Questioning Jasper Johns

Read Robert Zaller's essay on Jasper Johns' place in American art history here.

WGS opens in Charlottesville

Erwin Timmers, Michael Janis and Tim Tate, the driving forces behind the Washington Glass School make their debut in Charlottesville this coming Friday, April 4, 2008 at C'ville's leading gallery, Migrations. The opening reception is from 5:30pm - 8pm.

"Synchrony" Opens at Delaplaine Center‏

"Synchrony," a sculptural installation by Workingman Collective, will be on exhibition from April 5-27 at The Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center in downtown Frederick, MD.

This motion-driven installation will be created by regionally-known artists, Tom Ashcraft, Janis Goodman, and Peter Winant, who make up the Collective. Goodman and Winant appear on the WETA program "Around Town."

Cuban Art: Four Key Women Artists


This is the poster for the grand opening of a new fine arts gallery in Norfolk, Virginia, Mayer Fine Art, which opens on April 12, 2008 with an exhibition curated by yours truly.

For Mayer Fine Art I selected the work of four of the leading contemporary Cuban artists in the world: Sandra Ramos, Aimee Garcia Marrero, Cirenaica Moreira (all of whom live and work in Havana) and Marta Maria Perez Bravo, who currently resides in Mexico, where she teaches.

"Maleficio" by Marta Maria Perez Bravo
Much like Migrations did for Charlottesville, I think that Mayer Fine Art will go a long way to put the Tidewater area on the fine arts map from an independent commercial fine arts gallery perspective.


"La Libertad es una palabra enorme" [Freedom is a huge word] by Cirenaica Moreira
More on the exhibition and the trails and tribulations and expenses of getting contemporary Cuban artwork -- especially the kind not vetted nor approved by the Cuban dictatorship -- on American soil later...

Daphne

"Daphne," charcoal on paper, c.2008 by F. Lennox Campello, 7x10 inches
Read the myth of Daphne here.

Exhale

If the Armory Show was supposed to be a test of how the art market was faring amid tumultuous finan­cial markets, initial results revealed that the fair more than passed—and exceeded the expectations of many of the more jittery dealers.

Now that many have made sales, dealers readily admit that they arrived on Pier 94 with butterflies in their stomachs. “If I had applied two weeks ago instead of a year ago, I wouldn’t have come,” said Andreas Brändström of Brändström & Stene (118) in Stockholm. “The collapse of Bear Stearns is a huge issue in Europe,” he said. But by the second day, he said: “My sales are even better than last year’s.”

Read the whole article from the Art Newspaper here.

Conflict Opens at GRACE



Six artists using conflict as a catalyst open at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, VA this Friday: James W. Bailey, Aylene Fallah, Judith Forst, Linda Hesh, Carolina Mayorga and Matt Ravenstahl.

Opening Reception: Friday April 4, 6 -8 pmand Artists' Perspective Thursday April, 10 7pm. Exhibition: April 4 - May 3, 2008.

Artists' Interviews: Cara Ober

DCist's Amy Cavanaugh has an excellent interview with Baltimore artist Cara Ober. Read the interview here.

Curiously though, and unusual for DCist, comments are not enabled for this interview?

Update: DCist tells me that "Comments are never enabled on our interviews, out of respect for the person who granted us their time." Makes sense to me!

Henderson & Taylor Open in Alexandria

Sofia Silva opens in Baltimore

Kirkland on Kehinde Wiley

JT on Kehinde Wiley at the SAAM/Portrait Gallery's Hip Hop show. Read it here.

Arts on a Budget

The Washington Post's Dan Zak pops in with a really interesting article on collecting artwork on a budget; read it here.

My best deal ever? I bought about four small original Ben Tolman paintings a few years ago at DCAC's annual "Wall Mountables" show for about $20 a piece.

Money makes the art world go 'round?

"You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis?

At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn't catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard - but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself."

Has big money replaced the art critic as the true authority in the art world?

Read this very interesting article by The Guardian's Adrian Searle here... and then read this clever piece by blogger Alex Needham here.

Artomatic Registration Now Open

Registration for AOM visual and performing artists is now open. Click here to register and reserve your space.

Wanna hang around with some sculptors in DC?

The Washington Sculptors Group invites you to join them to meet and chat with fellow sculptors and sculpture lovers on the last Monday of every month at 6:00 PM (March 31, April 28th, May 26th, June 30th etc.).

Meetings take place at Gordon Biersch Restaurant in DC.

Artists Interviews: Doris Colbert Kennedy

Boston

Next week I am going to Boston for a studio visit and also to visit an arts-related business looking for some "new" online presence(s) advice and work.

Any Bostonians out there with a "must see" exhibition - drop me a line...

Artists' Websites: Rosemary Feit Covey

Dark Summer, c.1990, 15 x 13 by Rosemary Feit Covey
If there's a better wood engraver on the planet, I do not know who he/she is... as far as I am concerned, no one is better than this modern master, who continues to surprise me, gross me out, enlighten me, and always impress me with both her enviable technical skills and her super-sharp ability to cut deeply into my psyche.

Visit her website here and check out her new work here.

Words that count, or counting... period?

Earlier this week, GrammarPolice scribe and Washington City Paper gallery critic and good friend Kriston Capps and Washington City Paper museum art critic (and Arlington Arts Center curator) and also good friend Jeffry Cudlin -- joined in a little by the dynamic Philippa Hughes) -- hashed out the significance of Capp's words and counting skills in Capps' CP piece on "Collectors Select" at the Arlington Arts Center.

Specifically, the online chatterfuss is about the parts of Capps' review that deal with Philippa Hughes and Tim Conlon; Capps wrote:

[Daniel] Lavinas shows [the work of León Ferrari] without pretension: His biggest intervention is to have the gallery painted a deep shade of cherry-lambic red to match the heliographs. Philippa Hughes went further. The least experienced collector in the group, Hughes invited some graffiti artists—Tim Conlon, Bryan Conner, RAMS, and the Soviet—to tag her room. The intervention is the work here. But Hughes is bursting through a door that's been open for nearly three decades. There's still room for innovation in graffiti, but graffiti in a room isn't innovative alone (even if it shares the room with floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, as it does here). Context notwithstanding, the work by Conlon (which takes up most of the room) is dull in any formal sense. As tags, they're not particularly intricate or witty; as abstraction, they don't offer much.

Regardless of how you feel about Capps' words, opinions, advice, and counting skills in the review, this discussion is interesting to me because (a) it shows the blogsphere ability to challenge a writer's words and if needed correct his errors and (b) because it puts my good friend Jeffry Cudlin on the receiving and thus defensive end of a review which may not be in synch with what he perceives to be the real story or guts of an exhibition.

It tears me a little in both directions, because I am of the opinion that any review is a good review, and considering the dearth of art criticism in the Greater Washington DC area, Cudlin does give his colleague props for making his way to Arlington (Capps doesn't have an automobile, and it's a nice walk from the Metro stop to the Arlington Arts Center).

In the past, whenever someone has reviewed either my own work or a show that I have curated, even if there have been glaring mistakes, I have nearly always resorted to biting my lip and thanking the critic for the review.

On the other hand, when in reviewing someone else's show not-my-own, and a critic makes a mistake, or just gets something about the artist or exhibition plainly wrong, as a third party I'm glad to call them out on it.

But most gallerists, and a large percentage of artists and curators, have learned the hard way to just bite their lip, sigh and maybe bring up the error or the real "mark" - if the missed mark or error is egregious enough - in private to the writer.

I'm sure that Cudlin, in his capacity as a critic has received his fair share of complaints about his own writing - I myself have both chided and praised his words in the past -- but now it is interesting to see him react when he feels the criticism has missed the mark when the words are aimed in his own direction.

Was the substance of the complaint big enough to merit the fuss? I'm not sure, but it's a brave and interesting teen-aged world out there, where both valid and sock puppet commenting all add their own weird dialogue to the discourse and leave a new digital footprint for art exhibitions, artists, critics and opinions about their opinions.

A new model for the new Internet model?

For the first five years, the Jen Bekman Gallery, near the Bowery, lost money — and Bekman didn't have much to lose. She drained her 401(k), and racked up debt on her credit cards. Sometimes she slept in her mom's living room so she could sublet her apartment. Last year, when she couldn't pay the electric bill, the gallery's lights were cut off.

But Bekman stubbornly clung her basic idea: "There are a lot of people out there who want to sell their art, and a lot of people who'd like to buy it," Her job was to introduce the emerging artists to the emerging collectors.

An Internet person, she did Internet things. She blogged (personism.com). She started an open-to-all-comers on-line competition called "Hey, Hot Shot!" (heyhotshot.com) — one that gave the winner a shot at a gallery show, in Bekman's bona-fide New York gallery. (This is not the kind of thing that regular galleries do.)

Last year, she got the idea for 20x200. IM-ing each other, a few of her Internet friends put together a clean, cool Web site for what little Bekman could afford. It went live in September — and soon after, broke even. Sometimes 20x200 editions sell out within a week, or even days.

About half the purchases, Bekman says proudly, are from repeat customers some of whom grow brave enough to spend more than $20. And the site's success has spilled over, attracting new collectors to Bekman's traditional gallery.

Bekman, who once couldn't get an Internet job, has become a star in the digital universe. At South By Southwest this month, her old Internet friends bestowed on her the coolest adjective in their lexicon: "Disruptive." Her Web site, they said, is changing the way the art world works.

And that's impressed the art world, where once she was an outsider. For Christmas, a Museum of Modern Art curator bought 20x200 Christmas presents for his staff. American Photo Magazine named her its Innovator of the Year. And this month, she's mentioned in both Wired and Redbook — surely the first time anyone has appeared simultaneously in those magazines.

Read more about Jen Bekman and her radical website 20x200 in this terrific article by Lisa Gray.