Tonight: Select's Curators Talk



Tonight is one of the The Washington Project for the Arts' (WPA) big events of the year, as their Annual Art Auction Exhibition and Gala, SELECT kicks into high gear tonight with the Curators' View event from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

At the Curators' View, each Select curator will present and discuss their exhibition selections. In addition, WPA's prized Alice Denney Award will be presented by Robert Lehrman to Washington-based artist William Christenberry for his support of WPA and sustained commitment to the DC arts community.

Then Saturday, March 12, 2011 marks the 30th anniversary of the organization's well-known arts gala that includes a curated silent auction of more than 100 contemporary works by top contemporary artists, formal dinner, and performance art.

The events will be held at 700 Sixth Street, an Akridge-managed property, in northwest Washington on top of Chinatown; it is expected to draw over 500 art enthusiasts. You can see the selected works online here.

Meet Joel D’Orazio tomorrow

Art chairs, sculpture and abstract painting by architect turned painter/sculptor Joel D’Orazio. New as a Zenith Gallery artist, D’Orazio will be featured in a solo show, Listen to Me, at the Gallery at 1111 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, curated by Zenith Gallery.

The show opened on February 7 and will remain on display through May 13, with a “Meet the Artist” Reception on Wednesday, March 2, 5:30pm to 8:00pm.

Blake Gopnik busts the NYT!

Ahhh... did the grey old lady get caught ripping off an artist? .... and who may have caught the NYT?

Applause for the Gopnikmeister!

Read about it here.

But as Blake points out towards the end of the piece... there is no real copyright issue here... if you copy Dali's La persistència de la memòria then you have broken the law.

But if you paint your own melting watch, then you've just stood on the shoulders of a giant.

Still.... bravo Gopnik!

Sunday Funnies (ahem) Stamps


I know I'm gonna get killed for this, but here I discussed when I detected possible pornography in the American stamp issue of Sunday Funnies, and here I broke out one of the first two possibly sexualized panels (yay!) in our sexy nation's stamps history.

But as Tery Gilliam predicted in his groundbreaking film Brazil, all of you are too chicken to come forward (other than the dozen plus emails I've received... offline) to "see" the Onanist issue here.

Wait till tomorrow for me to tell you what Odie The Onanist is doing.

Antonia Ramis Miguel at Watergate

Spanish-born artist Antonia Ramis Miguel has a show coming (March 5th - April 2nd, 2011) at The Watergate Gallery in DC.

The Reception is this Saturday, March 5th 6-8pm and there's an Artist talk on Tuesday, March 15th at 6pm.

Antonia Ramis Miguel was born in Spain in 1963 and has been painting since childhood. She studied with Edgardo and Alceu Ribeiro, students of the renowned constructivist Joaquin Torres-Garcia. In this exhibition Antonia Ramis Miguel continues with her approach to Constructivist art. Her oil paintings combine the strength of structured line, color and abstraction creating a dramatic visual effect that arranges the parts of a subject into a whole. She spent several years studying the techniques of, among others, Rubens, Sargent, Velazquez and Vermeer. Miguel spent four years painting and teaching in Washington D.C. before moving to London where her palette was influenced by the greys of the sky and bricks of the buildings. The influence of her native Spain, particularly the use of saturated color, is however still visible in her work. She has shown her work in individual and collective exhibitions in her native Spain, the United Kingdom, Austria and the United States.