A blizzard is enforced surrender. Just stop. No where to go. Nothing to do. We wait in our cocoons while nature takes her course. Let go and let her have her way. A power greater than ourselves, all of our selves, the entire megalopolis of our selves reminds us that it's her world. All disappears beneath the frozen purity. A white hush descends.- Amy Marx
Saturday, January 23, 2016
A Blizzard is Enforced Surrender
Touchstone Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists
Open Call for Applications
Deadline: March 31, 2016
WHAT is it?
The
Fellowship provides a 2 year membership in Touchstone Gallery in
downtown DC. This guarantees a solo exhibition as well as participation
in gallery group shows, mentorship and a presence on the gallery
website. The monetary value of the fellowship exceeds $4500.00
WHO can apply?
The Fellowship is awarded to 1 or more emerging artists in the Washington area who have not been represented by a commercial gallery in at least 10 years.
HOW to apply?
The application process for the 2016-2018 fellowship program is now open. The application and related information can be found on the TFA website,
www.touchstonefoundationdc.org
www.touchstonefoundationdc.org
Friday, January 22, 2016
Trevor Young at Addison/Ripley Fine Art
TREVOR YOUNG
VOLTAGE
JANUARY 30 - MARCH 5, 2016
opening reception for the artist
Saturday, January 30th 5-7pm
 |
| Trevor Young, Two Currents, 2016, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches |
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Montgomery County High School Students and Teachers Exhibition
Washington ArtWorks is the largest visual arts center in Montgomery County and
will be hosting an opening reception for a gallery exhibition on
Friday, February 5th from 6-9pm.
The exhibition in both of their galleries is of photography work created by Montgomery County high school students and their instructors.
The exhibition in both of their galleries is of photography work created by Montgomery County high school students and their instructors.
The Montgomery County High School Photography Show features
photography by high school students and their instructors. This
exhibition gives hundreds of students across Montgomery County their
first opportunity to display in a professional gallery, supporting the
integration of the arts in high schools.
Opening reception of Montgomery County High School Students and Teachers Exhibition
Opening Date: Friday, February 5th
Time: 6-9pm
Dates of Exhibition: February 5th - February 26th
Cost: Free and Open to the Public
Contact #: 301.654.1998
Address: 12276 Wilkins Ave. Rockville, MD 20852
Website: http://washingtonartworks.com/galleries-events
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
The curious case of private museums
Most excellent report at the link:
- To date there are 317 privately founded contemporary art museums in the world.
- The top 5 ranks by number of museums are held by South Korea, the United States, Germany, followed by China and Italy.
- The South Korean city of Seoul leads the ranking with 13 museums, followed by Berlin and Beijing with 9 each.
- The average size of a private museum is about 3,400square-meter.
- More than one third (35%) of private museums have over 20,000 visitors per year.
- The average age of a private museum founder is 65.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT: https://www.larryslist.com/reports.php
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
A thought to shape the Shape of Things to Come
“It’s also important not to become angry, no matter how difficult life is, because you can lose all hope if you can’t laugh at yourself and at life in general.”
- Stephen Hawking
Monday, January 18, 2016
What Dan Zak did
Over the years, decades really, I've been complaining about the way in which the Washington Post treats its own visual arts backyard. If you go back to the very beginnings of this blog, well over a decade ago, you'll find it hard to see a week's worth of postings where I'm not complaining or bitching about something that the WaPo did, or most often didn't do, about our visual arts scene, galleries and artists.
When I first came to the DMV in the late 1980s (1987-1989) it was as a young Lieutenant in the Navy, and in those years I spent most of my summers sailing in the Arctic off the then Soviet mainland at the top of the world, I started reading the WaPo regularly. Back then, the WaPo had a daily section titled The Arts, which covered art galleries, museums, regional visual artists, etc., in addition to all the other genres of the arts.
I left the area for a few years, and lived in Scotland, and then in Sonoma, CA. I returned to the DC area in late 1993, and by then the precipitous decline in the WaPo's coverage of its city's visual art scene was just beginning.
I then began writing about the DMV visual arts scene for a lot of local, regional and national magazines, in the process becoming deeply immersed in the scene itself. In those latter years of the 1990s, the WaPo's Arts Editor was a nice, kind man named John Pancake. I developed a professional relationship with him, and every once in a while we'd meet for coffee and discuss the area's visual arts. It was he who once described deciding to open an art gallery as a "heroic undertaking."
In those years the paper still had multiple columns covering the visual arts, which included the usual Wednesday Galleries column, then authored by Ferdinand Protzman, as well as other ad hoc gallery and museum reviews by Paul Richards. It also included a weekly Wednesday column titled Arts Beat, then authored by Michael O'Sullivan, who as I recall held the title of Assistant Arts Editor. Arts Beat reflected the interests of its author, and essentially augmented the paper's coverage of the DC area visual arts scene.
By the end of the 90s, things began to unravel.
Almost against the will of the WaPo's leadership (as related to me back then by one of the editors of the WaPo Online), the newspaper went on a major expansion of its online presence and also an associated expansion of its printed paper coverage. This included the visual arts, and I was hired, along with Jessica Dawson and others, as freelancers to cover gallery shows for the paper's online site (I wonder where all those reviews are now - have they ever been archived and preserved by the WaPo?).
I can't remember exactly when Richards retired, but his retirement (to Scotland I think) caused all kinds of minor waves for the DC art scene. First, Protzman quit, some say because he was upset that he didn't get "promoted" to Richards' job. Instead, the WaPo began a hiring process and eventually brought Blake Gopnik from his Canadian newspaper to take over as the paper's chief art critic (my titling).
Protzman's departure also brought a need for a regular freelancer to do the Galleries column, and several of those of us who were doing online reviews about Galleries were interviewed. I declined the position once we got deep into it - at the time, as some of you may recall, I was also part of the Fraser Gallery, and didn't think that being a gallery co-owner and a regular Wednesday critic for the paper would pass the smell test with some; but the real victims would be the gallery's artists, as clearly they could never get at WaPo reviews.
Around 2000, Dawson (who had been writing art reviews for the Washington City Paper) was then hired as the freelancer to cover galleries and subsequently Gopnik was hired to cover all the visual arts.
A few years later Pancake retired, and by the mid 2000s the Wednesday coverage shrunk significantly when Arts Beat was demoted to a twice-monthly column, refocused to cover all the arts, and then eventually terminated. Most of the damage to the visual arts coverage was started by then Style Section editor Eugene Robinson.
It was Robinson who began the process to let Blake Gopnik get away with only reviewing (with one or two very rare exceptions) museums, thus having the nation's only art critic too good to review his city's artists and art galleries. On July 6, 2006, Steve Reiss (the Style section's Asst. Editor) stated online: "As for Blake Gopnik, he is a prolific writer and I find it hard to argue that we should be giving up reviews of major museum shows so he can write more about galleries that have a much smaller audience."
When Robinson left, under the new editor Deborah Heard, the coverage got even worse, with Galleries being reduced to twice a month. That added up to around 25 columns a year to review the thousand or so gallery shows that the DC area gallery art scene had to offer in those days.
A few years ago, when Dawson quit the WaPo (2011) to go to work for the Hirshhorn and in the interim, the WaPo experimented with using a couple more freelancers, but both experiments ended badly from both sides. Eventually they hired Mark Jenkins, who is their current Galleries critic, and who (in my opinion) is the best from all the names mentioned here so far.
What is a constant over all these years and memories, is the miserly coverage of DMV artists and galleries by the world's second most influential newspaper.
And then this past weekend, WaPo writer Dan Zak showed us a brilliant glint of what this coverage could be, if the WaPo "got it."
Zak's The Polaroids of the Cowboy Poet is perhaps the best article that I have ever read on an artist.
Dan Zak: Well Done! You've not only delivered a brilliant article, but also shown the WaPo and Washington, DC, and the DMV visual arts scene, how it is done.
When I first came to the DMV in the late 1980s (1987-1989) it was as a young Lieutenant in the Navy, and in those years I spent most of my summers sailing in the Arctic off the then Soviet mainland at the top of the world, I started reading the WaPo regularly. Back then, the WaPo had a daily section titled The Arts, which covered art galleries, museums, regional visual artists, etc., in addition to all the other genres of the arts.
I left the area for a few years, and lived in Scotland, and then in Sonoma, CA. I returned to the DC area in late 1993, and by then the precipitous decline in the WaPo's coverage of its city's visual art scene was just beginning.
I then began writing about the DMV visual arts scene for a lot of local, regional and national magazines, in the process becoming deeply immersed in the scene itself. In those latter years of the 1990s, the WaPo's Arts Editor was a nice, kind man named John Pancake. I developed a professional relationship with him, and every once in a while we'd meet for coffee and discuss the area's visual arts. It was he who once described deciding to open an art gallery as a "heroic undertaking."
In those years the paper still had multiple columns covering the visual arts, which included the usual Wednesday Galleries column, then authored by Ferdinand Protzman, as well as other ad hoc gallery and museum reviews by Paul Richards. It also included a weekly Wednesday column titled Arts Beat, then authored by Michael O'Sullivan, who as I recall held the title of Assistant Arts Editor. Arts Beat reflected the interests of its author, and essentially augmented the paper's coverage of the DC area visual arts scene.
By the end of the 90s, things began to unravel.
Almost against the will of the WaPo's leadership (as related to me back then by one of the editors of the WaPo Online), the newspaper went on a major expansion of its online presence and also an associated expansion of its printed paper coverage. This included the visual arts, and I was hired, along with Jessica Dawson and others, as freelancers to cover gallery shows for the paper's online site (I wonder where all those reviews are now - have they ever been archived and preserved by the WaPo?).
I can't remember exactly when Richards retired, but his retirement (to Scotland I think) caused all kinds of minor waves for the DC art scene. First, Protzman quit, some say because he was upset that he didn't get "promoted" to Richards' job. Instead, the WaPo began a hiring process and eventually brought Blake Gopnik from his Canadian newspaper to take over as the paper's chief art critic (my titling).
Protzman's departure also brought a need for a regular freelancer to do the Galleries column, and several of those of us who were doing online reviews about Galleries were interviewed. I declined the position once we got deep into it - at the time, as some of you may recall, I was also part of the Fraser Gallery, and didn't think that being a gallery co-owner and a regular Wednesday critic for the paper would pass the smell test with some; but the real victims would be the gallery's artists, as clearly they could never get at WaPo reviews.
Around 2000, Dawson (who had been writing art reviews for the Washington City Paper) was then hired as the freelancer to cover galleries and subsequently Gopnik was hired to cover all the visual arts.
A few years later Pancake retired, and by the mid 2000s the Wednesday coverage shrunk significantly when Arts Beat was demoted to a twice-monthly column, refocused to cover all the arts, and then eventually terminated. Most of the damage to the visual arts coverage was started by then Style Section editor Eugene Robinson.
It was Robinson who began the process to let Blake Gopnik get away with only reviewing (with one or two very rare exceptions) museums, thus having the nation's only art critic too good to review his city's artists and art galleries. On July 6, 2006, Steve Reiss (the Style section's Asst. Editor) stated online: "As for Blake Gopnik, he is a prolific writer and I find it hard to argue that we should be giving up reviews of major museum shows so he can write more about galleries that have a much smaller audience."
When Robinson left, under the new editor Deborah Heard, the coverage got even worse, with Galleries being reduced to twice a month. That added up to around 25 columns a year to review the thousand or so gallery shows that the DC area gallery art scene had to offer in those days.
A few years ago, when Dawson quit the WaPo (2011) to go to work for the Hirshhorn and in the interim, the WaPo experimented with using a couple more freelancers, but both experiments ended badly from both sides. Eventually they hired Mark Jenkins, who is their current Galleries critic, and who (in my opinion) is the best from all the names mentioned here so far.
What is a constant over all these years and memories, is the miserly coverage of DMV artists and galleries by the world's second most influential newspaper.
And then this past weekend, WaPo writer Dan Zak showed us a brilliant glint of what this coverage could be, if the WaPo "got it."
Zak's The Polaroids of the Cowboy Poet is perhaps the best article that I have ever read on an artist.
Chris Earnshaw is an odd and brilliant and sloppy man who vibrates with great joy and grand melancholy. For decades he has ambled through bandstands, major motion pictures and demolition sites, searching for prestige and permanence, all while being ignored on the gray streets of a humdrum capital.This work has Pulitzer written all over it, but more importantly, this article is exactly the sort of coverage of the DMV visual artists and galleries, that we've always clamored from the WaPo to do 2-3 times a year - as they do when some celebrity visits the city.
Dan Zak: Well Done! You've not only delivered a brilliant article, but also shown the WaPo and Washington, DC, and the DMV visual arts scene, how it is done.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
At NOVA-Annandale’s Verizon Gallery
In celebration of 50 years in education, opportunities, and student success, Northern Virginia Community College has arranged a diverse art show at NOVA-Annandale’s Verizon Gallery in the Richard J. Ernst Community Cultural Center, featuring the work of NOVA art faculty and emeriti.
Dr. Erin Devine, assistant professor and director of the New Gallery for Contemporary Art co-curated the show with Schlesinger Center Exhibition Director Mary Welch Higgins.
“While curating and organizing this show with my colleagues, I learned quite a bit about the beginnings of NOVA from some of the emeriti artists like Michael Platt and Rebecca Kamen," Higgins said. “As I started looking at the work I noticed that, through multiple generations, it reflects the strength of the art department at NOVA and the different art classes the College offers.”
Dr. Erin Devine, assistant professor and director of the New Gallery for Contemporary Art co-curated the show with Schlesinger Center Exhibition Director Mary Welch Higgins.
“While curating and organizing this show with my colleagues, I learned quite a bit about the beginnings of NOVA from some of the emeriti artists like Michael Platt and Rebecca Kamen," Higgins said. “As I started looking at the work I noticed that, through multiple generations, it reflects the strength of the art department at NOVA and the different art classes the College offers.”
Twenty-six current NOVA faculty and emeriti contributed to the show, displaying a diverse collection of thought-provoking pieces that successfully highlight each artists’ creativity and love for exploring different art mediums. The NOVA 50th Anniversary Art Exhibition will be on display in the Verizon Gallery from Jan. 5 to Feb. 7 with an artists’ reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Jan. 28.
The Verizon Gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and often on weekends when events are scheduled. For more information about the art show, please see the press release on NOVA’s website.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Akemi Maegawa's "Plurality"
DMV area uber artist Akemi Maegawa has a three-month solo show (titled "Plurality") coming up at UMUC. "From hundreds of works I have made over the last 10 years, 23 artworks were selected and curated for this solo show," she notes.
Opening Reception will take place on February 7th. If you can come to the opening, please RSVP through their website.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Cuba in Jail
For TBT: "Isla Prision (Prison Island)", c. 1978, charcoal on paper, done while a
student at the University of Washington School of Art, where I studied art from 1977-1981.
 |
| "Isla Prision (Prison Island)"By F. Lennox Campello c. 1978, Charcoal on paper In a private collection in New Jersey |
Asshole of the Week: Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association
The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association has banned high school students from chanting certain words and phrases at basketball games, and none of them are remotely close to being hurtful or inappropriate.The generation of the easily offended strikes again! Details here.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Wanna go to an opening this Friday?
Wash: New Paintings by Greg Minah
January 15 - February 14, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, January 15th, 7-9 P.M.
(Please RSVP at the Facebook Event Page and feel free to share and invite others!)
VisArts
Gibbs Street Gallery
155 Gibbs Street, Rockville, MD 20850
www.visartsatrockville.org
January 15 - February 14, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, January 15th, 7-9 P.M.
(Please RSVP at the Facebook Event Page and feel free to share and invite others!)
VisArts
Gibbs Street Gallery
155 Gibbs Street, Rockville, MD 20850
www.visartsatrockville.org
Artist residency by the sea
It's time to apply for the Goetemann Artist Residency. Selected Artists
will spend a month in a beautiful harbor-front live-work space In The Rocky Neck Artists Colony, Gloucester, Ma.
Monday, January 11, 2016
"Wake effect" - more empirical data
If you don't know what the art fair "wake effect" is, then read this.
Latest wake effect is the sale of the below piece to a Philadelphia collector who saw it at Context Art Miami last December and then followed up with the gallery a few days ago and purchased it.
Latest wake effect is the sale of the below piece to a Philadelphia collector who saw it at Context Art Miami last December and then followed up with the gallery a few days ago and purchased it.
 |
| "Portnoy's Complaint" (From the Written on the Body Series) by F. Lennox Campello Charcoal and Conte on Paper 2014. 11x13 inches. Matted and framed to 16x20 inches In a private collection in Philadelphia, PA |
Sunday, January 10, 2016
The Batman Brooding
 |
| The Batman Brooding (Version II) By F. Lennox Campello c. 2015, Charcoal on Paper, 12x36 inches |
 |
| The Batman Brooding (Version II) By F. Lennox Campello c. 2015, Charcoal on Paper, 36x36 inches |
Saturday, January 09, 2016
Superhombre Flying Naked
This piece went to Miami for Context Art Miami last December and now lives in Canada.
 |
| Superhombre Flying Naked 36x36 inches - Charcoal on Paper c. 2015 by F. Lennox Campello In a private collection in Montreal, Canada |
Friday, January 08, 2016
The Pope on Art
For Pope Francis, "a work of art is the strongest evidence that incarnation is possible." It is an idea expressed in his book "La Mia Idea Di Arte" (My Idea of Art), co-written with Italian journalist Tiziana Lupi.Details here.
Bethesda Art Walk is today
The first Bethesda Art Walk of 2016 will be held today Friday, Jan. 8, 2016. Stop by one of these local art spaces for new creative works in art + design.
Consider It Done
7806 Old Georgetown Road
Gallery B
7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E
The Lost Herd
4800 Auburn Avenue
Studio B
7475 Wisconsin Avenue, Lower Level
Union Hardware
7800 Wisconsin Avenue
Waverly Street Gallery
4600 East-West Highway
7806 Old Georgetown Road
Gallery B
7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E
The Lost Herd
4800 Auburn Avenue
Studio B
7475 Wisconsin Avenue, Lower Level
Union Hardware
7800 Wisconsin Avenue
Waverly Street Gallery
4600 East-West Highway
Thursday, January 07, 2016
Art Scam Alert!
Beware of this mutant, trying the old rip off scheme:
From: Kenneth Jackson (kjackson1111@outlook.com)
Sent: Thu 1/07/16 5:53 AM
Hi there,
I'm an art lover/collector and I'm collecting a few pieces to design the living room and stairway in my new house.I came across your artworks and I find them captivating. I would love to have some of your pieces. Let me know the pieces you have available including their sizes,materials and prices so I can make an order. You can also send me some pictures.
Thanks,
Kenneth.
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