Thursday, June 02, 2016

Bethesda Painting Prize winners

The Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District announced the top three Bethesda Painting Awards prize winners on Wednesday evening during the exhibition’s opening at Gallery B. Tanja Softic of Richmond, VA was awarded “Best in Show” with $10,000; Richard Levine of Falls Church, VA was named second place and was given $2,000 and Amy Sherald of Baltimore, MD received third place and was awarded $1,000.

 

Tanja Softic studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Sarajevo and earned her Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She works across the media of printmaking, drawing, photography and book arts. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship and Soros Foundation - Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant. Tanja’s work is included in numerous collections in the United States and abroad, among them New York Public Library, Library of Congress Print Department and New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia. She participated in 12th International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland and won a First Prize at the 5th Kochi International Triennial Exhibition of Prints, Ino-cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan in 2002. She completed print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute and Anderson Ranch's Patton Print Studio. She lives and works in Richmond, VA, where she is Professor of Art at the University of Richmond.

 

The eight artists selected as finalists are:

 

John Aquilino, Rockville, MD

Katie Baines, North Chesterfield, VA

Amy Chan, Henrico, VA

Andy Karnes, Baltimore, MD

Richard Levine, Falls Church, VA

Erin Raedeke, Montgomery Village, MD

Amy Sherald, Baltimore, MD

Tanja Softic, Richmond, VA

 

A public opening will be held on Friday, June 10, 2016 from 6 – 9pm in conjunction with the Bethesda Art Walk. Gallery B is located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E in downtown Bethesda. The work of the eight finalists will be on display from June 3-27, 2015. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 12 – 6pm.


Entries were juried by Dorothy Moss, Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery and Director of the Triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition; 

Dr. David Park Curry, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, American Painting & Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art and Megan Marlatt, award-winning painter and Professor of Art and at University of Virginia.

 

The Bethesda Painting Awards was established by Carol Trawick in 2005. Ms. Trawick has served as a community activist for more than 25 years in downtown Bethesda. She is past chair of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, past chair of the Bethesda Urban Partnership, Inc. and founder of The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards.

Wednesday, June 01, 2016

".art" domain to launch this fall

UK Creative Ideas Limited (UKCI) signed an agreement with ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in late March, to launch and be the exclusive operator of the new .ART top-level domain (TLD). Launching in late fall 2016, .ART is new, undeveloped Internet real estate dedicated to serving the arts and culture communities by providing the infrastructure to enhance and preserve the art industry’s online presence. With more name choice, shorter names, exact match for searches, and immediate identification with the arts, the global art world will have a new opportunity to meaningfully connect to their audiences in the digital realm.

“We are very fortunate to have secured .ART for the long-term,” states Ulvi Kasimov, Founder of UKCI. “We are at the beginning of an exciting new phase of innovation for art online, and .ART will be an important facilitator for existing and future players within the arts and culture community.”

“Our goals are to support existing museums, galleries, artists, auction houses and others in protecting and enhancing their brands, to inspire new organizations to build on .ART real estate, and to make domain names available to younger players to the art scene whose names are no longer available in other TLDs and want to immediately be identified with the art world,” states John Matson, CEO of UKCI.

The process of securing .ART began in 2012 when UKCI submitted an application to operate .ART to ICANN, the global nonprofit responsible for regulating and overseeing the Internet’s domain name policy. In 2014, ICANN expanded the number of generic top-level domains including major cities such as .nyc and .london, industry-specific domains such as .luxury and .guru; as well as brands like .axa, .bmw, and .google. Now with this new contract in place, the launch of the .ART domain will take place in late 2016.

To request a .ART domain or to learn more about .ART, please visit the website at
www.dotart.domains.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Airborne


Flying on Facebook - a cartoon by F. Lennox Campello c.2009

Heading to Miami to see my mother...