Wall Mountables at DCAC

Around this town, anytime that you have an open show (meaning a show without a juror or curator), the critics tend to immediately savage it. This seems to be a predictable critical analysis somewhat unique to our area's visual arts and artists as viewed by most of our area critics.

Once a year, the District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC), through a show called "Wall Mountables," allows any and all artists to hang anything they want, so long as it fits within a two square foot space. It's usually one of my favorite shows and a terrific opportunity for artists to exhibit and sell their work.

DCAC will be accepting and allowing artists to hang their work Wed - Fri. July 26-28, 2006 - On Wed. from 3-8PM and on Friday from 3-6PM. Spaces are available on a first-come basis and each 2x2 ft space is $10 and current DCAC members get one space free!

Details here.

Also at DCAC

Next Sunday DCAC has their last Summer Art Forum in the DCAC theater, July 23rd at 7:30pm: "Making, Showing, and Collecting Video Art." Panelists include: Jefferson Pinder, Kathryn Cornelius, Djakarta, Philip Barlow and Brandon Morse.

For more information on the Art Forum visit this website.

Vox Populi

There are only four days left to see "Home Free," an exhibition of the Philadelphia artists collective Vox Populi at DCAC.

The WaPo's Chief Art Critic Blake Gopnik, in a rare look at an area gallery show wrote about the exhibition:

"One piece manages to take a standard contemporary trick and get it absolutely right.... A video called 'Cocked,' by Matthew Suib."

Hurry!

Update: Warren commenting in Thinking About Art writes:

This video, or one just like it, was in the Radius 250 show in Richmond last year.

3 Years ago Michael Oatman, an artist based in Troy NY, did one pulling together all the time-travel sequences in movies.

Both were cool to look at, but I think you're correct to ask why Gopnik thinks that even though it's a "contemporary trick" (I read that as "cliché"), it's worth writing about.

Its funny, I believe he thinks he's really on the cutting edge with his knee-jerk support of video. Like he's cool or something because of it, and all the taunts make him more rigid.

Flashpoint Fracass

DCist reports on a private party at Flashpoint which ended with some artwork being destroyed.

Read it here.

Ariel Rios Building Murals

A few days ago I posted about a memo by Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator, Office of Administration and Resources Management, who announced a decision to install a temporary screen in two days. The screen will cover up five historical murals (out of 25 in the building) on the 5th floor of the Ariel Rios building in Washington, DC. These murals were created under a 1934 U.S. Treasury art commissioning program.

I'm still mulling about how to express my opinion on this issue... meanwhile here are a couple of the murals; click on them for a larger view.

Danger of the Mail


Death on the Prairie

Ariel Rios Murals

A few days ago I posted about a memo by Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator, Office of Administration and Resources Management, who announced a decision to install a temporary screen in two days. The screen will cover up five historical murals (out of 25 in the building) on the 5th floor of the Ariel Rios building in Washington, DC. These murals were created under a 1934 U.S. Treasury art commissioning program.

The six murals which will be covered up, and which have titles such as "French Explorers and Indians," "Torture by Stake," "The Red Man Takes the Mochila," etc. depict a diverse set of panoramas ranging from spectacular scenes of the often violent interaction between the American West’s native nations and the new settlers, to artistic recreation of historical meetings between European explorers and native Americans.

While it is perhaps understandable that the imagery on some of these murals may be objectionable to some workers or visitors -- perhaps embarrassing to some due to the nudity in some of the murals, and perhaps offensive to others due to its depiction of native Americans, and maybe even more objectionable due to the violence depicted in many of them -- in my opinion it would be even more objectionable to a majority of us to have these historical murals covered up or destroyed.

A nation that chooses to ignore or whitewash its past, is a nation without a historical memory and without a cultural footprint.

Nearly the entire world was aghast when the Taliban destroyed the gigantic Buddha sculptures that were offensive to that repressive regime, and we all condemned the demolition as a vile and barbaric act of cultural ignorance and artistic destruction. And yet here we are almost ready to do the same to an integral, if not proud, part of our historical and artistic past.

Art is perhaps the only vehicle that we have left that crosses all cultural barriers and creates bridges and memories for mankind. Visual art, especially representational historical visual art, has created for our nation an important cultural footprint and a significant record of our past. As such it cannot and must not be now censored or destroyed, lest we forget it.

I have had many opportunities to sit on the advisory board of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and in that process I have help to fund many of the contemporary murals that now adorn our nation’s capital. In that position, I have no doubt in my mind that there is no arts commission or city in our nation that would remotely consider funding these 1930s murals in 2006, much less in a public building. That is just the nature of where we were in 1930 as a people and where we are now.

But it is my hope that decades from now, if someone finds any of the murals that we have funded in the last few years for our nation’s capital objectionable, that our future Americans will have more conviction and more common sense and more guts to stand fast rather than to immediately take the politically-correct and knee-jerk reaction to "cover" them up, or consider removing them.

Keep the murals as they are.

Congrats!

To Min Jung Kim from Chantilly High School, who is The League of Reston Artists (LRA) award recipient of its 2006 Art Scholarship Award in the amount of $1,000.