Hypocritical art or political art?

Gone are the days when modern art used sex to earn your embarrassed attention. The latest Venice Biennale shows that to get international visibility these days, contemporary art must play with something much hotter: politics.

 Hypocritical art or political art? Details here.

Stolen Rodin recovered in NYC

From the folks at Art Recovery Group:

LONDON, 9 JULY 2015 – A version of Auguste Rodin’s ‘Young Girl with Serpent’ stolen 24 years ago has been recovered in New York.

In 1991, thieves stole artwork valued at over $1 million USD in a series of raids on a private residence in Beverly Hills whilst the owners were out of town. Among a number of high-value works of fine art stolen during the robberies was an edition of ‘Young Girl with Serpent’ by esteemed French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).

The residence was left unoccupied for several weeks, allowing multiple visits by thieves whose access had been arranged by the victims’ trusted housekeeper. It is understood that the individual in whose care the residence was regularly left had bragged about his employers’ wealth at a local bar and was convinced to sell a duplicate of the house keys for $5,000 when propositioned by criminals.

Upon their return, the victims described their home as looking as though it ‘had been hit by an earthquake’ and, with no sign of their housekeeper, they immediately informed the Beverly Hills Police Department of his assumed involvement in the crime. A police search identified the existence of a previously-unknown arrest warrant for the housekeeper, issued in his native Switzerland. He was subsequently tracked to a Miami hotel and arrested whilst sunbathing by the pool.

The location of all stolen items remained unknown until Rodin’s ‘Young Girl with Serpent’ was identified when consigned for sale at Christie’s in New York.  Art Recovery Group was appointed by the insurer and led the negotiations with the consignor’s legal representative. With title to the work unconditionally relinquished by the consignor, the sculpture has been offered back to the theft victims in line with the benefits of their insurance policy.

Speaking this morning, Christopher A. Marinello, CEO of Art Recovery Group, said:

“This case was a perfect example of public and private sector collaboration. We are extremely grateful for the steadfast determination of the Beverly Hills Police Department, and in particular the perseverance of Detective Michael Corren, in keeping this case open for 24 years and seeing through its resolution."

Additional artworks taken in the raid remain unaccounted for but the outstanding losses have been recorded on the ArtClaim Database. The last time the Rodin was offered for sale at Christie’s, its value was estimated at around $100,000.

In accordance with the confidential resolution agreed between the loss victim and their insurance company, this work will now be consigned for sale later this year.

Artist's Talk

My good friend Philip Brookman (former Corcoran photog curator, current NGA) has a new book combining his photos and a novella. 

He's speaking at the new Takoma Busboy on July 21st in the reading room named after Communist poet (and suffocater of Cuban voices while he was the President of the National Cuban Writers' Union), Nicolás Guillén.

Brookman will be in conversation with Henry Allen, a former WaPo journalist, poet, and novelist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.
  Details here.

Goslee and Carlson at the Athenaeum

The Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association (NVFAA) has announced exhibitions by David Carlson and Pat Goslee, in the Athenaeum Gallery. Carlson and Goslee are abstract artists whose works "explore the fields of energy and consciousness inherent in their creative process."

Opening Reception: Sunday, July 26, 4:00 — 6:00, FREE

Carlson’s paintings, video and performance pieces have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including the Pretoria Art Museum, Wichita Falls Museum of Art, Ludwig Forum, John Cabot University, Korean Embassy Cultural Service, Yacine Art Gallery, Asilah Arts Festival, Musee Des Tapisseries, Tutun Deposu, Arlington Arts Center, McLean for the Arts, and the Washington Project for the Arts. His paintings are represented in numerous collections both private and corporate, national and international. He has taught design, drawing and painting for 25 years at Marymount University and has participated in artist exchanges with Central Asia, West Africa, and North Africa and Europe.

Goslee’s work is included in the permanent collections of the National Institutes of Health, the Children’s National Medical Center, the US Embassy in Ethiopia, the US Embassy in Nepal, the Wilson Building (DC City Hall), the Washington Post, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the University of Georgia as well as in many private collections. She has served on the Board of Directors for the Washington Arts Museum (WAM) and the DC Arts Center (DCAC), and the Advisory Committee for International Arts & Artists’ Hillyer Art Space. She received a BFA in graphic design from the University of Georgia and an MFA in painting from Catholic University. She has been a visiting artist lecturer at local institutions including American University and the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

 

The Athenaeum Gallery, 201 Prince Street, Alexandria, VA  22314  703 548 0035   nvfaa.org

Campello at Auction

This art school drawing of mine somehow made its way to an European auction house and will be at auction July 16.

Check it out here - going for a good price.

VMFA FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

VMFA is committed to supporting professional artists and art students who demonstrate exceptional creative ability in their chosen discipline and, as such has awarded more than $5 million to Virginia's artists since the program's creation. This year marks the 75th anniversary of VMFA's Fellowship Program. 

A dedicated microsite and documentary to the 75-year history of the program is at http://vmfa.museum/programs/75th-anniversary/.
 
VMFA offers $8,000 awards to professional artists, $6,000 awards to graduate students, and $4,000 awards to undergraduate students.  Applicants may apply in the disciplines of Crafts, Drawing, Film/Video, Mixed Media, New/Emerging Media, Painting, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture, and Art History (graduate students only).  All applicants must be legal residents of Virginia and student applicants must be enrolled full-time in degree-seeking programs. Applicants' works are reviewed anonymously by distinguished jurors and awards are made based on artistic merit.  
 

The deadline for Fellowship applications is Friday, November 6, 2015. Full eligibility criteria can be found at www.VMFA.museum/fellowships.  

Artomatic baby!

Stop the press!  Artomatic is moving ahead in its efforts to arrange for a 90,000 square foot space in Prince Georges County in partnership with the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission (MNCPP), who are our hosts.

 

MNCPP Tours - want to see the space? You're invited to check it out!

 
LOCATION:
8100 Corporate Drive
Hyattsville, MD 20785
 
The site is a 10 minute walk from the New Carrollton Metro station, and there is lots of parking at 8100 Corporate Drive.
 
Thursday July 9th - 6 - 7 pm

Saturday July 11th - 10 - 11 am
 

Got questions? 

Call George Koch at 202-607-0879 or email him at george.koch@artomatic.org

Opportunities for Howard County artists

The Howard County Arts Council is now accepting submissions for Art Howard County 2015.

If you are a visual artist, 18 years of age or older, who lives, works or studies in Howard County, MD, you are eligible to apply to this biennial, juried exhibit. 

The juror for Art Howard County 2015 will be Paula L. Phillips, Community Artist and Professor at Maryland Institute College of Art. Details for entry are included in the prospectus and entry form, available for download on the ‘Exhibits’ page of the Arts Council website, for pick-up at the Howard County Center for the Arts, or by mail by calling 410-313-2787 or emailing info@hocoarts.org. The deadline for submissions is 11:59p.m. on Monday, August 31, 2015.

 

Art Howard County 2015 will be on display in Gallery I at the Howard County Center for the Arts from October 30 through December 11, 2015. A free public reception on November 6 from 6-8 p.m. will include juror remarks as well as the presentation of a minimum of $500 in juror awards. 

 

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 10AM - 8PM, Saturday 10AM - 4PM, and Sunday 12 - 4PM.  To learn more about HCAC programs and exhibits, call 410-313-ARTS (2787) or visit www.hocoarts.org.  

Studio gallery's 50th!

Congratulations to Studio Gallery, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary! In gallery years that's longer than the Roman Empire!

More details here.

AAFNYC

We will be at the Fall Affordable Art Fair in NYC next September! 9th year in a row.

Showcasing work by Anne Cherubim, Ned Martin and Sang Joon Park!


"Bread and Butterfly" Oil on Aluminum by Ned Martin 24x24 inches, circa 2014


Excitable Cells  Acrylic on canvas by Anne Cherubim 20x20 inches, circa 2013

Untitled
Ceramics by Sang Joon Park
Dimensions variable, circa 2014

Happy Fourth!

Blue Mountain Family Restaurant

We usually drive from DC to the Poconos via I-81, but as there was construction going on... this time we took I-78 and discovered this great family owned restaurant... From now on we will be taking this route just to eat at this joint; If I could give them 100 stars I would!

The Blue Mountain Family Restaurant in Shartlesville, PA.

Super friendly staff to start with... they employ an army of people, so there's always someone within eyesight! When we got there around fivish, the place was fairly empty; by the time we left around six, it was packed to the gills.

We had the buffet, which was spectacular. The salad bar was well stacked and included two kinds of cole slaw - both delicious and fresh cut up fruit and several kinds of rolls... Also hot bacon dressing, which must be some kind of Amish or German delicacy, but I passed on that.

At the buffet, everything looked home made... The oven baked fish plate was excellent, there was a ham carving station and a stack of the largest ribs that's I've seen in ages. 

There was also a sweet potato mash to die for... Just good old comfort food! 

Also a large variety of desserts, with two kinds of German chocolate cake!

Bottom line: If you're driving on I-78, stop for chow at the Blue Mountain in Shartlesville, PA!

How to eat a mango

For TBT: Originally published in 2011:

Here's another peek at some of the writing that I've been doing about my early childhood in Guantanamo, Cuba. This particular chapter has a section which deals with the art of mango-eating which I think you may find of interest.

The chapter in question essentially describes my neighborhood and the below segment picks up on a house up the street from my grandparents' house which had a huge mango tree:

Next to Mongo’s house was another walled house where Enrique “El Manco” lived. His nickname was slang for someone missing a hand, although Enrique had both hands, but was missing several fingers from one of them. His front yard boasted a huge mango tree. It was easily the largest tree for blocks around, and during mango season, the huge branches, loaded with fruit, that hung above the street were an unending supply source of mangos for everyone with a good aim to knock some of them off with rocks and then pick them off the street.

But soon all the mangos from the branches that over hanged onto the streets were gone, and then we had to actually sneak into the walled garden and climb the tree and knock some mangos to the ground, climb down, grab them and scram back to the street before anyone in the house noticed the intrusion. This was nearly impossible, as it seemed that every member of Enrique’s family was always on the lookout for mango thieves, as the mango tree was a source of income, since they sold them by the bag-full from the side of their house.

The art of eating a mango deserves some attention.

There are several ways. The first one, and the most easy to perform by amateur mango eaters, is simply to take the mango, cut into it with a knife and slice off the meaty parts, peel the skin off and eat the hard slices.

Seldom did a mango knocked off Enrique’s tree make it to any house to be eaten this way.

Once you knocked off a mango, and provided that no one grabbed it before you got to it – as there was always a group of mango rock throwers, and anytime a mango came down, it was always a debate as to exactly whose rock had brought the fruit down. Cubans love to debate just about anything, and the mango debates provided very good training on this art. Anyway, once you had a mango, then you ran to either the shade of my grandparents' house’s portico or the bakery’s veranda to enjoy the fruit.

Here’s the proper way to eat a mango.

First roll it back and forth on the ground, a tiled floor is perfect, to mush up the inside of the mango. Then, using you fingertips, really liquefy the mango pulp by gently squeezing the mango over and over. Once that pulp is almost nothing but juice, with your teeth puncture a small hole at the tip of the mango.

You can now squeeze the mango and suck the juice through that hole. It’s sort of a nature-made box drink!

Once all the mango juice is all gone, now comes the messy part. No one, not even the British, has ever discovered a way to eat a mango without making a mess.

Once the juice is gone, then you bite the skin, strip it away from the seed, lick it clean and then begin to bite away all the strands of mango fiber still attached to the seed. By the time a good mango eater is done with a mango, the mango seed looks like a yellowish bar of used soap, slick and fiber-less.

Of course, your face and chest area are now completely covered in dried up, sticky mango juice, so then you'd usually head back home to clean up with the garden hose and drink water to quell the thirst that the mango sugar causes.

That’s how one eats a mango – at least in my childhood neighborhood.

Confederate Cubans

 In view of recent events...

"A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, [her name was] Loreta Janeta Velazquez, fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford.

As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man.

In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find 'the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent' — Velazquez herself."

This is sort of a Cuban-Southerner-Confederate "Fidelio."

Loreta Janeta Velazquez along with Cuban Confederate Colonel: The Life of Ambrosio José Gonzales by Antonio Rafael de la Cova and "the definitive biography of a Cuban and Confederate rebel", are two curious examples of Cuba's alignment with the South during the Civil War.

Get the book here.

The Cuban dictatorship

If you think that the Castro brothers and their band of criminals will ever let loose their strangle hold on the Cuban people's neck, then as Dostoevsky so elegantly puts it in The House of the Dead:

Tyranny...finally develops into a disease. The habit can...coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate...the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible.

Warrant arrest for Shepard Fairey

And then there was this:

Detroit police have issued an arrest warrant for the artist who created the famous "Hope" poster in support of President Obama during the 2008 election, it was revealed Wednesday. 

The Detroit Free Press reported that Shepard Fairey faces two felony counts of malicious destruction of property.... In an interview with Esquire magazine published last month, Fairey said Obama had not lived up to the expectations he had when supported his campaign.

 All the details here.

Homage to a beautiful voice

The other day I was driving around the DMV listening to NPR when the voice of the new lady who does the credits for NPR came on. I reached for the knob and turned the volume up just to hear her voice.

It wasn't the first time that I had done that in the last few weeks, but this time my brain became aware of what I was doing: I was turning the volume up on the radio just to hear the voice of an unknown person... just to hear her voice... and she was essentially doing an ad!

What the heck? That's a little weird, right?

But then the sound waves of her hypnotizing voice flowed over the 88.5 WAMU airwaves, and it captured me once again. This time, aware of what I was doing, I awaited the tiny "ehh" sound that she makes as she skillfully breathes in between long sentences, as words, like tiny silk webs, flow out of her throat. That little "ehh" somehow was able to make me smile.

I don't know who the anonymous voice over for NPR's funding credits is, but I do know that she has the most beautiful voice on the planet. I would bet that she is somewhat tall (a voice like that needs an appropriate vehicle) and I just know that she has a long, elegant neck. Not as long as Parmigianino's Madonna dal Collo Lungo (Madonna with Long Neck), but she'd make a perfect model for a contemporary interpretation of that Mannerist masterpiece. It takes a breath-taking neck like that to deliver the melody that is her voice.

Whoever and wherever you are: thank you for giving me such a wonderful and unexpected pleasure on a daily basis.

Opportunity for female Artists

Call For Entry: CREATING CONNECTIONS
A Commission & Print Replication Project

Application Deadline: Saturday, August 1, 2015

MAP, in partnership with CyberPoint International is pleased to announce an open ‘Call to Artists’. As an extension of MAP’s annual IMPRINT Project, MAP is working with CyberPoint to offer a unique opportunity to female visual artists of the greater Baltimore metropolitan area. Collectively, MAP and CyberPoint wish to commission and license the image of a new work of art. The image of that artwork will be reproduced in a limited edition and presented to the guests of CyberPoint’s Women in Cyber Security reception on November 19, 2015.

The selected artist will receive a $750 Cash Award, increased visibility of artist’s name and artwork through press announcements and be highlighted on MAP and Cyberpoint's websites. Print production sponsored by CyberPoint.
Download the full application and guidelines here.
 

30 years of drawing

Gallery B call for artists

The Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District and Bethesda Urban Partnership are accepting applications for Gallery B 2016 exhibitions.

This gallery (the former Fraser Gallery), located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E in downtown Bethesda, is available to interested artists and arts organizations for one-month rentals. All media including, but not limited to, painting, photography and sculpture is eligible to use the space. Gallery B does not take a commission on any artwork sold during the exhibition.  

 

They are seeking applications from local artists and arts organizations for month-long exhibitions in 2016. Gallery B has approximately 1,500 sq. feet of available exhibition space. The deadline for submission is August 3, 2015.

To be considered for a solo or group exhibition, and to review the gallery requirements, please complete this application.

 

Questions?  Please send them an email to artist@bethesda.org.