Mellema on art

Kevin Mellema writes about shows, including the Reclaimed show at Target Gallery in Alexandria's Torpedo Factory.

Nice plug for seminal DC area green artists Erwin Timmers and Adam Bradley in the article here.

Campelloing on...

Proud papa bragging on:

People who work with Campello say her desire to take on challenging roles is evidence of another essential quality among successful actors. It’s why she landed a recent role with the Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre’s Touring company, and why she has upcoming roles with theaters in Issaquah and Olympia.

“She has a lot of drive,” said Jon Rake, managing artistic director of TMP. “She’s gonna go places. She has a lot of talent. She takes it seriously.”

Read a profile on my daughter Elise Campello by Paige Richmond here.

I'd like to see her audition for some roles in Washington, DC soon.

Before Robinson there was Estalella

We all, not just athletes or baseball fans, owe a tremendous debt to Jackie Robinson. Not only because of Major League baseball integration, but more importantly, because of the significant advancement of race relations worldwide that was the real aftermath of his actions during and after his baseball career. His sacrifices must never be forgotten or diminished, and Robinson was and will always be a hero, not just for Americans, but for mankind.

But sooner or later history must record that he wasn't the first black man to play in the Major Leagues. I've discussed this here before, and have this entire project ongoing on the subject. That website always gets me interesting emails, and in a most recent one I received this terrific poem on the subject:

Roberto Estalella
By Joe Hernandez

Before Jackie Robinson came to the Majors
Roberto Estalella was already there
Before you argue and want to wager
Let the historical facts make you aware

Roberto played for the Washington Senators in 1935
His ancestry were of white and black folks
That is twelve years before Jackie "arrived"
This is the plain truth, this is no hoax

Powerfully built Cuban slugger was he
With a lifetime batting average of .282
Played as an outfielder for all to see
The first black in the Majors that no one knew

How ironic that a black foreigner first played
In the Major Leagues in front of all
This is the truth historians evade
A truth that must be admitted by Major League Baseball

Roberto Estalella broke the color barrier
We need to recognize this and say
Although Jackie was the carrier
Of all the hatred that was on display

But baseball must be honest about its past
With no intention of deceit
This dishonesty cannot last
If it expects to deal with those that cheat

Tell the truth of Roberto Estalella
Jackie Robinson will still have his place
You need to remember this "fella"
And not lie about him or his race

Jackie and Roberto would think of it as a disgrace
That their true story has not been embraced
That they were both of the Negro race
And this lie of who was first must be erased

Laurel Lukaszewski

"When you're working in clay," says Laurel Lukaszewski, "you'd have a tough time if you worry about breakage."

Read the WaPo profile on DC artist Laurel Lukaszewski here.

Achilles Heel

"I often wonder how other galleries are dealing with artists who have gallery representation but continue to self-promote. I have been known to secret shop gallery represented artists. I contact them through their emails on their personal websites and inquire as to whether they have any studio pieces available. Not once has an artist directed me to his or her galleries for purchases.

I fear galleries will dry up if they don’t smarten up. Then where will collectors go to see art in person?”

The above from comments by gallery owner Carrie Horejs. Read them here.

A Window on Fine Craft

Yesterday's Washington Post's Weekend section had the kind of arts coverage that a city can only dream of... it covered the coming Crafts Week DC extravaganza that I mentioned last week.

Details here.

P.S. "The Crafts Whisperer..." (sounds of Lenny laughing...)

Wanna go to a Maryland opening tomorrow?

Opening Reception, Sunday, April 19th, 6-8 PM at Photoworks Gallery, in gorgeous Glen Echo Park, MD. Work by Rob Grant, Gary Jimerfield, and Scott Grant. Through May 17, 2009.


Photoworks Gallery
7300 MacArthur Boulevard
Glen Echo, Maryland 20812
www.glenechophotoworks.org
301-634-2274

And your art for free...

Australian artist Hazel Dooney is celebrating the 500th posting in her cool art blog by giving away a free Dooney original: a small, limited edition, color photographic study from her Lake Eyre series, titled Study for Modern Strategies For Survival : Resized For Mass Consumption.

Each print is stamped, signed, dated and numbered on verso. The image size is around 2" x 3" on 4" x 6" paper. Details here.

Want to win an original Damien Hirst painting?

Only if you are an UK resident... but details here.

Wanna go to a gallery opening in Arlington tonight?


The AAC's Spring solo shows 2009, featuring work by Jason Lee, Joseph Lupo, Gregory McLellan, Christopher LaVoie, and Steve Frost, opens tonight with a reception from 6-9PM.

Wanna go to an opening in Baltimore tomorrow?

If you wear a Che Guevara T-Shirt


Unless it is like the one on the left, you are wearing the image of a man whose own racist writing and actions are full of negative, racist remarks about Mexicans and Blacks and Native Americans.

By the way, "Comemierda" is an almost unique Cuban insult...

Call to Artists: In the Spirit of Frida Kahlo

Deadline: June 6, 2009

Frida Kahlo remains one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, but her spectacular life experiences, her writing and her views on life and art have also influenced many artists throughout the years.

From July 1 - August 29, 2009 The Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery at Smith Farm Center in Washington, DC will be hosting Finding Beauty In A Broken World: In the Spirit of Frida Kahlo.

This exhibition hopes to showcase the work in all mediums of artists influenced not only by Kahlo’s art, but also by her biography, her thoughts, and her writing or any other aspect in the life and presence of this remarkable artist who can be interpreted through artwork.

This will be the third Kahlo show that I have juried in the last decade and we are seeking works of art that evoke the prolific range of expression, style and media like that which Frida Kahlo used as an outlet for her life’s experiences.

Get a copy of the prospectus by calling (202) 483-8600 or email gallery@smithfarm.com or download it here.

Priceless

Through the wonders of mass emails, I received the below image yesterday:


In the process of trying to identify the source of the image (to give him or her props and credits in the ALT tag), I typed "Priceless" in Google image search and got a ton of these type images.

It's almost like the parody of the Mastercard commercial has spawned a new form of internet art, where the results can be funny, sick, nasty or downright historical.

See them here.

DC Arts Commission Open House

Black Caucusian Bone Picking

I've got a bone to pick with the Congressional Black Caucus members' remarks after their recent trip to Cuba; but first a quote from a source within Cuba:

In primary [Cuban] education, skin colour is not mentioned," ... If we are still living in a society where white people have the power, and we don't mention colour in education, we are in practice educating [Cuban] children to be white.

Cuban history as we teach it is a disgrace, because it is predominantly white history, and explaining the role of black people and mulattoes in building this society and its culture is not given its due importance.

Esteban Morales
University of Havana
Centre for the Study of the Hemisphere and the United States

My bone has nothing to do with President Obama's recent (and curiously announced by his press secretary) monumental decision to change a major visiting policy to the unfortunate Caribbean island prison of Cuba; but first another Cuban quote:

...to carry on "hiding" the issue [of racism in Cuba] would lead black people to think that "they belong to another country, and that there are two Cuba’s as there were in the 19th century, a black Cuba and a white one."

Roberto Zurbano
Director
Casa de las Américas publishing house
Havana

What my bone deals with is the spectacular lack of historical background that the various Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members' showed when commenting about their meeting with the Castro brothers.

Not that their highly complimentary comments about two bloody, murdering dictators would offend me. It does and it should offend anyone and everyone who loves and admires liberty. One would think that any comments about a nation with one of the world's worst human rights records, where Amnesty International has been denied access to (except to that bit of Cuba where the Guantanamo Naval Base is located); a nation where gay people were once given lobotomies to "cure" them; and where HIV+ Cubans were detained and segregated in guarded colonies away from the general public.

But what really bugs me, in my own pedantic hell, is how a bunch of historically and socially clueless African American legislators would praise the leaders and the government of one of the world's most racist dictatorships, a government which talks a talk of equality while walking a walk of institutionalized racism against its own black population.

Cuba has a long and agonizing history of racial issues, starting with its long bloody history of slavery, which didn't end on the island until 1886, and continuing through its freedom from Spain, birth of the Republic, and the triumph of the Castro Revolution in 1959. It continues to this day.

Cuba even had its own race war.

General Antonio Maceo, known as "the Bronze Titan." He was the true warrior leader of the Cuban Wars of Liberation. His father was white of French ancestry; his mother was black, of Dominican ancestry. After the first Cuban Liberation War ended in a truce with Spain, some say that Maceo was so disillusioned with the realities of life in Cuba as a black man, that he left Cuba and lived in Panama, until he was called back to lead the Cuban rebels in a new rebellion in 1895. He returned to Cuba and was killed in battle against the Spanish Army in 1896.

In 1912, black Cubans in Oriente province had enough of the new Cuban government's racist practices and the degrading treatment of Cuban black veterans, who had been the bulk of the Cuban rebels in the wars of independence against Spain. The Cuban government moved on a path of genocide and eventually the United States had to send in troops to end the war between the white Cuban government and the black rebels in Oriente.

As I recall from the CIA Factbook of 1959, on that year the island was about 70% white, about 20% black and mixed, and the rest Chinese, Jewish and other. The Cuban Diaspora which started a few months after the Castro takeover and continues to this day, with the exception of the Mariel boat lift of the 1980s, saw a mass exodus of mostly white Cubans, and as a result the island's racial balance shifted dramatically to where most people estimate that today the island is about 60% black or biracial.

But Cuba's black population has not seen a proportionate share of the power and a quick review of the governing Politburo/Parliament reveals few black faces in the crowd. In fact, "the Cuban cultural journal Temas published studies by the governmental Anthropology Centre in 2006 that showed that on average, the black population has worse housing, receives less money in remittances from abroad and has less access to jobs in emerging economic sectors like tourism, in which blacks represent barely five percent of managers and professionals, than the white population."

"I think silence is worse. The longer nothing is said, the more the racism fermenting underground is rotting the entire nation..."

Gerardo Alfonso
singer/songwriter
Havana

While the Cuban constitution of the 1940s (since then abolished by the Communist government) outlawed segregation and racism, and the current Cuban Constitution guarantees black Cubans the right to stay in any hotel and be served at any public establishment, as it has been documented by many foreign journalists, black Cubans will tell you in private that those rights exist only on paper.

The harsh Cuban reality today, they claim, is that "black Cubans won't be served" and that Cubans, regardless of race are in general barred from places frequented by tourists.

Unfortunately, these things [disparities in the treatment of blacks and whites] are very common in Cuba.

Ricardo Alarcón Quesada
President of the National Assembly of People's Power
Cuban Parliament

Do these Cuban voices from within Cuba itself sound like the subjects of a government whose murdering tyrants should be hugged and complimented by our African American legislators, in view of our nation's own racial history? Would they hug the criminal government leaders of the apartheid South Africa of the 20th century?

We have practically apartheid in this country sometimes... racism is deeply rooted in Cuba's history and will not disappear overnight."

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes
Director
Cuban Communist Party-owned Juventud Rebelde newspaper.

Shame on you CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-Ca.), shame on you Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Il.), shame on you Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Ca.), shame on you Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), and whoever else of you historically ignorant bobos praised the leaders of that unfortunate prison island.

Roadin'

I've been on the road since 4AM on Tuesday morning, and driving in the rain sucks...

Fair use

Richard Prince and his dealer Larry Gagosian have responded to a copyright-infringement suit filed by French photographer Patrick Cariou, saying that Prince's use of Cariou's work falls under "fair use," the Art Newspaper reports.

At issue are 22 paintings in Prince's "Canal Zone" series, which borrow photographs from Cariou's 2000 book Yes Rasta, shot over a decade in the mountains in Jamaica, and combine them with brushwork or pornography. According to Gagosian's filing, eight were sold when they were exhibited at the gallery last November and December, at prices ranging from $1.5 million to $3 million.

Details here.

Bienal de La Habana

All of the action -- the unofficial venues, the public-art installations and sculptures -- coupled with Tania Bruguera's daring performance last week in which Cubans and some foreign visitors took to a podium, clamored for freedom, and mocked the once-sacred figure of Fidel Castro -- make this Biennial, which runs through April 30, one for the books.

''Tania's [performance] has been the most provocative gesture in all of Cuban art history,'' Cuban art critic Hector Antón Castillo says from Havana. ``Any veteran from the 1980s will tell you the same

Read Fabiola Santiago's report on the Biennial here.

Wanna go to a museum opening in DC this week?


Details
here.