Today is my birthday.

On the road this week for a visit to Nebraska (don't ask). I will be back on Friday in time for the Bethesda Art Walk and the opening of GMU Professor Chawky Frenn at our Bethesda gallery.

Chawky Frenn is easily one of the most controversial artists in our area. Some of you may recall the noise and complaints that his recent show at Dartmouth University caused, where Frenn out-controversied Damien Hirst, who was also showing at the University at the same time.

A month ago or so, I juried a show from slides for Gallery International in Baltimore.

Last Friday I went to the opening and selected the prize winners. The Best in Show was won by area artist Paul Ellis, while the two awards of excellence went to Spanish-born New York photographer Yolanda del Amo for two-dimensional work and to Andrey Tsers for three-dimensional.

Yesterday the Baltimore Sun's art critic Glenn McNatt had a review of the show. McNatt writes:

"A touch of whimsy

The title of the exhibition at Gallery International, All Media Competition and Show, sounds a bit grandiose, but actually it's as apt as any for this sparkling group show, which brings together 48 artists from far and wide chosen by guest curator F. Lennox Campello.

Campello, a co-owner of the Fraser Gallery in Washington, selected the works on view from the more than 200 entries submitted, and he readily concedes that he followed no formula or format other than his own whimsy in making his choices.

The results, however, are as delightful as they are occasionally surprising. And, true to its title, the show's offerings are divided almost equally among paintings, sculpture, photography and mixed-media works.

There are also quite a few Duchamp-inspired artworks of the buzzing, whirling, mechanical variety, including Wade Kramm's ingenious Candle flipbook, an electric-powered contraption that mimics the flickering motion of an animated cartoon, and Adam Bradley's Dandelion, a weirdly alluring wind-up diorama depicting the soul's reluctant fall from grace.

One of the most polished works in the show is New York-based photographer Yolanda Del Amo's Domestica, a large-scale color photograph mounted on Plexiglas and aluminum that recalls the staged but unforced naturalism of Tina Barney's upper-middle-class domestic dramas. The Spanish-born Del Amo, whose photographs convey a compelling but stubbornly ambiguous narrative thrust, is on the evidence of this work clearly an artist to watch.

The show runs through Sept. 24. The gallery is at 523 N. Charles St. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Call 410-230-0561."

Like any juried competition, this was a difficult one to jury, and I struggled for what seemed hours with the Best in Show decision. It could have easily gone to Yolanda del Amo (a RISD graduate), whose photograph is as compelling and sublty seductive as McNatt describes. Her winning entry (Domestica) is pictured above to the left, and it is from a series called "Maids" photographed in Argentina by del Amo. According to one of del Amo's friends who was at the opening (the photographer was not present at the opening), del Amo has been stirring quite a bit of interest in her neck of the woods in N'Yak and could be a photographer to keep an eye on (pun intended).

A while back, the former Art Editor for the British newspaper The Guardian discussed how and why a newspaper should have a high commitment to supporting the arts.

The interesting point in this article by Ian Mayes is that fact that he discloses that between the Guardian and the Observer (owned and run by The Guardian), they employ about 60 art critics backed by a similar number of editors and sub-editors!

And they made a deliberate effort to provide arts coverage in spite of the fact that "...the commitment is not simply or primarily a commercial one. In terms of revenue for the paper, many areas of the arts would not pay for the coverage."

I would guess that our own Washington Post, which has a daily (and shrinking) circulation of around 600,000 printed papers, and gets around two million hits a day for its great website, and owns several other newspapers, is probably about twice the size of the Guardian newspapers combined.

Does anyone want to count the number of Post critics and see if they employ or use more or less than the Guardian?

The call to artists by Art.com will soon be out for artists wishing to be curated into the "Homage to Frida Kahlo" exhibition being hosted by them. There will be a substantial cash award and there is no entry fee.

I have been chosen to curate this exhibit due to my well-known interest in all things Kahlo.

It started in 1975, when I visited Mexico City and discovered the works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Almost immediately, I developed an artistic obsession with Kahlo's image and I have created hundreds of works on that subject, including dozens of art school assignments at the University of Washington School of Art (1977-1981).

In 1975 my parents took their first vacation ever, at least in my memory. As Cuban exiles, the American tradition of yearly vacations was as removed from their routine as the Cuban tradition of Noche Buena is from American Christmas holiday customs.

Anyway, they decided to go to Mexico City for a week with another couple from New York, which is where my folks had been living since leaving Cuba as political refugees in the 60s.

In 1975 I was finishing my first year in the US Navy, where I had enlisted right after High School, and stationed aboard USS Saratoga, homeported in Mayport, Florida. I had turned down a New York State Regents Scholarship and a Boston University art scholarship to satisfy my desire to see the world before I went to college.

Mexico City and its nightlife and food (and how far a dollar went) made such an impression upon my parents and their friends, that the one-week trip became two, and eventually they spent nearly a month in that huge, dirty city, enjoying the food, scenery, clubs and markets. They also asked me if I'd like to join them for a few days, and since they were paying for it, I took a few days leave and flew to Mexico City for about five days of my own, unexpected vacation.

I hardly spent any time with them.

As a teenager, my interests were more focused on girls, cheap booze and plenty of great things to do. It was while visiting a museum during the last few days of my visit, at the insistence of a cute American Jewish tourist girl whom I had picked up at my parents' hotel, that I accidentally discovered Frida Kahlo.

I remember walking into the museum salon where the Two Fridas hung. It was love, or more like witchcraft, at first sight. This large, spectacular painting swallowed my visual senses and attention as no work of art would do again until I first saw Velasquez's Las Meninas at the Prado in Madrid eight years later.

At that first exposure, and the ones that followed as I tried to absorb as much of Frida Kahlo as I could in my remaining Mexico City days, I became an addict for the work and imagery of this Champagne Communist Mexican virago. I recall sitting down in the room where the Two Fridas was hung, and copying the painting through a pencil sketch done on gift wrapping vellum paper from an earlier touristy purchase of a huge, saucepan sized solid silver belt buckle and brown cowboy etched leather belt that I wore for years after and that thankfully has now been lost.

Kahlo left me gasping for knowledge about her and her work. Her imagery was like nothing I had seen before, even in my childhood's New York atmosphere that often included day-long trips to the Brooklyn Museum, the Met, MOMA and many other New York museums. The more of her work that I discovered, the more I became obsessed with learning about her.

In 1975 and the first few years that followed, this wasn't exactly an easy task. In those years Kahlo, at least in Mexico, was still Diego Rivera's wife, who also happened to paint.

In 1997, together with the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, DC I curated a small exhibition at the Fraser Gallery focused on an attempt to bring to Washington contemporary artwork that paid homage to Kahlo. It rapidly became one of the best-attended, most visited exhibitions ever held by the gallery and showed the giant strides in recognition that Kahlo and her art had made since that day in Mexico City when I first discovered her.

The Seven Fridas (Pen and Ink, circa 1981)

Collection of Seeds of Peace
The love affair then produced in 2002 a show of my own work titled "Passion for Frida: 27 Years of Frida Kahlo Artwork." It chronicled 27 years of preparatory drawings, etchings, oil paintings, watercolors and sculptures about Kahlo. It received good critical attention in the Washington City Paper and the Washington Times. It consisted of work that I had done as early as 1975 and as recently as a week before the show opened. In the wake of Julie Taymor’s beautiful movie "Frida," it was also a spectacular success.

And now I am honored to juror a worldwide call to artists who share my passion for Frida, for her life, for her artwork and for her influence. This call for art will deliver a new Homage to Frida Kahlo and all things Kahlo. I’d like to see work that delivers new portraits of Kahlo, or work that has been influenced by Kahlo, or by her life or her work.

In the end, I hope to put together a virtual exhibition that will leave a memorable footprint of the tremendous influence that this iconic daughter of Mexico left on all of us.

As soon as the official call is ready to be announced, I will post it here.

For Women Photographers

The next Secondsight meeting will be held on Thursday, September 23 at 6.30pm in Bethesda, MD. The guest speaker will be Amy Lamb, a very successful fine arts photographer and highly respected scientist. For more information, visit www.secondsightdc.com or call Catriona Fraser at (301) 718-9651. Meetings are free for members - $10 for guests.

Secondsight is an organization dedicated to the advancement of women photographers through support, communication and sharing of ideas and opportunities. Secondsight is committed to supporting photographers at every stage of their careers, from students to professionals. Each bi-monthly meeting includes an introductory session, a guest speaker, portfolio sharing and discussion groups. Each photographer will have the opportunity to present their work within a small group of other photographers, ask for constructive criticism, gain knowledge or simply share their artistic vision and techniques.

This review by Michael O'Sullivan of a couple of exhibitions at The Textile Museum is a perfect example of why I think O'Sullivan is the best art critic writing for the Washington Post.

Call me plebian, but I am always delighted to read an art critic that shows his colors and his prejudices when reviewing a visual exhibition, and then has the honesty and courage to somewhat change his mind.

O'Sullivan writes:

"FULL DISCLOSURE: I don't particularly like flowers or shiny metallic thread.

Which makes my recent visit to the Textile Museum to check out two exhibitions -- the new "Floral Perspectives in Carpet Design" (whose title pretty much says it all) and the about-to-close "By Hand in the Electronic Age: Contemporary Tapestry" (a show with more than its share of fiber bling-bling) -- potentially problematic.

See, I've been conditioned by exposure to contemporary art to mistrust the decorative. Floral art -- unless it's a stand-in for sex or death, as it so often is -- is not my cup of tea. And glints of gold thread woven through textiles remind me, I'm sorry to say, of Liberace.

So I was heartened, not to mention somewhat surprised, by the fact that in addition to flowers and lamé, there's something to chew on in both shows."

I'll admit that althought I liked O'Sullivan's review, I'd rather still rather watch an ice cube melt than go see "Floral Perspectives in Carpet Design," which makes O'Sullivan a more open-minded and fair critic that I can ever hope to be; but that's just me.

But I digress. My point is that it is rare to see these sort of "full disclosures" when discussing an opinion in an art review. More often than not what we find is cynicism, and writing that is what the author thinks the other "cool" critics and "hot" curators would want to read.

That also explains why a lot of contemporary art critics and curators have such dislike of painting. They have been conditioned to think that it's not cool to like painting, and it's fun to see them scramble to line up when an unexpected painter bolts out of the blue, such as Gerhard Richter and the same people who shout that "painting is dead" line up to applaud a painter who Sotheby's calls the "most influential artist in the world." Not painter, but artist.

Thus we can always see critical hypochrisy or all the sheeps lining up to follow the lead. Another perfect example of that theory was the orgy of great reviews by super cool contemporary art critics for The Quilt's of Gee's Bend. The New York Times dubbed this show one of the "ten most important shows in the world," and art critics who one would imagine would rather have their eyes poked out with a blunt butter knife than hang a quilt as "art" in their post-modernist flats all lined up to applaud the show.

I did too. I was enthralled and seduced not just by the quilts, but mostly by the quilters that I met.

And I went back and re-read a lot of the reviews and I was (and still) nagged by the impression that a lot of the words were written not out of honesty, but out of political correctness; it would have been suicidal for any writer, not just an art critic, to dislike the show.

I could be wrong.

But when the world's most influential daily anoints a show as one of the "ten most important shows in the world," it essentially dares every other secondary art critic in the world to disagree with them.

But I could be wrong, and because I have never been particularly fond of quilts as "fine art," I went to see this show prepared to dislike it - my own prejudice and (like Michael says) "conditioning," and a fun opportunity to disagree with the mainstream critic media.

And yet, let me repeat myself: I was enthralled and seduced not just by the quilts, but mostly by the quilters. I ended up loving the quilts because of the quilters.

And to this day I am nagged by the feeling that it was the quilters, more than the quilts, that we all liked so much.

And thus, I applaud honesty like O'Sullivan's in today's review.

Today is the first Friday of the month, and thus the Dupont Circle Galleries technically should have their extended hours. It is also the "unofficial" opening of the Washington visual arts season, which "unofficially" opens in September.

However, since Labor Day is actually next Monday, I suspect that many galleries may still be closed and on vacation, in which case the "unofficial" opening of the visual arts season may shift to next Friday to the Bethesda Art Walk from 6-9 PM on September 10.

The week after that, on Sept. 16, is the Third Thursday Night Out for the 7th Street Area Arts District from 6-8 PM. By the way, if you'd like to volunteer as a 3rd Thursday gallery crawl guide, contact Rachel Leverenz at 202/315-1310.

The next day, on Sept. 17 is the third Friday and the Canal Square Galleries in Georgetown have their new show openings from 6-9 PM, catered by the Sea Catch Restaurant and Raw Bar.