Bad Art Destruction Party

Time: Thursday, October 13 · 7:00pm - 10:00pm
Location:
Warehouse Theater
1017 7th St NW
Washington, District of Columbia

Facebook details and RSVP here.

Tsk... tsk...

Billions of dollars in arts funding is serving a mostly wealthy, white audience that is shrinking while only a small chunk of money goes to emerging art groups that serve poorer communities that are more ethnically diverse, according to a report being released Monday.

Read the AP story here.

Two will be heading for Miami

The Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series has teamed up with Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation to search for a new generation of cutting-edge visual artists and the show now at International Visions Gallery, showcases winning work by Washington semi-finalists.

Across all markets, a total of twenty artists will advance to the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series Finale Competition exhibition, held during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2011. From that group, two finalists will be invited to exhibit at Rush Arts Gallery in New York City in February 2012.

Artists in this DC exhibition include Michael Anthony Brown, Zoma Wallace, Shaunté Gates, Julian Lytle, Farah Ahmed, Rob Chester, Edward Savwoir, Miles Burrell, Osereime J. Aimua, David Allen Harris, Cheryl Edwards, Jay Coleman, S. Ross Brown, Al Burts, Nicole Marshall, Ann Marie Williams, Victor Ekpuk, George Kochev, Eusebio Choque, Cedric Baker, Jesi Pace-Berkeley, Larry Cook, Michael Singletary, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Leonard Harris, Lawrence Charity, Helina Metaferia, Stephen Evans, Keah Fryar, Richard Thompson, Donivan York, W. James Taylor, and Tanekeya Word.

The cool thing for me is that I'm only familiar with the work of 3-4 of those named above. For information, visit the gallery’s Web site.

Percy Martin coming to Parish Gallery

Georgetown's Parish Gallery will showcase one of the DMV's most venerable and influential printmakers, Percy Martin, whose exhibition entitled “Bushmen Dreams” will open with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00 pm on Friday, October 21st and will run through November 15, 2011.

Percy Martin is a printmaker and teacher of art who has lived in the Washington, DC area since 1947. For over 25 years, he has been quietly working on a series of lush and technically complex prints detailing the daily lives and rituals of the Bushmen, a mythological people and culture born of Martin’s imagination. He studied printmaking and graphic design at the Corcoran Gallery of Art where he received a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1966. In 1975 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him with an Artist-in-Residence.

Mr. Martin taught private classes in etching and has been the Director of the W.D. Printmaking Workshop in Washington, DC, since 1947. He taught at the New Thing Art and Architecture Center, University of Maryland, Corcoran School of Art, printmaking to inmates at Lorton Prison, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and finally the Sidwell Friends School, from which he is now retired.

Mr. Martin has shown his work widely in the U.S., Russia, the Ukraine, and Africa. His works have been in traveling exhibitions of the Smithsonian Institution and are found in numerous private collections and the collections of the Washington Post, University of Maryland, and the National Collection of American Art.

There are a lot of DMV area artists, mostly those who were schooled around here, who received the spark of creativity from this talented artist, and I know that no art collection with any sort of focus on DMV artists, is complete without a Percy Martin in the collection.

Don't miss this show.

Heard on Univision

There are as many Americans from Latin American ancestry who despise the term "Hispanic" (my Dad is one of them) or "Latino" (he doesn't even know what that means and neither do I) as those who like that Nixonian label.

I think that Univision newscasters have begun a semantic revenge upon Non Hispanic Americans of European ancestry; lately I've noticed that they refer to this group as "Anglo-Saxons".

That ought to piss off Scots, Italians, Spaniards, French, Russians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Welsh, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Estonians, Finns, Laplanders, Andorrans, Belgians, Poles, Danes, and all the other folks who live from Portugal to Russia, etc. as much as being labeled under one label pisses me (and a lot of other gente) off...

You describe a Scot as an Anglo-anything; you better be ready to fight...

Heh, heh... makes my head hurt.