Wanna tour the DC City Hall Art Collection?

At 12 p.m. on Wednesday November 28, the public is invited to the Wilson Building for a guided tour through the City Hall public collection of art on permanent display on floors 1-5 of the Wilson building. The tour will be lead by the talented Denee Barr, whose work is included in the collection.

This is a unique chance to meet with local artists featured in the collection and have a discussion on being an artist in the Nation's capital and to see a rich cross section of local artists (both established and emerging). This will be a bi-monthly occurrence.

The tour is free; however space is limited. Please RSVP to beth.baldwin@dc.gov with the number in your party. Meet at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance — the building is located at 1350 Pennsylvania Ave NW. ID is required to enter the building.

Opportunity for Virginia Artists

Deadline: February 1, 2008

The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (CAC) invites artists from across the Commonwealth to submit works in all media for their annual, juried New Waves exhibition. New Waves 2008 is an opportunity for CAC to support the work of Virginia artists by promoting recognition from the public and nationally recognized galleries and collectors, as well as providing an opportunity for these artists to sell their work.

New Waves 2008 will be on view April 11-June 15, 2008 in Virginia Beach. The exhibition will be seen during the Museum's nationally recognized and award-winning Boardwalk Art Show & Festival, which draws 350,000 tourists annually.

Prizes: 1st $3,500, 2nd $2,000, 3rd $1,000, and two Honorable mentions at $500 each.

Jurors: Heather Darcy Bhandari, curator and artist manager at Mixed Greens in NYC and Anne Surak, director of Project 4 in Washington, D.C.

Download application here.

Atlas

Below is a tiny drawing, about 5 inches tall by 2 inches wide or so. It is titled "Atlas Holding The Firmament," and it's now in a private collection in Norfolk.

"Atlas Holding The Firmament"
Charcoal on Paper by F. Lennox Campello
That small drawing gives birth to the below drawing, which is about 13 inches tall by 8 inches wide.

"Atlas Holding The Firmament" (Version II)
Charcoal on Paper by F. Lennox Campello
The most recent drawing not only gained in size, but also lost in sense of detail and became a more sparse, minimalist work.

Congrats

To one of my absolute favorite DC area artists, Molly Springfield, whose first New York solo show, "The world is full of objects," opens on Thursday, November 29 with an opening reception from 6 to 8 pm at Mireille Mosler, Ltd. The show goes through February 2, 2008.

Wanna go to a DC opening on Monday?

One of the capital area's most beautiful venues, The Organization of American States has an opening on Monday, Nov. 26th at 1PM of street photography by DC area photographer Tom Wolff.

New Baltimore Gallery

"Quintessence" is the opening exhibit at Paperwork Gallery and this inaugural exhibit opens a new space in Baltimore that will focus on all types of artwork on paper.

Dana Reifler and Cara Ober are behind this project and their goals are "to create new exhibition and sales opportunities for local artists in an informal setting; to exhibit a variety of types of artworks on paper; and to keep a curated flat file of available works on location."

Their first exhibit features small, unframed works on paper by 25 Baltimore artists, all priced at under $300. Among the artists exhibiting are Don Griffin, Rene Trevino, Amy Eva Raehse, Ruth Channing, Bill Schmidt, Jackie Milad, and Denise Tassin.

Opening reception is Friday, December 7 from 7-9 pm and the location is 107 East Preston Street. Gallery hours will be Fridays from 4-7PM and by appointment. For more information and images, please visit their blog here.

Congrats!

To the very talented DC area photographer Joe Mills, who is currently having a solo at Galerie Verdier in Paris.

Nude Art at UPenn

Live Nude Art — a benefit auction for Penn Design MFA class of 2008 - November 30, 2007, 6-9pm.

Auction Preview: November 28 and 29, 9am-5pm.

The University of Pennsylvania Graduate Fine Arts department class of 2008 is hosting a silent auction fundraiser to support their graduation thesis show. Attendees will be able to bid on artworks by internationally recognized artists, as well as University of Pennsylvania faculty, students, and alumni. The auction will be held on Friday, November 30, 2007 from 6-9pm in the Meyerson Galleries on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Works will be available for preview in the gallery November 28 and 29 from 9am-5pm. Admission is free and open to the public.

"The title has less to do with the subject matter of the art or the dress code of those in attendance, and more to do with the pleasurable and playful atmosphere of the auction," explained class of 2008 member Travis Heck. "These days, it is rare to find an auction that allows guests not only the opportunity to bid on works by critically noted artists, but also to drink, eat, and boogie down all in one fun and free evening," continued Heck.

Works by Terry Adkins, Jane Irish, Gabriel Martinez, Sarah McEneaney, Joshua Mosley, John Moore, Eileen Neff, Demetrius Oliver, Robert Pruitt, Zoe Strauss and others will be available. Live Nude Art will take place at the Meyerson Galleries in Meyerson Hall, located at 210 South 34th Street on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Clothed guests will be treated to the musical stylings of DJ PHSH with free refreshments served throughout the evening. For additional information, contact MFA Class of 2008 representatives: Gianna Delluomo: 215-900-9714, delluomo@design.upenn.edu or Simon Slater: 917-763-7034, simonslater@gmail.com

You won't see this on mainstream TV...

This TV clip is making the rounds worldwide in Spanish speaking nations.

In the clip, Spain's King Juan Carlos orders Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to "shut up" as the XVII Ibero-American summit drew to a close recently in Santiago, Chile.

In spite of having his mike turned off, the Venezuelan strongman was continually interrupting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who was defending former Spanish PM Aznar, after Chavez insulted Aznar by calling him a fascist and adding that "fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Rodriguez Zapatero, who is seeing speaking in the clip, reminded Chavez that Aznar was a democratically elected PM, but Chavez kept insulting and interrupting.

The king is then seen leaning forward and saying in Spanish: "Why don't you shut up?"

The king addressed Mr Chavez as "tu", which is the familiar version in Spanish of "you."

"Tu" is normally used only for younger family members, close friends, and children. In this diplomatic context it is regarded as insulting.

YouTube.com has dozens of rap and reggae versions of the verbal exchange, and the king's words have apparently become a popular ring-tone in Spain.

The latest in Hugo Chavez's political performance art.

The Twenty-Third Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards

Deadline: December 4, 2007, 5:30pm.

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities invites you to submit nominations for the Twenty-Third Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards. The Mayor’s Arts Awards are the most prestigious honors conferred by the city on individual artists, organizations, and patrons of the arts. Awards will be presented and hosted by the Mayor at a ceremony on March 17, 2008. For more information please contact Lisa Richards at 202.724.5613.

Job in the Arts

Deadline: December 1, 2007

Candidates are invited to apply for the position of Director of the School of Art, Herberger College of the Arts, at Arizona State University.

Arizona State University is the largest public university in the United States and ranks among the top 100 universities in the world. The Herberger College of the Arts houses the program in Arts, Media and Engineering; the School of Art, the University Art Museum, the Department of Dance, the School of Music and the School of Theatre and Film.

The search committee will accept nominations and applications until the position is closed. Screening of candidates will begin immediately. For best consideration, application materials should be provided by December 1, 2007.

Nominations and application materials, including a letter of application, curriculum vitae, and the names and contact information for four (4) references should be sent, in confidence and preferably electronically, to:

Chair
Herberger College of the Arts, School of Art
Director Search
Arizona State University
260 Franklin Street
Suite 620
Boston, MA 02110

Or email to 91582@j-robert-scott.com.

Graphic Content

WARNING: Graphic Content, Philly's Print Center Annual Auction will be held on Saturday, December 1, 2007 from 6:00-8:00pm with an Exclusive Champagne Preview at 5:00pm.

The Print Center, one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most prestigious nonprofit cultural institutions, has set the goal to raise $35,000 with this year’s auction to support its outstanding visual art exhibitions and educational programs. Board of Governors President, Hester Stinnett said, “This will surely be our biggest and best auction in years. It’s going to be a great party, and we want not only to attract members of the art community, but individuals interested in visiting us for the first time.” Uninhibited bidding is welcome!

The Print Center Auction includes work by a large number of renowned local and international artists, including Thomas Brummett, Alida Fish, Carl Fudge, Guerrilla Girls, David Graham, Ann Hamilton, Daniel Heyman, Henry Horenstein, Jane Irish, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Marti, D.W. Mellor, Bruce Pollock, Stuart Rome, Dieter Roth, Ron Rumford, Lawrence Schiller, Shelley Spector, Amanda Tinker and Richard Torchia.

Proceeds from The Print Center Auction fund group and solo exhibitions featuring local, regional and international artists and The Print Center’s continuing education program. Tickets are $25 by November 30, $30 on the day of the event December 1, and include delicious hors d’oeuvres and libations. The Exclusive Champagne Preview begins at 5:00pm and tickets are $100. Online bidding will begin November 19 at www.printcenter.org. For more information or tickets, please call Ashley Peel Pinkham, Assistant Director, at 215.735.6090 x2.

Californication: Thinking Out Loud

Today I heard on the radio that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were suing Showtime over the title of the Showtime TV series "Californication," which is the same title as the RHCP song.

And pretty much the same title as my 1978 pen and ink drawing "Kalifornication: The Rape of the Earth," done while I was a sophomore at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington.

The "K" instead of "C" was a cool thing at the time - for example, some artsy people used to spell "America" as "Amerikka," etc. The drawing was done as a reaction to the huge changes taking place in downtown Seattle at the time, as the city revived slowly from enormous urban decay.

As I recall, I got a crappy grade for the drawing from Bill Ritchie, who was my drawing professor at the time. Nonetheless, I had 25 reproductions prints made from the drawing and sold them all during the four years that I sold my artwork at the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, where the Kalifornication was taking place. I still have the original.

"Kalifornication - The Rape of the Earth" c. 1978 by F. Lennox Campello
India Ink on Paper. 9.5 x 9.5 inches
I don't have any plans to sue either Showtime or the RHCP over the use of the made up word, but it got me to think about the lawsuit-happy society that we have become... and about Abu Ghraib imagery.

Musicians can "sample" music from the vast set of all music ever written to create "new" works. And many artists "appropriate" images to incorporate them into their work, although I am not sure how the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 reacts to that issue. Visual copyright appears to be a different aspect of the whole "sampling" or "appropriation" issue.

Which got me to thinking about Botero and the Abu Ghraib paintings currently on exhibit at the Katzen Arts Center in DC.

As we all know by now, Botero based the works on the infamous photographs taken by the mutants in charge at the prison.

Their photographs.

And thus my question: does the copyright to those photographs and associated imagery belong to whoever took the photos?

Do they have the right to sue the countless newspapers and news agencies worldwide who published the photographs without permission or payment?

Do they have the right to sue Botero?

Or, since the photographs were part of a heinous crime, do they forfeit the right to the copyright?

Who "owns" these images and the copyright to them?

An issue for a legal opinion; email me.

PS - If the RCHP want to send me 10% of whatever they get from Showtime or if Showtime wants to give me a free membership for life, I wouldn't turn it down and I would watch Dexter all the time!

Update: A Boterotista clarifies that:

"the paintings are all from the point of view of the suffering of the victims. He imagines them based on photos and written accounts but there is a huge difference. The photos are more like souvenirs taken by the poor dumb guards who mugged for the camera and took the wrap for the CIA and George II."

Good points!

Congratulations

To DC area painter Elena Maza, who will be getting her first museum solo show at the Museum of Florida Art and Culture in Florida.

The show opens on Dec. 5, 2007 and closes January 17, 2008. Maza will be doing an artist talk at the museum on Jan. 17.

This museum, by the way, has a terrific collection of works by the Florida Highwaymen, one of the most educational art stories of how the only art critic of any permanence is time.

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: January 11, 2008

19th National Drawing & Print Competitive Exhibition at the College of Notre Dame. A minimum of $1500 available in purchase prize money. Drawings and prints (not photography) in any medium are eligible.

Juror: Jed Dodds, Artistic Director, Creative Alliance at The Patterson, Baltimore, MD. A non-refundable entry fee of $30 entitles the artist to submit up to three entries. For prospectus vist this website or send a SASE to:

National Drawing and Print Competitive Exhibition
Attn: Geoff Delanoy
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
4701 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210

Tim Tate: I told you so...

I've received some emails from readers asking how artists get on my "buy now" list.

Disclaimer: zip objectivity. For years and years now I have been advising collectors to buy Tim Tate. He has been, and remains one of the key "buy now" artists on my list for collectors.

This advice comes from a place that's a mixture of savvy art dealer (I was one of Tate's art dealers until mid 2006), art collector, prognosticator, and experience in digging out the details of what makes an artist "tick," coupled in most cases with that artist's work ethic and talent and luck. Hopefully those hard to quantify details are what balance my resulting objectivity vacuum in regards to Tate.

When Fraser Gallery gave Tate his first ever solo show in 2003, collectors could have picked up an original Tate piece for as little as $300 - many did, as that show sold out, and those prices are already a distant fact of the past.

I acquired the work below, titled "Positive Progression;" a piece discussed in this Washington Post review of that first solo show. At that seminal show I also broke another piece while packing it, and thus bought that one as well, and over the years have accumulated the world's largest collection of broken Tim Tates.


Over the years Tate worked very hard in his own peculiar marriage of biography, social commentary and need to drag glass away from the crafts world and towards the fine arts arena. "The Hirshhorn," a Hirshhorn curator once emailed me, years ago, "does not collect glass."

He worked at a pace that was amazing to behold, and brought new things into the fragile glass world that were amazing to witness: cement, metal, found objects, AIDS and HIV imagery, ceramics, terracotta, and most recently videos and a dizzying array of technology (motion detectors, voice recordings, etc.).

Tim Tate discusses his work on Push Pause TV show
Filmed at his most recent Fraser Gallery solo show
He also worked very hard to make sure that people noticed what he was doing; no need to wait for a curator or art critic to come to you; as every museum curator and art writer in the Greater DC area knows, Tate has no issue in picking up the phone and cajoling you into visiting his studio or his latest solo show. And the coverage has been spectacular, especially for the Greater DC area. Only the Washington Post's Jessica Dawson has resisted the uberartlandslide and managed to avoid reviewing all four Tate Washington, DC area solo shows.

He also worked very hard in public art projects that brought a new refreshing look to public art: He was the winner for the International Competition to design the New Orleans AIDS Monument. Also Tate public works are at Liberty Park at Liberty Center, Arlington, VA; The Adele, Silver Spring, MD; at the US Environmental Agency, Ariel Rios Building Courtyard, Washington DC; at the National Institute of Health, Hatfield Clinic, Bethesda MD; at the Upper Marlboro Courthouse, Prince Georges County MD; at the American Physical Society, Baltimore Science Center, Baltimore MD; at The Residences at Rosedae, Bethesda MD; Holy Cross Hospital, Silver Spring MD; The Carmen Group, Washington DC and many others in process.

Hard work.

And now the payoff is beginning to taking place. In the last year alone, in addition to being represented by the Fraser Gallery in the Greater DC area, Tate has now picked up additional representation by the Maurine Littleton Gallery (outside of Greater DC area and arguably one of the world's leading fine art glass galleries), the Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis, the Jane Sauer Gallery in Santa Fe, and he's also in the process of completing negotiations with three other major galleries in California and Idaho and Philadelphia. In 2008 his European debut will take place with a solo show at Gallery 24, in Berlin, Germany, and talks with a British gallery should start soon.

Acquisitions by several museums (including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick in the DC area) have also all contributed to the development, and growth of this talented and ground-breaking artist.

The art fairs have also played an important part. SOFA NY was the start a couple of years ago, followed more recently by SOFA Chicago and AAF NY and also artDC. He's now heading to Art Basel Miami Beach where his work will be at FLOW. At the last fair in Chicago, Tate sold 14 sculptures (including a museum acquisition), and I am told that his newest video pieces were the buzz of the fair. In "Call for Redemption" (to the right), a motion detector triggers a video while a small speaker wails the Moslem call to prayers recorded by Tate at Istanbul earlier this year (where he was with Michael Janis teaching glass techniques at a workshop in Turkey).

The results from all these aggregate points and events yield an artist with a trail of many years of hard work now beginning to reap what he has sown. And because art is a commodity, prices are an indicator as well, and Tate's now start around $2,500 $3,500 and up, and look for the "up" part to continue to rise.

Buy Tim Tate now.

Update: [Added after Art Basel Miami Beach] And it looks like both collectors and museums are all in synch: Tim Tate's new and groundbreaking self contained video glass sculptures sold out at SOFA Chicago and sold out at Art Basel Miami Beach!

Too Funny...

Read this.

About time...

For years and years, when artists donated a work of art to a museum, all that they could deduct from their taxes was the cost of the materials to make the artwork.

However, this past March, Congressmen Jim Ramstad (R-MN) and John Lewis (D-GA) have introduced the "Artists-Museum Partnership Act" – a bill to provide a fair-market value tax deduction for works of arts donated by artists to arts institutions. By the way, Congressman John Lewis is an avid art collector himself and a very visible presence at the occasional art gallery opening in both DC and Atlanta.

This bill, (known in Congressional lingo as H.R. 1524) has been gaining Congressional co-sponsors, now standing at 58, with a number of them serving on the powerful House Ways & Means Committee.

The Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) and Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), has 25 co-sponsors in the Senate.

Here's how you can help: The Congressional Arts Caucus recently circulated a “Dear Colleague” inviting members to join the bill as a co-sponsor. To see if your House or Senate member has co-sponsored this legislation, visit this website. If they have ignored HR 1524, then give them a call or email them a note scolding them for their apathy towards artists. You can email them or call them from here.

And if you don't do that, then you give up your right to bitch about everyone else's apathy towards the arts and the people who create it.

Slow Movin' Outlaw

Willie Nelson and Lacy J. Dalton (Lyrics by Waylon Jennings)

All your stations are being torn down a high flying trains no longer roar

The floors're all sagging with boards at a suffering from not being used anymore

Things're all changing the world's rearranging a time that will soon be no more

Where has a slow movin' once quickdraw outlaw got to go...

The whiskey that once settled the dust tasted so fine now taste so faint
And the mem'ries that once floated out come back stronger
And more clearly with each drink you take

And the women who warmed you once thought so pretty now look haggard and old

So where has a slow movin' once quickdraw outlaw got to go

This land where I travel once fashioned with beauty now stands with scars on her face

The wide open spaces are closin' in quickly from the ways of the whole human race

And it's not that I blame them for claming her bounty
I just wish they're takin' her slow

Cause where has a slow movin' once quick draw outlaw got to go

Tell me where has a slow movin' once quick draw outlaw got to go

Whitney Biennial 2008

The artists for the 2008 Whitney Biennial have been announced.

As usual, the list is essentially (again) the New York and California Biennial, with a sprikling of artists from a handful of other places.

Congrats to Philly's own Karen Kilimnik and the Charlottesville's Kevin Jerome Everson, who were some of the rare non New Yorkers in the show.

I just don't know how to fix this show so that it's just not another New York artists show...