New Virginia Gallery

Ayr Hill Gallery will hold its Grand Opening Celebration on Friday, June 27, 2008, 5 PM to 8 PM, at 141 Church Street, NW, in Vienna, Virginia. Featured artists Armand Cabrera and Kathryn Ellis will attend the reception.

Canapés, confections, and conviviality will be served. To be included on the guest list, please send your name and mailing address to info@ayrhillgallery.com or call 703-938-3880; additional guests will be accommodated as space permits. Free and open to the public.

On the air next week

Next week I'll be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show discussing the Greater Washington area visual arts and artists and art stories as I usually do several times a year.

Tune in to WAMU 88.5 FM around noon; as soon as I have a final date (looks like Thursday, 26 June), I'll confirm it.

If you have any questions or art issues, you can call Kojo during the show at (800) 433-8850 or you can email him questions to kojo@wamu.org.

ICA drops admission cost

Beginning July 1, 2008, entry to Philly's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) will be free to the public for the first time in its history. This unprecedented initiative was made possible by a generous gift from Glenn R. Fuhrman, who is an ICA Overseer and a contemporary art collector.

Museum Residency

Deadline: Postmarked by Monday, July 14, 2008

Applications are being accepted for three artist-in-residence positions at the Newark Museum Arts Workshop for the month of January 2009. The residency offers three artists the opportunity to use the Museum’s professional facilities for creating new work. A stipend will be paid to selected artists. This year because the Newark Museum is celebrating the 100th year of its founding, artists are being asked to submit proposals that relate to this milestone event.

How to Apply: First, there is no application form to fill out, references to seek or fees to pay. Please send 10 JPEG images at 300 dpi on a CD, or a video/film clip of five minutes or less of your current work along with resume, artist statement, residency proposal and SASE. Do please include a hardcopy list of your images and information about them and how or in what manner they should be viewed.

Stipend: Each artist receives a stipend of $1200.00. This includes artist acting as juror to select the next round of Newark Museum Resident Artists for 2010. In addition, in-kind material and technical support is supplied to each artist depending on project needs. Send application material to:

Stephen McKenzie
Manager
The Newark Museum
Arts Workshop for Adults
49 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102-3176

Email address: smckenzie@newarkmuseum.org

Call for 3D artists

Alexandria's Gallery West has a call for 3D artwork. Jurying will be from the artwork itself— no slides or CDs. Jury selection is Monday, July 7, 2008, between 11am – 6pm. The opening reception for selected works will be on Saturday, July 12, 5 – 8pm.

Download the entry form from their website.

Affordable Art Fair: Final Report

Read it here.

Wanna go to a Germantown, MD opening?

Richard Vosseller's "Failure Is An Option" has an opening reception on June 21, 5:30 - 7:30 at the Black Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Maryland.

Emerging Artists

Having just returned from NYC, one of the side effects of the art fair phenomenon is the fact that through them many regional emerging artists are exposed to savvy art audiences in places like New York. Case in point is Norfolk's Sheila Giolitti, and last weekend was her first exposure to New York's art audiences and she sold about a dozen oil paintings!

Who are your notable emerging artist(s) in your town and area?

Go here, sign in (it's free) and give us a link to their website. Then maybe later we'll do a poll and see who emerges as the top 2-3 emerging artists around the nation to keep an eye on...

Richard Edson

Annie Adjchavanich returns to the DC area to present Richard Edson photographs from the series "Beyond the Valley of the Micro Bops."

Preview the show here.

The opening is Thursday, June 19, 8 - 11pm and the exhibition goes through June 29, 2008.

Jackie's Backroom Gallery
8081 Georgia Avenue
Silver Spring, MD

Artomatic to close tomorrow

Washington, DC's Artomatic 2008 comes to a close Sunday, June 15 at 10 pm. If you've already been, go again. There's so much to see and do. I've made the rounds half a few times and each time I discover new art, great music and performances. Make sure you drop a few bucks in the Artomatic donation boxes to help with expenses.

Also, there's a Glass Art Tour of Artomatic, on Sunday, June 15 at 2pm. By popular demand, one more tour on the last day of Artomatic! Please meet in the lobby of Artomatic between 1:45pm-2pm for a guided glass tour of Artomatic. Join Washington Glass School artists Cheryl Derricotte, Sean Hennessey and others as they lead you directly to all the great glass on exhibit this year. You will then ride up together to the 11th floor to begin and walk down to the 4th floor so comfortable shoes are suggested. The tour will depart the lobby at 2pm and concludes by 3:30pm.

Derivative Composition

A while back I was honored to be one of three jurors for VSA's "Derivative Composition" juried exhibition at the Kennedy Center.

The Derivative Composition exhibition at the Kennedy Center will be installed this coming Monday. I’m told that it is one of the most ambitious and interesting exhibitions that VSA has produced to date.

The opening is scheduled for Thursday, June 26, beginning at 5 pm. Several of the artists (which come from all over the country) will be attending. In addition, they will host two exclusive performances:

Mark Wittig, from Oklahoma, will present the performance component of his installation, To Have Straights. The performance will emphasize the potential of the physical act as a learning tool.

The Skin, by artist Emily Eifler, will awaken and walk among guests. The textural, full body costume serves to represent a visual boundary that recalls a different, invisible boundary: disability

Steinhauer on the Affordable Art Fair

Artinfo.com's Jill Steinhauer reports on the Affordable Art Fair here.

The Affordable Art Fair New York is one of the least pretentious places to see high-quality international contemporary art in the city. The annual fair, now in its seventh edition, runs June 12–15 at the Altman Building and adjoining Metropolitan Pavilion, and with general admission priced at only $17, it’s cheaper than a trip to MoMA or the Guggenheim.

An affordable art fair may sound amateurish to some, and the art on view here does range in quality, but the gallerists I spoke with yesterday had almost entirely positive things to say about the event, whose self-proclaimed mission is “to serve every kind of art enthusiast.” “This fair is much better than the Affordable Art Fairs in Australia,” said first-timer Peter Gant of Carlton, Australia–based Peter Gant Fine Art.

Read the whole article here. From the reports that I gathered yesterday, almost all galleries were selling well.

DC News

Tony Gittens, the executive director of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, announced a couple of days ago that he is leaving that post after 11 years. Read the WaPo report here.

Memo to Mayor Fenty: Appoint George Koch to the job.

Silly-Matic

Artomatic's odd developments with respect to "the Collector" are chronicled here by the WaPo's Reliable Source.

Affordable Art Fair New York report

The press preview and collectors's night (on Wednesday night) was packed to the gills and the AAFNYC staff told me that it was the largest turnout they've ever had for an opening.

Loads of press people, including a lot of NYC art bloggers, and a significant number of young people drinking the free booze. In our booth, Sheila Giolitti was selling loads of her paintings on this preview night.

Today was the "real" first day of the fair, and when we got there at noon, there was a line of people waiting to get in. I made some quick sales almost immediately of Cirenaica Moreira photos, and Tim Tate's video reliquiaries (as they did the preview night) continued to attract people like moths to a light. At $8,000, they're at the top price scale for this level of art fairs.

Sheila Giolitti continued to sell well, and the anecdotal reports that I received from the other DC, MD and VA galleries in the fair sounded like they were all doing well.

The press was back today to our booth to discuss Cuban art and the state of art fairs; seems like trying to gather if the fair market at this "battle front" level is also putting on the brakes.

More tomorrow...

Fairing

At the Fair in NYC all week with my new Alida Anderson Art Projects venture... more later.

Videos, Movies, Animation & Art at the Whino

National Harbor's Art Whino & Art Outlet will partner up again for the FLIK Movie Festival & Interactive Exhibit.

For FLIK 2008, Art Outlet has partnered with the Art Whino Gallery to expand upon last year’s success by expanding the call out to all mediums of animation and experimental film. There will be more screenings, a larger venue, a coinciding interactive exhibit, and a licensing of the program to allow for screenings both locally and internationally – thus expanding exposure for the selected filmmakers.

Friday, June 21 from 6 – 8pm is the opening reception from 8pm – 12am. On Saturday the sked is as follows:

9am – 3pm Workshops
3pm – 6pm Interactive Exhibit open to the public
6pm – 8pm Reception
8pm – 12am Screening / Performance

On Sunday: 12pm – 6pm Exhibit open to public

She's So Articulate

At the Arlington Arts Center: Black Women Artists Reclaim the Narrative!

Faith Ringgold, Who's Bad?, acrylic on canvas with pieced fabric border, 79.5" X 92.5", 1988
Work by Maya Freelon Asante, Renee Cox, Stephanie Dinkins, Djakarta, Nekisha Durrett, Torkwase Dyson, Faith Ringgold, Erika Ranee, Nadine Robinson, Renee Stout, Lauren Woods at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA.

Opening reception: Friday, June 13, 6:00 to 9:00 pm - the exhibition goes through July 19, 2008.

FotoWeekDC

The week of November 15-22, 2008 will mark the launch of FotoWeek DC, the first annual gathering of a diverse and wide-ranging photography community in the nation’s capital, including photographers, museums, universities and all those involved in the profession across the metro D.C. area, including Virginia and Maryland. Unique among American cities, Washington, D.C. is a nexus of artistic, business, political and public sector energy, in which photography plays an integral role. FotoWeek DC seeks to bring together all photographers and imaging professionals from every discipline to join with the public in celebration of the medium.

Details here. They were really keeping that event a "secret"! This is first heard for me and they've already got a whole series of events planned and an ass-kicking website and seems like almost every key art gallery in the Greater DC and DMV region is in the mix.

When Museum Guards Go Bad

A former Carnegie Museum of Art guard charged with vandalizing a $1.2 million painting simply "snapped" due to life's normal pressures, including impending fatherhood, his defense attorney said.

Read the story here.