As Cyndi Spain points out in DCist, the 20th Mayor's Arts Awards were awarded last night at the Kennedy Center.

Congratulations to all the award winners.

PS - But sourgraping: I think that Fondo del Sol got ripped off.

Starting this month, a new syndicated TV arts program will hit the airwaves around here, soon nationally, and then it is planned to go onto an international audience (it has been picked up by the BBC World News).

It is ArtsMedia News: a weekly television program delivering a fresh, vibrant overview of what’s happening in the arts. ArtsMedia News, produced by Global Program Ventures Group LLC, will deliver a robust collection of stories, features, updates and interviews – and provide exposure, promotion and access to the people and organizations who have something to show and tell. Each show will include:

• What’s Happening Where — Notable performance and visual exhibition openings
• Arts News — The latest news in theater, opera, and the visual and performing arts
• On Site Discussions with prominent curators, artists, collectors and critics
• Unique regular features
• Updates from the major auction houses
• The business of art
• How artists create

In January 2005, ArtsMedia News will commence a half-hour weekly program on Thursday nights on MHz Networks, along with the interstitial newsbreaks. National distribution of ArtsMedia News is planned for Spring of 2005.

I will be hosting the visual arts portion of this program, focusing on both visual art shows, interviews with curators, artists and reviews of art shows, as well as the updates from the major auction houses.

Two of the trial programs that I recorded a while back have already been shown extensively both locally and by the BBC. I hope to make this another means to help expand our area's art scene onto a national and international platform.

The best thing for art galleries is more art galleries; the best thing for art is awareness that there's art to be seen and experienced - let's see what happens if this works out.

Post-AOM Part II

Last weekend the Anne C. Fisher Gallery opened an exhibition based on Anne's pick of her top 10 AOM artists.

And now part II...

This Friday our Bethesda outpost will open an exhibition showcasing the work of the AOM artists who made it to our lists.

The opening will be from 6-9 PM, as part of the Bethesda Art Walk and features both some of the key artwork exhibited at AOM as well as new work created specifically for this show, such as Ira Tattelman's new installation titled They Sheltered Me From Harm and several new pubic hair tapestries by Mark Jenkins (as well as some new plastic men).

Part III the following Friday at Fraser Georgetown as part of the Canal Square Galleries third Friday openings and extended hours.

Opportunity for Artists

Dumbarton Concert Gallery
Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2005

Dumbarton Concert Gallery call for artists for art exhibitions for 2005-2006 season. Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2005. Dumbarton Concert Gallery is accepting applications from MD, DC, and VA artists for the 2005-2006 concert season. The Concert Gallery is operated in conjunction with Dumbarton Concerts, a series of chamber and jazz musical performances held in Georgetown's historic Dumbarton Church.

The artist's opening occurs in conjunction with a one-night concert performance, with an average attendance of 350 people. The exhibit stays up for one and a half weeks, during which time the gallery is open by appointment. Artists can submit slides independently or as a group. Decisions are made by jury. Eight shows will be installed, October 2005 through April 2006.

The gallery takes a 25 percent commission on sales. Submission requirements:
1. Ten to twenty images, on slides or CD
2. Name, address, phone, email, and curriculum vitae.
3. Dimensions, price, and medium of each piece (if pieces shown on slides are not available, they must be an accurate representation of the type of work that will be hung).
4. Enclose SASE for return of materials.
5. Only work that can be hung on walls will be accepted--no free-standing sculpture.

Mail to:
Eric Westbrook
2325 42nd St. NW #419
Washington, DC 20007

Questions? email: Eric here. Notifications: After July 1, 2005

Another GRACE Director bites the dust

Edie McRee Bowles, President and CEO of the Greater Reston Arts Center, has been fired by the Board of Directors.

Former Fairfax County Board of Supervisor, Kate Hanley, has been named interim director of GRACE.

I think the world about GRACE, which is a cultural jewel in that wealthy suburb, and I have curated a show for them, and their Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival hosted 180 artists and attracted over 60,000 visitors last year, and it is one of the best fine arts festivals in the nation (I am participating in the 2005 version next May).

But there's something wrong at GRACE, or maybe within its Board of Directors (I don't know), as this is their fourth director since Anne Brown was released in August of 2002. That's a clear indication that someone or something (besides the directors) is/are doing something wrong.

It has nothing to do with the visual arts, but...

Congrats to DC area Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lorraine Adams, whose book Harbor, was rated Fiction Book of the Year in the Entertainment Weekly Best of 2004 issue.

Bravo Ms. Adams!

Opportunity for Artists

Hispanic Heritage Poster Contest
Deadline: February 11, 2005

Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia artists throughout the metropolitan area now have the opportunity to compete for the $2,500 grand prize of the First Annual VEGA Hispanic Yellow Pages Poster Contest sponsored by the VEGA Hispanic Yellow Pages, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and The Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs. The deadline is February 11, 2005.

The poster theme should be the artist’s interpretation or rendition of Hispanic Heritage in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan Area.

The winning poster will be featured on the front cover of the VEGA Hispanic Yellow Pages. The design may also be used for other promotional items such as billboards, T-shirts, programs, etc. Only one work may be submitted per artist.

For more information contact Jose Dominguez at (202) 724-5614 or email Jose here. You can also download the prospectus here.

Artists need not be Hispanic/Latino/Latins/Spanish/Latin-American/Spaniards/Iberians in order to submit entries (I hope).

Critical Alignment II

In response to my thoughts on Critical Alignment, a friend emailed me a very interesting essay by Dave Eggers (co-founder of the now-defunct Might Magazine and editor of McSweeney's, and author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius").

It is too long to post in its entirety here, but the essence of it can be beautifully distilled to:

"What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips's new album is ravishing and I've listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210.

What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who's up and who's down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say.

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."

Bravo Mr. Eggers!

DCist has a nice write-up of the new AOM artists show that opened last weekend at the Anne C. Fisher Gallery in Georgetown.

This is the first of a triple gallery show about AOM artists. Next Friday we will open most of the artists from our lists with a show opening Friday, October 14 from 6-9PM at Fraser Bethesda, and the Friday after that opening at Fraser Georgetown.

And wait until you see the installation that Ira Tattelman has done in our Bethesda gallery!

And (Yawn) Painting is Hot Again...

Because Blake Gopnik firmly believes that painting is dead, he is going to hate this, but like it happens every few years, all the critical voices are aligning again to say: "sorry, we were wrong and painting is not dead... so sorry."

Tap, tap... Critical alignment happening here... Watch for art critics and curators who have dismissed painting over the last few years now try to re-invent themselves and desperately try to catch up. And art mogul Saatchi has already publicly chastised Blake Gopnik for having such a traditional and outdated view of painting's death.

This Telegraph article discusses that:

To suggest that painting has triumphed over other media would require a rather outdated notion of hierarchy. But it is certainly receiving a flurry of attention. The art periodicals Contemporary Art, Flash Art and Modern Painters all broke with regular practice and ran large special issues on it last year. Remarkably, it was Modern Painters' first ever issue devoted exclusively to painting.

Even painters themselves, who won't admit that painting ever went away, agree that it is back in focus. "There are always artists making interesting paintings – sometimes they attract little attention, sometimes, as now, a lot," wrote Michael Craig Martin in the New Statesman this month.

"There's certainly a lot of talk about painting being back," says Pablo Lafuente, curator of a much smaller painting show than Saatchi's now on at London's Haunch of Venison gallery. "It suffered a lot during the 1990s, but in the last few years it's been changing: there's a buzz in both the market and museum worlds. Before, painters used to explain that they also worked in other media. Now, there's an unapologetic-ness."

Read the whole article here.

Critical Alignment

One fact that has been quite evident to me for many years (at least from anecdotal evidence), is that fact that in almost all genres of the arts, more often than not, popularity tends to have an equally inverse relationship with formal critical acclaim.

If you are an extraordinarily popular visual artist with the masses, such as Jack Vettriano is in Great Britain, then usually you are either ignored or maligned by the critical world. In Vettriano's case it has actually worked to his advantage, making him even more popular, and he currently has the record for the highest price for a Scottish painting ever to be sold at auction.

I guess our equivalent here would be Norman Rockwell, although his "re-discovery" in the last few years has somewhat surprised me. But for most of my life, Rockwell has been tremendously popular with the American public, but snobbed and disdained by the critical mafia.

But when art critics do focus positively on someone, as they did for a while on John Currin, it appears to me that they tend to cluster in a communal group think about an artist. Conversely, when a "reversal" or negativity about an artist begins to surface (such as for John Currin now), it certainly appears, at least from the ten thousand foot level, to be a "group U-turn" and we all begin to savage the new victim.

I could be wrong, and it is clearly an observation not cast in concrete nor backed up by scientific and numerical facts, but it is how it appears to me.

But I also recall that in Peter Schjeldahl's (art critic for The New Yorker) 2004 lecture at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium as part of that year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art, and according to Ionarts:

"One of Schjeldahl's major points on the topic he chose ('What Art Is For Now') was that the snob appeal of art is one of the 'underestimated engines of culture,' that for now he has 'no desire to swell the size of the tent' of those who love art. In his view, there is no reason to bring art to the masses. Those who want it will find it, and 'if somebody doesn't want art, bully for them.' However, as Schjeldahl also noted, the audience for art worldwide may be larger now than it ever has been, and the art market is a booming business. This may help explain the gulf that can be observed between major art critics and the art-going public, in the case of the J. Seward Johnson sculptures at the Corcoran, for example."

And now David Sterritt, who is the film critic for The Christian Science Monitor, is concerned because so many of his choices for the best films, year after year, match so closely with his fellow movie critics, but often are never aligned with the public's choices. He writes:

"Don't get me wrong. The last thing we critics should do is try to echo the taste of some hypothetical 'average moviegoer' or twist our 10-best lists to mirror the box office. What concerns me is that there's so much agreement among reviewers, whose goals ought to include challenging one another's tastes, habits, and assumptions."

Read his article here.

Kelly Towles is hot!

A friend at the Washington Times tells me that the Times' senior art critic, Joanna Shaw-Eagle, will be reviewing Kelly Towles debut solo at David Adamson.

This is good not only for Towles, but also for our area art scene, to see three major art critics all focus on one talented artist. With three major endorsements like O'Sullivan, Dawson and Shaw-Eagle, Towles has gotten off to a spectacular start, following his also stellar Artomatic debut.

This is a strong signal to our museum curators (Brougher and Hileman at the Hirshhorn and Binstock and Schmidt at the Corcoran) that perhaps this "local" artist deserves some of their attention as well.

And if Kelly moves to Brooklyn, then maybe Blake will also write about him.

Anyway... Bravo Kelly!

Gallery looking for new members

Touchstone Gallery, one of the oldest and largest artists' cooperatives in the Greater DC area, is looking for new members. Interested artists should contact Touchstone Gallery at 202/347-2787.

A couple of new photography shows to open soon

January 9 - February 1, 2005
Glenview Mansion Art Gallery

Prescott Moore Lassman will be exhibiting 15 to 20 photographs from his "Domesticated Animals" series in a three-person show at the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery. The exhibition, which also features artists Elke Seefeldt and L.S. King, runs from January 9 through February 1, 2005. There will be an opening reception on Sunday, January 9 from 1-4 p.m., in conjunction with a jazz concert by The Lovejoy Group from 2-3 p.m. There will also be an artist's talk on Thursday, January 20 beginning at 7:30 p.m.

---

January 12 - February 11, 2005
"Stealing Dead Souls"

Rough Edge Photography by national award-winning experimental Mississippi photographer, James W. Bailey, which explores the concept of photography and its mystical ability to steal the life of the non-living. Opening Reception on Saturday, January 15, from 5:00 - 7:00 pm at the Black Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Maryland.

The Top 100 Artists

(Thanks AJ) A British website, ArtFacts, has come up with a way to rank artists by the exhibitions they've been shown in since 1999.

The Artist Ranking reflects the artists exhibition career from 1999 to today as seen from the perspective of the organizing curators of museums and private galleries.

Basically the artist ranking weights exhibitions by a special algorithm. Each exhibition gains automatically a certain value. See the ranking system explained here and the current Top 100 here.

The Super Art Thief Goes on Trial

Thirty-something French waiter Stephane Breitwieser has admitted stealing 239 works of art (including several priceless masterpieces) in seven European countries between 1995-2001.

It gets better... His mother is also on trial for having destroyed more than 200 of the works stolen by her son, who apparently stored them at her home.

Read it and weep.

P.S. Does anyone named Breitwieser live in Reston?

The Thursday Reviews

The WaPo's Jacqueline Trescott usually writes about museum news and issues. Today she has a piece that covers some museum going-ons dealing with special exhibits around Dubya's inauguration.

Jessica Dawson does something that rarely happens in the WaPo: She reviews an artist who was already reviewed last week! No doubt that Kelly Towles is hot! The review is (as usual) all over the place, sometimes doling out the feeling that it is a good review, other times throwing a bucket of cold water all over the reader. She also covers and offers a description of Time and Materials at Irvine Contemporary Art.

I'd like to see the WaPo's first threepeat and hereby call for Blake Gopnik to also review this show. Maybe a second visit to a single and talented Art-O-Matic artist will cause a shift in Blake's rootcanalization of AOM?

In the WCP, Louis Jacobson reviews "The Staged Body: Contemporary Photography," (which Jessica reviewed December 16) at Andrea Pollan's Curator's Office.

Hemphill Fine Arts has an opening this Saturday, January 8, of two of my favorite DC area artists: Martin Kotler and John Dreyfuss.

These are two of my favorite area artists. I included Kotler a few years ago into a massive show that I curated in 2001 for the Athenaeum in Alexandria. The show was titled "A Survey of Washington Area Realists" and had over 120 artists hanging salon-style in that beautiful Greek Revival building that is so architecturally out of place in Old Town Alexandria. He's an intelligent and gifted painter.

Dreyfuss' sculptures (and the studio where he makes them) have to be seen to be believed, from the massive plum bob that he last exhibited at Hemphill's old Georgetown space, to small, delicate neo Classic pieces that are all over his studio space. He will have seven new sculptures in this show.

The reception is Saturday, January 8, 2005 from 6:30 - 8:30 PM.

SYNERGY: DC Artists Unite!

Call for Artists
Deadline: March 15, 2005

Synergy is a collaborative community art project that will bring artists of the DC/MD/VA area together to create unique works of art. Synergy will revive and inspire an entire new art scene for the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area.

Evolving Perceptions (EP) is seeking teams of 2-4 artists to submit submissions for consideration. A jury panel will select the final teams and each team will receive a stipend for the artists as well as for materials. The teams will be asked to create a work of artwork(s) within a 6 week period.

The process of creation among the team artists’ will be documented and shared as part of the final exhibition. The exhibition will launch in Fall 2005/Winter 2006 at a local gallery in Washington D.C.

ELIGIBILITY: Visual artist(s) working/living within a 50 mile radius of Washington D.C. No age limit, encourage teams to include artists of diverse cultural heritages and artists with disabilities.

ENTRY INSTRUCTIONS: Artists may submit as:
1) teams of 2-4 artists
2) individuals who would like to be placed on a team
3) art organizations, galleries, museums who would like to submit a team, i.e., "the Torpedo Factory team"

To obtain an entry form please email Marsha Stein, Synergy Coordinator at marshasart@aol.com.

Each artist(s) on a team or applying as an individual must submit:
1. Resume
2. Statement about Why the collaborative art process is of interest to you? What do you hope to contribute and gain from this experience?
3. SASE
4. 5 Slides or digital images on a CD-ROM with print outs

POSTMARK DEADLINE: March 15, 2005
Teams announced in May 2005

Please send your submission to:

Synergy
11118 Lakespray Way
Reston, VA 20191

I'll be away most of the day today, and will be posting later in the day. Don't forget that tomorrow is the first Friday of the month and thus the Dupont Circle Galleries will be having their openings and/or extended hours from 6-8 PM in most cases.

Numark Gallery also has an opening tomorrow night from 6:30-8PM: Sharon Louden: The Motley Tails and also David Ryan: Batteries Can't Help Now in the gallery's Project Room.

Sharon Louden's installations and drawings "give character to individual
gestures through the illusion of movement, placement, and direction of marks.
The Motley Tails, Louden's second one-person exhibition at Numark Gallery, features a large-scale installation. A garden of hanging, hairy anthropomorphic and jungle-like forms, assembled with thousands of strands of monofilament (fishing line) clamped by cage clips, hangs from the ceiling of the main gallery space and brushes along the floor."

Las Vegas-based artist David Ryan creates his three-dimensional painted wall
constructions by referencing the design of mass-produced industrial products, automobiles, home stereos and computers.