Road trip

Starting tomorrow I will be on the road through the end of next week... two cities in six days... more later.

Newspaper bleeds

The Chicago Tribune has laid off a ton of people, including its art critic. Details and list here.

Wanna go to an opening Saturday?

Black and White, the art of three local artists (Tyler Matthew Oyer, Shawn Martinbrough and Anthony Patrick Jones II) opens at Art Whino on Saturday April 25th, from 6pm-Midnight.

More art scam artists

Beware of these email scam artists trying to rip you off:

Calos David
calos.david2504@gmail.com

Message:
Hi how are you doing,i will like to buy your art work (name of work) to my new apartment in Copenhagen,so let me know if we can a have deal on it Thanks
____________________________________
Penn Cage
penncage@dfsservices.us

Message:
Please Let me know your artworks that are still available for sale. Penn Cage.

____________________________________

Steve Adams
steveadams7199@yahoo.com

Message:
Hello to you out there. I am so excited that I came across of your work on internet search,I am interested in purchasing some creative artworks from you let me know their various prices.and how much discounts are you going to give? I will be happy to have these selected artworks hanged in our new home in South Africa. As well, I want you to take out the shipping cost.I have been in touch with a shipping firm that will be shipping other house decoratives, We are travelling from our Dallas home to our new apartment as soon as possible.On Paying for the artworks,I will be glad to pay you with a Cashier check or Money order from the U.S Bank that can be easily cashed at your local bank,please let me know on how to proceed, Have a wonderful day. Take Care, Mr Steve Adams....

____________________________________

Jane Francis
jan.fran01@yahoo.com

Hi,
Happy New Year. Hope this message finds you well. I saw these creatives works on your web site and i will like you to get back with more details if they are still available for purchase.
I will appreciate an urgent reply.

Best Regards,
Janet.

12x12

Jesse Cohen and his artdc.org crew will be hanging a show at their new space to coincide with the Hyattsville Arts Festival on May 16 11am-5pm.

They're going to hang a 12x12 show and they're looking for art that can fit 1ft x 1ft spots. All art must have a wire, capable of hanging on a hook, and be less than 10 pounds. Painting, printing, photography, 2-d sculpture, reliefs, and more. Each slot will be sold for $12.00, and all artists must be artdc.org members. They will hang at least 100 works of art, and slots will be first come first serve. All works from paid slots will have 0% commission and 100% of those sales go towards the artist.

Details here.

So far the following artists will be exhibiting work:

Tammy Vittale
Cheryl Edwards
Susan Crane
Sherill Anne Gross
Michael Auger
Jennifer Maben Bishop
Edward Hahn
Andrew Hendricks
Genevieve Lynn
Heather M. Schmaedeke
Paul Farley
Michael Woodward
Mara Odette Guerrero
Kimberly Stark
Matt Sesow
Dana Ellyn
Ric Garcia
Jennifer Verrier
John Grillo Lucien
Lisa Rosenstein
Jessica Hensley
Lynne Venart
Judith Kim
Meghan Taylor
Angela Kleis
Caren Quinn
Sean Welker
Jennifer Beinhacker
Jeannette Gordon
Julianne Fuchs-Musgrave
Liliane Blom
Loretta Thompson
Tara Kocourek
James Landry
Henrik Sundqvist
Laurie Breen
Eric Ginsburg
Steven Dobin
Jason James Cresswell
Davin Tarr
Liliane Blom
Deborah Winram
Roy Utley
Robert Fox
Caroline Dolan
Juan Pineda

Can art prices be negotiated?

That is one of the most common questions that newbie art collectors ask me and one that pops up all the time at the ubiquitous expert panels on collecting art, selling art, making art or whatever art.

My first warning is to always advise everyone to beware of "art galleries" that have "art sales." Although art is a commodity, a reputable art gallery doesn't have "sales" with drastic price reductions. All that would accomplish is to destroy the price base of an artist. Leave the "sales" approach to rug stores.

A collector can always try to negotiate prices, as some dealers are open to it and some aren't. Most dealers automatically give known or returning collectors a "collector's discount," and artists should be aware of this industry policy, and it should certainly be specified in the contract.

Most reputable dealers will try to accommodate a client's requests and will often consult the artist on specific pricing issues, such as the case (in my own experience), where a collector wanted to acquire 40 paintings at once from an artist, but clearly also wanted a major discount.

If you are a collector, beginning or not, and really want that particular piece of art, but because of your financial issues cannot afford the offered price, be honest and say so and see where that leads. Often the dealer can offer you other work by the artist in your price range.

Be weary of price reductions of more than 10% as huge discounts hurt the artist's sales record and most reputable dealers will not do them. It is also perfectly reasonable to ask for a small discount if you are buying several pieces of art at once.

And the most common mistake made by artists themselves: selling their own work directly at vastly reduced prices from the gallery price. This is perhaps the most fatal mistake that any artist can do to destroy his/her work's price base. Prices should be aligned and essentially the same regardless of where they are sold, at the gallery, at the studio or at the art fair.

2009 Top 25 Arts Destinations

New York City, which was the No. 1 Big Cities arts destination in 2008, came in at No. 1 again with almost double the number of votes over second-place winner Chicago, which also held the No. 2 spot last year. And Washington, D.C., which placed third on the Big Cities list in 2008, is third again this year.

Read the American Style Magazine poll here and see how Alexandria, VA beats Miami, FL... okeedokie.

MFAs at MICA this Friday

Friday, April 24, from 5 to 7 PM is the last of the three Maryland Institute College of Art MFA thesis shows.

If you are in the Baltimore area, go see these shows.

The shows take place in the Fox Building, at MICA, 1300. W. Mt. Royal Ave, Baltimore, MD. Guaranteed are great art, good food and fun people! Artists include:

Amita Bhatt
Nina Glaser
Kat Rohrbacher
Katherine Mann
Scott Shanley
Karla Cott
Clarissa Gregory
Judy Stone
Pete Cullen
Alan Callander
Robby Rackleff
Emily Wathen
Sandy Triolo

Wanna go to an art lecture tonite?

An open $250,000 art prize

ArtPrize is a radically new open competition and perhaps the shape of things to come. It is open to any artist in the world who can find space in one of the exhibiting venues in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Open to a vote from anyone who attends.

It does cost $50 to participate. Registration ends July 31, 2009. Details here.

London Overtakes New York

In 2008, New York's auction market produced only $2.9 billion, down approximately 23 percent from a year ago and falling behind London, the new global leader in art auction sales.

Details here.

Meanwhile, some are predicting that as the economic slump continues, art collectors will be turning their attention more and more to the basics of art collecting and looking more closely at emerging artists and more affordable art.

That is the concept behind the international Affordable Art Fair, and the New York version of that fair takes place May 7-10 in New York City.

If you want to score a couple of free tickets to that fair, send me an email and I'll set you up.

A Million Little Pictures

Deadline: July 1st 2009

Art House is looking for 1,000 people from around the world to receive 1000 disposable cameras. They'll mail you the camera for to you to document your life in 24 exposures and then you simply send them back the prints. Not only will they have an exhibition in Atlanta, but they say that they will also travel to the city with the most participants. The exhibition will be home to 24,000 photographs of 1,000 peoples lives all over the world.

For more information on the project go to this website. Postmark Deadline: September 1st 2009.

This Thursday in DC


An art show collaboration with Willco Residential, urbanpace and The Pink Line Project.

Artists: DECOY, Eve Hennessa, Susan Noyes, Mary Ott, Cory Oberndorfer, Andres Tremols, and Colin Winterbottom.

Two tri-plex lofts and a one bedroom filled with artwork in all mediums. Two Washington DC collectors will be placing works from their collection on the secondary market for the first time.

The Providence 11th Street Lofts
Thursday April 23rd 6:30pm-9:00pm
1515 11th Street NW (near P st)

Artists' Websites: Katherine Mann

Katherine Mann is about to have her MFA exhibit at MICA this coming Friday, April 24 from 5-7PM (Details later this week).


She writes about her work that her "paintings depict ever-changing fantasy worlds where blood cells, rainforests and coral reefs collide and intertwine. Each piece functions as a man-sized porthole into a landscape alive with minute details, patterns and interlocking systems. This is achieved through the conglomeration of minutia piled and cobbled together to create larger, overarching systems that define the whole painting. I work with ambiguous shapes that could function as elements in radically different environments in the real world—a scabby circular shape could be a marsh object covered with barnacles, a white blood cell, or a cratered moon."

Visit her website here.

Conservation lecture tomorrow

Join Amber Kerr-Allison, Paintings Conservator and Lunder Conservation Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for a gallery talk where she discusses the conservation treatments of several paintings in preparation for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists, currently on exhibition through January 2010.

Learn more about the paintings themselves as you become acquainted with the techniques, methodology, and tools used by conservators in the treatment and care of the collection. Ms. Kerr-Allison will be joined by curator Ann Prentice Wagner. In tandem, they will explore the technical and visual components of the artwork, elaborate on the historical context of this period, and dialogue about collaboration between curators and conservators.

Thursday, April 23, 2:00 p.m. Meet at the entrance of the 1934 exhibition.

Open Studios in DC

On April 25 & 26, 2009, 52 O St. Studios will host their annual Open Studios event.

You can view the working and living spaces of over 20 DC artists at one of the largest and oldest buildings dedicated to the practice of Fine Arts in Washington D.C. Artists range from painters to graphic designers, sculptors to musicians, mixed-media artists to furniture makers. The O Street Studios hosts this Open Studio for a rare peak into their process and creative influences. Meet the artists and discuss their work over refreshments, music and interactive activities.

The building will be open from 11 AM - 5 PM both days. Free and open to all

52 O St., NW
Washington D.C. 20001

Featured Artists:

Stevens Jay Carter
Matthew Scott Davis
Department of Furniture
DJ Natty Boom
Adam Eig
Thom Flynn
Cianne Fragione
Gallie Hendricks
Andrea Haffner
Peter e Harper
Matt Hollis
Andy Holtin
Dean Hutchinson
Rebecca Kallem
Micheline Klagsbrun
Raye Leith
Michael Mansfield
Kendall Nordin
Holly & Ashlee Temple
Lisa Marie Thalhammer
Ben Tolman
The Tuesday Night Group
Zach Vaughn

Trevor Young at Flashpoint

Trevor Young returns to present his second solo exhibition, curated and produced by my good friend Annie Adjchavanich at the Gallery at Flashpoint, with 100 paintings in homage to non-places. The exhibition addresses generic spaces, such as freeways, hotel rooms, airports and supermarkets, which are familiar and safe, but often make us feel like we do not belong. Trevor Young: Non-Places, runs through June 6, 2009 and has an opening reception on Saturday, April 25, 6-8pm.

In Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995) he coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places." Young says, “We survive with the greatest of ease in non-places. That is the point. There is no need to travel from village to village when one store has everything we need. The non-place neutralizes individuality. ‘Place’ is filled with history and identity. Non-place is void of history and identity.”

Created in his studio in Silver Spring, MD and during a 45 day painting fellowship in Los Angeles, Young’s new works are a departure from his mail art series, Trevor Young Has Gone Postal, in which he mailed more than 500 number ten sized envelopes to his friend and curator Annie Adjchavanich. These elaborately decorated envelopes were exhibited at the Gallery at Flashpoint in 2004.

My good friend Al Miner has written about this show:

Trevor Young: Non-places

On the road between here and there are anonymous structures, mere rest stops for most of us, but not for Trevor Young. Where some see purgatory, he sees and paints an oasis, and a portal becomes a destination. Young’s “non-places,” coax us down the highway with their seductive smell of familiarity and french fries. His paintings are composites made of a lifetime of mental snap shots taken on countless trips through the drive-thru. We are simultaneously drawn to their slick veneers and repulsed by their lack of history. Young’s gas stations, retail mega chains, fast food restaurants, and airline terminals capture the conflict we feel about such shrines to modern capitalism.

Brightly colored and backlit, they snap us out of highway hypnosis like dazzling beacons on a bland horizon. Young renders their flat, artificial surfaces in luscious oil, rich with the evidence of his hand. In Washington, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and beyond, non-places all essentially look the same, and that is comforting. To the artist, airline terminals serve as a gentle transition between the security of home and the shock of flight and then foreign soil.

However, non-places have a sinister side. While we may speak their language fluently, Young cautions against blind trust with his haunted, cinematic night scenes. Hotel rooms might feel like homes away from home, but who and how many slept there before? And how clean is that shiny fast food tabletop when we invoke the five-second rule?

Like all great love affairs, Trevor Young’s relationship with non-places is a complex one. His use of a traditional medium imbues them with the history they inherently lack, while his prolific practice reminds us that they are a dime a dozen. At once devotional images and mug shots, they marry optimism and cynicism. Lucky for us they make a beautiful couple.

-Al Miner

Artists' Websites: Nina Glaser

Nina Glaser is a superbly talented young painter about to do her MFA exhibit this coming Friday at MICA (details on all of those Frida MFA shows later this week).

Alyssa. Oil by Nina Glaser. 36x24 inches.
Her work is not only superbly crafted (she's a painter's painter) but also has that hard-to-describe inner quality to it that adds a sense of depth and mystery to the work which immediately separates her from the pack of technically savvy painters. There is youth and narrative in her work, and more importantly, immense promise.



Visit her website here. This is an artist which should be snatched by regional galleries now!

International Art Affairs 2009

Three Big Parties and five important Lectures + Wine Receptions...More on this later, but meanwhile click here.

Aqui Estamos comes to Philly

As I've written many times, as 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.

Now, with a new 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."

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!

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 after an initial showing in Norfolk, Virginia, it traveled to to H&F Fine Arts and the Greater Washington, DC region and now travels to Philadelphia's Projects Gallery with an exhibition of 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 Projects Gallery 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.

"Consume preferably before age 30." Gelatin Silver Print. Cirenaica Moreira
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.

Other artists in the show include work by Alejandro Mendoza (winner of the Best in Show 2006. IX Exposición de Arte Latinoamericano y del Caribe, Museum of the Americas) and Alex Queral. Also 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.

"Concavo" Digital Print by Aimee Garcia Marrero
The opening, free and open to the public is on May 1st, 2009 from 6-9PM. Projects Gallery is located at 629 N 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123, tel: 267.303.9652 and on the web at projectsgallery.com. The exhibition is open through May 29, 2009.