Soldier’s imagery

A while back I was honored to be asked to jury the All-Army Photography Contest, and with two other jurors we looked at over 1,000 photos sent in from all over the world.

This article discusses the winners from the competition.

Also on the 30th

I am told that an equally terrific date idea for March 30th (besides the Hirshhorn After Hours) is the WPA\C's After Effects at the Corcoran.

After Effects
Night #1 of the Experimental Media Series - Curated by Kathryn Cornelius

Date: Thursday, March 30, 2006
Time (all 3 nights): 7:00 - 9:00 pm
Location (all 3 nights): Corcoran Gallery of Art Armand Hammer Auditorium
(New York Avenue entrance.)

Night #2 – April 26th – Curated by Djakarta
Night #3 – May 24th – Juried submissions from open call by Kathryn Cornelius & Djakarta

Details here.

Vettriano gives critics the finger

The world's best-selling popular artist, Jack Vettriano, flips the bird to art critics and museums in an interview in The Scottsman (thanks AJ):

"I just consider myself a trader," Vettriano said. "I take my goods to the marketplace and try to get the best price I can."

The greater glory of art doesn't come into it, he confirms. "That's not why I paint," he said. "It's wall decoration for me, I don't regard it as this big meaningful thing. My subjects are men and women getting off, that's all. Mind you, some people don't think sex is serious, but I happen to think it's terribly serious."

Read the interview here.

Hirshhorn After Hours

This coming March 30, 2006 starting at 5:30 pm you can enjoy an evening of art and cocktails celebrating Hiroshi Sugimoto and his work. Join the artist for an exclusive film screening and discussion; experience the work of internationally renowned sound artists Richard Chartier (who is somewhat of a local as he's from Baltimore) and Taylor Deupree, and explore the photography of Sugimoto with co-curator of the exhibition Kerry Brougher, whom we're all hoping will one day look through the work of some Washington artists and DC area art galleries.

This event is free and open to the public and has a cash bar.

Schedule: 5:30 to 8:30 pm: Galleries open and then from 6 and 7 pm: Specification Fifteen: a live world premiere of a new musical work created especially for the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition, at the Lerner Room.

6:30 pm: Curator's tour with Kerry Brougher.

8 pm: Hiroshi Sugimoto will perform as benshi, narrating the beginning and epilogue of Kenji Mizoguchi's silent masterwork of early Japanese cinema, The Water Magician, 1933, at the Ring Auditorium. Please be advised that seating in the Ring Auditorium is limited, and the museum anticipates a high turn-out for this event.

Tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis from the far end of the information desk in the Museum lobby beginning at 7:15pm. Guests may enter the auditorium beginning at 7:45pm. Entry to the auditorium will not be permitted after 8pm. Please plan your visit accordingly.

Is this a great date night for artsy types or what?

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: March 30, 2006

Keeping the Flame Burning to be staged at the JoAnn Rose Gallery, Reston Community Center at Lake Anne, 1609-A Washington Plaza, Reston, VA 20190. The exhibition runs from April 3 - 30, 2006.

Awards – Generously funded by Pat Macintyre: $300 1st Place, $200 2nd Place, $100 3rd Place and Honorable Mention awards to be chosen by the juror: Nancy Sausser, Exhibitions Director, McLean Project for the Arts.

An additional $500 will be awarded at the discretion of Pat Macintyre and announced at the Awards Reception. Entry fee is $15.

Mail entry form with check payable to LRA to:

League of Reston Artists
PO Box 2513
Reston, VA 20195

Entries must be received by March 30.

Art Deal of the Week

My second pick is this gorgeous seascape photograph by Colombian photographer Adriana Echavarria.


It is titled "In Dreams" and the photograph measures 17x23.5 inches and then it is matted in a white pH-balanced acid free 8-ply white museum mat and framed in a black metal moulding under plexiglass to a framed size of 27.5 x 32 inches. Photo is signed by the photographer. The price (including frame): $400.

To buy it call 301/718-9651 or email the gallery.

DC Blogsphering

Bailey has a new project going. He has created a Lenten Season inspired memorial photography art project and is posting one photograph per day during Lent of a flood-damaged home in New Orleans on a blog titled Perelli Drive - An East New Orleans Lenten Season Memorial Art Project. This memorial art project blog can read be read here.

Adrian Parsons is exploring the severe disconnect between local art museum curators and regional art galleries and artists' studios. If you are an artist who has been visited by any of our museum curators, Adrian wants to hear from you.

Alexandra Silverthorne has a really cool photograph accepted into the 14th Annual Phillips' Mill Photographic Exhibition. See it here.

Tracy Lee is pissed off that the man who sang about his Chocolate Salty Balls, and pokes fun at all religions, suddenly got offended when South Park poked fun at his religion. Read that here

Amy Watson hasn't posted in over two weeks (again!) and we're all wondering if she's still alive.

Huckenpahler has a really nice posting about the Anne Rowland exhibition at Hemphill. Read that here.

Teague Clare is still probably recuperating from his mugging in New Orleans and hasn't posted in over a month. I hope that Teague is OK and recuperates quickly!

Kirkland shows the power of the web and how it got one of his drawings in a Brooklyn group show. Read that here.

V for VeryBadetta

For some reason I'm in some studio's press invite list and I get free press passes to movies all the time, although most of the times I don't have the time to actually get down to the theatre.

But I had some time recently and went to see V for Vendetta as I am sort of a "comic books in the movies" kind of fan.

V for Vendetta was mostly a sleeper for me, as it borrows heavily from too many sources as diverse as Orwell, Batman and even Scary Movie.

For starters, at 132 minutes, the movie is too long.

For midlins, the whole masked hero versus the big bad neo-Nazi government goons is such a tired theme.

For endings, the whole Guy Fawkes tie-in was interesting, but the unfortunate resemblance of Guy Fawkes' masks to Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman sort of screwed it up for me (and it also sort of brought back into my mind the silly mask from Scary Movie).

In this film, they even use the "Why won't you die?" exasperated question that the Joker yells at Batman in the 1989 Batman movie in a very similar context, when the government's police has fired like a million shots at the hero and he's still kicking their ass using nothing but knives and karate kicks.

So essentially in a virusy, terroristic future world (25 years or so into the future) where America is in a Civil War (Red vs Blue I guess), England has been taken over by a neo-Nazi Tory dictatorship with a Chancellor who now rules through fear, a police state and large screen TVs; beer and booze seem to be plentiful, although apparently real butter is very hard to get.

That was hard to swallow for me. I lived in the UK for three years, and the Brits use a ton of butter on everything - imagine a sandwich with a quarter inch of butter on each piece of white bread, and a few slices of cucumbers in between, and you've got one of the prime British dishes on the planet.

A butterless England is impossible to imagine, no matter how sciencefictionish my mind gets.

In any event, our hero (known as V) rescues Queen Amidala from government goons who are about to molest her. V is (I think) some sort of genetic superman created in a government lab, and he is seeking revenge against his creators and also to bring down the English dictatorship by arousing the anger and fire of the English people.

Yeah...

Anyway, after he rescues her, he blows up a major London landmark to Russian music, takes over a TV station and runs his DVD infommercial on the air (I guess they still have DVDs 25 years into the future) telling Londoners that he'll blow up the Parliament building in a year, rescues Amidala from the goons a second time, then tortures her to teach her some sort of lesson about losing fear, and in the process incites an almost bloodless rebellion by thousands of Londoners dressed in the Guy Fawkes outfit that he has FEDEX'd to all of them a few days ahead of the one-year deadline for the rebellion.

The best visual part in the movie is when Padmé is in V's secret hideout, which is full of art treasures which he has "rescued" from the government's banned artwork list. I picked up a Turner landscape, a Vermeer painting, some Greek antiquities and generally pictorial, ah... traditional masters' work. Seems like V passed on attempting to rescue any of the YBA's work, as I didn't see any Emins or Hirsts in his hoard (unless the bed where Natalie Portman sleeps in while she's at V's pad was Emin's "art" bed).

Wait for the video.

Parsons on Wolov

DCist Adrian Parsons makes a studio visit to Nekkid with a Camera's Samantha Wolov.

Read the studio visit here.

See Samantha Wolov's erotica here.

The secret

It's clear from the tons of emails that I've received since the last posting that:

(a) Many of you have no patience
(b) Some of you already know the secret

And some of you, in writing "is the secret the fact that blah, blah, blah..." have also revealed some interesting stuff!

Anyway.

As all of us know, museum curators and good galleries are flooded (and I mean literally overwhelmed) by submissions from artists. I know that by the time that you add up email submissions, snail mail submissions through slides, CD ROMs and photos, and visits, we get probably anywhere between 1,000 to 1,500 artists a year approaching the gallery seeking some sort of exhibition opportunity.

So as you may imagine, museum curators probably get their fair share of submissions from artists seeking to catch that curator's eye.

And it is not that much of a stretch to imagine that because of time and interest, most curators quickly glance at the submission (if even that) and immediately put it in the return file (in the event that the artist enclosed a SASE) or the round file if no SASE was included.

It's hard to blame them - if they looked with depth and interest at every submission sent in, they'd never get anything done!

And I suspect that by the nature of the curatorial world today, rare is the museum curator interested in "discovering" an unknown or emerging artist. Although I suspect that if the curator is working on some thematic group shows, there's a chance that some work may catch the curator's eye.

A good example of that was the fact that the two curators from this year's much maligned Whitney Biennial were technically open to receiving unsolicited proposals from artists. And I am curious to learn (and I have asked the Whitney):

(a) How many unsolicited proposals did they receive?
(b) Did they actually go through all the unsolicited proposals received?
(c) How many of the finalists (if any) were selected from this set of unsolicited proposals?

But back to "our" secret.

To review the issue: Museum curators get a lot of stuff from artists in the mail (snail and email) and they probably seldom look at it in depth, if ever.

And yet our own Hishhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has an incredibly artist friendly policy (either voluntarily self-imposed or because they are a federally funded museum) that requires that submissions from artists are all reviewed at joint curatorial meetings that are regularly scheduled throughout the year!

So when you send the Hishhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden your slide packet, or CD ROM, and resume, at some point it (one or two images I suppose) is presented and reviewed by the museum's curators!

And as we all know, just in having the work seen by a curator, a huge task has been accomplished!

Even being seen and rejected is better than not being seen at all! Especially by a group of curators.

Witness what happened to John Lehr.

John Lehr is a Baltimore-based photographer (represented locally by the new Heineman Myers Contemporary Art gallery soon opening in Bethesda).

A couple of Trawick Prizes ago, John applied to the prize and his work was reviewed by the three curators and rejected.

But he caught the eye of Jonathan Binstock, one of the curators for that year's Trawick Prize, who is also the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery and subsequently one of the two curators for the 48th Corcoran Biennial.

And guess what?

Binstock not only picked the work of Lehr for the Biennial, but if my memory serves me right, there were at least three regional artists in the Biennial whose work had also been exposed to the Trawick Prize curators earlier on; none of them won the prize that year, but nonetheless made it to the Biennial!

Even in rejection there's sometimes accomplishment.

It is better to submit and be rejected than not to submit at all.

Enough with the trite sayings; at the very least all of you should enter the Trawick Prize.

And handle the Hishhorn secret carefully, you don't want to waste this golden opportunity if your work is not ready.

Last night's panel

I must admit that I was a little surprised to find around 100 people show up for last night's panel at the Arlington Arts Center, including a few well-known DC area artists... but it was a good topic, and the panel was loaded with good talent.

After a brief introduction by Washington's own glass lordmeister (Tim Tate) and by the fair Claire Huschle, who runs the Center, we all got into the issue at hand very quickly, and soon it was clear that we had an audience that had come ready with a lot of good questions.

And I'm going to reveal the gem that came out of the panel...

A few years ago I was interviewing a curator from the Hirshhorn Museum for some art magazine; that particular curator revealed to me a fact that dropped my jaw with excitement, and she must have noticed, because it was clear that she had just revealed a HUGE secret that few know about.

She must have seen the excitement in my eyes, and also my tonsils, and she gasped, and begged me not to mention the secret that she had just revealed.

And I pondered and struggled -- we were in a Cuban restaurant that (thank God) no longer exists, as it was run by pseudo-Cubans and the food was not only bland and so so, but also culturally incorrect (they actually served the Moros y Cristianos already mixed!) -- and I poked my sweet fried plantains around, and she continued to plead, and I finally said "Fine!!!! I won't mention this in the article!"

"And you can't write about it anywhere else," she demanded.

"OK, OK," I agreed, already thinking that she had not specified "talking about it" (and over the years I've told this fact to the thousands of people who have taken the Success as an Artist Seminar).

And last night, one of the panel members revealed the secret.

I was astonished!

"Did you all heard that?" I almost shouted to the audience. "Write that down! That alone is worth the forty bucks that youse paid to come here!"

A murmur swept through the room as pens and pencils emerged. "What was that?" shouted several voices from the back, "we couldn't hear!"

And she repeated the secret! In a loud voice too! She did look at me a little funny and added that "maybe she shouldn't be revealing that..."

Too late!

Crap! I smell my chicken dinner (boneless chicken breasts, mojito sauce, plantains, olives, yucca, nyame root, sweet potatoes, olives and olive brine, adobo seasoning, onions, carrots, tons of garlic cloves, peas, mushrooms, and salt) in the oven burning!

Gotta run... but I promise to tell you the secret (since now it has been discussed publicly) in the next posting.

Hannah House Auction

Chris Goodwin is auctioning off a painting to benefit Hannah House.

Hannah House of DC is dedicated to serving homeless women and families.

Bid for the painting here. 30% of the final price will go to Hannah House of DC.

More on panel later

Last night's panel went great, with around 100 people packing the Arlington Arts Center.

More later.

Russian art in Reston

Evan Frank tells us about Russian artists at Galerie Europa in the Reston Town Center.

Read the article here.

13,000 a day

My opinions on the power of the new DCist art writers has been getting a lot of attention (and a lot of emails).

And I am told that DCist gets about 13,000 unique visitors a day and the numbers grow weekly.

Case closed.

Tonight: "How to Get Noticed" Panel at the Arlington Arts Center

I'll be leaving soon forthe Arlington Arts Center to take part in the workshop titled "How to Get Your Work Noticed by the press, galleries, and museums." The workshop runs from 7-9:30 pm on Wednesday, March 15, and will be held at the Tiffany Gallery in the Center and is hosted both by the Arlington Arts Center and the Washington Glass School.

The panelists are:
Michael O'Sullivan - Washington Post Art Critic
Lee Lawrence - Contributing Editor for American Style Magazine
Claire Huschle - Executive Director- Arlington Arts Center
Phylis Rosenzweig - Former Curator, Hirshhorn Museum
and Me!

The panel will take questions from the audience, as well as answer the following questions from the moderator (which I think are quite good):

1) In what context(s) do you come across a new artist’s work? (Press release? Gallery visit? Art or craft fair? Referral?) Do you have one way that you prefer?

2) What is the most effective "marketing" tool that an artist can have today, besides high-quality slides and/or images? Website? Blog? Resume? Etc.

3) Is there more than one person at your publication/business/project that covers similar material? How important is it to get the right information to the right person from the start?

4) How aggressive is too aggressive for an artist to be in trying to get a review/ exhibition?

5) The biggest faux pas an artist can make in approaching a reviewer/gallerist/curator is ___?

6) The most important thing an artist should, but probably doesn’t, know about the press, galleries, or museum exhibitions is ___?

7) Do you recognize any trends in your field that artists should pay attention to?

Cost: $40 in advance - $45 at the door. To register, call the Arlington Arts Center at 703-248-6800. They will take credit cards over the phone.

Location:
Arlington Arts Center
Tiffany Theater
3550 Wilson Boulevard
Right across from the Virginia Square subway
Arlington, Virginia

See ya there!

William Safire And Art That's Good for You

That's the title of today's essay in the WaPo by Philip Kennicott.

I've read it twice, and I still haven't got the foggiest idea what Kennicott is truly trying to say or convey in this essay.

New Gallery in Town

Soon we can all go to the grand opening of Heineman Myers Contemporary Art, a brand new art gallery opening next month in Bethesda.

Zoe Myers has been working really hard to find a good, large space to realize her goal of becoming one of the power art galleries in our area.

Their first show is "Re-Formation" by Baltimore-based photographer Connie Imboden, without a doubt one of the most influential photographers in our area.

Opening reception: Saturday April 8, 2006, 5-8pm. The gallery is located at 4728 Hampden Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814.

For more info contact the fair Zoe Myers at 202/415-6547.

See ya there!

Tape Dude's Pandymania

I think that even Blake Gopnik may have liked this panda as tape dude Mark Jenkins goes triple X with an escort Panda (I think) as part of the Itsy Bitsy Bollocks opening event at Transformer.

Itsy Bitsy Bollocks, with artists Mr. Eggs, Mark Jenkins, Travis Millard, and Kelly Towles has an opening reception this Saturday, March 18, 2006, 7-9 pm and runs through April 22, 2006. There's an Artists’ Talk on Sunday, March 19, 2006, at 3PM.

Materia Populi

I know this intelligent art collector in our area who has an amazing art collection, a large number of which is comprised of exceptional work by work by art students, some of which are now well-known artists.

And he is not a super rich guy, but a regular blue collar guy who just loves art. And (with a mistake here and there) he has developed a really good eye for spotting early talent.

This collector has one of the largest art collections in our area - easily pushing 3,000 paintings and a few hundred sculptures. But what makes his collection interesting is the large number of work that he acquires at University student shows and MFA shows.

And one of the best MFA shows is coming up: the Maryland Institute, College of Art (MICA) presents Materia Populi, their MFA Thesis exhibition, with an opening reception, this Friday March 24, 5:30-7:30 pm, and Artists' Talks on Wednesday March 29, 2:30-4 pm. The MFA candidates are Laura Amussen, Ian MacLean Davis, Emily Denlinger, Allison Lincoln Turrell and Cory Wagner.

At the Meyerhoff & Thesis Gallery, MICA Fox Building, 1303 Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217. Hours & directions: 410.669.9200 or visit www. mica.edu.