A Chihuly for Xmas

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts board of trustees has voted to acquire the work Red Reeds, by Dale Chihuly which was created for the Anne Cobb Gottwald reflecting pool outside the Best Café. The internationally renowned artist created over 100 red glass reeds as part of the Chihuly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, October 20, 2012- February 10, 2013. Since that time Red Reeds has been on loan to VMFA.

This dynamic, site-specific work by Dale Chihuly was an instant success at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” said Alex Nyerges, director.”It is beautiful in every season, and is a wonderful addition to the Lora Robins Sculpture Garden. I am especially pleased that this is the first site-specific outdoor installation by Chihuly to be acquired by an art museum.”

Red Reeds was purchased with private funds from the Arthur and Margaret Glasgow fund. Private funds are always used for art acquisition, but upon purchase the work becomes the property of the Commonwealth of Virginia for its ongoing care. 
The reeds were blown by team Chihuly at the Nuutäjarvi Glass Factory in Nuutäjarvi, Finland because of the excellent clarity of glass there and to take advantage of their annealing ovens, the largest in the world. The annealing process facilitates the curing of these large-scaled elements, which are as much as 10 feet in height. Also, the red glass in Finland has a particularly brilliant quality, due to the ruby red pigment and the added chemical element neodymium.

 Details here.

On this Christmas we demand freedom for this heroine

Today, we remember Sonia Garro, who is currently spending her second Christmas in a political prison and is another example of the targeted repression of the world's longest lasting dictatorship; not only against all of its enslaved people, but also even more venomous against Afro-Cubans.

Sonia Garro, a member of The Ladies in White pro-democracy movement, has been imprisoned by the Castro regime -- without trial or charges -- since March 18th, 2012.

In the wave of repression leading up to Pope Benedict XVI's trip to Cuba, Castro's secret police raided her home, shot her with rubber bullets and imprisoned her.

She has been repeatedly abused and beaten in the infamous Manto Negro women's prison.

Garro's husband, Ramón Muñoz González, was also imprisoned on that day.

He is being held -- without trial or charges -- in the Combinado del Este Prison.

Demand their freedom now.

Merry Christmas!

Nochebuena

Since tonight is Nochebuena, I usually prepare the classic Nochebuena Cuban feast for the night.

Cuban Roasted Pork
Mariquitas with Mojo Sauce for Dipping
Sweet Corn Tamales
Broiled Yucca with Garlic Mojo
Broiled Ňame with Olive Oil
Moros y Cristianos (White Rice and Black Bean Soup)
Cuban Nochebuena Salad

For 2013 I will substitute Ropa Vieja instead of pork... and yeah, I will use a lot of ajo (garlic)...

There is a long cultural tradition assigned to the Moros y Cristianos side dish, and even its Cuban Spanish name (Moros y Cristianos or "moors and Christians") tell you something about the dish (rumored to honor the 100th anniversary in 1592 of Queen Isabella's final victory over the Moors in 1492). 

And (at least in Oriente province) Ropa Vieja is a dish attributed to Cuban Jews, so we'll have a cool culinary diversity night encompassing all three major world religions on Nochebuena!

For once, Christians, Jews and Moslems will work together, in this case in my belly... cough, cough...

And from our family to all: a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Terrific 2014 to all!

Funny Faces

I've got this ever growing collection of funny faces that get captured on TV when you press the pause button... heh, heh...

This proposes legal changes to copyright laws...

OK folks... I need you lawyer types to read, interpret and report the gist of this new report ASAP!

Channeling Pollock Part II

Remember that proposal for a piece of art for a new cruise ship being constructed? It was part of the (e)merge art fair "wake" effect... Details here.

Anyway... seems like we're past the first stage and now they've requested some additional amplification and thus the two rough sketched of what the actual piece would look like.

Morris Louis (cough, cough) finds a home

In 1980 I did this piece as part of an assignment at the University of Washington School of Art. The assignment (and the class) was to create work in the style of the "masters" which at the U-Dub included modern masters... I did some "easy" ones such as Pollock, most of the Washington Color School stripe painters, Willem de K, etc. plus some really tough ones, such as El Greco.

Anyway... “Preparatory Watercolor for the Frida Kahlo Inside a Morris Louis Assignment” is an original watercolor painting on 300 weight paper. The painting measures 9.5 x 13.5 inches and it is signed and dated on the verso, and it is now heading to a collector in Crystal Bay, Nevada - 33 years after it was painted!

There is a companion piece to this work somewhere in New York.

An Abbreviated History of Moca DC

MOCA DC as we have known it for 21 years will end this week... There is a farewell party at Art Overnight - at 2328 Ontario Rd in Adams Morgan on Saturday, Dec 21st starting at 6 pm. Be on the lookout for the Grand Opening of Big Moca in the Sky.

Here is a guest post by MOCA's director David R. Quammen:

December 1, 2013

An Abbreviated History of Moca DC

Part One: 1992 to 2004 – The Formative Years

I’ve been sifting through records and media accounts of Moca DC from the time that Michael V. Clark started it in 1992, except he called it Clark & Company. That changed in 1995 after he married Felicity Hogan and they incorporated it as a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit corporation, naming it the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It has always been a gallery, never a museum so over time the name was shortened to MOCA DC, since it’s a bit of a stretch answering the phone or discussing it in any other context. Michael changed his given name to Clark Hogan, later shortening it to Clark when he and Felicity split in 2003. He was going to close the gallery December 31^st, 2004, having a tough time keeping it going, what with health issues and the divorce. He now calls himself Clark V. Fox, a name chosen when he was a co-exhibitor at a gallery in Houston.

I started modeling Halloween day 2000, shortly after turning 60; I enjoyed being part of a creative process but there were no directions for a novice and no list of places to model so I accumulated as much information as I could and started publishing a newsletter, Artists & Models, in February, 2002. It was well received but I published only 6 issues, terminating it after finding that it was going to take $300 a month to publish and deliver; I closed it the same month that the Figure Models Guild was formed.

In 2002, Clark let me use the gallery to form the Guild; the first formal meeting was in July of that year, a resounding success with about 50 models and artists in attendance. It continued to grow to the point that most of the colleges, universities, schools and groups from Baltimore to Annapolis and Winchester to Richmond were using it as a guide for their models. I told Clark that I would guarantee the rent and operate the gallery. He owned a condo in New York, so he agreed, moved to New York and on January 1, 2005 my status changed from model to model-gallery operator.

Part Two – 2005 to 2010 – A New Horizon

David R. Quammen

The end of MOCA DC

MOCA DC as we have known it for 21 years will end later this week... There is a farewell party at Art Overnight - at 2328 Ontario Rd in Adams Morgan on Saturday, Dec 21st starting at 6 pm. Be on the lookout for the Grand Opening of Big Moca in the Sky.

Rosemary Feit Covey's retrospective coming in 2014

In March 2014, a retrospective of the last fifteen years of Rosemary Feit Covey's work will be on display at Johns Hopkins University's Evergreen Museum in Baltimore. Covey is one of the great, master artists of the DMV.

Featured artwork will include engravings, paintings, mixed media and installations. A catalog with commentary by curator James Abbott will accompany this exhibition.

Rosemary Feit Covey will also be a featured artist in MFA's group exhibition Focus Africa which will open at the gallery April 25th, 2014. Included are artworks inspired by the artist's South African heritage.

$37M a day!

This dude made $37M a day...

Five Curators. One Exhibition. No Art. Zero Dollars.

Five Curators. One Exhibition. No Art. Zero Dollars.

Can they Crowdfund a Crowdsourced Exhibition of Crowdfunding Rewards?

Artists, technologists, and business people, tired of stagnation from the
traditional funding models of investment, grants, and representation, have
turned to crowdfunding as a means to supplement or fully support their
ventures.  Today's world of connectivity creates a fluid landscape of
ideas, incentives and, even money. Small ideas and small amounts of money
can amass to a grandiose scale as individuals are united even fleetingly
for common cause. This is unique to our time, and our era.  “Mining the
Crowd” seeks to bring together the audience and the funder for a
discussion of the sustainability of crowdfunding, especially, but not
limited to, how it pertains to the arts.

Currently, “Mining the Crowd” is in the middle of its 30-day make-or-break
fundraising Kickstarter campaign, the sole financial source for a future
Kickstarter and Indiegogo based art exhibition, which will present
materials from artists actively engaged in their own crowdfunding
campaigns. Fiscal sponsorship for this project will be provided by
Maryland Art Place (MAP), allowing donations to Mining the Crowd’s
crowdfunding campaign to be partially tax deductible.

While the culminating exhibition is scheduled for February 2015 in the
Sheila & Richard Riggs and Leidy Galleries in the Graduate Studio center
at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art), funding must be completed as
soon as possible.  The second phase of this project involved investing in
the artists who will ultimately exhibit.  Not only will the artist need to
be sought out in crowdfunding circles, but they will need to be given time
to create their art.

Through this meta-Kickstarter social experiment, social media, and the
exhibition, the curatorial team aims to educate artists and facilitate
critical discourse about the challenges to financially supporting one’s
artistic practice. Additionally, like most campaigns, the team desires to
build a community of supporters for this project and this conversation.

More information about the project and links the Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler pages can be found at http://miningthecrowd.org.

The ongoing Kickstarter campaign can be found at
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miningthecrowd/mining-the-crowd-artifacts-of-crowdfunding-exhibit

Contrails...

There were like a dozen contrails in the sky at once this evening on the drive on I-95S -- probably all heading to Dulles...

You gotta see this...

Click here.

Sigh...

Spiderman Naked finds a home

Spiderman Naked
Charcoal, conte and embedded appropriated video. 13x8 inches matted and framed to 26x20 inches
2013 by F. Lennox Campello

Detail of Spiderman Naked

Now in a permanent collection in Miami, Florida!

What's in a name...

This post is truly the result of me finding some slides from 1980 and 1981, which is when I was doing some artwork about identity and labeling and ethnicity, etc. when I was a student at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington.

I've been recently trying to digitize my art slides, and to my distress, I've been finding out that some of those slide-holding binders have succumbed to mold and moisture, and those two moist diseases have robbed me of a lot of my own artistic history.

I am sure that the fact that between 1980 and now I've moved about 30 times, including twice to Europe and back, has something to do with it, but it still sucks.



"Las Siete Fridas (The Seven Fridas)"
Pen and Ink Wash, F. Lennox Campello
Univ. of Washington Art School assignment circa 1980-1981
Collection of Seeds for Peace. What hurt the most was the loss of slides documenting a series of pen and ink drawings, such as the above one, that I did on the thematic focus of surnames and what immediate impact is attached to them as soon as people hear them. Most of them, except for the dozen or so Frida pieces such as the one above, were sold at the Pike Place Market in Seattle, which is where I used to sell my art school assignments back then. The last name identity series was anchored around my documented passion for Frida Kahlo, and we must remember that not too many people outside of a certain artistic sphere was familiar with her back then... certainly not too many of my fellow Washington art students knew about her and her work back then. Her last name gave rise to some interesting questions about her... "She was Mexican?" was a common question after I gave her name at a class review or talk... I knew that it was the last name throwing them off... a Mexican whose last name was Kahlo?
Having been raised in two distinct places of immense ethnic and racial diversity (Easternmost Cuba and Brooklyn) I was a little surprised at their surprise. "How can she be Mexican with a German (well, really Austrian... but) last name?" they might as well have asked... some did.
And so, starting in my junior year (I think) I commenced a series of portraits of faces migrating across a spectrum of ethnic, racial, cultural and even fantasy diversity. The Seven Fridas is a good example of that... as we see her as Nordic, Moslem, African, Punk, Native American, Vulcan and Beatle.
Many of the pieces were akin to this one, but the portraits were of either some fellow students, or sometimes borrowed from popular imagery. And they had titles such as "Portraits of Peddrossah" instead of Pedrosa and Rhoddrighez instead of Rodriguez, and "The Seven Stages of Dellauhehrtah" instead of De La Huerta, etc.
As soon as a De La Huerta becomes a  Dellauhehrtah, I discovered, his/her whole ethnicity, and in some cases, his/her race shifts tremendously, regardless of the race, ethnicity or national origin of both the subject and the ones being subjected to my name and visual puzzlement. By the way, to this day, that name/word does not exist in all of the Internets.
Get my drift?
The Kahlo name issue, was of course somewhat kindled by my own last name issue.
"Is that Italian?" is the question that I'm used to getting, except in New England, where it is usually a more blunt "What are you?"

PLAY BY PLAY at Project 4

Project 4 will host Play by Play, a pop-up FLEX focus collaboration developed by guest curator Kayleigh Bryant. The show runs Jan 11 - Feb 1, 2014, with an opening reception Saturday, Jan. 11 from 7-9PM.

This exploration of the darker side of children's playtime features the work of Amy Hughes Braden, Bridget Sue Lambert, Janelle Whisenant, and Mark Williams. The sticky place between childhood innocence and adult realism is examined through different exercises in subverted play.

The artists in Play by Play dig into the malaise, mediocrity, sexuality, and violence implied by commonplace toys and imagery of childhood by re-appropriating these objects within complex juxtapositions of adult ideals. Braden's paintings of children and families offer a stark glimpse into the transitional moment straddling childhood and adulthood. Lambert's staged doll and dollhouse photography exposes the sexual and sexist implications of such toys. Whisenant's mutant stuffed-animal creatures question the cycle of childhood materiality. Williams' toy soldiers mock the implied oversimplification of war as a child's play.

FLEX is a group of artists and curators who come together to produce a series of exciting temporary exhibitions. Focusing on projects that do not rely on a stationary base of operations, FLEX is able to adapt to different locations to engage a variety of audiences and contexts. FLEX's loose framework provides a platform for an ever-changing cast of independent curators and artists to test the boundaries of visual expression and probe new ways of connecting with the viewer. As an open model, FLEX allows exhibitions to be dynamic and adapt to the spaces they inhabit. Mobile gallery spaces, outdoor projection units, site-specific installations, drawing machines, and 3D Printing are some of the tactics employed.  The curator, Kayleigh Bryant is a young Washington, DC-based curator, arts professional and freelance arts critic for outlets including Examiner.com, CBS Local DC Online and Brightest Young Things.com.

Getting ready to haul the Xmas tree home!

Lessons learned at AU

American University was locked down on Wednesday night when a person with a gun was spotted on campus at the same time that faculty member Alida Anderson and her class of future teachers were undertaking their final presentations for the semester. Alida’s course was taking place ...

Read the WaPo story here... 

AU now has the opportunity to do a full scrub on this issue and gather some great lessons learned from this event... one clear one is that something easy and simple has to be developed and placed in each classroom to allow the class to lock the doors from the inside... but in any event, I am very proud of my wife!