldwell, but it has progressed since then."

Visit Owning It often!

Ideas

Just finished reading Kirkland's latest reviews of the shows at G Fine Art in Washington, DC, and my jaw dropped when I saw the paintings by Prof. Louis Cameron, an artist whose work I don't know and as far as I know, I've never met.

My jaw dropped because the paintings on exhibitions at the gallery are exactly the same subject and general size as paintings that I did in 1999-2000 from a series that I called "Digitalia" and which essentially were large paintings of my military ribbons earned while I was in the Navy.

My military ribbon paintings have an interesting story, first revealed here last year. I have also pasted it below.

It shows how two minds, apparently working apart, can come up with exact the same concept and idea. I still have perhaps 20 or so of these works, both paintings and drawings, that I did after the story below took place.

A Story That Must Be Told (Originally published Feb. 9, 2005)

As mentioned here, the McLean Center for the Arts sponsors a very good painting competition every couple of years called "Strictly Painting." It is now in its fifth iteration.

A few years ago, around 1999 or 2000, the juror for that year's version of "Strictly Painting" was Terrie Sultan, who back then was the Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran. I thought that this choice was a little odd, as Ms. Sultan, in my opinion, was not "painting-friendly." In fact, with all due respect, I blame her for diminishing the Corcoran Biennials, which used to be known as the Corcoran Biennial of Painting.

As such, they were essentially the only well-known Biennial left in the nation that was strictly designed to get a look at the state of contemporary painting, which was somehow surviving its so called "death."

It was Ms. Sultan who decided to "expand" the Biennial and make it just like all other Biennials: Jack of all trades (genres) Biennials. In the process, depending on what side of this argument you're on, she (a) did a great service to the Corcoran by moving it into the center of the "genre of the moment" scene - like all other Biennials, or (b) gave away the uniqueness of the nation's top painting Biennial title.

I'm aligned with the minority who supports camp (b) but understand those who defend her decision to become just another player in camp (a). Most people think that her decision and drive were the right thing to do in order to bring the Corcoran to a world stage, and perhaps it was.

But I digress.

When she was announced as the juror, I decided to see if I could predict her painting selectivity, sensitivity, process and agenda. It was my thesis that I could predict what Ms. Sultan would pick.

So I made a bet, and decided to enter the exhibition with work created specifically to fit what I deduced would be agreeable to Ms. Sultan's tastes. I felt that I could guarantee that I would get into the show because of the transparency of the juror's personal artistic agenda. It is her right to have one; I have them, in fact, we all have them.

I was trained as a painter at the University of Washington School of Art, but around 1992 or so, I stopped painting and decided to devote myself strictly to my love for drawing. So I had not picked up a brush in several years when I decided to enter this competition, designed to survey the state of painting in our region.

It was my theory that Ms. Sultan would not be in the representational side of painting. It was also clear that she (like many curators) was seduced by technology in the form of videos, digital stuff and such trendy things.

And so I decided to see if I could marry digital stuff with painting.

And what I did was the following:

I took some of my old Navy ribbons, and scanned them in to get a digital file. I then blew them up so that the final image was quite pixilated. I then printed about five of them and took slides of the printed sheets of paper.

I then submitted these slides to the competition, but identified them as oil on canvas paintings. My plan was that if accepted, how hard could it be to whip up a couple of paintings after the fact? I titled them with such titles as Digitalism: National Defense and Digitalism: Expeditionary Medal and so on.

From what I was later told, several hundred painters submitted work. And Ms. Sultan selected about only about seven or eight painters in total. And not only was I one of them, but she picked two of my entries.

I was elated! I had hit the nail right on the head! I felt so superior in having such an insight into this intelligent woman's intellect that I (a painter no more) could create competition-specific work to get accepted into this highly regarded show.

And then I began the task of creating the two paintings, using the pixilated images as the guide.

And it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

For one thing, I had submitted the "paintings" in quite a large size; each painting was supposed to be six feet long.

And it didn't take me long to discover that there are a lot of color nuances and hues in an average pixilated image.

And I went through dozens and dozens of rolls of tape as I pulled off the old Washington Color School trick of taping stripes (in my case small one inch square boxes of individual colors - hundreds upon hundreds of them) in a precise sequence to prevent smudging and color peeling, etc.

I painted for at least six hours every day, switching off between paintings to allow the previous day's work to dry off enough to allow a new layer of tape to be applied. I did all the varnishing outside, which usually attracted all the small neighborhood ruffians.

It was incredibly hard work, and I was ever so sorry that I had even gotten this crazy idea. All my nights were consumed.

But eventually they were finished and delivered to MPA and Ms. Sultan even wrote some very nice things about them in the exhibition's catalog.

Me? I was in a mix of both vindication and guilt; exhausted but fired up with the often wrong sense of righteousness of the self-righteous.

After the show, I had no idea what to do with them, and they didn't fit my "body of works," but I ended up selling both of them through Sotheby's.

And today, some art collector in South Carolina and another one in Canada, each have one very large, exhausting and handsome oil painting of pixilated naval ribbons hanging in their home, in happy ignorance of the interesting story behind them.

I mentioned the adjective handsome in describing them, because a few years ago I was telling this story to Prof. John Winslow, who asked to see the images of the real paintings. When I showed him, he said that they were actually "quite handsome paintings."

I had never had my work described as "handsome" (although the Washington Post once described it as "irritating"), so it stuck in my head.

So there you have it: The story of a former painter with a point to prove about a local curator, the subsequent hard-labor punishment of the process, and a hidden story behind two handsome paintings.

Postcards from the Edge

Deadline is postmark Friday, November 10, 2006 (NO late entries)

Postcards from the Edge is an annual Visual AIDS benefit and this, its 9th year, it is being hosted and held at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co in New York City.

Postcards From the Edge is a show and sale of original, postcard-sized artworks on paper by established and emerging artists. All artworks are $75 and sold on a first-come, first-served basis. The works are signed on the back and exhibited so that the artists' signatures cannot be seen. While buyers have a list of all participating artists, they don't know who created which piece until it is purchased and the signature is revealed. A collector might end up with a work by a famous artist or one they don't yet know. Either way, they walk away with a great piece of art while supporting Visual AIDS's important work. Last year Ida Applebroog acquired my art donation.

I have participated for several years and encourage all artists to join us and participate.

Hosted by Sikkema, Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd Street, NYC

Preview Party on World AIDS Day Friday, December 1, 2006
Benefit Sale December 2 –3, 2006.

For more information contact Visual AIDS at (212) 627-9855 or email them at info@visualaids.org.

See ya there!

Oh, Snap

Oh, Snap is a new (formerly Tubulosity) DC-based art blog by Greg Wasserstrom. Visit him often!

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: October 25, 2006

Coker College's Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery is reviewing entries (all media) for solo shows in the 2007-2008 exhibition season. Send ten 35mm slides or jpeg files (they prefer 1024 x 768 pixels) on CD/DVD, list for images, statement, resume, and SASE to:

Larry Merriman
Coker College Art Dept
300 East College Av
Hartsville SC 29550.

Full prospectus here

Kirkland does DC

JT over at Thinking About Art has been hitting the key shows around the District and has several interesting reviews:

Five Shows at the Katzen.

Trawick Prize.

David FeBland at Fraser Gallery.

Robin Rose at Hemphill.

William Wegman at Adamson.

Robert Creamer at Heineman-Myers.

Nicholas and Sheila Pye at Curator's Office.

Conservative Berkeley and Rocky

Chris Gilbert, the former curator of art at the Baltimore Museum of Art (and a past Trawick Prize juror I believe), a while back resigned his position as a curator at the Berkeley Museum of Art & Pacific Film Archive and has now quit the "system."

Gilbert resigned over disagreements caused by the exhibition "Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process".

In his statement Gilbert states:

"...they have said they wanted "neutrality" and "balance" whereas I have always said that instead my approach is about commitment, support, and alignment -- in brief, taking sides with and promoting revolution."

Gilbert then discusses

"...the fact that the museum, the bourgeois values it promotes via the institution of contemporary art (contemporary art of the past 30 years is really in most respects simply the cultural arm of upper-class power) are not really those of any class but its own. Importantly the museum and the bourgeoisie will always deny the role of class interests in this: they will always maintain that the kinds of cultural production they promote are more difficult, smarter, more sophisticated -- hence the lack of response to most contemporary art is, according to them, about differences in education and sophistication rather than class interest. That this kind of claim is obscurantist and absurd is something the present exhibitions make very clear: the work of Catia TVe, which is created by people in the popular (working-class) neighborhoods of Caracas, is far more sophisticated than what comes out of the contemporary art of the Global North."

So what this once "insider" offers to us is the opinion (backed by his experiences) that popular artwork is inherently better than most museum-level contemporary artwork, and that the reason that contemporary museum shows are not generally accepted by the public is then rationalized by the museums and art elitists as a result of the public not being educated and sophisticated enough to understand what the artwork is all about.

But this elitist operating mode of thinking will always be denied.

Interesting; Gilbert continues:

"...it is too weak to say that museums, like universities, are deeply corrupt. They are. (And in my view the key points to discuss regarding this corruption are (1) the museum's claim to represent the public's interests when in fact serving upper-class interests and parading a carefully constructed surrogate image of the public; (2) the presence of intra-institutional press and marketing departments that really operate to hold a political line through various control techniques, only one of which is censorship; finally (3) the presence of development departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favor and flatter rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of public responsibility that the museum parades)."

Now take Rocky.

In the Greater Philadelphia area, and elsewhere through newscoverage and blogs, a lot of discussions and opinions have been aired about the public return of the Rocky Balboa statue to a new spot at the foot of Eakins Oval next to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The statue, which re-creates one of the most famous scenes from the original Rocky movie (and was introduced in Rocky III), was installed initially many years ago at the top of the museum steps, but was removed just a few months later when "museum officials and art aficionados argued that it was merely a movie prop and that its 'exaggerated proportions and caricature' would sully the internationally renowned museum's image."

And now the Philadelphia Arts Commission recently voted 6-2 to move the 2,000-pound, 8 foot, six inches bronze out of storage and install it permanently at the foot of Eakins Oval.

This decision has divided public opinion faster than Mrs. Clinton.

On one side of the public opinion, there's... ah... the public, which seems to me to like having its Rocky statue back as sort of a visual and touristy symbol of this blue collar, working class city.

"We're thrilled," said city Commerce Director Stephanie Naidoff. "What more wonderful a symbol of hard work and dedication is there than Rocky?"

On the other side are art academics and elitists and some art bloggers.

The two "no" votes from the Arts Commission came from Prof. Moe Brooker, an abstract painter from the Moore College of Art and Design and from Miguel Angel Corzo, the President of the University of the Arts.

"It's not a work of art and ... it doesn't belong there," said Brooker.

Corzo has suggested that he might resign from the commission over the vote, saying that "placing the pugilist near the museum goes against the commission's desire to 'raise the standards of the city.'"

I wonder what side Chris Gilbert would take: the side shuddering at the thought of the Italian Stallion sullying the image of the museum, or the masses, rushing up the 72 steps to the museum only to find that the statue is not there and then having to ask where the Eakins Oval is.

By the way, according to Google, the words "Conservative Berkeley" have been used together only just over 100 times in the billions and billions of pages that make up the web.

Yo Adrian!

New writer at the CP

From Erik Wemple (WCP editor):

Dear Colleagues:

Allow me to announce that Washington City Paper has hired a columnist for our S&T column. Her name is Jessica Gould, and she comes to us from the Northwest/Dupont/Georgetown Current.

She has a wonderful and direct writing style and her passion is arts reporting [underlines are mine], which she's eager to do in a column format for Washington City Paper. She's used to writing up to five stories a week, so she can crank news copy like no one's biz.

She starts on Oct. 12.

We all welcome Jessica!

Looking Through a Lens

"The eruption in the media and on photo blogs last week over an image taken on 9/11 by the German photographer Thomas Hoepker--and the glib interpretation put upon it by Frank Rich in the New York Times--has proved once again that we don't need Photoshop to doctor the meaning of an image."

Art critic Richard Woodward discusses in the WSJ the war of words triggered in the blogsphere by this photograph depicting five young Brooklynites on the Brooklyn waterfront seemingly engaged in a fun and relaxed conversation while the WTC burns in the background.

As reported by David Friend in his book "Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11," Herr Hoepker, who never spoke to his subjects, saw the New Yorkers in the photograph as "totally relaxed like any normal afternoon. They were just chatting away. It's possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it. . . .I can only speculate [but they] didn't seem to care."

Read here what happened next.

In Latin America

Just finished doing a massive piece for a chain of Latin American newspapers covering the fine arts scene in the Greater Washington, DC region. I'm now hoping to sell them on doing the same thing for some of the other major art scenes in the Mid Atlantic.

More later...

Philly Art Falls Guide

...the town that birthed Thomas Eakins is pushing paint again this fall.

Roberta Fallon, writing in the Philadelphia Weekly, gives us a preview to the visual arts highlights coming this fall. Read it here.

In her superb co-blog, Roberta also visits the newest gallery in Philly.

Cerulean Arts is owned by Michael Kowbuz and Tina Rocha, and located at 1355 Ridge Avenue. Their grand opening show includes work by Astrid Bowlby, Pat Boyer, Eric Brown, John Bybee, Alexander Cheves, Michael Kowbuz, Nancy Lewis, Yuri Makoveychuk, Meg McDevitt, Hiro Sakaguchi, Mark Shetabi and Kevin Strickland.

According to Fallon, the gallery's "exhibition program is not locked down yet but the pair said they'd have six-week shows, not month-long. Artists who will be featured in upcoming solo or group shows are Sara Roche, Alexander Cheves, Jeffrey Tritt, Binod Shrestha, Hiro Sakaguchi and Yuri Makoveychuk."

Wyeths

Went to the Brandywine Museum to see Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat and will be writing a review for a couple of newspapers and also a review here. Stay tuned.

While there I was lucky enough to run into the fair Victoria Wyeth, grandaughter of Andrew and niece of Jamie, who gave us all a terrific tour of the museum with a lot of great personal insights into the Wyeth family.

Black Artists of DC

Black Artists of DC (BADC) is a community of artists formed in 1999 whose purpose is to "promote, develop and validate the cultural and artistic expressions of artists of African ancestry in the Washington, DC metropolitan area."

The exhibit "Convergence of Vision: The Power of Art," showing at the Prince George's Community College's (PGCC) Marlborough Gallery from September 18th through October 12th will be the group's first showing at a public venue and will feature the work of 34 of the group's artists.

"As a group, BADC seeks to engage and educate our community in the history and value of Black art," says Claudia Gibson-Hunter, BADC facilitator. "There is such a wealth of artistic talent in the Washington metropolitan area, and we want to expose our community to the hidden treasures they have right in their own backyards."

Details here.

Bummer

No Artomatic this year. The NOMA building that they were negotiating for has not come through, despite their best efforts. The AOM crew is working hard to make AOM happen in 2007.

Detail here.

Trashball

Chris Goodwin has started a blog called Trashball! that documents some of the stuff that he finds (much of it in his PT job driving a dump truck). Much of the trash that he finds will end up in one of his two Trashball! machines: One is currently at Warehouse on 7th Street and the other at Busboys and Poets on 14th street in DC.

Visit Trashball! often!

Survey

The Indianapolis Museum of Art announced today that it is planning the first full-scale survey of the critically acclaimed Afro-Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

New Baltimore Studios

A dozen artists or so have been renovating around 24,000 feet of the former Lombard Office Furniture spaces located at 122 West North Avenue (at Howard Street) just across the Howard Street bridge from MICA in Baltimore.

They're having their first event on Saturday, January 28th from noon to 4:00pm. RSVP to Daniel Stuelpnagel at danstuelpnagel@yahoo.com or call him at 415/203-7739.

Gordiany's Grille

A couple of nights ago I went out to a Widener University function, and afterwards we drove around looking for a place to eat.

We drove down Baltimore Pike, and eventually ended up in a little restaurant in Clifton Heights, PA called Gordiany's Grille.

Let me summarize this find in one word: WOW!

We expected to find a small, local place, with maybe some decent food. Located at 252 West Baltimore Avenue in Clifton Heights, PA, the place looks nice from the outside, but unassuming and like a regular neighborhood joint.

It is all that, but the food was amazing!

The chef is a beefy guy nicknamed "Zus" - "It's from Hay-Sus," explained Kelly the waitress. "It's Spanish for Jesus."

And the food was divine! And so affordable!

Imagine a place where you can can a huge plate of clams in a wine and onion and Italian sausage concoction for under nine bucks (and I mean huge). It's called "Drunken Clams" and it was great.

The table next to me ordered a steak, and Jesus came out with a slab of meat on a board to discuss how she wanted it cut with the lady who ordered it. They settled on a "butterfly" cut.

When the pasta dish that we ordered came to us, it brough "ooohs" and "aaahs" from the locals at the place, as it was a sight to see, as the crab legs had been arranged is such a fashion that the huge plate looked like a work of edible art.

Unlike the ritzy places that give you three strands of pasta, this dish was also massive, and I ended up taking half of it home.

This was a truly memorable discovery, everything on the meny is under $20, and I look forward to visiting this little jewel many times. They are located at 252 West Baltimore Avenue in Clifton Heights, PA, and their phone is 610/259-4060.

Stephen Wiltshire

I was first exposed to the amazing skills of Stephen Wiltshire when I was living in the United Kingdom in the late 80's.

His first words were "pencil" and "paper," first spoken when he was five. He is called "the living camera."

But this video is amazing.

Tonite: Sandberg at Conner

This week is shaping out to be an extraordinary week to see the best that contemporary painting has to offer to the DC region.

In addition to Robin Rose at Hemphill, and Manon Cleary at Edison Place Gallery, and the New Leipzig Painters at the Katzen Arts Center, and New York's David FeBland at Fraser Gallery (which is selling out as usual), tonight Conner Contemporary Art hosts the opening for Erik Sandberg's newest solo, titled Contrary.

Just like Cleary and Rose are easily some of the best DC area painters of their generation, Sandberg - in my opinion - is amongst the best Washington area painters of his generation. Buy Erik Sandberg now.

The opening night reception is tonight, Friday, September 15th from 6-8pm.

Saturday: 14th Street Galleries

The Galleries of the 14th Street Arts Corridor in Washington, DC launch the Fall Art Season with joint receptions on Saturday, September 16.

Who: Adamson Gallery, Curator’s Office, G Fine Art, Hemphill, Irvine Contemporary, Gallery plan b, Transformer, and Street Scenes: Art Not Ads (a Welmoed Laanstra public art project).

What: Joint Receptions to launch the fall season

When: Saturday, September 16, 6-9 PM

Exchange

Tomorrow is the WPA/C's EXCHANGE: DC @ Baltimore opening at the Creative Alliance (3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD). The opening is from 7 – 9pm. Curated by Gabriel Martinez.

Features work by Trawick Prize finalists Molly Springfield and Jason Zimmerman as well as Breck Brunson, Avi Gupta, Nilay Lawson, Carrie Mallory, Isabel Manalo, Piero Passacantando, Solomon Sanchez, and my good friend and former Georgetown neighbor Rocky Wang.

Congratulations

To former Trawick Prize winner Jiha Moon, who was included in the New York Times review of the "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now" group show at the Asia Society in New York City.

Read the Roberta Smith review here.

From the Reverend's files

"After pickled sheep, unmade beds and painting with elephant dung, some questioned where modern art could go next.

Kira O'Reilly will provide her own answer today by spending four hours naked, hugging a dead pig - at the taxpayer's expense.

The controversial Irish performance artist will invite one person at a time to watch her sit in a specially-constructed set and perform a 'crushing slow dance' with the carcass in her arms."

Details here.

Manon Cleary Tonight

Tonight, from 6-8PM, is the opening for the Manon Cleary retrospective at the Edison Place Gallery located at 701 9th Street, NW (enter from 8th and G).

Without a doubt the leading realist painter in the Greater Washington region, and made nationally famous by HBO a few years ago, Cleary's retrospective is long overdue and it's a huge black mark on the conscience of DC area museums and curators.

At the Corcoran Tonight

The WPA/C is having their first All Members' meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the auditorium.

Paul Greenhalgh, the new director of the Corcoran will be there to meet the WPA/C members and invites them and see the current show: "redefined: Modern and Contemporary Art form the Collection."

Details here.

Thank you!

To the artists who sent me art as a birthday present! WOW! I was only kidding serious!

And in return I will send all of you a piece of artwork for your walls!

Robin Rose at Hemphill

Robin Rose, one of the District's most influential painters, opens this Saturday, Sept. 16 at Hemphill Fine Arts. This will be Rose's first solo at Hemphill since he switched galleries from Numark Gallery, where he used to exhibit in prior years. The opening reception for Rose is Saturday, September 16, 2006 from 6:30 - 8:30 PM.

This is shaping like the week to see two of the District's giants of paintings, as Manon Cleary, easily one of the most technically gifted and creative painters that I have seen in all my years of looking at the visual arts, also opens this week, in her case Cleary opens on Thursday at Edison Place Gallery.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: September 22, 2006

The Arts Council of Fairfax County announces Arts Council @ GRACE, a juried art exhibition offering $2,000 in prize monies.

This year’s exhibition will mark a first time collaboration with the regional visual art center GRACE in Reston, VA. Artists from DC, MD, or VA are encouraged to apply. Artists working in any media can submit up to four (4) images on CD, or video totaling no more than five (5) minutes on DVD.

Juror: Jack Rasmussen, Director and Curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen. Cash prizes totaling $2000. Entry Fee: $35 (waived for Arts Council and GRACE members). Exhibition will take place November 3 – December 1, 2006.

Information is available on their at website at www.artsfairfax.org or contact Angela Jerardi, Visual Arts Coordinator at ajerardi@artsfairfax.org.

Art Narratives

WOW! Check out the kind of artwork presentation that Paradise Studios has done for Bailey.

It's about 2MBytes - Click here.

Gopnikisms

"One of the things that drive me crazy is that there's this notion, especially among younger artists, that to make serious art some woman has to get naked. I see it in performance art all the time."

- Blake Gopnik

UPDATE(s):
1. Capps polices Gopnik here.
2. Bailey... ah "Baileys" Gopnik here.

DCing

I'm in DC all this week.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: October 6, 2006

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities' Art Bank Program has a call for entries as they are purchasing artwork to be part of the District of Columbia's 2007 Art Bank Program.

Works in the collection are owned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and loaned to other District Government agencies for display in public areas. Deadline: October 6, 2006.

For more information and an application, please visit their website to download the Call for Entries application, or call 202-724-5613 to have one sent to you.

The City's Art Bank is a growing collection of moveable works funded through DC Creates Public Art, the District’s Art in Public Places Program.

Works in the collection are owned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and are loaned to other District government agencies for display in public areas of government buildings. This collection helps preserve the city’s past and is an important legacy for future generations. Currently, approximately 1,600 artworks are on display in more than 100 agencies.

9/11 Artwork

Beliefnet artists have put together a 9/11 art scrapbook. See it here.

Wanna go to an opening tonight?

The place to go tonight in the DC area is the opening reception at the Katzen Arts Center at AU.

The Mid-Atlantic's best looking arts venue will host the opening receptions from 6-9PM to welcome:

Life After Death: New Leipzig Painters from the Rubell Family Collection
Eberhard Havekost: New Works from the Rubell Family Collection
Hungarian Revolution, 1956
Mindy Weisel: Words on a Journey
Athena Tacha: Small Wonders

Just the fact that Don and Mera Rubell may be there (they will be at the Katzen on Sept. 19 to discuss "their very personal process of selecting and collecting art") probably means that every art dealer within a 200 mile radius will probably show up.

I am particularly interested in Life After Death: New Leipzig Painters from the Rubell Family Collection. In 1989, the seven artists represented in this exhibition: Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Neo Rauch, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer — all rejected the trendy genres of today's art critics and museum curators: video, photography and installation art, and instead chose to study figurative painting at the Leipzig Art Academy.

The resulting work goes completely against the grain of what a lot of art writers, critics and curators try to force-feed us as the only viable contemporary art forms, and reflects the fact that as long as talent is given room to grow, there is room for all genres and visual interests, including the much maligned realism.

It will be interesting to read what the chief art critic of the Washington Post, a leading town crier for the "painting is dead" mob, writes about this show. However, if his review of fellow German painter Gerhardt Richter's 2003 show is an indication (which Gopnik should have hated), Gopnik won't step out of line and will conveniently join the international applause chorus to the Leipzig boys.

Kudos to the Katzen for bringing a top-notch show to the capital area.

Wanna go to a DC opening this weekend?

The read Heather Goss over at DCist as she has a list of the top shows opening this weekend as the "arts season" kicks in with a bang at the Greater DC area's top galleries.

Read the openings list here.

Signs

I don't know if it is true or not, but a friend of mine told me a while back that some of the subjects in Trawick prizewinner James Rieck send hidden signals/messages via their hands' depictions.

If you know how to read that sort of stuff, go here and tell me if the top two paintings of the little girls are "messaging" anything.

Is it just me or...

This recent Zippy comic strip looks influenced by like Mark Jenkins' "Embed."





When Zippy references something -- like Mark Cline's Foamhenge out in the Virginia country, there is a tiny "Tip of the Pen" credit of thanks to the person who made the reference. There is no tip of the pen here so he probably came up with idea without knowing about Mark Jenkins' tapework. Nonetheless, the Tapedude rocks!

Update: The Tapedude informs me that the Zippy comic "is a drawing of a bronze sculpture that exists in LA... and when I did my 'embed,' I had people asking me if that piece had inspired mine (it hadn't)." Jenkins just had a show in Rotterdam, Holland last week and the below piece is from that show.

Trawick Prizewinners

The winners of this year's Trawick Prize were announced yesterday and they are James Rieck of Baltimore, MD, who was named as the Best in Show winner of $10,000; Kristin Holder of Washington, D.C. was awarded the Second Place prize of $2,000; Molly Springfield of Washington, D.C. was honored with the Third Place prize of $1,000 and Jason Zimmerman of Washington, D.C. was given the Young Artist Award of $1,000.

The work of fourteen finalists will be on display at Creative Partners Gallery from September 5-29, 2006.

The 2006 Trawick Prize was juried by Ashley Kistler, Director of the exhibition program at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond; Dr. John Rasmussen, Director and Curator of the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center and Gerald Ross, Director of Exhibitions at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

Rieck has won a ton of money from Ms. Trawick this year, as he was also the Second Prize winner in the Bethesda Painting Awards, which this amazing lady also sponsors.

As a quick search shows, this is a widely exhibited artist, with a solid gallery record in New York and other major markets (and apparently seldom exhibiting in the Greater DC area). I'm not too familiar with his work, other than what I saw at the Bethesda Painting Awards exhibition, but it was clear to me that this was the work of a very gifted artist, both technically (which is so easily dismissed by those that can't accomplish or understand how difficult it is to do) and in its intrinsic sense of delivering mental ideas and messages through intelligent composition and dramatic cropping of imagery.

What impressed me the most about the work, once we get past and recognize the enviable technical expertise (which was also shared in this year's prizewinning crop by the amazing and also technically-gifted Molly Springfield), was the sense of questioning (and foreboding) that his paintings planted in my mind. This is an artist whose work is intended not only to impress with technical finesse, but also reach deep into accepting minds and plant the seeds of understanding how the power of visual art can make the chemical connectors in our brains cause us to gasp at the realization that we are truly being awed by a master artist.

A good choice and well-deserved, and had I been the juror, I'm pretty sure that he would have won a prize, although I would have given the Trawick to Molly, who shares nearly all of the same attributes, skills and subtle bravado as Rieck, but whose work I know better and understand on a deeper level.

And that's how prizes are won or lost.

PS - Capps on the Trawick.

New art charity

This is such a great and generous country.

A new organization called United States Artists, announced yesterday an plan to offer support to working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence and a brilliant example of what can happen when the private side of our society takes over from what the public side fails to do.

50 American artists will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4. They will be chosen by "panels of artists, critics, scholars and others in the arts [that] are reviewing the applications of 300 artists who were nominated by 150 anonymous arts leaders around the country."

Fellowships will be awarded across a broad array of disciplines: Architecture, Design, and Fashion; Crafts and Traditional Arts; Dance; Literature (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry); Media Arts (film, media, and radio); Music; Performing Arts (performance art and theater); and the Visual Arts (yay!).

According to the NYT story:

Four foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential and the Alaska-based Rasmuson— have put up a total of $20 million to create the organization and seed its initial operations, but the goal is for it to become a conduit between artists and individual donors.

Read the story here and visit United States Artists here.

B-day

Almost forgot! Today is my birthday!

Either 30, 40 or 50... I can't seem to remember exactly.

Anyone wishing to send me original artwork as a b-day present, email me.

Wanna go to an art event tonight?

Go to The Common Share located at 2003 18th St. NW (in Adams Morgan), DC (upstairs). Featured artist is Barry Bishop and music by DJ 2-Tone Jones. 8pm - 1am and no cover charge.

D A N G L I N G

Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, in Silver Spring, MD, will be hosting D A N G L I N G (as in suspense), an exhibit by 20 artists from the Washington region "commenting on critical challenges to the global human condition including militarism, economics, environmental degradation, and personal, philosophical, and political conflicts."

The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 8th from 6:30-8:30pm and will feature remarks by participating artists as well as performance art and poetry. The exhibit is on display through September 29th.

Exhibiting artists include Anonymous, iona rozeal brown, William Christenberry, Graham Boyle and Alex Curtis of the Submissive Generation, Richard Dana, Joan Danziger, Behnam Farahpour, Susan Firestone, Dalya Luttwak, Nan Montgomery, Adrienne Mills, Brian Petro, Michael Platt, Wendy Ross, Renee Stout, R.L. Tillman, Kelly Towles, Genna Watson, Jamie Wimberly, and Jason Zimmerman.

The show is curated by Carolyn Alper and Helen Frederick, who in early April invited artists to Pyramid Atlantic to discuss ideas for an exhibition that might grow out of the DADA movement that had influenced most of them during their lives. There was agreement that although the DADA exhibition (presented this spring at the National Gallery of Art) made a huge impact on them, Dada could not be "re-created."

"I thought that artists should have the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the current state of our world. It seems that such a show would be not only interesting but essential," stated curator Carolyn Alper.

Although I am not "disillusioned with the current state in our world," I am nonetheless looking forward to seeing this exhibition.

I am especially looking forward to seeing the living paintings of Adrienne Mills, who (in addition to her work on the gallery walls) will have two "living paintings" at the reception. Spoken word artist Charisse Carney-Nunes will be covered in her words and Mills' model Jaye will be on display as well.

I am also looking forward to seeing the new work of Jamie Wimberly, who in addition to his piece for the show (titled "Art History," and which is a direct comment on contemporary art) is also contributing an essay on contemporary art.

Jamie tells me that his "intention is to start a dialogue." To that end, he has created a blog: Provocations, where "people can be as nasty or nice as they want to be."

See ya there!

Congratulations

To Richmond-based sculptor Kendall Buster, who was just announced as the winner of the 2006 Kreeger Museum Artist Award.

If you haven't heard much of the Kreeger Museum Artist Award, it is because (in my opinion), the museum has done a pretty poor job of disseminating info about it.

The Kreeger Museum "established the award, a biennial cash prize to be given to a Washington metropolitan area artist deserving of recognition and to honor its founders (Carmen and David Kreeger) generous commitment to the arts in Washington, D.C. An independent five person jury made the selection based on demonstrated consistent artistic excellence, and significant influence and contribution to the Washington arts community. The $10,000 award is being underwritten by Fleishman Hillard International Communications."

An example of Kendall Buster's work will be on view at the museum October 6 through November 25, 2006. The artist was selected by an independent five-person jury: Andy Grundberg, Milena Kalinovska, Robert Lehrman, Jim Sanborn (who was the first recipient of the award) and Sarah Tanguy.

Another superb choice for this award and congrats to Kendall and my kudos to the Kreeger for institutionalizing a great art prize for the DC area.

P.S. Capps polices the award here.

P.S. Kirkland makes a good point on what the definition of the "Washington metropolitan area" is. Read it here.

Farewell Russell

The fair Heather Russell, gallerina extraordinaire for Irvine Contemporary in DC, is returning to the NYC area after a year in the District.

As of this Thursday, she will be in NYC, as the Assistant Director of the Williamsburg-based Black and White Gallery. She will be running the new ground floor Chelsea space, and also their Williamsburg gallery

She will also have a small art advisory business, based out of her home, for works not related to the gallery, and she will be hosting events and helping clients find artworks as well.

MAAN wishes Heather all the best, hopes that she stays in touch, and we're sure that she will be a great success in NYC.

NYT on daily painters

And now the New York Times chimes in with yet another story on the whole genre of "daily painters" which was birthed by Richmond's Duane Keiser.

Read the story here.

And in DC area, add another artist to the daily artist genre: Pamela Viola. Visit her daily artwork often!

Street Secrets

There is a public art project going on in Philadelphia now and its focus is "confessions" and they are collecting secrets from people and then posting them.

Sound familiar?

The Philly Inky's Natalie Pompilio has an excellent story on the subject here.

She writes:

"Hundreds of collected confessions - written on anything from toilet paper to postcards, scrawled with pens or pencils or markers, crafted both from the heart and as pranks - are on display at the 3rd Street Gallery, on Second Street in Old City. These stories were gathered from 12 confession boxes across Center City."

She also reveals that:

The artists shaping the project said their aim was to have a dialogue with city dwellers - or to encourage residents to have a dialogue with each other. The writings are called "confessions" according to the definition of making oneself known or disclosing one's identity, said Michael Sebright, one of the project's leaders.

"We hoped that people in Philadelphia would find it intriguing," Sebright said, "not in the Catholic sense of confessing something wrong, but in the sense of telling a story about themselves or making themselves known to other Philadelphians."

She also quotes Frank Warren, who essentially invented the whole "secret-as-art" genre as art during the last Art-O-Matic and then made it a worldwide phenomenom through the PostSecret website and through the best-selling book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

What the story does not say is that the organizers had invited Frank Warren's PostSecret to be a major participant in the whole Philly street secret event, but when Warren said that he "did not want to water down the content of the secrets in order to show them in public spaces," he never heard from them again - "until they they started their own secret project."

Anyway, for anyone who wants to see the real PostSecret project, the Reading Public Museum still has a large PostSecret exhibit on until October 8th.

And two more books by Warren will be coming out soon:

My Secret: A PostSecret Book , comes out next month. You can pre-order it here.

And The Secret Lives of Men and Women comes out on January of 2007 and you can pre-order it here.

DCing

Heading back to DC tomorrow.