Review of ABMB Week in Old Town Crier Newspapers

See it online here: http://oldtowncrier.com/2015/12/29/art-basel-miami-beach/. All photos by J. Jordan Bruns.

I think that DC area galleries and DC area non-profits and artists’ collectives need to go to the big dance or become non relevant.

Because of this, I decided to highlight a city on the other side of this great land to show how that city’s galleries make an impact on ABMB.

The City of Angels.

It was refreshing to see a lot of Los Angeles area art galleries in the various fairs during this last December, and of the many LA area galleries at the big dance, several stood out, not only to me, but also to Texas-based super, uber, monster collector Ardis Bartle, an experienced art fair aficionado, and an ass-kicking lady who hasn’t missed a single ABMB week in the last decade.

Once the VIP pre-opening parties were finished and the elegant crowds, booze and small food ceased to circulate, and tightly-dressed women in lethal-looking six inch heels finished their improbable art fair strolls with plastic wine glasses in their manicured hands, and handsome young men in slim suits and nerdy black glasses used their cell-phones to photograph the artwork, while third generation blue-eyed Cuban-American girls, four or five inches taller and 25 pounds lighter than their political refugee grandmothers, and slim as rifles, finished shooting selfies in front of the artwork, it was time to check out some LA galleries.

Snowzilla: From 2005

After two days of moving snow from A to B (don't forget the roofs or you'll have ice dams), I'm too sore for anything but a repost of one of my favorite posts of all time.

Originally posted in 2005:

Waste of Time

Since we opened our first gallery in 1996, we have rarely worked with "art consultants" or "interior decorators."

Overall, the experience (in the very few times that we've worked with them) has been quite a waste of time (such as the time that we wasted months dealing with Sen. Hillary Clinton's Georgetown-based interior designers to select a work by New York painter David FeBland.

Because the focus of our galleries is contemporary representational work ("realism with a bite"), it seldom agrees with the bland, "cannot afford to insult anyone," art selection process of most major corporate and business buyers (and public art projects).

But yesterday I bit again, and delivered work by several of our artists that had been selected by a very major law firm's art consultant to possibly hang in their new meeting room in a beautiful building in downtown DC. Come in, get a badge, drive to the loading dock and start delivering work to the 9th floor. As soon as I got there I knew that our chances were slim to none, as I saw a lot of this stuff.

And the very nice and professional art consultant was horrified to see that I had brought this piece by artist Javier Gil.

"Get that out of here before anyone sees it," she advised. "Nothing like that can even be considered and it may poison their minds about the rest."

Her favorite from our four artist selection was the work of our best-selling artist David FeBland. I explained that David's works have been selling very well, especially since the Europeans have discovered his work. Since his prices have been skyrocketing (law of supply and demand), we both doubted that they'd be interested in his work, since he was by far the most expensive artist in what was being presented.

But I schlepped all the work over, including a massive, framed Maxwell MacKenzie photo.

"Near Pomme de Terre Lake, Grant County, Minnesota, 1997"
Silver Gelatin, 1997 Maxwell MacKenzie

After a few trips I return to the gallery van, which had been parked in the loading dock, as directed, to find it blocked by a truck delivering paper supplies. I ask the guy nicely if he can please move a foot so that I can leave. He cusses me out.

I then waste 10 minutes of cussing and yelling and threatening the very large truck driver, near to a fist fight with a guy who looks like George Foreman, before another huge guy comes in and breaks up the argument... all that before I can leave, now in a total black mood.

Return to DC around 3:30PM to pick up the work. Back up into the tiny loading dock, where I manage to put a huge gouge on the left side of the new gallery van (less than 800 miles on it). Then I get a large smear of grease from one of the dumpsters on the back of my new suit, which I had naturally just worn for the first time this morning. Things are going great uh?

Up to the 9th floor, which for some strange reason, in this building is actually a few steps below the 7th floor.

Not too surprisingly, none of our work had been picked. And what was picked can best be summarized as "big, bold, large abstract art," mostly by names I had never heard of.

I can't say that I blame corporate art buyers, especially in selecting work for their public meeting spaces. We're at a juncture in our history where anything that could remotely be offensive to anyone, is not part of the PC art process. When was it the last time that you saw a nude in an American airport?

On one of the trips I run into a very tall woman who had been (I think) the head of the "art pickers" from the law firm; she sees me packing the David FeBland. "That was our favorite among all the artists," she says.

"He's our best-selling painter," I replied, too tired to inquire as to why he wasn't selected (I already know: price). On the massive table I see the work selected; around 20-30 pieces of mostly abstract, large, inexpensive work.

Waste of my time; scratch on my new van; possibly a ruined suit; and near fist fight with a huge burly truck driver... another day in the life of an art dealer.

A Blizzard is Enforced Surrender

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

Touchstone Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists

Touchstone Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2016-2018)

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

Trevor Young at Addison/Ripley Fine Art

TREVOR YOUNG

VOLTAGE

JANUARY 30 - MARCH 5, 2016

opening reception for the artist

Addison/Ripley Fine Art

Saturday, January 30th 5-7pm

Trevor Young, Two Currents,  2016, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches

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 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

Art Talk

Barbara Januszkiewicz
The Value of the Arts

6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Torpedo Factory Art Center
105 North Union Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

 

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.

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. 

Here is link to the info.

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.

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 

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.

Click here for more information

"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.

"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

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

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

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