Littleton

I'm in Littleton, Colorado, surrounded by beautiful rocks, great trails and mountain lions. "If you come across a lion while hiking," said the six foot tall hotel front desk lady, "Just look big and stare at it; whatever you do, do not try to run away."

Look big, stare at it.

Right.

Airborne today and heading to Denver and then Seattle on Friday... more later.

Stolen sculpture

A few days ago, one of the local radio stations had a story about how thieves are stealing railroad tracks and other metal objects and then sell it as scrap metal. They do this because the price of most metals has skyrocketed in the last few years.

Sometime between July 7 - 13, 2006, artist Judith Richelieu had a bronze sculpture stolen from an exhibition held at the second floor of the Atrium at 1650 Tysons Blvd.

The bronze was called Fallen Flower, 1994. It is 15 x 20 x 21, and since the price of metal is so high, I wonder if sculptors everywhere ought to be warned that there have been thefts in other parts of the country of railroad tracks, plaques, and maybe now a work of art.

I'll have an image of the stolen sculpture as soon as I get it later today.

Tapedude in the WaPo

Adriane Quinlan has a really good article on DC's own tapedude Mark Jenkins.

Read a rare profile of a DC area artist (now achieving fame all over the place by the way) here.

More murals bite the dust

Apparently the Ariel Rios Building murals are not the only ones in extremis.

According to this story by Diane Haithman in the Left Coast Times:

"On Thursday, attorneys representing artist Kent Twitchell filed a claim against the U.S. Department of Labor in connection with Twitchell's large-scale mural "Ed Ruscha Monument" — a six-story portrait of fellow artist Ruscha on a building owned by the federal agency — being painted over in early June. Twitchell said he received no notice, as required by law, that the paint-over would take place.

Within the past few days, two more downtown murals, Frank Romero's "Going to the Olympics" and Willie Herrón's "Luchas del Mundo" (Struggles of the World) were partly covered with mud-colored paint, an apparent error by a Caltrans work crew cleaning up graffiti.

A Caltrans spokeswoman described the covering as a mistake and said plans are in place to remove the paint next week. Because of a protective coating, she said, the removal process will not affect the artwork."

Read the entire article here.

However, Bill Lasarow at LAMurals.org states that the partial painting-over of Frank Romero’s celebratory "Going to the Olympics" mural was done "in order to save it from graffiti taggers" - not on purpose to destroy it, and that in fact the covering up was apparently scheduled and part of the process and Romero is going to work on the mural some more!

New painting term

In the CP, Capps reviews E3: Painters at Transformer and describes one of the artists' works as:

"...And Passacantando’s untitled clusterfuck of color doesn’t seem to have gained much from all the criticism—it’s static through and through, despite its technical merits."

And let me be the first one to congratulate the Texan in coining a new way to describe a painting, as Googling "clusterfuck of color" reveals that no one else on the planet has apparently ever used that art term before; and I like it!

Art history legend has it than when Greenberg came to DC in the late 50s (or was it early 60s?) to give a lecture, he stated that "painting should be thin." After that statement settled in, apparently some DC area artists actually broke out their caliphers and started measuring the thickness of their paint above the canvas. Eventually, according to Wolfe, the Washington Color School was partially borne out of that statement.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that even as I write this, someone is considering clusterfuckism in art.

Update: An alert DC Art News reader detects that although clusterfuck of color is unique, when it is Googled at "cluster fuck of color," these entries are logged by Google's ever busy robot spiders.

Wanna go to a closing and an opening tomorrow night?

Then come to Adams Morgan on Saturday night from from 7 to 10 p.m. and go to the closing reception for "Focusing On The District" at Studio One Eight gallery.

This photography show showcases scenes from various parts of the city.

Studio One Eight is located at 2452 18th St. NW. (directly above Julia's Empanadas - mmm).

If instead you wanna head down to the beach in Norfolk, then DC artist Andrew Wodzianski opens in Norfolk for a solo exhibit. Old Dominion University Gallery hosts "Coulrophobia and Other New Paintings." Twenty nine paintings on display with thirteen new ones being unveiled. Opening reception on Saturday, July 22 at 7pm and the show goes through Aug. 22, 2006.

Me in the CP

Nell Boeschenstein has a cool story about my recent changes in today's CP.

Read the article here.

She also writes about the Ariel Rios murals. More on that later...

Wall Mountables at DCAC

Around this town, anytime that you have an open show (meaning a show without a juror or curator), the critics tend to immediately savage it. This seems to be a predictable critical analysis somewhat unique to our area's visual arts and artists as viewed by most of our area critics.

Once a year, the District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC), through a show called "Wall Mountables," allows any and all artists to hang anything they want, so long as it fits within a two square foot space. It's usually one of my favorite shows and a terrific opportunity for artists to exhibit and sell their work.

DCAC will be accepting and allowing artists to hang their work Wed - Fri. July 26-28, 2006 - On Wed. from 3-8PM and on Friday from 3-6PM. Spaces are available on a first-come basis and each 2x2 ft space is $10 and current DCAC members get one space free!

Details here.

Also at DCAC

Next Sunday DCAC has their last Summer Art Forum in the DCAC theater, July 23rd at 7:30pm: "Making, Showing, and Collecting Video Art." Panelists include: Jefferson Pinder, Kathryn Cornelius, Djakarta, Philip Barlow and Brandon Morse.

For more information on the Art Forum visit this website.

Vox Populi

There are only four days left to see "Home Free," an exhibition of the Philadelphia artists collective Vox Populi at DCAC.

The WaPo's Chief Art Critic Blake Gopnik, in a rare look at an area gallery show wrote about the exhibition:

"One piece manages to take a standard contemporary trick and get it absolutely right.... A video called 'Cocked,' by Matthew Suib."

Hurry!

Update: Warren commenting in Thinking About Art writes:

This video, or one just like it, was in the Radius 250 show in Richmond last year.

3 Years ago Michael Oatman, an artist based in Troy NY, did one pulling together all the time-travel sequences in movies.

Both were cool to look at, but I think you're correct to ask why Gopnik thinks that even though it's a "contemporary trick" (I read that as "cliché"), it's worth writing about.

Its funny, I believe he thinks he's really on the cutting edge with his knee-jerk support of video. Like he's cool or something because of it, and all the taunts make him more rigid.

Flashpoint Fracass

DCist reports on a private party at Flashpoint which ended with some artwork being destroyed.

Read it here.

Ariel Rios Building Murals

A few days ago I posted about a memo by Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator, Office of Administration and Resources Management, who announced a decision to install a temporary screen in two days. The screen will cover up five historical murals (out of 25 in the building) on the 5th floor of the Ariel Rios building in Washington, DC. These murals were created under a 1934 U.S. Treasury art commissioning program.

I'm still mulling about how to express my opinion on this issue... meanwhile here are a couple of the murals; click on them for a larger view.

Danger of the Mail


Death on the Prairie

Ariel Rios Murals

A few days ago I posted about a memo by Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator, Office of Administration and Resources Management, who announced a decision to install a temporary screen in two days. The screen will cover up five historical murals (out of 25 in the building) on the 5th floor of the Ariel Rios building in Washington, DC. These murals were created under a 1934 U.S. Treasury art commissioning program.

The six murals which will be covered up, and which have titles such as "French Explorers and Indians," "Torture by Stake," "The Red Man Takes the Mochila," etc. depict a diverse set of panoramas ranging from spectacular scenes of the often violent interaction between the American West’s native nations and the new settlers, to artistic recreation of historical meetings between European explorers and native Americans.

While it is perhaps understandable that the imagery on some of these murals may be objectionable to some workers or visitors -- perhaps embarrassing to some due to the nudity in some of the murals, and perhaps offensive to others due to its depiction of native Americans, and maybe even more objectionable due to the violence depicted in many of them -- in my opinion it would be even more objectionable to a majority of us to have these historical murals covered up or destroyed.

A nation that chooses to ignore or whitewash its past, is a nation without a historical memory and without a cultural footprint.

Nearly the entire world was aghast when the Taliban destroyed the gigantic Buddha sculptures that were offensive to that repressive regime, and we all condemned the demolition as a vile and barbaric act of cultural ignorance and artistic destruction. And yet here we are almost ready to do the same to an integral, if not proud, part of our historical and artistic past.

Art is perhaps the only vehicle that we have left that crosses all cultural barriers and creates bridges and memories for mankind. Visual art, especially representational historical visual art, has created for our nation an important cultural footprint and a significant record of our past. As such it cannot and must not be now censored or destroyed, lest we forget it.

I have had many opportunities to sit on the advisory board of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and in that process I have help to fund many of the contemporary murals that now adorn our nation’s capital. In that position, I have no doubt in my mind that there is no arts commission or city in our nation that would remotely consider funding these 1930s murals in 2006, much less in a public building. That is just the nature of where we were in 1930 as a people and where we are now.

But it is my hope that decades from now, if someone finds any of the murals that we have funded in the last few years for our nation’s capital objectionable, that our future Americans will have more conviction and more common sense and more guts to stand fast rather than to immediately take the politically-correct and knee-jerk reaction to "cover" them up, or consider removing them.

Keep the murals as they are.

Congrats!

To Min Jung Kim from Chantilly High School, who is The League of Reston Artists (LRA) award recipient of its 2006 Art Scholarship Award in the amount of $1,000.

Conversions

The Ellipse Arts Center and the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran have teamed up to present "Conversions," which is an exhibition "exploring spatial interpretations juried from three distinct points of view."

The opening reception is tomorrow, July 19, 7 – 9 pm and the show runs through September 29, 2006. It was curated by artist Sam Gilliam, Dennis O’Neil (director of the Hand Print Workshop and printmaking professor at the Corcoran College of Art + Design), and Ubercollectors Heather & Tony Podesta.

They selected works by Renee Butler, Kathryn Cornelius, Susan Eder/Craig Dennis, M. Sedestrom Guthrie, Lisa Kellner, Michelle Kong, Tomas Rivas, Tai Hwa Goh, Joan Sarah Wexler, Ami Martin Wilber and Amy Glengary Yang.

Silverthorne on our show

Alexandra has some words and some pics of our current show.

See them here.

Art Enables

Art Enables is a not-for-profit arts studio for persons with developmental and/or mental disabilities. They work with artists from throughout the region - DC, MD, and VA.

On July 22nd, they are hosting their first-ever regional art event, a one day juried exhibition of outsider/folk/visionary artwork produced in 14 programs located in DC, Baltimore, and the region.

The exhibition features the work of over 60 artists, most of whom have not been exhibited before.

Although Art Enables is the host for the exibition, the show includes work created by outsider artists through a diverse group os organizations, such as Miriam’s Kitchen, Prisons Foundation, Smith Farm for the Healing Arts, Create! For Seniors, Anchor Mental Health, Art for the People, Studio Downstairs, Mitch Snyder Arts and Education Center, Life Skills, Arc of Baltimore, St. Luke’s House, ARTiculate of WVSA arts connection, and Arts for the Aging.

The juried show, on July 22, 2006, is at MOCA DC in the heart of Georgetown. It is a one-day event, 11 am to 8 pm (reception from 6 pm to 8 pm). The exhibit and gala are free and open to the public.

Phantom Floor

Phantom Floor is a new exhibition opening this coming Thursday, July 20, 2006 from 6-9pm (show runs through August 11, 2006) at Salve Regina Gallery, Catholic University, 620 Michigan Ave. NE, Dept. of Art, Salve Regina Hall. Red Line Metro, Brookland/CUA stop.

The exhibition is curated by Lea-Ann Bigelow, and according to the news release, the exhibition explores the following:

"In the shifting territory between the real and the (imag)ined, the material and the ephemeral, the defined and the unbounded, the self and the other – there dwells the phantom.

For their existence, phantoms draw deeply on individuals’ desire to conjure, project and believe-in alternate and ofttimes contested truths based on their singular, personal experiences.

With Phantom Floor, guest curator Lea-Ann Bigelow brings together the bold new work of three young Washington-area artists – Phoebe Esmon, Tomás Rivas and Karen Joan Topping – in a collective engagement with the liminal and powerfully evocative notion of the phantom.

Through site-specific installations, sculpture and mixed media compositions, the artists excavate, (re)interpret and unleash a host of histories and memories - of places, of people, of things – in a strategic haunting of the gallery, and in so doing remind us of the willful defiance of established truths that fuels artistic creation itself."

New art gallery

I'm hearing of a new art gallery which will open later this year in DC. The new owner/director already has an ambitious and strong focus to become one of the top notch spaces immediately.

More later...