From: "Dave Gordon"The scam works like this.
Hello,
I would like to make an order for some works.
Do you ship internationally?
Let me know if payment is accepted by Master card or Visa card.
Regards,
Dave Gordon
Bruguera and Casanella were pulled over due to an alleged technical or administrative problem with the van they had rented, which was laden with donated mattresses and rice destined for citizens of Baracoa, a city that was pummeled by Matthew in October...
...Casanella was allegedly physically attacked during his detention, and Bruguera was questioned for six hours by four counterintelligence officers and Lieutenant Colonel Kenia, who has monitored the artist’s activities in the past. The point of the questioning and the pretext for the pair’s detention remain unknown, but Bruguera will not be permitted to deliver the donated goods to hurricane victims in Baracoa. She plans to travel back to Boston to teach her class at Harvard University today, assuming Cuban authorities allow her to leave the country.Read the whole report here, and put your own artistic issues in perspective.
The Alper Initiative for Washington Art is the gift of Carolyn Small Alper, a Washington artist, AU alumna, and philanthropist. It provides the space and resources to fulfill one of the American University Museums’s primary objectives and meet one of the region’s greatest needs: to promote an understanding and appreciation of our region’s art and artists from our past, present, and future. It is an exhibition space and a place for study and research. But it is first of all a meeting place for people and ideas. Its most important contribution to the Washington region may well be the opportunities it provides for us to exchange perceptions and, perhaps, rewrite the history of Washington art.
The Initiative presents five exhibitions of regional artists each year, creates publications and programming to engage and build the audience for Washington art, and serves as a resource for its study and critical appreciation. Curators are solicited to propose appropriate exhibitions, and artists are invited to submit their work for consideration on our website.
The Initiative is a part of a thriving museum that for ten years has specialized in presenting Washington artists in the larger context of national and international contemporary art. Washington art is strong, intelligent, and relevant, and has earned a prominent place in contemporary cultural discourse. Thanks to the Alper Initiative for Washington Art, we have the means to present serious, focused exhibitions for all the world’s appreciation and enlightenment.
Jack Rasmussen
Director and Curator
American University Museum
Andy Maybo, president of The Fraternal Order of Police District of Columbia Lodge #1 said, “This piece of art, which depicts officers as pigs, is both offensive and disgusting. During a time in our society when tensions are so high that someone can be offended by a single word, this painting does nothing but attack law enforcement to its core. The fact that a member of Congress would advocate and praise such a painting is reprehensible. We, in law enforcement, regardless of the police department we work for, are held to higher standards that certain Members of Congress now have made a mockery of.”And then Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) personally removed the painting from the wall, and then the painting became a political football, as narrative art often does... you never see anyone bitching about abstract art, do you?
This year, the Crystal City Business Improvement District (CCBID) welcomes Artomatic back to Arlington County for the third time in a 100,000 square foot space, located at 1800 S Bell Street with a spring opening date on Friday March 24th.
Artomatic is well-known for transforming empty spaces into vibrant arts communities that create unique and exciting events for tens of thousands of visitors - all free to visit. Anyone can show art at Artomatic - it is non-juried and art is selected on a first-come, first serve basis - so it’s a great way to discover new art.
In addition to visual art Artomatic also features a range of performing art forms throughout the exhibition – live music, dance, spoken word, comedy as well as professional development series and special events showcases. Every night of the event, thousands of people visit Artomatic to discover new art, grab a drink, listen to music, go on dates, and mingle with the creative community. No matter what kind of creative events you like, you’ll find something to like at Artomatic.
“We are very excited to be working again with the Crystal City BID, a constant champion of the arts, to create a unique, invigorating and brand new artistic experience for all visitors to enjoy”, said Jennifer Williamson, current Artomatic Board President. “We will be conducting Artist tours starting from mid January to allow interested participants an advance glimpse of their artistic home for six weeks where they can start imagining the endless creative possibilities they can do with the space”.
“We first brought Artomatic to Crystal City in 2007 in order to demonstrate the transformation that was already in progress – a new main street, fun restaurants – as well as to underscore how easily accessible our neighborhood is from DC. The second showing in 2012 helped us further showcase our emerging arts and innovation scene,” said Crystal City BID President/CEO Angela Fox. “Now in our third iteration, we are excited to mark the beginning of the next generation of growth, engagement and creativity for Crystal City.”
Launched in 2013 to transform Crystal City’s interior concourse into a vibrant arts and cultural destination, the Art Underground includes Synetic Theater, the 1200-foot long FotoWalk Underground, ArtJamz Underground, the Gallery Underground, TechShop, and Studios Underground which provides work space for two dozen artists.
Visitors have easy access to Artomatic with the Crystal City METRO Station, as well as plenty of parking and bus stops nearby.
So six months ago, he had an idea. Nearly every Peter Lik photograph is printed in a “limited edition” of 995; the first print sells at about $4,000, with the price rising as the edition sells out. With his eye fixed on a record-setting sale, he printed a single copy of “Phantom.” Then he alerted a handful of his most ardent collectors, one of whom, he said, agreed to the $6.5 million price. Before the deal was signed, Mr. Lik hired a public relations firm to make sure that the sale, and the record, were noticed.
“The P.R. firm dropped those off yesterday,” said Mr. Lik, looking at four fat ring binders, which an associate had just plopped on a table. They contain hundreds of stories from around the world about the “Phantom” sale. Typical was the reaction of Time magazine, which published the headline, “This is officially the most expensive photo ever.”
It’s hard to know what’s “official” about it. Previous records in photography were set by competing bidders in public auctions for images that were familiar and celebrated. This was a private sale for a newly printed photograph, and scant details were offered. But while the buyer’s hidden identity inevitably arched some eyebrows, anonymity in such deals is not unusual. Joshua Roth, the Los Angeles lawyer who represented the buyer, declined to name his client, though he emphasized that the client exists.
Despite the reported size of the deal, the art world greeted the news mostly with silence.Read the NYT article here...
Former Senate minority leader Harry Reid used leftover campaign funds to pay one of his staffers to paint a portrait of himself, campaign records show...
... The Washington Free Beacon uncovered the expenditure last August, when they noticed a $7,000 check paid from Reid’s campaign committee, Friends of Harry Reid, to Gavin Glakas, one of Reid’s former staffers. Glakas had already painted a portrait of Reid’s wife Landra, which hung on a wall in his office on Capitol Hill. At the time, the Free Beacon reached out to both parties for comment but did not receive an answer...
...Although both FEC regulations and House ethics rules prohibit the use of campaign funds for “personal use,” this is not the first time a politician has used campaign funds to commission a self-portrait.Read the report by Sara Gonzales here.
While many presidents have been the subject of art (with one—George W. Bush—recently becoming an artist himself), President Barack Obama has been a particularly popular muse for artists. His historic presidency has inspired an outpouring of artworks, from both amateur and established artists.Shame that Ms. Gottsman is not a DMVer, otherwise she would be aware of the many, many artists and many multiple views of the current Prez that have been exhibited at Charles Krause Fine Art, which have included many artists' favorable views of POTUS, plus a sprinkling of negative and critical views (both from the left wing nuthouse and the vast right wing conspiracy's perspectives) of the Prez.
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| "Young Obama" (Detail) Charcoal, circa 2008 In a private collection in North Carolina |
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| "President Obama as The Batman Charcoal, circa 2014 (10x10 inches framed) In a private collection in Washington, DC |
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| "Obama as Atlas" Charcoal, circa 2006-2014 Framed to 20x16 inches (Updated Yearly) |
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| "Eyes of Obama" Charcoal, circa 2014 (Framed to 5x7 inches) In a private collection in Miami |
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| "President Obama Walking to His Right" Charcoal, circa 2014 (10x20 inches framed) |
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| "President Obama Looking to his right" Charcoal, circa 2014 (Framed to 10x10 inches) |
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| "President Obama Walking to the Left" (Detail) Charcoal, circa 2014 (10x20 inches framed) |
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| "President Obama Walking to the Left" Charcoal, circa 2014 (10x20 inches framed) |
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Ostdeutscher Schwimmer
Acrylics on paper. 40x30 inches, circa 1979 by F. Lennox Campello
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Information sessionsInformation sessions will be held at MEG on Saturday, January 7th, and Sunday, January 22nd, from 10am-12pm for photographers interested in learning more about the gallery and our selection process. Topics to be covered include: the benefits of MEG membership; roles and responsibilities of a MEG member; expectations for sales; displaying your work at MEG; the application and portfolio submission process and timeline; and “best practices” for submitting a portfolio for membership consideration.
The information sessions, which are optional, will be held at MEG in Studio 312 at the Torpedo Factory Arts Center, 105 North Union Street, Alexandria, VA 22314. You may RSVP for either information session by sending an email to MEG Vice President Eric McCollum.
Application processTo be considered for membership, photographers must complete a four-step process:
NotificationJurying for membership will take place on February 23, 2017. Any accepted applicants will be notified soon thereafter.If you have any questions about this opportunity, please contact Eric McCollum.
"Hoy se ha caido otro roble en la selva del amargo exilio" is how I always thought that my father's eulogy would begin once he died.
"Today another oak falls in the jungle of bitter exile," began the eulogy for the man whose bloodlines my children and I carry on.Florencio Campello Alonso died today at age 90 in Miami, the heart of the bitter Cuban Diaspora. Like many Cubans of his generation, he was the son of European immigrants to Cuba. His Galician parents left the scraggy mountains of northern Spain's ancient Celtic kingdom and in the first decade of the 1900s migrated to the new nation of Cuba upon its liberation from Spain.Galicians have always been uneasy subjects of the Spanish crown, stubbornly hanging on to their ancient Celtic traditions, to their own language and to their bagpipes, so it is no historical surprise that they left their mountain homelands en-masse and headed to the new tropical paradise of Cuba, free from the heavy hand of the Spanish monarchy.
And thus it was never a surprise to me that my father was both a fighter against heavy-handed rulers, a lover of freedom, and one who was never afraid to re-start a life for the better, even if it involved discarding the old.
My father could have been one of the privileged few who currently rule atop the food chain of Cuba's Workers' Paradise. But instead of accepting the benefits of oppression, this most valiant of men chose the harsh path of right over wrong.
And he paid for it dearly (he spent years in Concentration Camps), but when he died, his soul was clean.
In his youth, my dad worked the brutal hours of the son of an immigrant who was slowly building a small financial empire in eastern Cuba. My father was pulled from school as soon as he learned to read and write, and like his two other brothers and eight sisters, he was expected to work and contribute to building a familial empire.
And he did, as my mother relates the stories of my father's childhood in the fields of eastern Cuba, a blond creole in a land of jingoist natives... he trying to out-Cuban the "real Cubans"... how he organized a labor union of the exploited Haitians who worked almost as slaves at the Los Canos Sugar Mill, how he joined a group of bearded rebels in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra in the fight against a tyrant, how he ran for the leadership of the Sugar Workers' Union and beat the Communists to the post, and how he spent years in a Castro Concentration Camp, jailed for the crime of refusing to join the Party, because he believed in Democracy and not Communism.
And because of that stubbornness, in the 1960s he was offered the bitter pill of exile, and this brave man decided to choose family... and left his birth place, and thus became another immigrant within two familial generations and brought his wife and child to another new land.
And it is to him that I owe the greatest gift that a father can give a son: the opportunity to grow in freedom in the greatest nation in the history of this planet.
It is because of my father's courage that I was raised in this country and not in a land bloodied by brutality and oppression.
It is because of my father's teachings that I was raised with the conviction that freedom is not free and never to be taken for granted; after all, he fought for freedom and then Castro, the man who inspired the fight, ended up being a worse dictator, eventually destroying all notions of freedom for all of his people.
It is because of my father that I was taught that every citizen owes his nation some form of service, and that's the main reason that I signed (at age 17) to serve in the US Navy.
It is because of my father that I despise anyone who hides behind the mask of victimism to excuse failures and shortcomings.
When our family arrived in New York in the 1960s, my father began to work in a factory three days after he landed at the airport; my mother (who came from a privileged Cuban family and had never worked a day in her life) found a job as a seamstress five days later. That pattern was repeated for decades as they worked their way in a new nation.
"We thought we'd be back within a few years," was the answer given to me when I once asked the question about leaving their birthplace. When that didn't materialize, they became fierce Americans in the "United States of Americans" sense... these were the "America None Better!" set of immigrants, and in my Dad's case, you better be ready to fight if you dissed the USA.
"Americans"!
Always a fighter he was... and always for the right reasons.
Cubans are archaic immigrants... we love this great nation because we recognize its singular and unique greatness; perhaps it is because our forebears had the same chance at greatness and blew it.
And my Dad loved this nation even more than he once loved Cuba... perhaps it is the genetic disposition of the serial immigrant. After all, his father had left his own ancient Celtic lands and kin for a new land... which he learned to love dearly.
My father always wanted to make sure that I knew that I was an "Americano" and not another forced-on label.
"Labels," he'd say, "are just a way to separate people."
By labels he meant "Hispanic" or "Latino" or anything with a "-" between two ethnic words.
I also remember as a kid in New York, when he bought a huge Hi-Fi record player-color-TV console... that thing was huge. He bought it "lay-away" and he'd pay $10 a week to the store and him and I would walk all the way from our house on Sackman Street to the store on Pitkin Avenue to make the payments every Saturday - he never missed a single payment, and that taught me a lesson.
It was soon playing my Dad's favorite music, which oddly enough was Mexican music (Cuban music was a close second)... and he knew all the words to every charro song.
Guadalajara en un llano, Mejico en una laguna...That Jorge Negrete song... being shouted often on weekends at the top of his lungs from our apartment in a mostly Italian neighborhood in East New York in Brooklyn must have raised some eyebrows.
Guadalajara en un llano, Mejico en una laguna...Me he de comer esa tunaMe he de comer esa tuna.... aunque me espine la mano.
My dad and I watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon on that TV set... we also watched loads of Mets games... and in 1969 and 1972 went to Shea Stadium to see the Mets win in '69 and lose in '72. He really loved baseball and he really loved those Mets!
When I joined the Navy at age 17, my first duty station was USS SARATOGA, which at the time was stationed in Mayport in Florida, so my Dad decided to migrate south to Florida and moved to Miami... just to be close to me.
He and my mother spent the next 40 years in the same apartment while I was stationed all over the world.
When I visited him today in Miami, he looked good and freshly shaven... this is a good thing, as my father was a freak about hygiene... and that's a common "creole" trait.
The Hospice nurse almost teared up when I told her that my parents have been married for 60 years.
I looked at this old "gallego"... his skin as white as paper, his eyes as blue as the sky, and his head (once full of blond hair) as bald and shiny as the old Cuban sing song ("Mira la Luna, mira al Sol... mira la calva de ese.....") and I saw the generations of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Gallego Homo Sapiens that led to my bloodlines... the generations of fighters, of strugglers, and of tough guys who didn't take no for an answer and who made a better place for others.
And I felt at peace and grateful.
And as my father died tonight, after an extubation, all that I can think to say to him is "Thank you for your courage... from me, and from my children... and soon from their children. You opened a whole new world for them."
I love you Dad... Un Abrazo Fuerte! Thank you for your gifts to me and my children and it is no coincidence that you died on El Dia de Los Reyes.
Seeking positive, forward-thinking, organized & innovative individual, looking to job share Operations Management role for growing 23,000 sq. ft. Artists & Makers Studios 2 in Rockville, MD.
We are seeking a manager that has an understanding and appreciation of art, combined with the business and marketing skills to manage and run a profitable operation. Experience in art sales or a management role in an art related enter...prise is preferred. Basic Business Software (Word, Excel, etc.) software is required, and experience with Photoshop and web design is a plus.
The Operations Manager is responsible for the smooth day to day running of the Wilkins buildings, is the liaison between resident artists and management and a proactive presence to the continued growth and success of the organization. Duties include everything from spackling walls to writing financial reports so no two days are ever the same!
This approximately twenty hour per week job will include one evening art reception and two Saturdays a month, and two open studio events per year. If you are a dynamic organized business person who loves art and loves people, apply today.
Send resume and salary requirements to Judith HeartSong. Judith@artistsandmakersstudios.com
