Predicted Mini Controversy

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced a design competition, in partnership with the Joint Committee on the Library and the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, for a statue of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. Commissioned by the U.S. Congress, the sculpture will be permanently installed in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building. The Chrysler Foundation has provided $100,000 to support the administration of the competition.

Chances are that the selected winner will be a classic sculpture to complement the works already there. But, and this may be a bit of a stretch considering the site and the probable set of jurors, if a jury dares to select something a little different from a classical statue, then expect the usual angst and fight over contemporary art.

This event could be an instant career-maker a-la-Maya-Lin and the Viet Nam War Memorial, but only if the jury sidesteps the tradition of traditional statuary (yes, yes.. I know) and selects - as an example - a life size glass reliquary featuring objects that belonged to this amazing lady, plus a running video of her life couple with motion detectors to kick in a little audio when someone stops in front of it.

Details for the competition here, and if I was an art professor teaching some 3D class somewhere, I may just make this a school assignment and have my students each submit a proposal for this call.

Application Receipt Deadline: May 30, 2008
Notification of Semi-Finalists: August 1, 2008

PMA and regional artists

Here's something that you will never see in a Washington, DC museum: This spring the Philadelphia Museum of Art collaborates with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists -one of this region’s artist organizations - to present "Emerging to Established: Twenty-Five Years of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists."

Organized in conjunction with the CFEVA in celebration of this milestone anniversary, the exhibition includes works on paper by 25 artists, including current and former Fellows from CFEVA’s Career Development Program, as well as members of its Board of Artistic Advisors, who select the Fellows. It will be on view through July 6 in the Director’s Gallery.

While the CFEVA program encourages work in all mediums, this exhibition concentrates solely on those making works on paper: drawings, prints, photographs, and mixed-media.

The Center For Emerging Visual Artists, formerly Creative Artists Network, was founded in 1983 by Felicity R. “Bebe” Benoliel to encourage the career development of emerging visual artists. Since then, the organization has worked steadily harder to provide the support essential to talented individuals building careers in the visual arts.

Artists' Talks: Philadelphia

Bill McRight and Alex Lukas are both members of the artist collective Space 1026, McRight creates strange and fantastical creatures for magazines, sidewalks, walls and skateboards. He has worked with Cannonball Press, Saturday Skateboards, Swindle Magazine and Mishka NYC. Lukas, originally from Cambridge, MA, creates ‘zines under the name Cantab Publishing. His work has been seen in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles as well as in Swindle Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times Book Review.

This Saturday, April 19, from 2:00–3:00pm, they will be discussing their work at The Print Center in Philly. Free and open to the public; to register, contact Eli VandenBerg at evandenberg@printcenter.org or 215.735.6090 x1

Artomatic update

The District of Columbia's massive arts extravanganza known as Artomatic already has almost 700 visual artists and nearly 150 performing artists signed up to participate in the coming AOM, and in order to accommodate the large number of 2-D artists that still needed space and for those on the wait list they met with the building owners and got permission to expand.

Artomatic will now be on the 4th - 12th floors of the Capital Plaza I Building. The massive Opening party is Friday, May 9, Noon, the Meet the Artists Night is Friday, May 16th, the Artist Social I is Sunday, May 18th, and Artist Social II is Thursday, June 12th.

AOM Closes on Sunday, June 15, 2008.

Details here.

Huge Arts Friday in Philly tomorrow

This Friday is crazy in Philly... first is the opening weekend for the Heartworks series of multimedia events. On Friday there's an ecletic mix of sights and sounds that will greet you during the HeartWorks Opening Weekend events, taking place over two days at two different venues. Musical performances, video art, mixed media presentations and DJ sets by Gang Gang Dance, Douglas Armour, Cory Archangel, Professor Murder, Chad Brown, Megawords. All the details are here and online auction here.

Then also on Friday is the Center City District gallery night from 5-8:30PM, with the City Paper's after-party with free food and drink specials at Vango (116 S. 18th Street) - must RSVP as space is limited. Visit this website for details.

My picks? Drop by and see Dennis Beach at Schmidt Dean, also the Philadelphia Sketch Club's 145th Annual Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings and Amanda Means at Gallery 339.

Art Businesses Across the Nation

"As of January 2008, the Creative Industries are a formidable industry in the United States — 2.98 million people working for 612,095 arts-centric businesses (2.2 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively, of U.S. employment and businesses)."

From the top 50 most populated US cities, Seattle (first) and San Francisco (second) and Atlanta (third) are way ahead in the Arts businesses per 1,000 residents; Seattle has 6.98 and SF has 6.5 and Atlanta has 5.0 - all other cities are below 5.

By comparison, DC has 4.06, Philadelphia 1.71, NY 3.25, Minneapolis 4.84, Miami 3.35, LA 4.72. The US city with the least interest in doing business with an arts business? That would be Detroit at 1.19 art business per 1,000 residents.

Want to know how many creative industries are located in your community?

Want to know how your community compares to other regions in the country?

Then visit this website.

Trib does Tim Tate

I am not familiar with the Chicago Tribune's art critic Alan Artner, but apparently much like his counterparts in DC and Philly, he rarely does galleries. But last week he did in writing about Narratives at Marx-Saunders Gallery

The easy seductiveness of glass as an artistic medium has in 20 years given rise to a virtual industry in sculpture in which prettiness is all. But what is there beyond technique? One answer comes in the four-artist exhibition at the Marx-Saunders Gallery: Narratives.

Each of the artists — Carmen Lozar, Catharine Newell, Minako Shirakura, Tim Tate — is to some degree a storyteller. So glass is less important in and of itself than in how it conveys the artists' tales, either alone or in combination with other materials. This shifts the works' emphasis from physical appeal to presumably something more inward.

The pieces incorporating video by Shirakura and Tate accomplish this best, still without convincing us that glass was essential to the enterprise. Could their glass components have expressed as much if they had been executed in another medium? Yes. And in Newell's pieces the new material could have been as simple as paper, as chief interest is in her representational drawing. Even so, only Lozar's cartoonlike tableaux disappoint with an equal coyness in execution and idea. If not there yet, Shirakura and Tate are clearly onto something to deepen the discourse. Here narrative is interesting enough to be periodically revisited.

Read the entire column of reviews here.

Artists' Talk: DC

Join co-curators Andrea Pollan and Jayme McLellan for a conversation with the artists featured in Civilian Art Projectss current exhibition, craigslist, on display through April 26. Artists John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz and Jason Zimmerman will discuss and share their ideas and artistic process with the audience. This April 18, 2008, 7PM at Civilian Art Projects.

RSVP to info@civilianartprojects.com or 202-347-0022. Refreshments provided.

Artists' Websites: Katie Miller

Child Standing on a Dresser. Oil on canvas, 46x70" c.2007 by Katie Miller
I recently juried an art exhibition for VSA Arts in Washington, DC - the show will be at the Kennedy Center... more later on that - and during the jurying process came across the fantastic paintings of Katie Miller. I had never heard of her, but Katie Miller is a young artist in the Greater Washington, DC area and she received her B.F.A from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007.

Visit her website here.

Opportunity for illustrators

The Chester River Press is looking for an experienced artist to illustrate a fine letterpress limited edition publication of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Illustrations, fullpage in theme of black figure Greek vase paintings, should be accurate quality reproductions of the various Homeric forms. Approx. 50 full page illustrations are anticipated. Qualifications: quality artist,strong working knowledge of Iliad, Odyssey, Greek Homeric period painting and drawing. Familiarity with Greek language a definite plus. Project dates: June to Sept. 2008. Not an 'in-residence'position. All welcome. If poss. include resume, work sample, and comp. requirements.

Contact:

Gerard Cataldo
Chester River Pres
Chestertown Old Book Co.
113 South Cross St.
Chestertown MD 21620

Mangravite on Prestegord

Gregory Prestegord at F.A.N. Gallery in Philly is reviewed by Andrew Mangravite:

Gregory Prestegord’s city scenes get right down to business. He doesn’t do the sort of work that you have to stare at and stare at, trying to decipher its message.

Read the whole review here.

Gopnik on Dumbachers

The WashPost's Chief Art Critic Blake Gopnik pops in with a terrific profile of the Dumbacher brothers, whose work first made a debut in 1999 at Artomatic and by 2001 had evolved dramatically was a hit at the Corcoran...

Looking at the brothers, their oneness comes as no surprise. They're only fraternal twins, but you'd swear they were identical. They have precisely the same athletic, 6-foot-something build. They also have the same shoulder-length brown hair. And the same attractive face, just a bit too quirky to be model-handsome.

There are differences. John's a touch slighter, sunnier, more sociable; Joe's a bit more solid and remote. Joe's sunglasses, always dangling from his neck, hang over clothes that are California casual. John's ever-present sunglasses tend to pair with sporty-chic outfits.

Read this really good profile by Gopnik here.

Museums and buying art

...should museum staff be free to advise board members (or other collectors) on what they should be acquiring themselves, and should those board members who are also active collectors be free to acquire works informed, in effect, by the insider knowledge that they are making the same bets or judgments as the museum on whose board they serve?

Read the article by Adrian Ellis for the Art Newspaper here.

Radcliffe Institute Fellowships

Deadline: October 1, 2008

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University awards approximately 50 fully funded fellowships each year. Radcliffe Institute fellowships are designed to support scholars, scientists, artists and writers of exceptional promise and demonstrated accomplishment, who wish to pursue work in academic and professional fields and in the creative arts.

Applicants must have received their doctorate or appropriate terminal degree by December 2006 in the area of the proposed project. Radcliffe welcomes proposals from small groups of scholars who have research interests orprojects in common.

Please check this website for more information. The stipend amount is $70,000. Fellows receive office space and access to libraries and other resources of Harvard University. During the fellowship year, which extends from early September 2008 through June 30, 2009, residence in the Boston area is required as is participation in the Institute community.

Fellows are expected to present their work-in-progress and to attend other fellows¹ events. Applications must be postmarked by October 1, 2008. For more information, visit their Web site at www.radcliffe.edu.

Trash People

Earth Day is a week away... and I've been hearing good things about a new art installation that opened last week at the National Geographic Museum: "Trash People by HA Schult."

Starting in 1996, the German artist HA Schult created 1000 life-size figures made entirely of trash with the goal of spreading the word about human consumption and waste. His army of figures have stood at the Pyramids at Giza, in the Red Square in Moscow and on the Great Wall of China.

Though they didn't have room for all 1000, the NGM is displaying 50 of them in their courtyard, and they've stirred quite a reaction from their visitors, several of which have emailed me. With Earth Day a week away, it may be a great time to visit this show.

Supplementing the 50 “trash people” will be a selection of still photographs from the new National Geographic Channel film “Human Footprint," which I have seen and it is terrific.

Go see this show.

Hyattsville Arts Festival

Where: Hyattsville, MD - on Longfellow Street and Route 1 (or take the metro to Hyattsville)

When: Saturday, April 19th from 12-5pm


For more info visit this website.

Colloquium on African American Art

The Howard University Department of Art is going to host the 19th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art to be held on April 17 – 19, 2008 on the campus of Howard University.

The James A. Porter Colloquium is the leading forum for scholars, artists, curators, and others in the field of African American Art and Visual Culture. The theme of this year’s Colloquium is “From FESTAC to DOCUMENTA: Crossing Boundaries, Constructing Identities, Expanding Discourse in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora.”

It honors the pioneering achievements of Richard Long, Professor Emeritus, Emory University and Leslie King-Hammond, Graduate Dean, Maryland Institute College of Art. For registration & more information, visit www.portercolloquium.org.

NYC Art Program Slide Registry

The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program Slide Registry is accepting slides from professional artists who wish to be considered for Percent for Art Commissions. No residency requirements.

For more information, contact:

Percent for Art
Department of Cultural Affairs
31 Chambers St., 2nd Fl.
New York, NY 10007

Phone: (212) 513-9300 or check website here.

Slides? It is 2008 NYC... how about a digital image registry?

Open House at the Torpedo Factory

On Friday the 25th of April is the annual Spring Open House at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia and there's also a book signing in Margaret Huddy's studio of a new art book about her of Sycamore Series.

The book includes 29 full color images of the paintings she's done of the same tree in the past 22 years. It incudes some words from me about this amazing series.

The open house party is on Friday, April 25 from 6-9PM.

Common Waters at Mayer Fine Art

Below is a quick video showing the exhibition "Common Waters: An Ocean Apart" at Norfolk's new Mayer Fine Art.

Works by Sandra Ramos, Aimee Garcia Marrero, Cirenaica Moreira and Marta Maria Perez Bravo.