Yoani Sánchez is an acclaimed Cuban blogger, journalist and founder of 14ymedio, Cuba’s first independent daily digital news outlet. She is currently the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.She will be speaking at GMU on Tuesday, march 17, 2015 from 4:30pm - 6:15pm. RSVP here.
A University of Havana graduate in Philology, she emigrated to Switzerland in 2002 to build a new life for herself and her family. Two years later, she returned to Havana, promising herself to live there as a free person. In 2007, she began Generation Y, her personal blog about daily life in Cuba. She has been arrested and detained by the Cuban government for starting her activities.
In 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama wrote that her blog “provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba” and applauded her efforts to “empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology.” TIME magazine listed her as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People, stating that “under the nose of a regime that has never tolerated dissent, Sánchez has practiced what paper-bound journalists in her country cannot: freedom of speech.” Foreign Policy magazine has named her one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.
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| "Isla Prisión" (Prison Island) Watercolor on Paper by F. Lennox Campello, c. 1977 2x4 inches |
Artist Derek Thomas Hambly has just been appointed a professorship at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) where he will teach ceramics and develop its arts program. Derek was one of the artists that helped the Washington Glass Studio create the DCCAH public artwork sculpture “Community Gateway“.Check out the full article in East City Art here.
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| "Eve, Running Away from Eden" |
"Majority of my Facebook friends are artists and art related people whom I have met before or artists whom I would love to meet in person one day. Facebook has become a virtual art salon to me. Of course I would prefer to meet friends and discuss things face to face but everyone's busy schedule and different location (many of them are international friends) won't allow us to meet face to face easily.
Because of the Facebook I feel so close to far away friends and family as getting everyday information is so easy. We can discuss our concerns or social issues anytime and pass around important news instantaneously. It is the biggest power of social media and I think artists are playing an important part in supporting our freedom of speech and expression through social media like Facebook.
My “Thank You Artist Friends on Facebook Project” allowed me to look closer at each of my artist friends. This project made me think about our crazy everyday life and let me take a longer time to reflect and question how we process any single image from the Internet.
I decided to reproduce a small profile picture of each of my artist friends on a small ceramic tile to be able to feel his or her presence real and make the moment permanently frozen in time. I was hoping that those portraits, being the physical images on tiles, would remain to be “real” despite being shared only virtually with friends. I had looked thoroughly at each of my artist friend profile picture on my cell phone and when I finished making a tile portrait I got a feeling that each time I learned something new about this person.
I had made porcelain tiles and sketched/etched each artist profile picture directly on them. There was no eraser or pre-sketch practice tiles. I prepared only one tile for each friend and used only a needle tool to make each sketch. I had really stayed focus and be careful not to damage their "face" which they chose to share with public on Facebook. As an artist and an art supporter, I tried my best to focus- during etching of each artist portrait- on our time together and concentrating my thoughts on the person and how to show my appreciation and respect for each of them. I am very happy to have a chance to show those portraits at the exhibition and share my admiration to their persistence and achievements. I plan to keep adding the tiles as I make new artist friends on Facebook."
- Akemi Maegawa, February 4th, 2015
From: Sally Riding (riding_sally@yahoo.com)
Greetings
Am Sally Michael,
Am interested in buying artworks from your esteemed organization for my new apartment and you still have for sale and i will be glad if you can Send me recent art work you have for sale with the asking prices,also my method of payment is by (BANK CHECK) as means of payment.
Kindly email me some of the artwork you have in stock with the name and prices now. Looking forward to an early response.
Regards, Sally Michael
In 1770 Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” These words are as relevant today as they were then. There are, in the history of the visual arts, many examples of artists “doing something”, speaking in images rather than words.
In 1830 Eugene Delacroix painted “Liberty Leading the People.” He renders “Liberty” in feminine form leading the people over the dead bodies of the old order, in one hand holding aloft the tri-color flag of the French Revolution, the epic violent battle for freedom, and in the other hand she carries a bayoneted musket. This iconic painting of the July 1830 Revolution depicts the overthrow of King Charles X of France. Delacroix wrote his brother: “If I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her.”
In 1814 Francisco Goya painted “The Shootings of the Third of May 1808 in Madrid.” It is a gut-wrenching portrayal of a man with arms upraised before a firing squad. He has an expression of horror on his face. His comrades lie in a bloody heap at his feet. Goya’s emotionally charged depiction of this man’s last minutes of life was unprecedented. The painting graphically illustrates the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion and occupation in the Peninsular War. Art historian Kenneth Clark has said this is "the first great picture that can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention".
In 2001 Phyllis Plattner began the creation of a series of artworks in which she made meticulously rendered copies of art historical paintings in the style of the original artist, and photographs culled from newspapers and magazines. In “Chronicles of War, Saints and Martyrs” she utilized Goya’s historic painting, mentioned above, and amplified its effect. She placed Goya’s painting in the center of a sixteen-paneled piece. To the left of Goya’s work is the arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, an early Christian martyr (288 AD) from “ The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” by Andrea Mantegna, (1480). On the right is Christ, blindfolded and bound, about to be scourged, painted by Van der Weyden, (1450). Further heightening the effect of “Chronicles of War, Saints and Martyrs” is a horizontal row of images along the bottom, a format known as predella panels. From left to right are painted the following: The Twin Towers ablaze on September 11, Christ’s feet nailed to the cross, the well known image of an inmate in Abu Ghraib, a World War Two survivor with a prosthetic leg, and finally the tangled heap of stainless steel, a ghostlike cathedral, the remains of the World Trade Center. A cherub from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna glances heavenward atop all of this with additional angels on either side. And there’s more, even in this one piece.
Chronicles of War/Saints and Martyrs Oil and gold leaf on linen on panel2007 40”x50”
This is one of twelve complex pieces that make up “Chronicles of War,” the epic two-part show at The Katzen Center at American University. The other half is entitled “Legends.” The two together form “Gods of War!” “Legends” details the Zapatista uprising in San Cristobal, Mexico, which Plattner witnessed. She and her archaeologist husband later lived in Italy. She tells the story of the Zapatista uprising utilizing Italian Renaissance paintings, substituting Zapatistas for the saints and apostles. For example, “Legends, Deposition” is after a painting by Caravaggio, (1585), and “Legends, Mary Magdalene in Glory,” is after a painting by Domenichino, (1600). The succession of places in which they lived is reflected in the subject matter, style, and technique of the work. Italian Renaissance meets Liberation Theology.
Chronicles of War/Heads and Hands Oil and gold leaf on linen on panel2009 67”x 45”
The soft-spoken, long time professor at The Maryland Institute College of Art is profoundly anti-war. In order to speak against war and violence she employs images of violence. Though the images are deplorable, the overall effect is beautiful. “Chronicles of War” is a pastiche of images of human violence borrowed from art historical paintings and photo-journalism across cultures and across time. She juxtaposes violent images with the bucolic and the divine, skies at sunrise and at sunset, cherubs and angels, Jesus and Mary. Eight or more panels are assembled into one artwork. She also adds borders of gorgeous motifs from a multitude of cultures and intricately carved and gold-leafed frames and borders. The overall shapes of each work are based on Renaissance altarpieces, copied directly from the Italian in the “Legends” half of the show, and more loosely based on Asian, German and Italian altarpieces in “Chronicles of War”. Plattner has done all of this work herself. It is a fourteen year project, to which she plans yet to add. It represents an immense labor of love.
Plattner enumerates the vast array of violence throughout human history. From the guillotine to napalm, to a pyramid of human skulls, from child soldiers to suicide bombers, from Napoleon to the Samari, from Guernica to the Mayan Bonampak murals in Chiapas, Mexico. Could there possibly be something she has left out? Plattner’s work has a continuing relevance to our present condition as the world is menaced by ISIS.
One might say that the destructive history of all humankind is represented here. The forms of destruction are assembled by the type of destruction so that each artwork has a theme. In “Chronicles of War, Heads and Hands,” 2008, the subject is beheadings. In “Chronicles of War, Swords and Lances,” 2008, a pastiche of death by blade, the central image is the “Battle of San Romano” by Paolo Uccello, (1432). Above fourteen panels of death and destruction, cherubs alight in the vault of heaven. With fist-fulls of flowers they rain rose petals over the bloody folly of humankind.
"Majority of my Facebook friends are artists and art related people whom I have met before or artists whom I would love to meet in person one day. Facebook has become a virtual art salon to me. Of course I would prefer to meet friends and discuss things face to face but everyone's busy schedule and different location (many of them are international friends) won't allow us to meet face to face easily.
Because of the Facebook I feel so close to far away friends and family as getting everyday information is so easy. We can discuss our concerns or social issues anytime and pass around important news instantaneously. It is the biggest power of social media and I think artists are playing an important part in supporting our freedom of speech and expression through social media like Facebook.
My “Thank You Artist Friends on Facebook Project” allowed me to look closer at each of my artist friends. This project made me think about our crazy everyday life and let me take a longer time to reflect and question how we process any single image from the Internet.
I decided to reproduce a small profile picture of each of my artist friends on a small ceramic tile to be able to feel his or her presence real and make the moment permanently frozen in time. I was hoping that those portraits, being the physical images on tiles, would remain to be “real” despite being shared only virtually with friends. I had looked thoroughly at each of my artist friend profile picture on my cell phone and when I finished making a tile portrait I got a feeling that each time I learned something new about this person.
I had made porcelain tiles and sketched/etched each artist profile picture directly on them. There was no eraser or pre-sketch practice tiles. I prepared only one tile for each friend and used only a needle tool to make each sketch. I had really stayed focus and be careful not to damage their "face" which they chose to share with public on Facebook. As an artist and an art supporter, I tried my best to focus- during etching of each artist portrait- on our time together and concentrating my thoughts on the person and how to show my appreciation and respect for each of them. I am very happy to have a chance to show those portraits at the exhibition and share my admiration to their persistence and achievements. I plan to keep adding the tiles as I make new artist friends on Facebook."
- Akemi Maegawa, February 4th, 2015
... But most people, I gather, think that O’Brien’s trip to Cuba was really cool.Read the whole article by Jay Nordlinger here.
These visitors are like Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing” — beyond the pretty girls, the classic old cars, the swaying palm trees, etc.
Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, was just in Cuba. She met with no dissidents, of course. While she was there, more than 100 were arrested, for such crimes as trying to attend church. The American said nothing.
She did, however, post pictures of old cars to the Internet. Isn’t that cute? There have long been political pilgrims to totalitarian countries. Paul Hollander has devoted a good part of his career to chronicling them.
There have been plain old ignoramuses, too.
As he crossed from Poland into the Soviet Union, George Bernard Shaw threw his food tins out the train window, because there would be no need of them in the land of milk and honey.
He denied that there was famine in the Soviet Union, because there was plenty of food in his hotel — the Moscow Metropol, which was for foreigners only. They have that kind of hotel in Cuba, too.
John Kenneth Galbraith went to Communist China during the Cultural Revolution, when millions were being starved, tortured, humiliated, and killed. He came back with a criticism: The Chinese smoked too many cigarettes.
In my observation, most Cubans and Cuban Americans bear no great grudge against visitors — as long as they show some moral awareness. As long as they have a smidgeon of conscience.
Conan O’Brien was able to flit down there and then flit back home. Does he realize what happens to ordinary Cubans if they try to leave the island? Does he realize that they have been shot and killed in the water, as they desperately try to escape?
I sometimes wish that people in free countries could be sentenced to live in unfree ones — just for a while — in order to appreciate what other people have to endure, and what they themselves have to be grateful for.
"You can’t go to Cuba and be apolitical. Traveling there is a political act alone. The brands [Conan O'Brien] joked about at the grocery store were all companies that were appropriated by the Cuban government. That cigar factory he visited was taken from a Cuban family of cigar makers. Cubans cannot afford to eat at paladares because the average Cuban only makes $20 a month, creating an unofficial tourist apartheid where foreigners enjoy Cuba while Cubans endure the regime. The “ruins” that took Conan’s breath away are dilapidated buildings that thousands of people have to live in because they are not free to move out of them without government permission."
-- Carmen Pelaez, Cuban-American filmmaker, "Conan’s TV Show Avoided Politics, But For Cubans It’s Not That Easy," Remezcla, 3/6/14
Read the whole article here.... a total of 1,032,729 people attended the world's top 20 art fairs in 2014. The best attended fair was ARCO Madrid, which attracted 92,000 visitors, followed by Art Miami, which attracted 82,5000 visitors, and Art BA, Buenos Aires, which attracted 77,000 visitors.The lower end of the table is occupied primarily by specialist fairs such as Paris Photo/LA, which attracted 12,000 visitors, Affordable Art Fair NY, which also attracted 12,000 visitors, and The Salon: Art + Design, which attracted 8,000 visitors.
Q: Who did you find was the hardest to capture?
Clinton was hard. I'll tell you why. The reality is he's probably the most famous liar of all time. He and his administration did some very good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing completely out of my mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting.
If you look at the left-hand side of it there's a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.
What a brilliant example of the power of an artist to make history! This will make this portrait the most famous and visited and chuckled about Presidential portrait at the NPG! Velazquez did something similar with a variety of hidden (and some later deleted) clues in Las Meninas centuries ago, and one of them, when discovered 500 years later, changed the Spanish crown's line to the throne from the first male born to the first born, period!And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the National Portrait Gallery. They're putting a lot of pressure on them. [Reached by phone Thursday, a spokeswoman from the National Portrait Gallery denied that.]
Argentinean multimedia artist Jorge Caterbetti, between 1999 and 2003, consigned 105 artworks for sale to New York’s Belenky Gallery. In 2013, when the gallery alerted him it was closing, he went to a storage facility to pick up his works and found about 65 of them missing. The gallery told him some were lost or stolen, his subsequent lawsuit charged, and that others may simply have been thrown out over the years.Read the rest here.
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| "Eyes of Mr. Spock" Charcoal and Conte on Paper. 1.5x3 inches, circa 2014 by F. Lennox Campello |
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.
Graeme WoodThis cancer within Islam must be destroyed and cured by Islam, and so I ask again: Where are the fatwas, from clerics all over the planet, denouncing these mutants and their barbarism?
"What ISIS Really Wants"
The Atlantic
Painter Dean Levin has sued Upper East Side dealer Robert Blumenthal for nearly $200,000, claiming non-payment after a sold-out show in May 2014. The suit pits a 26-year-old artist represented by New York dealer Marianne Boesky and collected by Leonardo Di Caprio against a real estate investor and dealer whose gallery has been open for just a year.Details here.
Spanish Police have arrested two brothers from Girona, Spain, who attempted to sell a fake Francisco de Goya painting to a purported sheikh, EFE reports. But the "sheikh" was no victim: he paid the pair with photocopied money.The con artists realized they had been tricked when they tried to deposit 1.7 million Swiss francs (€1.5 million) in a Geneva bank and were told that the banknotes were mere photocopies.Spanish police officers found out about the scam in December 2014, when the Avignon customs warned them that they had intercepted two Spanish brothers trying to smuggle 1.7 million fake Swiss francs.
Today is the birthday of Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, the Cuban sex virago who is perhaps best remembered as a diarist and as a writer of erotic tales and seducer of nearly everyone who came across her incandescent life.An opportunity to exhibit, develop and grow as an artist. The Fellowship provides a 2 year membership in Touchstone Gallery in downtown DC. This guarantees a solo exhibition as well as participation in gallery group shows, mentorship and a presence on the gallery website. The monetary value of the fellowship exceeds $4500.00. The Fellowship is awarded to 1 or more emerging artists who have not been represented by a commercial gallery in at least 10 years.
That's my right shoulder, which as previously announced, has been out of commission since December 23rd and will be cut open and operated on this morning around 8:30AM.The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.Read Graeme Wood's eye-opening article in The Atlantic here.
It all started with a box. A box jam-packed with treasure — previously unseen, extremely rare Picasso drawings and collages, 271 works altogether. The box has been through everything imaginable. It survived flooding of the painter's workshop when the Seine River overflowed its banks, the German occupation, the Liberation, and it was carted about from home to home.
The deceased Pierre Daix, the best expert on the painter's works, once told us, "Picasso was often ejected from his Parisian workshops. He didn't know how to store his works anymore. It made him furious."Read all (thanks to NotionsCapital.com) about it here!
The box, one among thousands, then wound up in one of the villas on the French Riviera where the artist lived. Once Picasso filled one home with his paintings, he would buy another one to fill that too.
When the artist died in 1973, the box disappeared. No one noticed because his two villas, the "Californie" and the "Notre-Dame-de-Vie," were overflowing with paintings, sketches and packages.
A box worth €60 million
The box reappeared almost half a century later, and in a completely unexpected way.
