New BLOG

Colby Caldwell, whom I interviewed for ArtsMedia News recently, has a new BLOG called Notes from the Fieldhouse. Visit him often.

The Thursday Reviews

Nothing in the WaPo.

In the City Paper, Louis Jacobson has a superb review of André Kertész at the NGA. I am a big fan of "intimate-sized" photography, and dislike Teutonic, poster-sized photos so much in vogue in museum exhibitions these days. Jacobson writes:

These negatives were roughly 2-by-2-and-a-half inches, and the resulting works—sometimes cropped further by the artist’s steady hand virtually demand that visitors to the National Gallery put their noses up against the glass.

The constraints of these photographs’ tiny proportions demanded something of Kertész, too: a fealty to clear composition.

Jacobson also reviews Don Reichert at the Canadian Embassy’s Art Gallery and is then puzzled in his review of the Domestic Policy printmakers' group show at District Fine Arts.

The City Paper also has an excellent profile and discussion of Jonathan Blum's portrait show at Market 5 Gallery by Mike DeBonis. Elsewhere in the CP, Kara McPhillips has a tidbit on Trish Tillman and Bridget Lambert at Warehouse Gallery. Kara also reveals that someone once offered (her boyfriend) a bag of coke in exchange for her.

In the Gazette, Tracy O'Dowd reviews "H2Art" at the Carroll Arts Center, and Dr. Claudia Rousseau reviews Pyramid Atlantic's 25th anniversary exhibition, now at the District's Edison Place Gallery.

At MAN, Green discusses Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre at the NGA.

At DCist, Kirkland reviews Prescott Moore Lassman at the Fisher Gallery (and gets in somebody's "most loathsome" list in the process).

In The Washington Examiner (in page 5) there's an article about J.W. Bailey's i found your photo project.

Gallery openings this weekend

Tomorrow is the third Friday of the month (but today is not the third Thursday), and so the five Canal Square galleries will have our extended hours and new shows. The extended hours are from 6-9PM, and the openings are catered by the Sea Catch Restaurant. The five galleries are Anne C. Fisher, Alla Rogers, Fraser, MOCA and Parish.

We will have Washington's best Sangria plus the bizarre digital photographic manipulations of New York digital artist Viktor Koen, who will be making his DC debut. More work by Koen here.

Also tomorrow, Dan Steinhilber has his first solo exhibition at Numark Gallery with a reception from 6:30-8PM. Steinhilber had his DC debut a few years ago at MOCA in Georgetown, and since then has certainly become one of our best-known artists, and this should be a terrific exhibition. Steinhilber is slated for a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston next year, to be curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver. He has also been invited to a residency and commissioned to create a site-specific installation for an exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh next year.

On Saturday, Brooklyn artist Sylvan Lionni returns to Fusebox which has Sylvan Lionni: Stadia in their main space and Tim Rollins + KOS: Freedom Works in their project space, opening with a reception from 6-8PM. The exhibitions runs through May 21, 2005.

Go to an opening this weekend.

Back from Aggieland... this week's DCist Arts Agenda is here.

More later... I seem to have a lot of emails on something published by former Style section editor Gene Robinson in the WaPo this week. Will look at all that later.

Airborne Today

Heading West to College Station, Texas to do some lekturin' in Y'All country.

More later...

Kirkland on Lassman

J.T. Kirkland debuts on DCist with a terrific review of Prescott Moore Lassman's current exhibition at the Fisher Gallery.

Kahlodiscovery

A two-year renovation project at the home-turned-museum of legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has uncovered a vast wardrobe of previously undiscovered clothing and other valuable artifacts, Oscar Arana reports on ABC News.

Commonly known as the Blue House because of its indigo external paint job, Kahlo and her husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera, lived in the home in the Mexican capital's fashionable Coyoacan neighborhood until her death in 1954.

Rivera turned it into a museum four years after his wife's death, but it wasn't until work to restore private areas began last summer that officials found the 180 articles of clothing which included traditional Mexican dresses depicted in Kahlo's famous self-portraits, as well as shoes, shawls, and pre-Hispanic jewelry that belonged to her.