Antognoli at R. Coury Fine Art Gallery
Erin Antognoli's latest solo exhibit of her Holga artwork is now hung and ready to be seen by the public at R. Coury Fine Art Gallery in Savage, Maryland. There are 29 of her works hanging in all, some of them never before exhibited.
There's an opening reception from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM ON Friday, October 31st. The artist will be present for questions and conversation! R. Coury Fine Art Gallery is located in Historic Savage Mill in the Spinning Building suite 217A, 8600 Foundry St., Savage, MD 20763. The gallery is open by appointment, and is owned and operated by artist Jill Hackney.
Feel free to bring the kids as there will be trick-or-treating throughout the mill or if you're in the mood, there is a Halloween costume party at the Ramshead (also in Savage Mill)_ from 5:00 PM to Midnight. The exhibit will run from October 13 to November 14, 2008.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Power 100
The November issue of ArtReview magazine, with the 2008 Power 100 list is out. Read a full report on the list here.
01. Science (Damien Hirst)
02. Larry Gagosian
03. Kathy Halbreich
04. Sir Nicholas Serota
05. Iwan Wirth
06. Jay Jopling
07. David Zwirner
08. François Pinault
09. Jasper Johns
10. Eli Broad
11. Jeff Koons
12. Steven A. Cohen
13. Daniel Birnbaum
14. Charles Saatchi
15. Brett Gorvy & Amy Cappellazzo
16. Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal
17. Marian Goodman
18. Gerhard Richter
19. Richard Prince
20. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin
21. Michael Govan
22. Marc Glimcher
23. Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler
24. Alfred Pacquement
25. Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp
26. Barbara Gladstone
27. Matthew Marks
28. Takashi Murakami
29. Agnes Gund
30. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan
31. Dakis Joannou
32. Bernard Arnault
33. Richard Serra
34. Sadie Coles
35. Julia Peyton-Jones & Hans Ulrich Obrist
36. Donna De Salvo
37. Simon de Pury
38. Don & Mera Rubell
39. Ann Philbin
40. Paul Schimmel
41. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
42. Michael Ringier
43. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
44. Chris Kennedy
45. Bruce Nauman
46. Cy Twombly
47. Ai Weiwei
48. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
49. Andreas Gursky
50. Olafur Eliasson
51. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
52. Jeff Wall
53. Peter Doig
54. Roman Abramovich & Daria Zhukova
55. Bruno Brunnet, Nicole Hackert, Philipp Haverkampf
56. Marlene Dumas
57. Gavin Brown
58. Victoria Miro
59. Mitchell Rales
60. Yvon Lambert
61. Mike Kelley
62. Paul McCarthy
63. Banksy
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. William Acquavella
66. Lucian Freud
67. Victor Pinchuk
68. Maurizio Cattelan
69. Cai Guo Qiang
70. Maureen Paley
71. Roberta Smith
72. Peter Schjeldahl
73. Thelma Golden
74. Ralph Rugoff
75. Robert Gober
76. Iwona Blazwick
77. Richard Armstrong
78. Massimiliano Gioni
79. Jerry Saltz
80. Reena Spaulings/Bernadette Corporation
81. Louise Bourgeois
82. Cindy Sherman
83. Okwui Enwezor
84. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn
85. Shaun Caley Regen
86. Liam Gillick
87. Miuccia Prada
88. John Baldessari
89. Francesca von Habsburg
90. Christian Boros
91. Nicholas Logsdail
92. Subodh Gupta
93. The Long March Project
94. Paula Cooper
95. Peter Nagy
96. Casey Reas
97. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
98. Guy & Myriam Ullens
99. Laurent Le Bon
100. Thomas Kinkade
Is number 100 a joke?
James Castle at the PMA
The nature of "outsider" art may be debatable, but self-taught artist James Castle was an outsider of sorts from the day he was born.Read the review by Joann Loviglio here.
Castle, subject of a new exhibit organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was born profoundly deaf and never learned to read, write, sign or speak. But he spoke volumes through art, which he created ceaselessly from early childhood until his death in 1977 at age 77.
"James Castle: A Retrospective," which opened this week and remains on display through Jan. 4, brings together more than 300 evocative drawings, handmade books, collages and sculptural pieces from 60 public and private collections. The first comprehensive museum exhibition of Castle, it will travel to Chicago and San Francisco in 2009.
Monday, October 27, 2008
That one coming to Widener
"That one" is coming to Widener University (where my wife teaches) tomorrow morning.
Update: Photos from the rally here.
Aqui Estamos
As a result of the decades-long Cuban embargo, the work of contemporary Cuban artists has been noticed for many years by many important museums and curators around the world, but often remains a mystery to American collectors and art enthusiasts. And those who write about the commoditization of art, such as the Wall Street Journal, have been telling art collectors who buy art in the hope those prices will rise, to buy contemporary Cuban art.
The WSJ wrote:
"With art from Asia and Russia in demand, some in the art world are betting on Cuba to be the next hot corner of the market. Prices for Cuban art are climbing at galleries and auction houses, and major museums are adding to their Cuban collections. In May, Sotheby's broke the auction record for a Cuban work when it sold Mario Carreño's modernist painting "Danza Afro-Cubana" for $2.6 million, triple its high estimate.This suggestion and idea is simple, and has been proven recently by the super hot rise of Chinese artists: when a closed society is opened up a little, its top artists see a substantial rise in exposure and thus in demand, and of course, in prices!
Now, with a new Cuban president in power and some hope emerging for looser travel and trade restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba, American collectors and art investors are moving quickly to tap into the market. Some are getting into Cuba by setting up humanitarian missions and scouting art while they're there. Others are ordering works from Cuba based on email images and having them shipped.
The collectors are taking advantage of a little-known exception to the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba: It is legal for Americans to buy Cuban art."
And it makes sense (if you buy art as an investment strategy rather than love of art).
Generally speaking, when an artist is in certain major collections around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Tate in London, and other such giants of the museum world, it attracts a certain level of collector interest, and it is almost always associated with a certain price range.
And there are many contemporary Cuban artists whose work has been in those and many other important museums around the world for a very long time, and whose work continues to attract curatorial, critical and savvy collector interest, but because of their lack of exposure to the American market in general (often created by their closed societies), their price range is not in par with their colleagues from other nations in the same level.
Several years ago, almost by accident, I became involved in the curatorial process of contemporary Cuban art, in an effort to help with fundraising efforts by the Havana Hebrew Community Center. Since then I have become an experienced curator in this genre and have acquired a wealth of good knowledge about the artists from that unfortunate and imprisoned island.
Aquí Estamos (Here We Are) is my latest curatorial project and brings to H&F Fine Arts and the Greater Washington, DC region recent work by several important Cuban artists working out of Havana as well as Cuban artists from the Cuban Diaspora.
How can this be done?
It’s a brutal, labor intensive touch and go process, as although art and books are the only two items exempt from the Cuban embargo, the heavy hand of the Communist dictatorship that runs everything on that unfortunate nation touches all aspects of life, including the creation and destination of art. Bypassing and escaping the government is not easy, but it can be accomplished if the artist is willing to risk it.
In the works that you’ll see at H&F Fine Arts we find narratives and imagery that represent many of these artists’ historical dissidence to the stark issues of contemporary Cuban life. The works are images that offer a historical and visual sentence in the history of an island nation behind bars with a powerful world presence in the arts and events of world history.
In Sandra Ramos’ works we see one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists in the world continue to visit themes dealing with racism in her homeland, the physical and intellectual drain caused by mass migration, and other austere realities of daily Cuban life. Ramos uses her body and her figure in many of her paintings and mixed media etchings to narrate the daily issues that confront her life in Havana. In her drawing "Larva," Ramos anticipates a future Cuba where she may be allowed to spread her artistic wings to full capacity, without fear of how her visual imagery may be interpreted by her own government.Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who escaped from Cuba in the early 1990s, also uses her image and body to deliver powerful biographical and observational elements of the realities of being a black Cuban woman in America. She has been called “one of Boston’s most prominent artists,” and as evidence it has been submitted that the Cuban-born artist has shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian, the Venice Biennale, and many other prestigious venues around the world.
And last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted “Everything Is Separated by Water,” a mid-career retrospective of Campos-Pons’ paintings, sculptures, photos, and installations. And as an Afro-Cuban woman, Campos-Pons has used her cultural and racial background as the initial key theme of her own work, with long ties to her Cuban homeland, but also with a powerful influence of her evolving Americanosity.
Both Cirenaica Moreira and Marta Maria Perez Bravo also employ their bodies to become the canvas of their photographs, although in each case with a different goal. Moreira has been called “woman as vagina dentata” for the ferocity via which her images depict her themes of loss of freedom, feminism, and being a Cuban woman in a land of unabashed machismo.
Perez Bravo is considered by many to be the preeminent Cuban female photographer in the world, and her work addresses the fabulous rituals and images of Santeria, the unique Cuban mixture of Catholicism and African religions brought to the island by African slaves.Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) is also considered by many to be among the leading Cuban artists in the world, and he first attracted international attention by winning the grand prize at South Korea's Kwangju Biennial in 1995. This will be his initial debut in the Greater Washington, DC region.
Other artists in the show include work by Roberto Wong, whose powerful paintings develop intelligent ways to showcase ways in which freedom is restricted and Aimeé Garcia Marrero, considered by many to be among Cuba’s most talented new crop of painters. Her technical skills are married to intelligent interpretations of daily Cuban life and even the influences of the giant to the North.
"Aliento" Oil on Canvas by Aimee Garcia Marrero
The opening, free and open to the public is on November 8, 2008 from 6-8PM. H&F Fine Arts is located at 3311 Rhode Island Avenue, Mount Rainier, MD 20712, tel: 301.887.0080 and on the web at www.hffinearts.com. They are open Thursday and Friday - 11:00 AM-7:00 PM, Saturday - 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Sunday - 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM. The exhibition is open through November 30.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Postcards from the Edge
The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge benefit for Visual AIDS will be hosted by Metro Pictures in NYC on January 9-10, 2009.
Preview Party
Friday, January 9, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show.
Benefit Sale - ONE DAY ONLY!
Saturday, January 10, 2009 from 11:00 - 6:00
Over 1500 original postcard-size works of art.
$75 EACH. Buy 4 cards and get 1 free!
Postcards From the Edge is a show and sale of original, postcard-sized artworks on paper by established and emerging artists. Offered on a first-come, first-served basis, each piece is exhibited anonymously, and the identity of the artist is revealed only after the work is purchased. With the playing field leveled, all participants can take home a piece by a famous artist, or one who’s just making his/her debut in the art world. Nonetheless, collectors walk away with something beautiful, a piece of art they love. For more details, visit this website
Attention Artists!
DEADLINE: Wednesday, December 10, 2008
They are looking for artists to donate a 4" x 6" original work on paper for the exhibition and sale. Painting, drawing, photography, printmaking and mixed media are all welcome. If you would like to participate in Postcards From the Edge, download submission forms at this website.
I always participate in this fundraiser and encourage all of you to do as well.
Mellema on Irvine Show
Kevin Mellema with an excellent review of Shepard Fairey, Al Farrow and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), at DC's Irvine Contemporary.
Read it here.
Go see this today in DC
I'm hearing good tings about the inaugural Ten Miles Square photography exhibit, "Move Along," featuring work by Tracy Clayton, Katy Ray, Matt Smith and Pat Padua. It's at BloomBars.
BloomBars is rapidly getting a rep as being one of the coolest hot spots in DC and it is located at 3222 11th St NW, next to Wonderland Ballroom. Today Sunday, roll up between noon and 4 p.m. for the last day of the show.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Shattering the Glass Myth: Art or Craft?
That is the title of a discussion panel on that subject to be held at VisArts at Rockville (155 Gibbs Street, Rockville, MD 20850, 301-315-8200) on Thursday, October 30, 2008 6:30pm-8:30pm.
Discussions with Jackie Braitman, Elizabeth Mears, Lindsey Scott, Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers. To register, please call 301-315-8200 or email awhitford@visartscenter.org.
Gateway Hires New Executive Director
Heralding the start of a new future for the Gateway Community Development Corporation, the organization has hired a new executive director to lead its efforts at revitalizing the Gateway Arts District communities of North Brentwood, Brentwood and Mount Rainier in Maryland. The incoming executive director, Cheryl Patrice Derricotte, AICP, has extensive experience in the arts and community development, having worked for the last 20 years in the fields of arts administration and affordable housing.
A talented artist on her own right, Ms. Derricotte’s past experience includes functioning as development officer of Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, as well as prior service as the financial/facility project manager for the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in the Silver Spring Arts and Entertainment District. She holds a masters of regional planning (M.R.P.) from Cornell University and a B.A. in urban affairs from Barnard College, Columbia University. Ms. Derricotte has been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) since 1995.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Arte Sin Fronteras
Let me relate this again: a few months ago Joan Belmar and a group of friends got together and decided to help a small organization called The Family Place.
The mission of Family Place is to work with mothers and children, prevent domestic violence, and provide healthy meals to children and parents. Now he has curated an art exhibition, Art Without Frontiers, put together to raise funds for The Family Place.
The opening reception is Oct. 30th from 6:30 - 9:30PM at the beautiful Cultural Institute of Mexico in DC. Details here and RSVP required to lfleitas@thefamilyplace.org.
Artists include Sondra Arkin, Joseph Barbaccia, Constance Bergfors, Salvados Casco, Nina Falk, Carles Guasch, Willem De Looper, Adrienne Moumin, Linn Meyers, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Minna N. Nathanson, Kevin Postupack, Katya Romero, Raimundo Rubio and I am proud to also be part of this effort.
Instead of dining out on October 30, why not join us for this reception? It's a tax-deductible contribution. If you choose to buy some art, your tax-deductible contribution will go even farther since 50% of the sales will go directly to The Family Place.
See ya at the opening!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Student Art at GW
Everyone knows that I am a great fan of student art, and work by first- and second-year MFA students from the George Washington University is on view now through Halloween at Classroom 102, the new gallery space at the Smith Hall of Art.
Co-curated by GW art historians Jeffrey Anderson and Bibiana Obler, the show seeks to "make visible and catalyze further the interactions taking place in the studios upstairs." Art by Steve Ioli, Sarah Koss, Patrick Mc Donough, Ding Ren, and Teresa Sites. The reception on October 28, 5-7 pm, will round out the exhibition with food art by Chanan Delivuk and music by Bible Kiss Bible.
Mark St. John Erickson on Sesow
DC artist Matt Sesow gets an excellent review by Richmond's art critic Mark St. John Erickson here.
Scary Times
"How to Survive as an Artist in this Frightening Economy" is the title of a panel being presented by the Washington Project for the Arts. It is next Wednesday, Oct. 29 from 6-7:30 at the WPA.
The presentation by Kim Ward, Executive Director of WPA and Tim Ward, Deputy Director of Examinations, Supervision, and Consumer Protection, Office of Thrift Supervision.
Following the presentation there will be time for questions and answers, and member networking.
Refreshments will be served. Space is limited and you must sign up for the workshop (open to current WPA members only). To register email Kristina at: kbilonick@wpadc.org
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Hizzoner Responds
Last June I posted about the subject of the new DC Art Commission leadership and the selection process.
It must have been brought up to the attention of Mayor Fenty, as he responds below in an email that I received today:
Dear Mr. Campello,Lionell Thomas is not only a superbly qualified Interim Director, but he has my vote for the permanent assignment as he would make a very good leader for the Commission.
Thank you for your suggestions in regards to the leadership of the DC Commission of Arts and Humanities. Please be assured that all DC government leadership is chosen by qualiifications.
Lionell Thomas, formerly the deputy director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, has been named the Interim Director.
Lionell held a host of other responsibilities prior to being named the deputy director for the DC Arts Commission such as the legislative and grants manager, grants assistant, mailing list coordinator, program officer for media, music, visual arts and craft, and literature grant programs and program coordinator for a number of special projects and initiatives such as the Customer Service, Risk Management, Washington Writers' Week/Larry Neal Writers' Awards Program, Mayor's Arts Awards, and Arts Resource Fair. He also founded the DC Advocates for the Arts, a network of local artists, arts professionals and arts representatives and patrons that support the ongoing development arts and culture in Washington, DC.
Thank you for your comments. They are greatly appreciated. Thank you for writing me.
Sincerely,
Adrian M. Fenty,
Mayor
Update: OK... I'm officially confused! As Paul Ruppert noted here and as I noted here, Gloria Nauden has been appointed as the new Executive Director of the Arts and Humanities Commission.
I've emailed the Mayor to ask for clarification.
Awarded
Last weekend I was down in Norfolk for the Stockley Gardens Fine Arts Show, where I was selling my own work.
And I for the second year in a row I was honored with an award, as the juror awarded me the Edward G. Carson Memorial Award, which I am told is given to honor a strong supporter of artists in the Norfolk area.
I am honored by the award and happy to have received it!
