What was the best thing before sliced bread?

George Carlin

Congratulations

To area artist Laura Amussen, whose Void/Filler II recently opened at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This site-responsive piece continued the dialogue, began in Void/Filler first shown at the old Elizabeth Roberts Gallery, of loss, emptiness, yearning and desire. Dancer Andrea Workman choreographed and performed a modern dance in response to this piece.

Wanna Go To An Opening Today?

"The Light I Saw," a black and white photography exhibit by Karen Keating at Multiple Exposures Gallery, inside the Torpedo Factory Art Center, in Old Town Alexandria, VA, Studio #312 is on exhibit until May 1, 2005 with an opening reception today, Sunday, April 10, from 2-4pm.

Multiple Exposures Gallery is open daily 11am-5pm.

The 6th annual Bethesda Literary Festival will be held Friday, April 22 through Sunday, April 24, 2005 throughout downtown Bethesda's art galleries, bookstores, restaurants, arts organizations and venues and retail businesses.

The festival will bring together novelists, poets, journalists, nonfiction writers and children's authors and illustrators who represent the rich diversity of modern literature. The Bethesda Literary Festival also features essay contests, poetry slams, kids' and youth book parties and the 2nd annual Play In A Day.

On Saturday, April 23rd from 1-2PM we will host Alexandra Robbins, author of Quarterlife Crisis and its sequel Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis and Jen Chaney, the Washington Post's DVD and movie columnist. Robbins and Chaney will join together to share their insight on modern day living.

And then, on that same day from 2:30-4PM, we will host authors Jim Grimsley (Comfort & Joy); Susan Leonardi (And Then They Were Nuns); Michael Mancilla (Love In The Time of HIV: The Gay Man's Guide to Sex, Dating, and Relationships); and Kathi Wolfe, a local poet. The authors and poet will offer a look inside gay and lesbian literature.

See ya there!

Juror

I'm jurying this art show next. Entries must be postmarked by May 31, 2005. There are $1500 in cash prizes.

Click here for details or send a SASE to:

League of Reston Artists
PO Box 2513
Reston, VA 20195

Sunday Artsilliness

Are there any editors awake at the WaPo?

Maybe I'm just too brittle by now, but does this belong in an art criticism column?

Finch is a slight 42-year-old, with a feathery crop of short blond hair that's thinning on top. His eyes are a pale, watery blue, and they tend to look away as he explains himself, rather shyly, to a stranger. He's dressed in worn khakis and Adidas (but not the trendy ones that scenesters wear). An old white T-shirt reveals surprisingly well-muscled arms: They hint at time spent at the gym, and are the only sign of an artist's narcissism in a man who might otherwise be almost any kind of junior academic.

It's All Good

Our current Lida Moser: 50 Years of Photographs at our Georgetown gallery has become (by far) our best-selling photography show ever, thanks in part to great reviews in the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, On Tap, and soon in The Morning News, but mostly due to Lida Moser's spectacular eye over the last 65 years or so.

Even the mighty Christie's is coming by next Wednesday (last day to see the show) to look at the exhibition.

Wanna Go to an Opening Today!

Scott Lassman has an opening artist's reception today from 1-3 p.m. for his solo photography exhibition entitled "Domesticated Animals" at the Fisher Art Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia.

The Fisher Gallery is located on the upper level of the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall & Arts Center.

Also last night, at Warehouse Gallery, Trish Tillman and Bridget Lambert opened a collaborative show titled "Love Me Lose Me".

According to Trish, "Love Me Lose Me" consists of "solo and collaborative fabric and print installations based on themes of getting attention when it is unwanted, vs. looking for attention that isn't there. Confrontational issues are touched upon regarding anger/relationship turmoil, sexual exploration and sexual abuse, as well as the coping mechanisms that we fall into to get by."

The exhibition runs until May 8.

Another Opportunity for Artists

The Center of the Washington DC Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender People (GBLT) Community Center is currently seeking artist to participate in an exhibition over the month of June. The art should reflect their experiences as a member of Washington's GLBT community. The exhibit will take place in the Center.

There will be special events open to the public during the month that will draw a large number of people into the space to view the art.

Interested artists should submit proposals for participation to Scott Billings at scott@brotherhelpthyself.org.

Opportunity for Artists

The Greenbelt Community Center Art Gallery in Greenbelt, MD, part of the Greenbelt Recreation Department Arts Program is currently seeking artists for exhibitions between July, 2005 and June, 2006.

Apply before May 27 for best chances. No residency restrictions apply. The gallery hosts professional-level exhibitions of contemporary art in an educational community setting.

Proposals may be submitted by individual artists, groups, or curators. Artwork may deal with serious content but must be appropriate for a public building with an intergenerational audience. Preference will be given to artists who are interested in leading one or more paid workshops or other community-oriented program in conjunction with their exhibition.

Send a letter articulating your concept for the exhibition, identifying the contributors, and describing a related workshop or public program (if any) which you would like to produce. Also enclose: photo cd (preferred) or slides (no limit); resume for each contributor; sound or video recording if applicable; documentation of past community-oriented projects if available; and padded return envelope with postage.

Send materials to:

Nicole DeWald
Arts Coordinator
Greenbelt Community Center
15 Crescent Road
Greenbelt, MD, 20770
For more information, call 240-542-2057 or email Nicole here.

The Power of the Web (local Bloggers do good)

J.T. has a solo show coming, G.P. is on CNN, Green will be curating a gallery show, and that living word-processing machine known as J.W. Bailey, strikes again.

Congrats to all!

The Thursday Reviews

Jessica Dawson has an excellent piece about A Proud Continuum: Eight Decades of Art at Howard University, an exhibition that I was not aware was taking place, and which sounds superbly interesting.

Dawson also writes about David Adamson Gallery's move while she looks at Victor Schrager's book still lifes and four landscape prints by William Christenberry.

And in an unexpected orgy of Thursday visual arts coverage, the usually visual art-stingy WaPo also offers a magnificent profile on area photographer John Gossage, whose last book is by Bethesda-based Loosestrife Editions, which produces beautiful photography books.

This profile of Gossage is extraordinary not only in the sense that it profiles a very important (and very good) area visual artist, but in the sense that it is there (in Style) at all. I hope that it signifies a course correction change by the Style section's new editor (Deb Heard), in doing for visual artists what the section already does for local musicians, dancers and actors.

In the City Paper Louis Jacobson has a very good review of our current Lida Moser exhibition in Georgetown.

Elsewhere in the WCP, Bidisha Banerjee has an excellent review of Prof. Peter Charles at Irvine Contemporary; a show which I quite liked as well.

The CP again comes through with a superb artist profile, in this case by Adam Mazmanian about Alexandria artist Mike Lowery.

In The Gazette, Karen Schafer discusses The Baltimore Watercolor Society 2005 Mid-Atlantic Regional Watercolor Exhibition at Strathmore Mansion.

In The Georgetowner, Gary Tischler reviews Faces of the Fallen.

The Friday Openings

Tomorrow is Bethesda's time to showcase their galleries, and tomorrow is the Bethesda Art Walk, with 17 participating galleries and art venues.

Free guided tours begin at 6:30pm. Attendees can meet their guide at the Bethesda Metro Center, located at the corner of Old Georgetown Road and Wisconsin Avenue. Attendees do not have to participate in tours to visit Art Walk galleries.

Ozmosis Gallery has "A Single Vision" by Deanna Schwartzberg, while Elyse over at Gallery Neptune has an exhibition of artists' made
bookmarks, Marin-Price has paintings by Roxie Munro. Many of her oils and watercolors are views from the roof of her sky-lighted loft studio in Long Island City, just across the East River from her home in mid-Manhattan. And Creative Partners has large watercolors by Valerie Watson.

We have the second solo show by Canadian photographer Andrzej Pluta, who uses a lot of darkroom tricks (like photographing the subject flowers underwater) to deliver some of the most unusual series of flower photographs in contemporary photography.

Read the review of his 2003 solo show here.

Arts Agenda

The DCist Arts Agenda Listing has the best of this week's openings.

Time of the month for the Bethesda Art Walk on Friday.

Kahloprizes

Over the last few months I've been curating a worldwide call to artists for an Homage to Frida Kahlo hosted by Art.com with the sponsorhip of the Cultural Institute of Mexico and the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City.

Like every single one of the hundreds of art shows that I've juried or curated or organized over the years, it was an extremely difficult task. Putting together a group art show, no matter what the subject or focus, is never easy.

I reviewed about 500 entries and selected sixty or so for exhibition at art.com.

Check out the prizewinners here.

National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is scheduled to reopen in July 2006, and emulating their namesakes in England and Scotland, they are now institutionalizing and sponsoring a major new national competition for painted and sculpture portraits: The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

One portrait completed since January 1, 2004 may be entered between June 1 and September 6, 2005. Winner will receive $25,000 commission to complete a portrait for the Gallery's collection. Smaller awards for other finalists. Entry fee is $25 for online entries and $35 for snail mail entries.

Up to 500 paper entry forms accompanied by slides of the portrait will be accepted. Submit one or two slides for a painting and up to four slides for a sculpture. A paper entry form must be requested via e-mail from portraitcompetition@npg.si.edu after May 15, 2005. The entry fee will be $35, payable by credit card, certified check, or money order.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006 will be judged in two stages. First, a panel of experts will use an online jurying system to select approximately 120 semifinalist works. The Gallery will then arrange to ship these paintings and sculptures to Washington, D.C., where the panel will meet again in early March of 2006 to select the 50-60 finalists. These works will be installed in the National Portrait Gallery’s newly renovated second-floor special exhibition galleries.

Details here. I think that it is a shame that only two genres (painting and sculpture) are being admitted to the competition. That decision leaves out the potential for the NPG to explore other rich and vibrant genres like printmaking, collage, photography, even video.

Insider's Hint: I know one of these jurors quite well, and at least in that juror's perspective, he/she will be looking for portraits that really "expand" the definition of portraiture. I will be really, really surprised if a "traditional" portrait is chosen; but I could be wrong.

Don't Mess with the (Russian Orthodox) Church!

(Thanks Joseph)

"The director of the Sakharov Museum was convicted Monday of inciting religious hatred with a controversial art exhibition that was deemed "blasphemous and profane" by the Russian Orthodox Church.

A federal district court fined museum director Yuri Samodurov and curator Lyudmila Vasilovskaya $3,600 each for organizing the 2003 exhibit, which featured dozens of artists' expressions on the subject of religion."

Read the story here. Password available here.

New Website

I keep forgetting to mention it, but our galleries website has been completely redesigned and relaunched.

New website has been designed by Mark Jenkins. Check it out here.

Art Prizes

Chris from Zeke's Gallery in Canada, has an interesting posting with a listing of a variety of American and International Art Prizes, links and the most recent winners.

See it here.

Congratulations

To Janet Solinger, now Vice President, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Public Programs, and who previously directed the now-national Smithsonian Resident Associate Program from 1972–1992.

Ms. Solinger has been selected to receive DC ArtTable's "ArtSpark" award, given to women who have achieved a distinguished career and made significant contributions to art in America.