Wanna go to an art event tonight?

Go to The Common Share located at 2003 18th St. NW (in Adams Morgan), DC (upstairs). Featured artist is Barry Bishop and music by DJ 2-Tone Jones. 8pm - 1am and no cover charge.

D A N G L I N G

Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, in Silver Spring, MD, will be hosting D A N G L I N G (as in suspense), an exhibit by 20 artists from the Washington region "commenting on critical challenges to the global human condition including militarism, economics, environmental degradation, and personal, philosophical, and political conflicts."

The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 8th from 6:30-8:30pm and will feature remarks by participating artists as well as performance art and poetry. The exhibit is on display through September 29th.

Exhibiting artists include Anonymous, iona rozeal brown, William Christenberry, Graham Boyle and Alex Curtis of the Submissive Generation, Richard Dana, Joan Danziger, Behnam Farahpour, Susan Firestone, Dalya Luttwak, Nan Montgomery, Adrienne Mills, Brian Petro, Michael Platt, Wendy Ross, Renee Stout, R.L. Tillman, Kelly Towles, Genna Watson, Jamie Wimberly, and Jason Zimmerman.

The show is curated by Carolyn Alper and Helen Frederick, who in early April invited artists to Pyramid Atlantic to discuss ideas for an exhibition that might grow out of the DADA movement that had influenced most of them during their lives. There was agreement that although the DADA exhibition (presented this spring at the National Gallery of Art) made a huge impact on them, Dada could not be "re-created."

"I thought that artists should have the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the current state of our world. It seems that such a show would be not only interesting but essential," stated curator Carolyn Alper.

Although I am not "disillusioned with the current state in our world," I am nonetheless looking forward to seeing this exhibition.

I am especially looking forward to seeing the living paintings of Adrienne Mills, who (in addition to her work on the gallery walls) will have two "living paintings" at the reception. Spoken word artist Charisse Carney-Nunes will be covered in her words and Mills' model Jaye will be on display as well.

I am also looking forward to seeing the new work of Jamie Wimberly, who in addition to his piece for the show (titled "Art History," and which is a direct comment on contemporary art) is also contributing an essay on contemporary art.

Jamie tells me that his "intention is to start a dialogue." To that end, he has created a blog: Provocations, where "people can be as nasty or nice as they want to be."

See ya there!

Congratulations

To Richmond-based sculptor Kendall Buster, who was just announced as the winner of the 2006 Kreeger Museum Artist Award.

If you haven't heard much of the Kreeger Museum Artist Award, it is because (in my opinion), the museum has done a pretty poor job of disseminating info about it.

The Kreeger Museum "established the award, a biennial cash prize to be given to a Washington metropolitan area artist deserving of recognition and to honor its founders (Carmen and David Kreeger) generous commitment to the arts in Washington, D.C. An independent five person jury made the selection based on demonstrated consistent artistic excellence, and significant influence and contribution to the Washington arts community. The $10,000 award is being underwritten by Fleishman Hillard International Communications."

An example of Kendall Buster's work will be on view at the museum October 6 through November 25, 2006. The artist was selected by an independent five-person jury: Andy Grundberg, Milena Kalinovska, Robert Lehrman, Jim Sanborn (who was the first recipient of the award) and Sarah Tanguy.

Another superb choice for this award and congrats to Kendall and my kudos to the Kreeger for institutionalizing a great art prize for the DC area.

P.S. Capps polices the award here.

P.S. Kirkland makes a good point on what the definition of the "Washington metropolitan area" is. Read it here.

Farewell Russell

The fair Heather Russell, gallerina extraordinaire for Irvine Contemporary in DC, is returning to the NYC area after a year in the District.

As of this Thursday, she will be in NYC, as the Assistant Director of the Williamsburg-based Black and White Gallery. She will be running the new ground floor Chelsea space, and also their Williamsburg gallery

She will also have a small art advisory business, based out of her home, for works not related to the gallery, and she will be hosting events and helping clients find artworks as well.

MAAN wishes Heather all the best, hopes that she stays in touch, and we're sure that she will be a great success in NYC.

NYT on daily painters

And now the New York Times chimes in with yet another story on the whole genre of "daily painters" which was birthed by Richmond's Duane Keiser.

Read the story here.

And in DC area, add another artist to the daily artist genre: Pamela Viola. Visit her daily artwork often!

Street Secrets

There is a public art project going on in Philadelphia now and its focus is "confessions" and they are collecting secrets from people and then posting them.

Sound familiar?

The Philly Inky's Natalie Pompilio has an excellent story on the subject here.

She writes:

"Hundreds of collected confessions - written on anything from toilet paper to postcards, scrawled with pens or pencils or markers, crafted both from the heart and as pranks - are on display at the 3rd Street Gallery, on Second Street in Old City. These stories were gathered from 12 confession boxes across Center City."

She also reveals that:

The artists shaping the project said their aim was to have a dialogue with city dwellers - or to encourage residents to have a dialogue with each other. The writings are called "confessions" according to the definition of making oneself known or disclosing one's identity, said Michael Sebright, one of the project's leaders.

"We hoped that people in Philadelphia would find it intriguing," Sebright said, "not in the Catholic sense of confessing something wrong, but in the sense of telling a story about themselves or making themselves known to other Philadelphians."

She also quotes Frank Warren, who essentially invented the whole "secret-as-art" genre as art during the last Art-O-Matic and then made it a worldwide phenomenom through the PostSecret website and through the best-selling book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives.

What the story does not say is that the organizers had invited Frank Warren's PostSecret to be a major participant in the whole Philly street secret event, but when Warren said that he "did not want to water down the content of the secrets in order to show them in public spaces," he never heard from them again - "until they they started their own secret project."

Anyway, for anyone who wants to see the real PostSecret project, the Reading Public Museum still has a large PostSecret exhibit on until October 8th.

And two more books by Warren will be coming out soon:

My Secret: A PostSecret Book , comes out next month. You can pre-order it here.

And The Secret Lives of Men and Women comes out on January of 2007 and you can pre-order it here.

DCing

Heading back to DC tomorrow.