Congratulations

To DC area artist Victor Ekpuk (now living in Holland), who will be having his first solo show in Holland at Gallery 23 in Amsterdam.

WPA/C Call for Artists

Deadline: Friday, August 11, 5pm.

The WPA/C is calling all Video, Performance, and Sound Artists for their experimental media series.

Download the call for entries here.

All nights will run from 7:00 - 9:00 pm in the Corcoran Gallery of Art's Armand Hammer Auditorium.

Artists Wanted For Barracks Row Festival

Barracks Row Main Street is looking for artists to sell their creations at Barracks Row Fest, which will be held on Saturday, September 16th from 11:00-5:00 p.m. in the 400-700 blocks of 8th Street, SE.

The street festival attracted 6,000 people last year, and they hope to attract even more this time. If you would like to participate, you can download a vendor application at www.barracksrow.org or email mainstreet@barracksrow.org.

Barracks Row is located next to the Eastern Market Metro station.

Exhibit Opportunity for Emerging Artists

ARCH Development Corp. and the Honfleur Gallery, a new art gallery located in historic Anacostia, are looking to exhibit emerging artists in the Washington D.C., Metropolitan area.

The gallery is still under construction, but ARCH is planning the 2007 opening exhibition and putting together an artist group for the season. To learn more about the gallery visit the ARCH website for details at www.archdc.org and click on the arts tab.

Lunacy

A recent memo by Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator, Office of Administration and Resources Management announced a decision to install a temporary screen to cover up several historical murals 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, and have apparently been the subject of complaints over the years, and were once previously covered up during the Clinton Administration, before being apparently exhibited again during the current administration, before being hidden from view once more.

The murals which will be once again 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.

I object.

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 somewhat ready to do the same in principle 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 Washington, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and in that process I have helped to fund many of the contemporary murals that now adorn our nation's capital. In that experience, 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 vintage 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.

Airborne today and heading home to the news that the world's longest reigning dictator may be getting ready to face the music!

Introductions

Friday is shaping out to be the key day of the year to go see what new talent two of our savviest gallerists out there have discovered in the way of new talent.

"Introductions 2" at Irvine Contemporary also opens the same night as Conner's Academy exhibition. "Introductions 2" features eleven recent graduates from MICA, Corcoran, American University and VCU.

Irvine's reception is also Friday Aug 4 6-8. This is a great night to see new talent at both Conner and Irvine.