Incredible Art Day in DC area

Today is the day of days if you're into the arts in the greater DC area... not only are there a ton of openings going on later tonight, but also there are dozens and dozens of open artists' studios (such as the Mid City Artists) and the Washington Glass School, which is where I am today and I just got here and let me tell you, there are a lot of really good affordable glass, etchings, and cool art things from the school's faculty and students and a lot of other invited artists. And from there you can also walk to the many artists' studios in the same building complex.

Come see and buy some art somewhere today!

Opening in Richmond today!

All the background about my solo show opening at 6PM today is here, but the bottom line is that if you are anywhere near Richmond, Virgina today Friday, December 12 between 6-9PM, swing by Red Door Gallery where my solo show "The Colors of Wars to Come" is opening and say hola!

"Suspension Ribbon for the Second Cuban Pacification Campaign Medal." Oil on canvas. 24x48 inches by F. Lennox Campello, c.2008

The Second Cuban Pacification Campaign Medal was established by Executive Order 13459 signed by the President on 03 May 2011. It may be awarded to American military and naval personnel for participating in prescribed operations, campaigns and task forces ranging in dates from 24 March 2010 to present.

The area of operations for these various campaigns includes the total land area and air space of Cuba (including the Isle of Youth), and the waters and air space of the Caribbean Sea within 12 nautical miles of Cuban coastline.

Personnel must be members of a unit participating in, or be engaged in direct support of, the operation for 30 consecutive days in the area of operations or for 60 non-consecutive days provided this support involves entering the area of operations or meets one of the following criteria:

• Be engaged in actual combat, or duty that is equally as hazardous as combat duty, during the operation with armed opposition, regardless of time in the area of operations;
• While participating in the operation, regardless of time, is wounded or injured and requires medical evacuation from the area of operations;
• While participating as a regularly assigned aircrew member flying sorties into, out of, within, or over the area of operations in direct support of the military operations.

One bronze service star shall be worn on the ribbon for qualifying participation during an established campaigns. However, that if an individual's 30 or 60 days began in one campaign and carried over into another, that person would only qualify for the medal with one service star. The medal is not awarded without at least one service star.

The executive order provides that service members who qualify for either the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal for service in Cuba between 24 March 2010 and 01 May 2010, remain qualified for those medals. However, upon application, any such member may be awarded the Cuban Campaign Medal in lieu of the Armed Forces Expeditionary medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal, but no Service member may be awarded more than one of these three medals for the same period of service in Cuba.

The suspension ribbon for the medal's white, and blue colors were suggested by the striking colors of the Caribbean Sea and the stripes of the Cuban flag.

Rousseau on Aquilino

John Aquilino has been one of my favorite DC area painters since he moved from New York to the Maryland suburbs a few years ago. His landscapes are elegant and intelligent, and under the pretext of being an urban landscape, are really all about the handling of light and form, not really the subject matter.

He currently has an exhibition in Bethesda's Neptune Gallery, and like any other Aquilino shows in galleries and art fairs, it is selling out very quickly.

Dr. Claudia Rousseau of the Gazette newspapers reviews that show here and once again I wonder why this very talented bilingual art critic is not writing for the Washington Post (which owns the Gazette chain).

Aquilino is also a master of light, as in a painting like "No Parking" in which the angled sunlight falls sharply on the garage walls. These harsh contrasts of light and shadow are reminiscent of Edward Hopper, or even more of Charles Sheeler in the 1920s and '30s; the two are important 20th century American precedents for Aquilino's style. Like Hopper and Sheeler, realism is tempered with an abstract sensibility to underlying form, and a tendency toward simplification and reduction to emphasize the juxtaposition of shape and color. Hopper often included the human figure, bringing a sense of narrative into his work. Although Sheeler's cityscapes and paintings of factories eliminated the figure, there was always a hidden discourse about progress in them. It is this narrative element Aquilino seems to reject.

Bettie Page is gone

"Page was mystified by her influence on modern popular culture. 'I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work,' she said in an interview with The Times in 2006.

Read the LAT obit and story here on this icon.

The richer they are...

The cheaper they are:

"He is one of the world's richest artists, who defied the credit crunch in September by auctioning a whole collection for £111m. But even Damien Hirst may not be immune to the economic climate - many of the workers who produce his works found themselves out of a job this week, the Guardian has learned.

On Thursday, up to 17 of the 22 people who make the pills for Hirst's drug cabinet series were told their contracts were not being renewed, according to two sources close to Science Ltd, Hirst's main art-producing company. Another three who make his butterfly paintings were also told they were surplus to requirements.

It is thought that amounts to approximately half of the London-based artists who work for Hirst. They are paid about £19,000 a year, sources said. In June 2007, Lullaby Spring, a cabinet filled with hand-painted pills, sold for £9.65m."

Read the Guardian story here.

I'm opening in Richmond on Friday

You can read the background about the show here, but the bottom line is that if you are anywhere near Richmond, Virgina tomorrow (Friday, December 12) between 6-9PM, the place to be is Red Door Gallery where my solo show "The Colors of Wars to Come" is opening.

Suspension Ribbon for the Alaska Secession Pacification Campaign Medal. Oil on Canvas by F. Lennox Campello. 18x24 inches, c.2008

The Alaska Secession Pacification Campaign Medal was established by Executive Order 14178 signed by the President on 7 December 2014. It may be awarded to mainland and Hawaii American military and naval personnel for participating in prescribed operations, campaigns and task forces ranging in dates from 6 September 2013 to the present.

The area of operations for these various campaigns includes the total land area and air space of Alaska and surrounding islands, and the waters and air space of the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Strait, Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean within 12 nautical miles of the Alaska coastline.

Personnel must be members of a unit participating in, or be engaged in direct support of the operation for 30 consecutive days in the area of operations or for 60 non-consecutive days provided this support involves entering the area of operations or meets one of the following criteria:

• Be engaged in actual combat, or duty that is equally as hazardous as combat duty, during the operation with armed opposition, regardless of time in the area of operations;
• While participating in the operation, regardless of time, is wounded or injured and requires medical evacuation from the area of operations;
• While participating as a regularly assigned aircrew member flying sorties into, out of, within, or over the area of operations in direct support of the military operations.

One bronze service star shall be worn on the ribbon for qualifying participation during an established campaigns. However, that if an individual's 30 or 60 days began in one campaign and carried over into another, that person would only qualify for the medal with one service star. The medal is not awarded without at least one service star.

Additionally, one black service star shall be worn on the ribbon for qualifying participation during oil fields recovery and pacification operations immediately following the defeat of the Alaskan Insurgent Army.

The suspension ribbon for the medal's white and black colors were suggested by the colors of the snow and ice bound views of the Alaskan coastlines and by the color of oil, its main economic force.

See ya there!

Open Studios: Matt Sesow

DC's Matt Sesow is having shows all over the place, but this this Saturday from 12-6PM he has an open studio.

Details here.

Lecturin' at the Museum



My world famous lecture on collecting contemporary art (a primer for art collectors), which includes a bonus lecture on fun art history.

Email kidnapping

And so I get this email:

Artworks Purchase.‏
From: Lennox Campello (lennox_campello@yahoo.com)
Sent: Thu 12/11/08 12:02 PM
To: lenny@lennycampello.com

Hi ,

I checked you website and i think your artworks sucks....

lennox campello.

And clearly, someone with too much time in their hands and too much evil in their heart has gone through the trouble of creating a fake email account in Yahoo in my name just so that he can send me (and probably others) hate emails in my name.

If you get an email from "lennox_campello@yahoo.com" - it is not me.

But clearly this idiot is not aware that the days when you could do this in total anonimity are gone and that it is illegal to do what they have done and quite punishable by law. And we have busted the following from the fake email:

X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MTtTQ0w9Mg==
X-Message-Status: n:0
X-SID-PRA: Lennox Campello
X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jHU+hsIIhqBSgZ9LzI/t33wvrR8pu/N0FjUEEwMSzkurxMuOWIFNS55EWkNlfuhXScIr6gSVZwh+Ba9VMEaVjZ/
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Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:02:21 -0800
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Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:56:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Lennox Campello
Reply-To: lennox_campello@yahoo.com
Subject: Artworks Purchase.
To: lenny@lennycampello.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-2120375569-1228996571=:19021"
Message-ID: <969407.19021.qm@web111211.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Return-Path: SRS0=K+iieE=4Q=yahoo.com=lennox_campello@lennycampello.com
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 11 Dec 2008 12:02:21.0757 (UTC) FILETIME=[52ADC6D0:01C95B88]

--0-2120375569-1228996571=:19021
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hi ,
=A0
I checked you website and i think your artworks sucks....
=A0
lennox campello.=0A=0A=0A
--0-2120375569-1228996571=:19021
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii

Hi ,   I checked you website and i think your artworks sucks....   lennox campello.

--0-2120375569-1228996571=:19021--

You have 24 hours to send me an apology note or you'll be hearing from my lawyer (and from law enforcement) soon.

When you have loads of money...

"A few months ago, a mystery began blossoming on the streets of New York. All around town, on hundreds of hoardings, bus shelters, phone kiosks and half a dozen billboards in high-traffic areas, a simple white-on-black phrase teased passersby: "See The World Through Ana's Eyes." What did it mean? The sheer omnipresence of the ads suggested it was the work of a movie studio, but no forthcoming releases seemed related. Workers in offices near the billboards quizzed each other and came up blank. Amateur sleuths went online to share theories, to no avail.

Then, late last month, the stark ads were replaced with reproductions of paintings composed of bursting, wild colours, and a new tag line: "See the world through Ana Tzarev's eyes." Oh, well then: Mystery solved.

Wait - Ana who?

Ana Tzarev is a 72-year-old painter, and though almost nobody has heard of her, she is about to become the first person in New York - indeed, perhaps in the history of the art world - to have her work carry a price tag of a million dollars without first ever having sold a single piece of art."

Read the G&M story here.

Gateway Arts District Open Studios coming up!

The Gateway Arts District Open Studio Event will take place on Saturday, December 13, from 1:00-5:00 p and it is a public self-guided tour of professional studios showcasing a variety of mediums - clay/ceramics, painting, sculpture, glass, photography, mixed media, and printmaking

Participating venues include Flux, Red Dirt, Washington Glass School along with several other artists whose studios are located throughout the municipalities of Mount Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood and Hyattsville.

The Arts District, just over the border from DC, is a veritable new and growing hot spot of highly acclaimed artists (and a lot of cool new restaurants) that produce works that are exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. For further information, contact Tonya Jordan at 301-864-3860, ext. 1 or email: tonya@gateway-cdc.org.

Wanna go to an Alexandria opening tomorrow?

The Art League Gallery inside the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia will be hosting an opening reception on Thursday, December 11 from 6:30 to 8:00pm for "Virtue, Sin & the Balance Within."

On exhibition are Carlos Beltran Baldiviezo's contemporary fine art sculptures, featuring 14 fascinating sculptures representing his "sometimes controversial interpretation of the Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins." Through January 5, 2008.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: 5:00pm on Friday, January 23, 2009

The Cultural Development Corporation (CuDC) is requesting proposals for the Gallery at Flashpoint's September 2009/August 2010 season. Open to all artists, independent curators and arts organizations presenting contemporary work in any medium. The Request for Proposals can be found at flashpointdc.org. The Gallery at Flashpoint presents cutting-edge contemporary art and provides a springboard for talented artists and curators to enhance their careers. The Gallery seeks to inspire creativity and encourage the creation of new work by emerging and under-represented artists and curators. In addition, the Gallery provides a place for artists and curators to experiment with progressive concepts and participate in an active, multi-disciplinary arts community. The Gallery is a venue for exhibitions that explore new and challenging ideas, free from the traditional constraints of a commercial gallery. CuDC is seeking inventive, original proposals in any media.

Gallery at Flashpoint
916 G Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001.

When Gallery Owners Bite

Four years ago I wrote this piece for Blogcritics on the subject of "Vanity Galleries."

And today, some disgruntled gallery owner somewhere, perhaps burned out after the waste of time and money that has been the 2008 art fair season, and maybe in a hotel room somewhere in the South as he/she drives the gallery van full of unsold work back to his gallery in Illinois or some other such state, writes the following in a comment about my post:

What you don't realize is that running a gallery is a BUSINESS, and there are expenses. If you had a full list of patrons and a CONFIRMED sales track, you'd be able to show anywhere in the world free of charge. If you're NOT going to sell paintings, a gallery still needs to pay its operating expenses. Upcoming artist need to gain EXPOSURE before anyone will buy their paintings.

If you are a NOBODY, no gallery will show your work. Show me a list of patrons who regularly BUY your work, and I'd invest into your career. It costs upwards of $40,000 a month to run a commercial gallery. If a gallery only showed UPCOMING artists with no fees, they would go out of business. My gallery shows one established artist a month, and has a few unknown artists.

If I ONLY made $20,000 from the established artist, I'd be $20,000 in the hole EVERY MONTH. Why should I take that burden to promote your art. PLEASE EXPLAIN THE LOGIC BEHIND THAT!

You are DELUSIONAL if you think that I'm going to go broke promoting you for no financial reward!

You folks need to reevaluate the BUSINESS that you have chosen. When I go to Red Dot or Art Miami, I have to pay upwards of $20,000. EVERYONE has to pay to show work! You need to join the real world. A gallery falling in love with your art and selling out of an UNKNOWN's paintings is a fantasy. It doesn't happen. You need to be FAMOUS before you make money as an artist, or you can paint "hotel paintings" and sell them for $1,000 a piece. The choice is yours...

I'll let you folks answer this person; please feel free to comment here or at the Blogcritics post. I'm too tired to deal with this asshole.

Margaret Boozer at Project 4

I visited Margaret Boozer's studio a while back and cheated a little, and have already seen most of her next show (titled "Acumulation"), which opens at the District's Project 4 gallery on Thursday, December 11, with a reception from 6:00-8:30 pm.

Boozer is truly one of the District's blue chip artists, and as Project 4 sharply describes her, she "approaches ceramics with an eye for painting and a mind for experimentation. She encourages clay’s physical properties to express themselves in unpredictable manifestations of cause and effect. Drying, warping, cracking- small studio processes echo large geologic events as clay reclaims its origin as earth. Boozer disguises her hand underneath clay’s distortions, then claims authorship with carefully orchestrated compositions driven by the randomness of the result. The work is unexpectedly recognizable as a variety of subject matter that crosses genres between representation and abstraction, painting and sculpture."

There's an Artist's talk on Saturday, January 10, 2:00 pm and the exhibition goes through January 17, 2009.

Time for Glass

It is time for the semi-annual Washington Glass School Holiday Open House & Sale this coming Saturday, December 13, 2008 from 2-6 pm

There will be art, glass, music, food, jewelry, craft, class discounts & more!

Artwork by noted DC area glass artists Tim Tate, Erwin Timmers, Michael Janis, Liz Mears and all the Glass Studio artists and the Washington Glass School instructors will be on exhibit and for sale. The many adjoining artist studios will all be joining them to make for a huge event!

Cool ceramics works from the artists of Flux Studios and Red Dirt Studios, painting and encaustic works by Sinel/Stewart/Weiss Studios, Janis Goodman, Blue Fire Studio and the other artists along the Railroad Tracks.

PG County's Gateway Arts District has their arts & craft sales at their nearby arts centers scheduled to coincide.

What : Annual Holiday Party and Sale!
Where : The Washington Glass School, 3400 Otis Street, Mount Rainier, MD
When : Saturday Afternoon, December 13th from 2pm to 6pm

This is a really great event to pick up Christmas presents by the way. Last year I ended up with a box full of small, gorgeous and affordable glass works from many of the school's studio artists which saved my butt for Xmas and the Holidays.

Directing Cornelius

On December 12, 2009, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, as part of the Arlington Art Center's show about art, mass production, and commerce titled "Unlimited Edition", D.C.-based performance artist Kathryn Cornelius will be transmitting a performance piece live via webcam to be projected onto the walls of the AAC. For ReDO IT, Cornelius will "upend the typical model of artistic production and authority, allowing gallery-goers to direct her actions, turning her into a sort of service provider."

Anyone who chooses to do so can send instructions for Cornelius to act out -- via Twitter, through e-mails prior to the night, or at a web terminal conveniently set up in the gallery.

All of the instructions will appear projected on one wall as they are updated; on the adjoining wall, viewers will see Cornelius interpret her audience's directives.

More information on how to participate can be found on a website designed by Cornelius specifically for the project: redoit.kathryncornelius.com/blog

Cornelius is "known for pieces that create a strange, phantom territory at the edges of the art world: From offering massages at one art fair; to staging a faux red carpet event at another; to masquerading as a one-woman arts corridor cleaning company, Cornelius is often darkly funny, never boring, and typically whip-smart."

Seven Days in the Art World

"Hollywood, it has been said, is like high school with money: cliquish, catty and status-obsessed, awash in insecurity and plagued by conflicting desires to stand out and to fit in. The same might be said of the contemporary art world, particularly during the glitzy boom years chronicled by Sarah Thornton in her entertaining new book, “Seven Days in the Art World.”

A freelance journalist with a background in sociology, Thornton spent five years air-kissing her way through art fairs, auction houses and artists’ studios as a “participant observer” intent on decoding the manners and mores of this globe-­trotting Prada-clad tribe. What she learned, among other things, is that wealthy collectors buy expensive works of art for a variety of reasons — vanity, social status, an appetite for novelty and, most important of all, an acute excess of money. As one of her auction-house informers bluntly puts it, “After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?”

The book is cleverly divided into seven day-in-the-life chapters, each focusing on a different facet of the contemporary art world: an auction (at Christie’s New York), an art school “crit” (at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia), an art fair (Art Basel), an artist’s studio (that of the Japanese star Takashi Murakami), a prize (Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize), a magazine (Artforum) and a biennale (Venice)."

Read the review of Sarah Thornton's "Seven Days in the Art World" by Mia Fineman in the New York Times here and buy the book here.

Early Look: Miami Sales Report

The recession sculpted Art Basel Miami Beach into a humbler version of itself this week, with galleries reporting significant drops in sales.

Nearly half of all art dealers interviewed saw sales drop, with almost 20 percent saying sales fell below the 30 percent mark. Just over 15 percent reported a sales increase, while 30 percent said sales were flat.

To gauge the effects of economic turmoil on the country's largest contemporary arts fair, five Miami Herald reporters surveyed 85 exhibitors participating in the official Basel show and in five satellite fairs.

Read the report in the Miami Herald here. From what I am hearing from the ground, some of the satellite fairs are doing better than others.

Neptune's beautiful new building

Nearly everyone in DC that has been to Gallery Neptune's new location in the renewed PeriPoint Building in downtown Bethesda, Maryland keeps telling me what an amazing transformation has taken place.

Not only has PeriPoint applied to become Bethesda’s first Silver Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design building as certified by the US Green Council, but let me be the first to say that award winning architect Michael Belisle AIA should easily win whatever architectural award is given to gallery designers. PeriPoint is located at 5001 Wilson Lane, at the busy crossroads of Wilson Lane, Old Georgetown Road, Arlington Rd. and St. Elmo Avenue.

The corner site has been a landmark in Bethesda since 1927, serving first as the Sanitary Grocery store, later as USO Headquarters during World War II, and most recently as a vacuum repair shop. Today, the 80-year-old structure has been renewed, embracing the 21st century while maintaining the defining geometry of the building’s early 20th century shell.

It is absolutely gorgeous inside and out, from the cool lightning to the even cooler hollow storage/wall units and even the balcony addressing the busy street corner below.

Michael Belisle and Elyse Harrison's labor of love shows, and the new gallery is easily among the most beautiful in the Greater DC area, and also (as far as I know) the only "green" one around here, and maybe even in the entire nation.

Nevin Kelly Gallery on the move

DC's Nevin Kelly Gallery has moved to their new location in Columbia Heights and I am told that they are now in a beautiful new space in the Highland Park complex at 14th and Irving Streets, NW just above the Columbia Heights Metro station on the Green Line.

The Amazing Work of Itsuki Ogihara

I walked into Projects Gallery the other day to deliver some of my artwork, as they are taking my work to a couple of fairs in Miami this weekend, and hanging was their "Paper" show.

The show opens today, which is First Friday for Philly galleries, with an opening reception from 6-9PM. The exhibition continues through December 20th. I have a few pieces in that show, so I wasn't really planning to write anything about it.

But when you first walk into the gallery you see this:



The work all the way on that far wall, seemingly a sort of artist wallpaper at first sight, is one of the most amazing conceptual pieces with a powerful delivery mechanism and one of the most innovative and intelligent works of art that I have ever seen.

Itsuki Ogihara. Population Series. 17”H x 17”W. Digital prints
Like all of you, I was initially fooled by the subject matter macro visual, and it wasn't until I zoomed in and understood what I was seeing, that this young Japanese-born artist (and a student at UPenn I believe) struck me with the powerful punch of that ellusive artistic goal: something new.

Itsuki Ogihara is her name, and this is her latest project (see earlier projects here) and after I describe it for you, I think you will see why I came away so impressed.

Each one of those 17" x 17" digital prints represents an American city. Each "city" has a different design.



Ogihara has taken data from the US Census to determine that city's racial and ethnic demographics, and using an artistic algorithm, she then designs each print to represent that city. The macro design in each city is made up of 100 tiny silhouetted figures in various poses and activities. As an example, in the Salt Lake City print, there are 83 white silhouettes, 2 black, and so on to describe that city's racial and ethnic make-up.



Pretty interesting so far. And then when you study each figure, you realize that they are each individuals. That's right, each individual figure is a separate and distinct image on its own.

What she has done is actually taken hundreds of portraits of people; real people and real photographs, and shrunk them down to the tiny size seen in the prints, and then colored them to represent each race (white for Caucasians, black for African-American, red for Native Americans and yellow for Asians) and one ethnicity (brown for Latinos).

It is such a labor intensive endeavor that it leaves me tired just to think of it. And it is also one of the rare conceptual ideas where the art actually delivers on a par with the idea or wall text about the concept.

Itsuki Ogihara's demographic wallpaper is an unexpected treat delivered in a superbly professional and unique delivery mechanism, which employs concepts of mass production generalization to delve deep into our shared consciousness about race and ethnicity and art.

I see great things in the future of this young artist.

Wanna do some bodypainting in DC tomorrow?

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA DC) over in Georgetown is not just having their opening reception for the December Member Holiday & Gift Show tomorrow, but also on Friday evening there will be body painting with many models & perhaps a "special duo performance." It all starts at 6 pm until late!

And on Sunday, December 7th, they will have a major "Meet the Models Party." Hors d' ouevres, wine, soft drinks for all. This is a meet-and-greet party - artists are welcome to come share in the festivities and draw until there's no more - They will have loads of models at hand and anyone interested in modeling can also show up.

Questions? - Call Dave at 202.342.6230 or email at mocadc01@comcast.net

And they're off!

All 25 or so art fairs in Miami are off and running and the art world holds its collective breath to see what happens next.

I'm staying home this year.

Email me your experiences at the various fairs and I'll publish them here.

Kuah on BAM

Laura Kuah has the run down on Baltimore's Contemporary Museum and its schedule of coming holiday events. Read it here.

How my football season is going so far

Street Artists

40+ street artists that you should know besides Banksy... see them here.

Giants in the City

Directly from Art Basel MB:

If the video doesn't load properly view it here.

DCist Exposed

DCist Exposed, under the guidance and development (pun intended) of Heather Goss has matured into one of the Greater Washington DC area's best photography events. They are now having their call for photographers for the next event.

All the details here.

Bader Fund

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund has awarded a total of $50,000 to three Greater DC and Baltimore area visual artists. The recipients of this year’s Bader Fund grants are sculptors Emilie Brzezinski of McLean, VA, and Richard Cleaver of Baltimore, MD and photographer Mark Power of Silver Spring, MD.

Congrats to all three!

The Colors of Wars to Come

Yesterday, when I mentioned the VFMA's Alex Nyernes segment on NPR I dropped the hint that I'd be coming down to Richmond for a day or two. The main reason is that this coming December 12 I will be having an opening of my recent paintings at Richmond's Red Door Gallery.

It is titled "The Colors of Wars to Come," and the work in the show focuses on the series of paintings that I started in the late 90s, initially based on my own military awards earned during my service in the United States Navy, and subsequently (last year) refocused on creating and inventing new awards and campaign ribbons for imagined, forecast or foreseen events of the future.

It is my own visual arts commentary on the futility and near inevitability of foreign policy and unforeseen world events, perhaps predicted (or perhaps avoided) by this line of work.

As I've told the story before many times, this series saw its beginning as a result of the fact that the the McLean Center for the Arts sponsors a very good painting competition every couple of years called "Strictly Painting." It is now in its sixth or seventh iteration.

About a decade 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 back then, was not "painting-friendly."

In fact, with all due respect, I used to blame her for diminishing the Corcoran Biennials, which used to be known as the Corcoran Biennial of Painting. In fact, since then they have been so diluted that I think they no longer exist? (I should ask the Corcoran about this).

Anyway, for many decades 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. Since I haven't heard any Biennial talk lately, I should check with the Corcoran to see if they intend to continue doing them. If not, I think that the first stake was driven through its heart by Sultan back then.

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 secret bet, and decided to enter the exhibition with work created specifically to fit what I predicted 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 had stopped painting and decided to devote myself strictly to my love for drawing.

So by 1999 I had not picked up a brush in several years and that's 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 including often myself) was seduced by technology in the form of videos, digital stuff and such trendy things.

And therefore 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 about 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.

It surprised me a little that I enjoyed this return to painting and I continued to create new work along this series, while slowly walking away from the "exactness" of replicating a pixilated image and drifting towards more towards brushwork and texture.

And then last year I came up upon the concept of inventing new ribbons and awards.

And I created this:

"Iranian Campaign Medal", Oil on Canvas, 24 x 48 inches, c.2007
By F. Lennox Campello (from the Digitalia series)

The Iranian Campaign Medal was established by Executive Order 13975 signed by the President on 13 January 2012. It may be awarded to American military and naval personnel for participating in prescribed operations, campaigns and task forces ranging in dates from 2 February 2011 to present.

The area of operations for these various campaigns includes the total land area and air space of Iran, and the waters and air space of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean within 12 nautical miles of Iranian coastline.

Personnel must be members of a unit participating in, or be engaged in direct support of, the operation for 30 consecutive days in the area of operations or for 60 non-consecutive days provided this support involves entering the area of operations or meets one of the following criteria:

• Be engaged in actual combat, or duty that is equally as hazardous as combat duty, during the operation with armed opposition, regardless of time in the area of operations;
• While participating in the operation, regardless of time, is wounded or injured and requires medical evacuation from the area of operations;
• While participating as a regularly assigned aircrew member flying sorties into, out of, within, or over the area of operations in direct support of the military operations.

One bronze service star shall be worn on the ribbon for qualifying participation during an established campaign. However, that if an individual's 30 or 60 days began in one campaign and carried over into another, that person would only qualify for the medal with one service star. The medal is not awarded without at least one service star.

The executive order provides that service members who qualify for either the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal for service in Iran between 2 February 2011 and 13 January 2012, remain qualified for those medals. However, upon application, any such member may be awarded the Iranian Campaign Medal in lieu of the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal, but no Service member may be awarded more than one of these three medals for the same period of service in Iran.

The suspension ribbon for the medal's purple and gold colors were suggested by the historical Imperial colors of Iran’s millennial Persian history and the golden sunsets of the Persian Gulf.

The above text also "replicates" what a "real" award's wording would look like.

At Red Door I plan to exhibit the most recent paintings in this series, as well as half a dozen or so small preparatory watercolors from the late 90s. Here's a video on the creation of some of the works.


The opening reception is December 12, from 6-9PM.

See ya there!

Belmar & Binstock

The beautiful spaces at H&F Fine Arts next present concurrent solo shows of works by Alan Binstock and Joan Belmar. Both artists’ work explores the circle of life and construct dialogue assessing the parallels of three dimensional abstract structures and human life.

Belmar’s own rich work will serve as a layered backdrop to the translucent sculptures created by Binstock, whose work explores the forms that express or reflect the sacred, the inner life and varied manifestations of the micro and macro worlds.

Opening reception: Saturday, December 6 from 5-8pm.

Opening in Norfolk this Friday

Alexander Rutsch Award

Deadline: February 6, 2009

This award consists of a solo exhibition May 15 - June 27, 2009 and $5,000 cash award. U.S. based artists 19 years of age and older. All work submitted must be available for exhibit. Entries must be received by February 6, 2009. Download submission guidelines and prospectus at www.pelhamartcenter.org or contact rutschaward@pelhamartcenter.org or 914-738-2525. Pelham Art Center, 155 Fifth Avenue, Pelham, NY 10803.

Mid City Artists Open Studios

DC's Mid City Artists all of which are within walking distance of the Dupont/Logan Circles will be open for visitors with over 20 artists exhibiting this coming weekend.

Around 40 artists in one weekend. Details here.

Alex Nyerges

Yesterday NPR had a really cool segment on Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' director Alex Nyerges where he managed to weave together a really interesting segment on the museum, a ghost, a Pollock, generous donors and a really strong path forward.

Details here.

I'll be visiting VMFA soon as I'll be in Richmond for a few days later this month and plan to write on the museum and Richmond galleries.

Down at the Factory this Thursday

Fragmented Idioms
I love the power of representational imagery to deliver a visually important work of art.

And to the left is "First Day" by Anthony Armstrong, whose works open at Howard University's Armour J. Blackburn Gallery with an opening reception December 7, 2008 from 5-8PM.

The gallery is at 2397 6th Street, NW in DC.

Here we go again: Dexter & the Cubans

I do realize that this issue of mine is such a jingoist thing, and I am also keenly aware that I've written about it before in a different scenario, but the more we become aware how culturally blind Hollywood is, the more they underscore their own cultural stupidity with minute mistakes that keep adding up to colossal mountains.

Last year I bitched when Jimmy Smits, a superb actor on his own, was chosen to play the lead part in the CBS drama "Cane."

My historical issue was that Jimmy Smits is a great actor, but not what your typical Cuban sugar magnate would have looked liked in the racist Cuban society of the late 1950s and the Cuban-American refugee wave of the early 1960s.

CBS picked Smits, a brilliant actor, I guess based on their perception of what a Cuban looks like (Smits is not of Cuban ancestry... his father, Cornelis Smits, was a Surinamese immigrant from Dutch Guiana, and his mother, Emilina, is Puerto Rican).

This is what the person that Smits' "Canes" character was loosely based upon really looks like...

That is him and his also Cuban wife to the left... but because, like a lot of Cubans, he looks too "Anglo" and not enough of what Hollywood (and CBS) want all of us to think that Latinos should all look like, they hired a terrific Emmy-winning Surinamese actor who fits the sterotypical image of what Hollywood thinks Cubans should look like, to play the lead part.

Latinos are a culturally, racially and ethnically diverse group of people, and we're not all made of one mold, as Hollywood wants you to think.

So that was then, and here's what has me all spun up in a tempest in my demitasse.

Currently my absolute favorite TV show is Showtime's "Dexter."

If you haven't seen this show, then go and rent seasons one and two out on DVD and then get hooked.

In the series, Michael C. Hall is absolutely brilliant as a serial killer who works as a blood expert for the Miami Metro Police while hiding the fact that he is also a serial killer. Dexter goes after bad guys, but he is still a truly disturbing psychopath pretending to be normal while killing bad guys left and right in a very orchestrated manner.

Dexter is television crime drama at its best.

Because this is set in Miami, several of the regular characters in the series are portrayed as Cuban characters, such as Dexter's boss, Lt. Maria LaGuerta, played superbly by Puerto Rican actress Lauren Velez and detective Angel Batista, also played superbly by Puerto Rican actor David Zayas.

Now enter season three, which introduced a new character, that of Asst. District Attorney Miguel Prado, another Cuban character played by, yep that's right: Jimmy Smits!

Smits is a terrific actor, and since by now he seems to be making quite a decent living playing Cubans on TV, the least that Showtime can do is hire some Cubans to write their Spanish dialogues for the series so that at least he can sound Cuban.

I know that this is pedantic, but everytime that the "Cuban" characters speak to each other in Spanish banter, it is grating to Cuban ears to hear "non Cuban" being spoken.

Imagine that you are watching a foreign movie, let's say a French movie... and all the dialogue is in French, and two British actors are in the film playing American parts, and every few minutes they speak to each other in English, and instead of American English coming out of their mouths, what comes out is cockney English.

That's what (in my pedantic world of Virgoes) I have to suffer everytime that LaGuerta, Batista and/or Miguel Prado talk in Spanish.

The straw that broke the camel's back a few episodes ago was when Miguel Prado (Smits) jokingly called Dexter a "filipolla" (or "gilipolla").

That's when I realized that whomever Showtime has hired to write the Spanish for the series, not only has no idea about what Cuban Spanish sounds like, but also zero idea of what Latin American Spanish sounds like.

Having lived in Spain for a few years in my 20s, I know what that word means, which is essentially a curse word used by Spaniards; let me repeat that: Spaniards, to mean asshole or jerk, etc.

I am almost 99% sure that no Cuban in Miami or Cuba or anywhere else in the Great Cuban Diaspora, has ever called anyone a gilipolla, unless perhaps they live in Spain and have picked up the term there... from Spaniards.

But in Miami? Naaaaaaaaaaaah...

A Cuban would have said "Maricon" or perhaps "Cabron." But fili/gilipolla? Nunca!

Now imagine those two Brit actors playing Yanks in my earlier French movie example, calling each other "arseholes" or "wankers."

Welcome to my pedantic hell.

And now for Showtime: My list of actor candidates who are actually of Cuban ancestry and thus a shoe-in for the part and who actually fucking speak Spanish with a Cuban accent:

Andy Garcia (duh!!!! perfect for the part!... but probably too classy and too expensive to do TV).

Nestor Carbonell. He was great in "Canes" and also in "Lost City," although I think that he wears eye make up?

Mel Ferrer... ah!... I think he's dead.

Desi Arnaz... fine, fine... he's definately dead; but how about Desi Jr.?????

Jorge Perrugorria

Cesar Romero ... fine! I know that The Joker is definately dead.

Julio Mechoso

Ruben Rabasa

Victor Rivers

George Alvarez...

Showtime: call me.

Meet the Artist

Jean Marie Barrett will be at her solo exhibition at the Arlington Ed. Center (1426 N. Quincy Street in Arlington, VA) today Monday, December 1 at 5:30pm with a few friends - join them!

Closing Reception for "Aqui Estamos" today

This afternoon, from 2-4PM H&F Fine Arts will host a closing reception for "Aqui Estamos," contemporary artwork by some of the best known Cuban artists from Cuba and from the Cuban Diaspora.

As I've said before, I called the show "Aqui Estamos" or "Here We Are," as sort of a footprint statement for these important artists making an exclamation point to the Greater DC area.

On the walls are drawings, photographs, paintings and etchings by Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kcho, Sandra Ramos, Cirenaica Moreira, Marta Maria Perez Bravo, Aimee Garcia Marrero and Roberto Acosta Wong.

Last chance to see the show before it travels to Philly!

La Cubanita bailando reggaeton

My good friend and Cuban uberartist Tania Brugera sent me this video of a young Cuban girl dancing raggaeton, which had the effect to instantly making me proud of my Cuban roots and also feel 150 years old!

Sunday Post Reading

Washington has a vibrant, under-the-radar art party scene that has long been visible only to those in the know. But thanks in part to a growing community of art socialites, bloggers and paparazzi, nearly 3,000 people are suddenly pounding down the doors of a museum on a Friday night, and 700 are lining up in the rain to get into a crumbling skate park to see photography. Party organizers sometimes lament the new notoriety, but the crowds keep coming. This month, we fanned out to four events to capture a slice of the action.

Read the WaPo story here.

New Art Scam

If you get the below email, ignore it. It is a new art scam:

Subject: Artworks..‏
From: Janet Karloff (jan_kar001@yahoo.com)
Sent: Tue 11/25/08 1:58 PM
To: lenny@lennycampello.com

Hi, Hope this message finds you well. I saw these creatives works on your web site and i will like you to get back with more details if they are still available for purchase. "Iranian Campaign" and "Expeditionary Service Test" I will appreciate an urgent reply. Best Regards,

Janet.

Like I have done in the past with other scammers, I will try to hook "Jane Karloff" into wasting time and effort with me...

Hundreds of portraits by Kayti

She never did my portrait, but Kayti Didriksen, who can rightfully claim to have done Dubya's most famous portrait, will have an exhibition of a lot of new portraits.

It all starts on Saturday, November 29th at 7 pm at th Fight Club, located in Blagden Alley between 9th and 10th and M & N Streets, N.W. Washington D.C.

This neighborhood is peppered with a lot of "off the radar" little clubs and "you need to know someone in order to get in" places, and the best way to get on the "in" list is to hang around some of these exhibits for a while and ask...

Go see this show and then tell me (here it comes) how Kayti did.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: December 8, 2008

No entry fees!

CRUX is an exhibit sponsored by Trinity Presbyterian Church (TPC)M in Norfolk, VA. The purpose of this show is to support the arts community as it explores the theme “CRUX.” The exhibit will be held at The Mayer Fine Art Gallery (MFA) in Norfolk on January 10-31, 2009.

Eligibility: All are invited to participate. Fine art in two and three dimensions is eligible for entry. Works should relate to the theme. TPC reserves the right to refuse any works with unusual installation requirements or works otherwise judged unsuitable.

Entry application: There are no fees. Artists should complete the entry form and notification form giving all information requested. Send a SASE for notification.
digitatal entries only: Artists may submit one image each for up to three works. Digital images should be sent on a PC-compatible CD-ROM in JPG format or emailed to crux@trinitynorfolk.com. Each file should include artist’s name and image number to correspond with annotated image list. Maximum image size is 1920 x 1920 pixels at 72 dpi. Do not embed images into PowerPoint or submit moving images or audio files. Each artist should submit an image list including title, medium, dimensions, year and description of piece as it relates to the theme, CRUX.

Sales: There will be absolutely no commission retained on any sale by either TPC or MFA. Work will be sold at the price listed on the entry form. All work not for sale must be marked “NFS” and please, no “PORs.”

Jurors: William Hennessey, the Director of the Chrysler Museum, Solomon Isekeije, Assistant Professor of Arts with the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Hampton University, and Ken Daley, Professor of Art at Old Dominion University.

Calendar:
12/12/08 Deadline to receive entry forms, and digital submissions, all postmarked by Dec. 8, 2008, and mailed to:

Trinity Presbyterian Church
7th Annual Juried Exhibition
Attn. S. Lucas
1600 Colonial Avenue
Norfolk, VA 23517

Email submissions may be made to crux@trinitynorfolk.com
12/17/08 Notification forms mailed
1/8/09 Accepted works must be received at TPC
1/10/09 Exhibition reception from 7:30-10:00PM
1/30/09 Exhibit closes.
1/31/09 All hand-delivered works are to be picked up from TPC.
2/2/09 All works shipped UPS will be returned UPS at artist’s expense.

Contact the TPC office at 757.466.0989 or crux@trinitynorfolk.com with questions or for more information or to get a copy of the prospectus.

Hickey on the art boom's Dionysian last gasps

After attending 2007's Frieze Art Fair and Art Basel Miami, Dave Hickey found himself pondering the retrenchment to come:

"So think of the art world as a beach and money as the surf. Waves roll inbut they always suck back out, leaving a few masterpieces, taking some beachwith them. When a really gnarly monster rolls in, the best we can hope isthat it will leave some beach behind and a few treasures in the sand, alongwith the wreckage and the bodies‹because the wave will suck away. And whenit does, as it is doing right now, the whales will either hold or dump. Ifthey hold, art will remain a stable-valued, low-liquid commodity. If thewhales dump at cut-rate prices, the art world will undergo its firstcatastrophic value re-adjustment in 40 years. It won¹t be pretty, but itwill be exciting to watch."

Read the article in Vanity Fair here.

Last week to see "Here We Are"

"Aqui Estamos" (Here We Are) closes on November 30 at H&F Fine Arts just over the DC street border at H&F Fine Arts, which by the way is quite a really beautiful gallery space and clearly a lot of work from the co-owners Karen Handy and Cheryl Fountain and easily the key arts presence on the rising Gateway Arts District.

On the walls are drawings, photographs, paintings and etchings by some of the most important contemporary Cuban artists on the planet today as well as a couple of emerging ones; work by Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kcho, Sandra Ramos, Cirenaica Moreira, Marta Maria Perez Bravo, Aimee Garcia Marrero and Roberto Acosta Wong.

Kevin Mellema just reviewed the show and you can read his insightful review here.

I have mentioned before the coup of this show has been in bringing to the Greater DC area for the first time work by Kcho and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and I will admit that I have been a tiny bit puzzled that this fact has not received a little more attention; it's not everyday that the focus of an exhibition, even a Cuban art exhibition, includes work by Afro-Cubans, with their unique perspective on art given to them by their experiences with both the African and Cuban diasporas.

Take the case of Campos-Pons.

She has been called "one of Boston’s most prominent artists," and as evidence it has been submitted that this exceptional Cuban-born (and now American by citizenship) artist has shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (where she had a solo before age 30), Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the Venice Biennale, and many other prestigious venues around the world.

And last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted “Everything Is Separated by Water,” a mid-career retrospective of Campos-Pons' paintings, sculptures, photos, and installations.


When I was trying to arrange her participation in this show (and the follow on in Philadelphia) I visited Magda, as she is usually called, and we met in her four year old gallery, Gasp, which she and her husband opened in 2004 -- and which according to the Boston press "specializes in group shows of young experimenting artists and stars from the international art circuit that her own stature attracts. It’s one of a handful of galleries in town that aren’t primarily commercial or institutional."

"Te pareces a uno de mis primos (you look like one of my cousins)," she told me with a huge smile as we met; the smile would rarely leave her face during the three plus hours that I spent talking with this dynamo of a woman.

Campos-Pons was born in La Vega, in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, a sugar plantation town where her Nigerian-born great-great grandfather worked as a slave in Cuba's brutal slave system, in which sugar mill owners often owned thousands of slaves and where death and rape were common parts of life.

In Spanish, Matanzas means "Slaughter" or "Killings" -- imagine a US state or a Canadian province named "Slaughters" as a reminder of the brutality of the Spaniards' treatment of the native Indians (within a couple of decades of the Europeans arrival in Cuba, nearly the entire native Indian population had been wiped out by disease, murder and suice). The name "Matanzas" commemorates the actual suicide deaths of tens of thousands of Taino Indians who committed suicide rather than become slaves to their white masters from Spain as Kubanacan (as Cuba was known in the native Taino language) became a colony of the mighty Kingdom of Spain as the world entered the so called "Spanish Century", mostly on the back of the red and black races.

When Cuba's native population died out from suicide or disease, the Conquistadores began the new continent's slave trade and brought in African slaves purchased from the Arabs, and mostly on the brutal labor of their backbones, a new Cuban nation was forged eventually.

And as an Afro-Cuban woman with this history in her blood lines, Campos-Pons has used her cultural and racial background the initial key theme of her own work, with long ties to her Cuban homeland, but also with a powerful influence of her evolving Americanosity.

We talked about Cuba, about her background there, her family, her education in the Cuban system, her growing disappointment with the intolerant and repressive Castro regime, her trials and tribulations in leaving the land that she loves so much, her marriage to the talented American musician Neil Leonard, the struggle to get a legal visa to the US - during which she lived for a year and a half in Canada on art fellowships with her husband visiting her on weekends, before she was allowed to immigrate to the US at the end of 1991.

We switched between machine-gun Cuban Spanish ("Cubans use Spanish as a weapon," a South American friend once told me) and English, as she described her gallery, which she is heroically building one room and idea at a time. I was amazed by a wide-planked wood floor that Magda constructed herself, the doorway that she cut through the wall, the translucent plastic materials that she uses very elegantly to cover up and separate areas and to create a resident artist's studio, and the new expansive room that she is now building. "This gallery is an art installation in progress," I thought to myself.

We discussed her then current show at the gallery, Are We There Yet? - curated by Dawoud Bey. It featured work by Howard Henry Chen, Alan Cohen, Christine DiThomas, Aron Gent, Rula Halawani, Surendra Lawoti, Curtis Mann, Oscar Palacio and Adriana Rios. I was particularly impressed by the work of Curtis Mann and Christine DiThomas. Mann's compositional abilities and a very effective technique of distressing paper in order to acquire a good ground for the piece, really yields very memorable imagery, while DiThomas' photographs transcend the focus of the show and float - aided considerably by the very elegant presentation and soft focus - a sense of time and place; they can be "modernized" images from the 50s, 60s or even colonial America.

Magda was enthusiastic and energizing in describing the show and the artists, and relating - from one gallerist to another now - the struggles and successes of running an independent art gallery: dealing with landlords, helping the emerging Brookline neighborhood establish a separate but individual identity rather than become another cookie-cutter gentrified neighborhood, etc.

She is a hurricane in action, one moment telling me about her plans to talk to a friend restauranteur into opening an Iranian food cafe that would feature artwork; the next moment talking about forging friendships with the new small businesses that have opened since they opened Gasp.

In the middle of this, a smiling Chinese lady pops into the gallery. "I just cooked these and wanted to give you some," she tells Magda as she hands her a bag full of noodles. She is the owner of a tiny new Chinese restaurant down the block. It is the perfect exclamation point to our conversation.

I've been there for over two hours and I still have not talked about her own work, but I have been hypnotized into talking for hours about Cuba, the gallery business, art, race, immigration, the press, Cuban food, cooking, her neighborhood, Boston, and even issues dealing with the plight of illegal aliens.

Her 15-year-old son Arcadio walks in, already half a foot taller than either one of us; it is time for Magda to check his homework assignment. They disappear for a while in the back of the gallery while she checks his laptop report. Later on I find out that Arcadio's homework assignment is in fact assigned by his parents in exchange for computer gaming time. The assignment? ... To write four gallery or museum reviews a month. "He is really developing into a very good writer and critic," the proud mother tells me.



We digress into a discussion about children and she laughs as she tells me about the surreal experiences of being a Cuban black woman in the wee hours of the morning taking her very Bostonian child to hockey practice in a freezing ice arena and also relates Arcadio's visits to Cuba and how well he fit into the Cuban world of La Vega.

"Probably the first grandson of La Vega to play hockey," I think silently.

My wife calls and wants to know if she can run from the downtown hotel to the gallery and meet us. Magda, who also runs regularly, changes gears and gives her directions and is amazed when my wife shows up forty minutes later. "You ran from Copley to here already?" she asks amazed.

My wife was once ranked fifth in the world in the triathlon and repesented the United States twice at the world competitions of the event. She was twice the Maryland state champion during her competing days.

We start the gallery tour all over again - this is a gallerist possessed by love for her art and love for her gallery and the opportunity that it affords to the artists that she show. "We have a different model," she tells us. "We have a curated show each month," she explains, "with a thematic exhibition by several artists as well as a show by a new, emerging artist in the back room."

We walk upstairs to her studio, on the way up she apologizes about the mess that we're to expect. "All artists do this," I think to myself. I have never been to a neat artist studio, and hopefully I never will.

She immediately begins to root around for things and artwork and post-cards and books and memories. "I never throw anything away," she warns us as she dances around the crowded two rooms that make up her studio space. The walls are packed with both work by other artists, really advanced work by her son, and works in progress by Campos-Pons.

Like most Cuban artists, Magda is highly trained in nearly every facet of the fine arts: she is a printmaker, a painter, a sculptor, a videographer, a photographer and even a glass artist.

Over the years her photographic work has been a prominent member of the leading visual imagery of contemporary art; the one below (of Magda and her mother) once graced the cover page of the New York Times' art section and is currently in the collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum ...



As most artists who dance at the top of the art world know, it is a hard dance, and continuing exploration of what fuels the fire of being an artist becomes an essential part of continuing success.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water (Indianapolis Museum of Art) (Hardcover) by Okwui Enwezor (Author), Lisa D. Freiman (Editor). Order the book here
We begin discussing her latest works and Magda dissolves and melts in front of my eyes, and reforms herself into a fountain spewing multiple jets of information at once.

There's something unique about this talented artist - she's the Cuban art world's Pocahantas to the New Yorkish John Smith art universe. Through her and her work, Cuba's bloody African entrails are exposed, perhaps to the chagrin of Miami's powerful and nearly all white Cuban-American population. Like Pocahantas, she learned English harshly and quickly, and also like Pocahantas, she learned to adapt as needed and become a new entity in an almost colorless new world.

Through her and her art, first Bostonians and then the art universe was given a high dose of Cuban art education, and within that art world even African-Americans were also initiated: "you are not the only ones, my Northern brothers and sisters," her artwork shouts to the four corners of America.

It is all a good thing for art, because the most important achievement that her artwork has caused is to deliver Campos-Pons from precisely all those boxes and labels that we are all so fond of trying to pin on artists.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Island Treasures. Large Format Polaroids - Currently hanging at H&F Fine Arts
In a very strong sense, her artwork and her worldwide success has liberated her from labels, and while her Cubanosity has certainly fueled her artistic personna and productivity, it is her talent and work ethic as an artist that now has her as just a brilliantly talented artist simply producing great art.

Art.

Donate art to this

The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge benefit for Visual AIDS will be hosted by Metro Pictures in NYC on January 9-10, 2009. This is one of my favorite charity art auctions and I've been donating and encouraging artists to donate to it for years.

Postcards From the Edge is a show and sale of original, postcard-sized artworks on paper by established and emerging artists. Offered on a first-come, first-served basis, each piece is exhibited anonymously, and the identity of the artist is revealed only after the work is purchased. With the playing field leveled, all participants can take home a piece by a famous artist, or one who’s just making his/her debut in the art world. Nonetheless, collectors walk away with something beautiful, a piece of art they love. For more details, visit this website.

Attention Artists! Deadline: Wednesday, December 10, 2008.

They are looking for artists to donate a 4" x 6" original work on paper for the exhibition and sale. Painting, drawing, photography, printmaking and mixed media are all welcome. If you would like to participate in Postcards From the Edge, download submission forms at this website.

Preview Party
Friday, January 9, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show.

Benefit Sale - ONE DAY ONLY!
Saturday, January 10, 2009 from 11:00 - 6:00
Over 1500 original postcard-size works of art.
$75 EACH. Buy 4 cards and get 1 free!

Michael at G

G Fine Art holds an opening reception this Saturday for the most recent Trawick Prize winner Maggie Michael's new body of work, All at Once.

G is at 1515 14th Street NW, and the reception is from 6 to 8 p.m. Note to G Fine Art: update your website.