Tonite in Philly

Tonite, starting at 6PM at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Print Center is sponsoring a lecture by internationally renowned camera obscura artist Abelardo Morell.

He will discuss his career and the recent work he has made in conjunction with The Print Center and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. A book signing of his recent book, Abelardo Morell published by Phaidon Press, will immediately follow the lecture. Books will be available for purchase in the Museum Store.

Abelardo Morell transformed Gallery #171 in the Modern and Contemporary wing of The Philadelphia Museum of Art into a camera obscura. Through a small hole in one of the gallery’s windows the image of the museum’s East Entrance becomes a piece of art on display along with The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) by Surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico.

When I lived in Scotland in the late 80s, one of my favorite places to visit when in Edinburgh was the 1850's Camera Obscura in the Outlook Tower, which shows constantly rotating panoramic views of one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

New DC gallery

Galerie Myrtis announces its grand opening with an exhibition featuring works by African-American and African artists including: Selma Burke, Ed Love, Folusho Akomlede, Sylvester Mubayi, Joseph Holston, William Tolliver, Edward Chiwara, Velphia Mzimba, Lois Mailou Jones, Danny Simmons, Ben Macala, Hargreaves Ntukwana, Viola Burley Leak, Charles Sebree, Thokozani Mathobela, Winston Saoli, Samella Lewis, Ellen Powell Tibernio, and David Mbele.

Date: October 20, 2006
Time: 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Location: Galerie Myrtis
500 9th Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003

RSVP: Phone: 202/548-7575
Email: collectors@creativeartisans.net

Please RSVP by October 10, 2006

Warren Craghead at GRACE

New work from Warren Craghead opens tomorrow, Friday Sept. 29 at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, Virginia, easy to find right off the Dulles Toll Road. The Opening Reception is tomorrow, Friday September 29, 6pm - 9pm with an Artist's Talk at 7PM.

Craghead likens his studio to "a bomb crater where pieces of notebook paper, cardboard, post-its, and foam lie in piles surrounded by scraps of pen and pencil drawings, string, plastic, old junk mail, and magazines."

Also showing is "The Suburban Excavation Project: Recent Work by Adam Grossi."

Kudos to GRACE, whose exhibition program this past year has been vigorously renovated and has certainly offered some exciting new work. Don't miss this show!

Miya Ando Stanoff at Ligne Roset

Bay area artist Miya Ando Stanoff's minimalist works on steel canvas make their DC area debut with an exhibition at Ligne Roset DC.

There will be a champagne reception for the artist on September 30, 2006 from 12-6PM. Ligne Roset is at 3306 M Street NW, Washington DC 20007.

Miya is a graduate of UC Berkeley and attended Yale University where she studied East Asian Buddhist Iconography. Half-Japanese and half-Russian, she was raised bilingually and in two cultures, living both in her family's Buddhist temple in Japan and in Northern California. She comes from a tradition of metalworking, as she is the descendant of Bizen sword maker Ando Yoshiro Masakatsu.

Freedom at Heliport

In an exhibition titled "Freedom," Gateway's Heliport Gallery in Silver Spring, Maryland, features the works of four artists that have left their respective countries due to socio-political strife. According to the news release, the exhibit is not overtly political, nor does it shout oppression. On the other hand, it shows four artists at different stages in their careers that have each used art and their new found freedom as a means for emotional release and chance to redefine themselves.

An example is Dr. Kyi May Kaung. While growing up in Burma, Dr. Kaung was only allowed to paint realistic images because the government could understand them. Abstract art was more or less forbidden. Conversely, now living here in the US, Dr. Kaung is now exploring the boundaries of abstract art for the first time.

The exhibit includes work by Machyar Gleunta, Dr. Kyi May Kaung, Win Pe and Hatim Eltayeb Mahmed Ali Elmaki.

The opening reception is Friday, October 6 fro 6-9 PM.

Ellyn Weiss at Nevin Kelly

The Nevin Kelly Gallery will host a solo exhibition of new works by Bethesda artist Ellyn Weiss from October 4 until October 29, 2006. The exhibition, titled "Circular Reasoning," includes two series of new works. The first is a series of oil bar paintings on wood that shares its title with the show itself. The second is a series of woodblock monoprints on paper called "Bioelectronics." An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, October 5 from 6 until 9 o'clock p.m. The public is invited. The gallery is located at 1517 U Street, NW, Washington, DC.

Sydney McGee

I've spent all day in the DC area, and when I returned home tonight I had my inbox full of emails from readers asking if I had seen this.

Sydney McGee is an art teacher (with 28 years of experience) who has been fired by the Frisco, Texas school board because this Fisher Elementary School art teacher took 89 fifth-graders on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art last April and then some of the fifth graders reported to their parents that they had seen "a nude sculpture at the art museum."

Then the parents "raised concern..."

And then she was put on paid administrative leave...

And now the Frisco, Texas school board has voted not to renew her contract after 28 years.

[Anger]

Does the Frisco, Texas school board realize that these actions appear to put them a century or two ahead of the Islamofascists that I am sure they all abhor?

According to the Dallas Morning News:

Ms. McGee, who has taught in various Texas districts for 28 years, said she visited the museum and spoke with museum staffers before the trip to ensure that it was appropriate for the fifth-grade class. Ms. McGee said she does not know which piece of art offended the parent, and the district did not identify it.

Ms. McGee said principal Nancy Lawson called her into a meeting the day after the trip to admonish her about the parent's complaint. Shortly thereafter, she received a negative review and a series of directives about displaying student artwork and creating lesson plans.

"You have to start somewhere when you've seen things you don't believe are in the best interest of the students," Superintendent Rick Reedy said.

Quick to appear to shift the blame, "board members said there were other performance issues in question beyond the trip complaint."

Aw Texas... can't take you anywhere...

Options:

1. Frisco School Board immediately should prohibit any and all school trips to any museums or any other venues where any art nudity or nudity in any other form is present.

2. All Texas museums within school bus driving distance of Frisco, Texas should immediately (a) get rid of all nude artworks or (b) cover them up whenever the Frisco kids show up.

3. Frisco voters should fire all these Friscidiots on the Board.

Here's what we can do:

Email a note of support for Sydney McGee to Buddy Minett President of the Frisco School Board. Or write to him at:

Buddy Minett
President
8548 Scott Circle
Frisco, TX 75036

If you write, be courteous and intelligent.

Tapedude in Holland

Dutch television with a really good clip on DC's Mark Jenkins' street installation in the Netherlands .

See it here.

And see Jenkin's babies first words here. The installations were curated by Fleur Kolk in Rotterdam.

I wonder when DC museum curators will "discover" Jenkins.

I've said it before

Whatever you do, never piss off Bailey.

Bailey, who has spent (and documented) a ton of time in New Orleans, does a Bailey on Robert Polidori's After the Flood.

Read it here.

Art by Students

The AP's Joan Loviglio had an interesting article in the Philly Inquirer about art by students being the latest rage.

"If there's an art to collecting art, Susan Guill just might be considered an old master.

For about 15 years, she has been attending the annual student exhibition at the esteemed Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nearly every wall in her Bala Cynwyd home is adorned with the work of an academy student; she purchased five student paintings at this year's show alone.

But in recent years, the crowds have become larger and the art gets snapped up even faster."

Buying student artwork has always been a great idea for young collectors and collectors on a limited budget. Savvy collectors and smart art dealers have always known that keeping an eye on what the art schools are delivering is a proven way to stay fresh and ahead of the game.

"Tilton Gallery in New York City has successfully brought the work of art students to its commercial gallery. Gallery director Janine Cirincione told The New Yorker that a show this year called "School Days" featuring art by 19 graduate students from Hunter College, Columbia and Yale University was 70 percent sold before the opening. Prices ranged from $2,000 to $16,000."

In the Greater DC area, over the last few years, Conner Contemporary, Fraser Gallery and Irvine Contemporary have all regularly had student shows and consistently included work by art students in their exhibition schedules. In the Greater Philly area, according to the article: "this year, the Pennsylvania Academy's 105th annual student show broke all previous sales records, raising $313,000 in its three-week run... and about 350 works of art were sold, some priced as high as $15,000."

I know of at least one major ubercollector, based in Maryland, who regularly attends students shows aroun the Mid Atlantic region, and happens to have an excellent eye (and one of the largest private art collections that I have ever seen - literally numbering in the thousands of paintings and sculptures (and lately even some videos) and who has been doing this "student art" practice for many years now.

For example, he started collecting Erik Sandberg and Andrew Wodzianski while they were both students, and has many, many paintings by Sandberg and a gigantic Wodzianski acquired while Andrew was a student at MICA.

Sandberg's latest is currently at Conner Contemporary until Oct. 28 and Wodzianski just recently had two very successful shows following his last solo at Fraser: one in Philadelphia at the Rodger Lapelle Galleries and one at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, and he has twice been a finalist for the Bethesda Painting Awards.

Needless to say, both those two young artists have gone on to bigger and better things and higher prices.

The fly in the ointment could be that:

"Some art school professors worry that early success could inappropriately influence students still defining their voice and their style to play it safe and commercial, so their works can easily sell.

"The danger is where you have critics coming into (students') studios looking for new talent; that's when it can be very disruptive," said Carol Becker, dean of faculty for The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "You want students finding themselves, not trying to find what the market wants."

I would be curious to hear Dean Becker tell me and the rest of the world "what the market wants"?

Employment in the arts - Public Art Projects Curator

Closing Date: October 5, 2006.

Arlington County, Virginia Department of Parks, Recreation & Cultural Resources.

The Public Art Projects Curator structures and leads the implementation of public art and design enhancements of capital and infrastructure projects in support of the goals of the County's Public Art Master Plan and Policy.

The position entails communication and project-related activities to elevate the profile of public art and design enhancements in the County. Duties include: management of the public art design/enhancement component of capital projects; liaison to the Arlington Commission for the Arts Public Art Committee (PAC); caretaking of the Public Art Collection; education of County staff and residents; initiating/ supporting other visual arts projects such as temporary public art, exhibitions, publications and other projects. Strong organization, self-motivation and communication skills are essential. The position is located in the Cultural Affairs Division's Public Art Section, supervised by from the Public Art Administrator.

Online application required. Salary Range: $45,906 - $75,899 annually. Announcement No: 7102-7A-PRC-GW. Apply here.

The College Art Association

Deadline is ongoing

Assists artists financially in completion of MFA and Ph.D. programs. Grants of up to $5,000 are awarded to individual artists. For information, contact:
The College Art Association
Fellowship Program
275 7th Ave., New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 691-1051; or check website: www.collegeart.org

Art-O-Matic News

In 2004 Nils Henrik Sundqvist brought the DC area designers community into Art-O-Matic with AOM's first official poster show.

It was well received by the public, the artists and the designers, in fact, my good friend Kristen Hileman, Assistant Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum, recognized the effort by adding the poster exhibit to her recommended viewing list for the 2004 show.

As we all know, this year's AOM is delayed to 2007, but they already have some amazing art contributions by 23 DC area designers and I wanted to share these with you; see them here. For more info email Nils at info@fiskdesign.net.

New PostSecret Book

The worldwide phenomenom that is Frank Warren's PostSecret project continues to grow.

A new book - My Secret: A PostSecret Book - which is a collection of secrets from young people in their teens and twenties is due out next November 1, 2006.

Order it online here and save $6.32!

And yet another new gallery

New to me anyway!

A Woman Story Gallery, is an arts venue in Alexandria, VA which primarily promotes immigrant women’s art and educates foreign-born and American artists in entrepreneurial skills for the arts market.

They're having an opening this coming Friday, Sept. 29, 2006 from 6-9PM. RSVP to Marga Fripp at cfripp@aol.com.

The featured artist of this month is Padma Prasad, an Indian-born artist whose collection depicts life, figures and the human spirit in bold and powerful colors. Her Figurative Moods exhibition runs through October 28, 2006.

New Galleries

Two new galleries will open soon or have opened in the Greater Washington, DC area:

The 9th Street Gallery, owned by Zeki Fendikoglu is located in the historic Shaw District of Washington, DC, in a circa 1880 historic brownstone building. Their website is here and their address is 1306 9th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001. The gallery director is Ilknur Boray and their cuurent show is by two of the DC area's top magicians of the traditional darkroom and the digital darkroom: James Steele and Craig Sterling. The show runs through October 21, 2006.

After looking for a space for quite a while, the Randall Scott Gallery will open next November. The new gallery is located at 1326 14th street NW on the 2nd floor. That’s above Thai Tanic on the corner of 14th NW and Rhode Island in DC.

They will be working with Julia Fullerton-Batten, Larry Gipe, Margot Quan Knight, Lucy McLauchlan and Kelly Tunstall, and Josh Urso. They have also signed the super hot Amy Lin, whose minimalist work has been selling like gangbusters everywhere that she has exhibited in the last few months. Randall will also take his new gallery and artists to Art (212) in New York later this month.

They will also be developing a multiples division, Randall Scott Editions, which will publish editioned prints by various artists. Randall tells me that the first threee gallery shows will all be group shows.

Correction: Amy Lin has not signed with the Randall Scott Gallery, she was just taken to Art(21) in NYC.

Opportunity for Artists

Scrivener Creative Review welcomes submissions for art, photography, poetry, and prose. General submissions will be accepted throughout the year and considered alongside specified calls for submissions.

Email submission (in TIF format only) to scrivener.review@gmail.com. Artwork must be in black and white format and must have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. The subject line must state the department to which the submission is directed. Submissions must be included as an attachment and will not be accepted if they appear in the body of an email.

Owning It

Malena Barnhart has an online blog project in which, using a scanner, she condenses everything that she owns into one tiny spot - contained at www.owningit.blogspot.com.

She says that "it deals with the nature of possession, equalizes all my 'stuff' so that my mess is on level grounds with my medicine. Originally I created this as part of a project for a visual thinking class taught by Colby Caldwell, but it has progressed since then."

Visit Owning It often!

Ideas

Just finished reading Kirkland's latest reviews of the shows at G Fine Art in Washington, DC, and my jaw dropped when I saw the paintings by Prof. Louis Cameron, an artist whose work I don't know and as far as I know, I've never met.

My jaw dropped because the paintings on exhibitions at the gallery are exactly the same subject and general size as paintings that I did in 1999-2000 from a series that I called "Digitalia" and which essentially were large paintings of my military ribbons earned while I was in the Navy.

My military ribbon paintings have an interesting story, first revealed here last year. I have also pasted it below.

It shows how two minds, apparently working apart, can come up with exact the same concept and idea. I still have perhaps 20 or so of these works, both paintings and drawings, that I did after the story below took place.

A Story That Must Be Told (Originally published Feb. 9, 2005)

As mentioned here, the McLean Center for the Arts sponsors a very good painting competition every couple of years called "Strictly Painting." It is now in its fifth iteration.

A few years ago, around 1999 or 2000, the juror for that year's version of "Strictly Painting" was Terrie Sultan, who back then was the Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran. I thought that this choice was a little odd, as Ms. Sultan, in my opinion, was not "painting-friendly." In fact, with all due respect, I blame her for diminishing the Corcoran Biennials, which used to be known as the Corcoran Biennial of Painting.

As such, they were essentially the only well-known Biennial left in the nation that was strictly designed to get a look at the state of contemporary painting, which was somehow surviving its so called "death."

It was Ms. Sultan who decided to "expand" the Biennial and make it just like all other Biennials: Jack of all trades (genres) Biennials. In the process, depending on what side of this argument you're on, she (a) did a great service to the Corcoran by moving it into the center of the "genre of the moment" scene - like all other Biennials, or (b) gave away the uniqueness of the nation's top painting Biennial title.

I'm aligned with the minority who supports camp (b) but understand those who defend her decision to become just another player in camp (a). Most people think that her decision and drive were the right thing to do in order to bring the Corcoran to a world stage, and perhaps it was.

But I digress.

When she was announced as the juror, I decided to see if I could predict her painting selectivity, sensitivity, process and agenda. It was my thesis that I could predict what Ms. Sultan would pick.

So I made a bet, and decided to enter the exhibition with work created specifically to fit what I deduced would be agreeable to Ms. Sultan's tastes. I felt that I could guarantee that I would get into the show because of the transparency of the juror's personal artistic agenda. It is her right to have one; I have them, in fact, we all have them.

I was trained as a painter at the University of Washington School of Art, but around 1992 or so, I stopped painting and decided to devote myself strictly to my love for drawing. So I had not picked up a brush in several years when I decided to enter this competition, designed to survey the state of painting in our region.

It was my theory that Ms. Sultan would not be in the representational side of painting. It was also clear that she (like many curators) was seduced by technology in the form of videos, digital stuff and such trendy things.

And so I decided to see if I could marry digital stuff with painting.

And what I did was the following:

I took some of my old Navy ribbons, and scanned them in to get a digital file. I then blew them up so that the final image was quite pixilated. I then printed about five of them and took slides of the printed sheets of paper.

I then submitted these slides to the competition, but identified them as oil on canvas paintings. My plan was that if accepted, how hard could it be to whip up a couple of paintings after the fact? I titled them with such titles as Digitalism: National Defense and Digitalism: Expeditionary Medal and so on.

From what I was later told, several hundred painters submitted work. And Ms. Sultan selected about only about seven or eight painters in total. And not only was I one of them, but she picked two of my entries.

I was elated! I had hit the nail right on the head! I felt so superior in having such an insight into this intelligent woman's intellect that I (a painter no more) could create competition-specific work to get accepted into this highly regarded show.

And then I began the task of creating the two paintings, using the pixilated images as the guide.

And it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

For one thing, I had submitted the "paintings" in quite a large size; each painting was supposed to be six feet long.

And it didn't take me long to discover that there are a lot of color nuances and hues in an average pixilated image.

And I went through dozens and dozens of rolls of tape as I pulled off the old Washington Color School trick of taping stripes (in my case small one inch square boxes of individual colors - hundreds upon hundreds of them) in a precise sequence to prevent smudging and color peeling, etc.

I painted for at least six hours every day, switching off between paintings to allow the previous day's work to dry off enough to allow a new layer of tape to be applied. I did all the varnishing outside, which usually attracted all the small neighborhood ruffians.

It was incredibly hard work, and I was ever so sorry that I had even gotten this crazy idea. All my nights were consumed.

But eventually they were finished and delivered to MPA and Ms. Sultan even wrote some very nice things about them in the exhibition's catalog.

Me? I was in a mix of both vindication and guilt; exhausted but fired up with the often wrong sense of righteousness of the self-righteous.

After the show, I had no idea what to do with them, and they didn't fit my "body of works," but I ended up selling both of them through Sotheby's.

And today, some art collector in South Carolina and another one in Canada, each have one very large, exhausting and handsome oil painting of pixilated naval ribbons hanging in their home, in happy ignorance of the interesting story behind them.

I mentioned the adjective handsome in describing them, because a few years ago I was telling this story to Prof. John Winslow, who asked to see the images of the real paintings. When I showed him, he said that they were actually "quite handsome paintings."

I had never had my work described as "handsome" (although the Washington Post once described it as "irritating"), so it stuck in my head.

So there you have it: The story of a former painter with a point to prove about a local curator, the subsequent hard-labor punishment of the process, and a hidden story behind two handsome paintings.

Postcards from the Edge

Deadline is postmark Friday, November 10, 2006 (NO late entries)

Postcards from the Edge is an annual Visual AIDS benefit and this, its 9th year, it is being hosted and held at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co in New York City.

Postcards From the Edge is a show and sale of original, postcard-sized artworks on paper by established and emerging artists. All artworks are $75 and sold on a first-come, first-served basis. The works are signed on the back and exhibited so that the artists' signatures cannot be seen. While buyers have a list of all participating artists, they don't know who created which piece until it is purchased and the signature is revealed. A collector might end up with a work by a famous artist or one they don't yet know. Either way, they walk away with a great piece of art while supporting Visual AIDS's important work. Last year Ida Applebroog acquired my art donation.

I have participated for several years and encourage all artists to join us and participate.

Hosted by Sikkema, Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd Street, NYC

Preview Party on World AIDS Day Friday, December 1, 2006
Benefit Sale December 2 –3, 2006.

For more information contact Visual AIDS at (212) 627-9855 or email them at info@visualaids.org.

See ya there!