It's always fun to see what the art teachers are doing with their personal work. The Corcoran Faculty Biennial Exhibition opens at the Hemicycle Gallery on August 18, 2004 and runs to September 13, 2004. Opening reception on September 2,2004 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm.

Talking about openings, tonight is the Bethesda Art Walk from 6 - 9 PM.

Sarah Godfrey has a very informative and well-written profile of Iona Rozeal Brown in the current issue of the City Paper.

Brown's newest work (based on Japanese erotic prints) will be on exhibition locally at G Fine Art this coming October. She also has shows coming in New York and Los Angeles and is clearly an artist developing a major (and well-deserved) reputation. She's also a "former local artist," who graduated in 1991 from Maryland before heading out West.

Brown's success, in no small part, has been through the niche use of her imagery depicting the Japanese ganguro subculture, where Japanese youths associate with African-American culture though the use of clothing, signs, and makeup or visit tanning salons to keep their skin artificially dark.

It has been her main thoroughfare to artistic success, and over the future years, could also become her Achilles' heel if she allows her unique artistic theme to dominate her arts vision and thus expose her work to becoming Mondrianized.

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And last week in the WCP, someone named Gadi Dechter had an extraordinarily informative profile of Andrew Krieger, whose work is currently on exhibition at the Corcoran.

As Dechter points out, Krieger has been relatively anonymous and quite unknown for the last 25 years, and it is only through curator Eric Denker's intimate and personal knowledge of Krieger's work (the two have known each other ince the mid-1980s, when they were working at the National Gallery of Art bookstore), that this exceptional artist's works have come to a brighter light and more focused scrutiny. Read Jessica Dawson's earlier review in the Post here.

Pilfered from AJ:

A Seattle newspaper's freelance critic writes a negative review and is then threatened with a lawsuit. When she asked the newspaper to guarantee that it would represent her should the lawsuit be made, they declined - and she quit!

Read the story here.

J.T. Kirkland, over at "Thinking About Art," has a very valid point about Glenn Dixon's first ever "Galleries" column review of Alison Clay at Numark Gallery.

J.T. writes:

"Is it too much to ask for an opinion? Sure, he's working with tight space constraints, but couldn't he say "I liked it" or "it works"? In all honesty, didn't he just re-word the press release? Wouldn't it be cheaper for the Washington Post to just print the press release of the show?"

And he's right! After reading his posting, I went back and re-read Dixon's review and Kirkland nailed him with one of (our shared) pet peeves: the "review" that describes a show rather than offering a critical opinion.

Somewhat surprising coming from Dixon, who is (in my experience) one of the most opinionated and one-sided critical writers in our area. Perhaps it is the seminal signs of the "Washingtonpostizing" of his work as opposed to the more aggressive style of writing usually employed by WCP writers.

Kirkland's own and earlier review of the same show can be read here.

Dr. Jonathan Binstock tells me that the artists for the 48th Corcoran Biennial have been selected by him and Associate Curator for Contemporary Art Stacey Schmidt.

The list will be announced soon.

But I already know that the list includes area artist and Corcoran alumni James Huckenpahler.

Huckenpahler is represented locally by Fusebox Gallery and was the Second Prize winner for last year's Trawick Prize. He is a former faculty member of the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and a former member of the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran Advisory Board.

Huckenpahler, trained as a painter, now works primarily on a laptop. Congratulations to Huckenpahler and well deserved!

Former Washington City Paper Arts Editor (and then their former art critic), Glenn Dixon made his Washington Post Galleries column critic debut today.

Dixon reviews the National Academy of Sciences and Numark Gallery in his first column.

Elsewhere in the Post, in Arts Beat, Jonathan Padget profiles photographer Joan Marcus.

Want to have your artwork (or nearly any image for that matter) on a U.S. Postal stamp?

Photo Stamps allows anyone (within certain constraints) to make up and put nearly any image into an official United States stamp! I can already imagine the explosion of artwork that we will begin to see soon adorning and paying for snail mail letters as this service develops and catches on.

This will be hell for stamp collectors to keep up with!

And thanks to AJ for this related Wired article on the subject.

I can already visualize some exhibition somewhere in the future of artist-designed stamps.