Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: Unclear

Open Call for Web Based Art for the Web Biennial 2007. Submissions and exhibition Start: February 1st and end December 31 2007. The Web Biennial is a project produced by the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, in Turkey and artists can participate through the portal located at webbienial.org.

One project per artist. No Portfolio sites, No Commercial Projects. This project is totally free and open for all. This year all languages welcome except, in the head tags.

The Web Biennial is a NO concept, NO curator, NO location, NO sponsor event.

Send them the URL of your Web Based Art project. Put inside the head tags of your index page:

"Web Biennial 2007 - Name of the Artist - Name of Your Project." The index page and the web site needs to be on the same domain. No attachments.

You can e-mail submissions to: webbiennial@yahoo.com

Please also put in the subject line of your email: "Web Biennial 2007 - Name of the Artist - Name of Your Project."

First come first served; collaboration proposals from institutions welcome.

The Power of the Web

The other day I finally closed on my Potomac house, which I may add, sold at a helluva good deal.

Anyway, the really nice guy who bought my house informed me that he had learned all about the house and the sale, etc. by virtue of being a reader of this blog!

Picts at Honfleur

The below drawing is currently hanging at Honfleur Gallery as part of the pre-grand opening show on the art of tattooing. Call them at (202) 889-5000, x 113 to buy it.

It's a Pictish woman from my Pictish Nation series. Learn more about the Picts here.

Kirkland in New York

This is what happens when a motivated artist decides to take the artbull by the horns and organize his own first solo show in NYC.

Read JT Kirkland's NYC debut here.

Go JT!

Civilian Moves

Kriston Capps tips us that Jayme McLellan's Civilian Art Projects will move into the building (at 406 7th Street NW in Washington, DC) that currently houses Touchstone Gallery and was once home to Numark, David Adamson, eklektikos and others.

Read Capps' post here.

Proposal to DCCAH

I sent an idea to the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2004 for a novel (in my opinion anyway) public art project dealing with the now vert traditional use of video as an art form (now in its middle age).

Nothing heard back from them so far, so I am assuming that they are not interested, and I am thus hereby posting a gist of that idea/letter, with some corrections and updates, in case some other city or organizer is interested:

Summary: This point paper offers a recommendation for a recurring public art project designed to attract worldwide attention to the Washington, DC fine arts community. This idea is being submitted for consideration by DCCAH for future implementation.

Background: Washington, DC public art projects, like many other cities, have yielded a mix of public success and bitter art criticism. Most recently, projects such as “Party Animals” and “Pandamania” have enjoyed spectacular public acclaim, but have been severely criticized by area art critics. Whereas it is my belief that a publicly-funded DCCAH should answer to the public and not to elitist art critics, I believe that I have come up with a concept and idea that is both novel and creative. No other city has done this before (to my knowledge) and this project, if funded and implemented, will make a huge leap in placing Washington, DC on the leading edge of the art world.

The Project: A call for artists to create art videos. No theme, no guidance (other than the standard caveats to preclude pornography, hate-mongering, racism or personal attacks): just a call for artists (either worldwide or Greater DC area) to create an art video. This has never been done before by anyone, anywhere, as a mass call for public art. A public project that delivers art videos on a massive, public scale will place this contemporary genre of art outside of a museum environment for the first time ever.

The Logistics: 100 20-inch TVs with built-in DVD players will be needed ($269 each). Each one placed inside a custom built viewing bubbles (see attached design). The viewing bubbles can be constructed by the same company who built the Pandas. The material for the “bubble” can be the same as the Panda material, except for the viewing area, which should be constructed of Lexan, which is the plexiglass material from which NASCAR racecar windshields are made from; it is practically indestructible and it does not fog or scratch. Cost for these “bubbles” should be approximately the same as a panda or party animal.

Electrical power will be needed; however, this is easily available on nearly every street in DC, as every single lamp post in Washington has a power source at the base of the lamp post. The “bubbles” will have to be built and placed so that a safe connection to the power source can be accomplished.

The accepted videos will be run on a 24/7 continuous loop so that they can be viewed by the public ad hoc. At the end of a specified period, signed still photography from the videos can be auctioned off – or even sold throughout the period (from a website). This is very common in the world of art videos – no one buys videos, but they will buy signed photographs from the videos.

The Process: A worldwide call for videos: the call for art can be made for free in many Internet web sites (places like artdeadlines.com as well as magazines such as ArtCalendar, etc.) If successful, this can become an International Public Video Biennial (no one is doing this!) to a huge public audience. Call it the Washington Video Biennial!

We ask for artists to submit videos (CD ROMs) and then a panel selects 100 videos to be exhibited to the public. Each year DCCAH can hire two curators to select the videos (or an advisory panel can be picked to select the videos).

Next Step: I hereby request a meeting with DCCAH to verbally explain this project and answer any questions.

New gallery

A while back I discussed about a new independently owned commercial fine arts gallery that would be opening in the Tysons Corner area of Virginia.

Although construction is still going on, it looks like sometimes in February will be the grand opening of Habatat Gallery Virginia, owned and run by Lindsey and Jay Scott.

This is a "second" Habatat, as the gallery has been around since 1971 and there's another one in Florida. The galleries’ focus is on contemporary art, national and international, in a variety of materials, but certainly with a recognized focus on glass.

In fact, Habatat has already partnered with the American University Museum at The Katzen Arts Center to bring an exhibition titled "Contemporary Glass: Beauty and Innovation" at the end of this month.

This will certainly add a new "power" gallery to the Greater DC area art scene, and even more, continue to focus a lot of attention on the area as one of the "glass" hot spots.

Welcome!