Downtown BID Call Box Project Request for Proposals

Deadline: July 18, 2018

The DC Downtown BID is seeking multi medium visual artists that can include but are not limited to Fine Artists, Street Artists, Graffiti Artists, Metal Workers, and Graphic Artists to design, submit and fabricate original designs to be installed on individual call boxes located in the Downtown area of the District of Columbia. Selected artists not currently residing in the District of Columbia will be required to have a District artist as a project assistant on the instillation.

There are 27 call boxes located downtown. The BID is seeking designs for 9 call boxes in 8 locations.

No entry fee!

Details here.

2019 Maryland Individual Artist Awards

Apply Now! -- 2019 Maryland Individual Artist Awards

The deadline for 2019 applications is Wednesday, July 25, 2018 at 4:30 pm EST

Each year, the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) recognizes outstanding artistic achievement and honors the contributions artists make to our state through the Individual Artist Awards (IAA) program. IAAs are accompanied by grants of $1,000, $3,000 or $6,000 to help support artists as they advance their craft. 

The 2019 IAA application is now open to Maryland artists in the following categories: 

• Creative Non-Fiction/Fiction
• Media
• Digital/Electronic Arts
• Theater Solo Performance
• Painting
• Works on Paper

MSAC partners with Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MAAF) to administer the IAA program.

Applicants can access IAA guidelines, application, and application assistance resources by clicking the "Maryland" tab on MAAF's website. 

MSAC and MAAF will offer two webinars to guide IAA applicants through the application process. Advance registration is required. 

Thursday, May 31, 2018, 1:00-2:30 PM - Register here

Saturday, July 7, 2018, 10:00-11:30 AM - Register here

Questions about applying? Contact Kimberly Steinle-Super at kimberly@midatlanticarts.org 

Regardless of the piece’s authenticity, Hahn v Duveen set a precedent for how vital refraining from wrongly attacking the reputation of an artwork can be. 

Read and learn - click here. 

The curious case of "Negligence and Reputation Management"

While Werner Spies is an example of an individual brought to court over this tort, auction houses can also get sued for negligence. Take, for example, the case of Dickson v Christie’s in 2010.

David Dickson and Susan Priestley sold “Salome with the Head of St John the Baptist” for £8,000 after an assessment by Christie’s determined the painting was from the school of Titian, and not the artist himself. However, Sotheby’s later sold the painting having assessed it as an original. It was put up for auction with a starting price of $4 million. Dickson and Priestley claimed Christie’s didn’t do the proper research in determining the painting’s correct origin and selling price. However, this case settled before trial.

Read the fascinating article here. 

Opportunity for Artists!

Our friends at the Hyattsville CDC are looking for artists to submit designs to be considered for their traffic box art project. Selected artists will be paid a $500 honorarium and will have their art displayed on a traffic box along a major thoroughfare. 

This call is open to ALL artists, graphic designers, illustrators, and photographers who currently live or work within the State of Maryland. Submitted designs must be original artwork.

Details here.

Ric Garcia at Glen Echo Park

Ric Garcia

June 1 to July 1, 2018

Art Walk reception: June 1, 6­8 p.m.

Reception with artist: June 9, 6­8 p.m.

Glen Echo Park Partnership

7300 MacArthur blvd., Glen Echo, md
Stone Tower Gallery Hours: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.—6p.m.

Ric Garcia – You are not my Kryptonite  - 30 x 30 - oil on canvas

DC metro area artist Ric Garcia will exhibit new paintings, digital prints and mixed media works at Glen Echo Parks’ Stone Tower gallery in an exhibit titled “Super America”. The exhibit opens June 1 and runs through to July 1.  The exhibition is populated by iconic superheroes, atomic age monsters, and cinema icons—all portrayed in re-imagined ways with a bilingual context— and asks who has been the traditional hero or heroine of our stories and who gets to be the main character today.   

Ric Garcia sees his appropriation of American cultural images as a meditation on identity.  "I infuse my art with references to various mythos, focusing on hero worship, Latino and gender cultures, creating images about Americana filtered by my bi-cultural experience," Garcia says.

Barbara Januszkiewicz's two solos at once!

Not one, but two solo shows opening up at the same time for DMV artist Barbara Januszkiewicz. The Nitty Gritty at the Art Club of Washington will be displaying mostly works on paper appropriately name after her musical muses. 

Each work is titled from a song from the late 60s early 70s, with an “ip” in front of it. Januszkiewicz explained the ip means inspired by. This painter has taken her love for watercolors and has been able to reinvent acrylics in a new way.  Philosophically, Januszkiewicz values risk taking, experimentation, and creative collaboration which lead to  Washington Color Painter Paul Reed encouraging  Januszkiewicz to experiment with staining with acrylics. 

She has mastered this technique that offers the luminosity of watercolors, but with the nitty-gritty texture that only acrylics could offer. Also in this exhibit are some fine examples of her works on unprimed canvas using the same technique. What is astonishing is to witness her able to stain the unprimed canvas in the same manner as she paints on paper. This is not an easy task.  

"Music is my muse," she continues.  "I am inspired by the gritty undertones and rhythm patterns of the Blues and Rock.  I take the basic structure of a song’s chord progressions and play with the idea of a building a cord in the colors that I paint with.  Blending the music and corresponding color notes, I work to create luminous paintings that reflect the emotionalism and improvisational freedom that we find in music genres. I see my work as a frozen moment of the song." 

Across town at Martha Spak Gallery at the Wharf, Januszkiewicz is showing a group she calls Acoustic Fields. The artists explains that these are mostly large works, both on unprimed canvas and metal with resin.  Clearly her fascination for color reminds us of Mark Rothko’s Color Fields with her effortlessly produced zen-like brush strokes across her canvas.  Yet she is giving us something new and perhaps even changing our perception of the future of contemporary abstraction.  "I find it intriguing that there is a vocabulary of words that apply to both music and visual art, like movement, patterns, compliments, harmonies and layering," she says. These paintings from the intense color compositions to subdued shades of reverberations can visually  suggest the sensation of sound.

The Nitty Gritty @ Arts Club of Washington 
2017 I St. NW, Washington, DC 20006
Exhibition Dates: May 4 – May 26, 2018
gallery hours Tuesday - Friday: 10:00am to 5:00pm
Saturday: 10:00am to 2:00pm
Curator: Mattie Schloetzer

Acoustic Fields @
Martha Spak Gallery at the Wharf 
40 District Square, SW, Washington, DC  20024 
Exhibition Dates: April 30-May 29, 2018
Gallery hours are Thursday – Sunday 12-6pm 
Curator Martha Spak

Letter from Jack Rasmussen

Dear Museum Patrons,

I am thrilled to inform you that the American University Museum has been chosen as the recipient of nearly 9,000 works of art from the Corcoran Art Collection. If you have not seen last week’s announcement in the Washington Post, please see it here.

We plan to use this once-in-a-lifetime gift to establish The Corcoran Legacy Collection at American University. To give you a taste of this new collection, it contains some of history’s most masterful artists such as the 16th-century Italian painter Titian, American artists Ansel Adams and Helen Frankenthaler; 18th-century British portraitist Thomas Gainsborough, as well as important American collections such as those of William A. Clark and Olga Hirshhorn. 

In the spirit of our Alper Initiative for Washington art, we are very excited to expand upon our collection of 19th-century Washington art, with works from the Washington Color School and paintings by figurative artists such as Sarah Baker, Manon Cleary, and Claudia DeMonte. 

The gift will also supplement our collection of work by female artists and artists of color, in alignment with the legacy of the American University Art History department as a leader in feminist art history and the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. 

For those who are curious, you may view the complete listing of artwork and recipient organizations in the Corcoran’s May 14th press release here.

In order to prepare for the legacy collection at AU, the university has invested in a new storage facility that will be a home to works utilized most often by the museum, complete with rolling racks and shelving. We have also upgraded our collections management software and will be working with the registrars at the National Gallery of Art to incorporate the data on the new collection. 

With every great collection comes great responsibility. We still have much work to do! American University is seeking support through a funding initiative designed to further expand our storage capacity, enhance the museum’s exhibition space to accommodate the growing collection, and safeguard the Corcoran legacy for the greater arts community. We also aspire to create a collection viewing and study room to provide increased accessibility to scholars and visitors and new faculty and staff positions to care for the collection and ensure it is shared with the world through public program offerings. 

We will continue to update you as this project progresses and look forward to celebrating this transformational milestone with you! 

Jack Rasmussen 

Director & Curator

 American University Museum

Sunny in Reston for the art fair!

Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival, Reston, VA 2018

Target Gallery’s Newest Exhibition Creates Utopic Fictional Landscapes

Caroline Hatfield: Unearthing
May 25 – July 15, 2018

Opening Reception: Friday, May 25, 7 – 9 pm; Artist Talk at 8 pm

Target Gallery, the contemporary exhibition space for the Torpedo Factory Art Center, explores concepts of utopia and the science-fictional sublime in a new solo site-specific exhibition featuring Baltimore artist Caroline Hatfield.

Caroline Hatfield: Unearthing is on view May 25 through July 15, 2018. In the show, Hatfield creates sculptural landscapes within Target Gallery. Composed of industrial materials like cast aluminum; rocks, coal, and other geological formations; as well as mutable boundaries like sand and salt, the combined objects accumulate into forms and recall a cycle of transformation. Through site-specific installations and photography, her work references the awe-inspiring natural experiences of our world while referencing a shift outward towards a science-fictional sublime.

Environmentalism and land use has a lot of personal significance to Hatfield, who grew up in a Southern Appalachian coal-mining community. They recall the region’s ironic juxtaposition of protected wilderness and mined land as a major influence on their work.

“This exhibition presents the idea of unearthing in a literal, metaphorical, and speculative sense,” Hatfield said. “The process of unearthing asks: What are we uncovering? We dig to find history, time, and energy. As a metaphor, it often refers to finding an elusive, hidden substance or truth. Finally, we could consider ‘un-earthing’ in a speculative sense. Our potential is becoming less tethered to this planet through scientific advancement and ecological destruction.”

Hatfield was selected from more than 150 applicants as part of Target Gallery’s annual Open Call for a Solo Exhibition. Jurors were: Jarvis DuBois, independent curator; Carolina Mayorga, D.C.-based artist; and Victoria Reis, co-founder and executive director of Transformer.

“Caroline Hatfield’s art speaks to timely environmental concerns of noticeable climate changes, fracking, and deforestation wreaking havoc across the globe,” said DuBois. “Their landscapes—created from untraditional materials such as aluminum powder, tar paper, sand, and coal slag—are otherworldly yet eerily reminiscent of terrains found after a natural disaster or in a science-fiction movie. They should be read as urgent harbingers of what could happen to our Earth if we continually neglect her.”

“Based on their individual experience of growing up in an Appalachian coal mining community, Caroline’s exhibition offers a unique perspective on issues affecting the environment and our relation to land,” said Mayorga. “Their work transforms the gallery space into powerful and aesthetically pleasing landscapes that comment on industrial practices and questions the viewer’s relationship with their immediate surroundings. I find Caroline’s work both personal and sincere, yet universally relevant to our current time.”

“I was immediately drawn to Caroline's very sophisticated and thoughtful use of materials to convey concepts of utopia and science fiction,” said Reis. “Caroline adeptly conveys an otherworldly experience that completely draws in audiences, taking us on a journey that is both wondrous and confounding. Their innovative re-contextualizing of current environmental circumstances through beautiful yet haunting installations provides an important and engaging viewpoint to our relationships with land uses and our evaporating natural resources."

Caroline Hatfield: Unearthing runs Friday, May 25, through Sunday, July 15, 2018. The opening reception will be Friday, May 25th, 7 – 9 pm, with Hatfield’s comments at 8 pm. Target Gallery will host a second reception and juror talk on Friday, June 15 at 8 pm, as a part of the Torpedo Factory Art Center’s monthly Late Shift event. Target Gallery is open daily from 10 – 6 pm and until 9 pm on Thursdays.

My choice for Best of Show at Reston

Suzy Scarborough at Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival
Reston Town Center, booth 231
and represented locally by Zenith Gallery!