Do we start them early or what?

For the second year in a row the MCPS Visual Art Center has produced six visual arts winners in the prestigious National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts 2003 art competition for talented high school seniors. Two MCPS Visual Art Center (VAC) seniors Max Chavez (AEHS) and Kevin Lee (J.F. Kennedy HS) were selected as finalists. Three VAC students, Elizabeth Black(Walter Johnson HS), Joanna Bresee(AEHS,) and Julie Chiplis(Blair HS,) received honorable mention awards. Soo Jin Kim(AEHS) received merit award recognition.

New York painter Norma Greenwood has a show of her work at the Arts Club. Greenwood was selected by Stacy Schmidt, the Corcoran's talented Assistant Curator for Contemporary Art.

The Washington Arts Club is another of our city's great cultural jewels which usually gets ignored by the press. The Club usually has an annual call for artists, as their exhibition season is juried, a year at a time, by an invited curator, in this case Stacey Schmidt.

Hey! A contemporary realist has won this year's Turner Prize!

Transvestite potter Grayson Perry, who creates vases depicting representational subjects like death and child abuse, has won this year's Turner Prize. He beat the favorites, the Chapman Brothers, who had entered a piece titled "Sex," - a sculpture depicting bodies being eaten by maggots. Another Chapman work, called "Death," was a Seward Johnson-like painted bronze sculpture of a pair of blow-up dolls having sex.

Shock, gimmick, kitsch, art or all of them?

Next Saturday the 13th, at the Millennium Arts Center (located at 65 I St., SW, Washington, DC), 20 or so artists will host open studios from 1-5 PM. From there you can go to Transformer Gallery from 7-9 PM. They have an opening reception for "The Out-of-Towners."

BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD recently received an $80,000 gift from Mid-Atlantic Petroleum Properties, LLC, a company headquartered in Germantown that owns, operates and supplies over 50 gas stations, convenience stores and property investments in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia.

More local area businesses ought to follow MAPP's example under the leadership of company President Carlos Horcasitas.

Next Saturday Saturday December 13, from 7-9pm Transformer Gallery has an opening reception for "The Out-of-Towners" with site-specific installations by Laura Amussen, Lily Cox-Richard, Harrison Hayes, George Jenne and Michele Kong.

Transformer Gallery has really been hosting some very exciting shows and has very quickly become one of the key non-profit visual art spaces in our area.

Jayme McLellan and Victoria Reis have really done a spectacular job with the gallery. Goes to show you what hard work and dedication can accomplish.

The A. Salon Artists’ Cooperative, located in Old Town Takoma Park, will host a Holiday Open Studios and Sale on Sunday, December 14, 2003 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The address is 6925 Willow Street, NW, Washington, D.C. (across from CVS).

The event will feature four floors of professional artists and artisans, including: Ed Brooks, Fashions by Clintonia, Anne Cook, Robert Debbane, Matt Fasone, Tim Flatt, Judybeth Greene, Kathy Karlson, David Kliger, Katherine Knight, Giliah Litwack, Fred Limbach, Janet Matthews, Richard Moy, Bev Ringel, Alice Robrish, Sercan Sahin, Ann Saunders, Carol Schumm, Milena Spasic, Hillary Steel, Ira Thompson, Krista Weiss Tretick, Liz Vail and Amy Watson.

A. Salon is a fifteen-year-old artists’ cooperative offering affordable studio space to artists in the D.C. metro area.