Opportunity for Artists

The Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District is currently taking submissions for Bethesda’s June and July Artist Markets. Selected artists will be invited to participate in the Bethesda Artist Markets on Saturday, June 9 and Saturday, July 14, 2007 from 10am-5pm.

Deadline for application and slide submission is Wednesday, February 28, 2007 by 5pm. Participating artists will be selected by members of the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District Advisory Committee.

Details here.

Artomatic is on!

Just in! There will be an Art-O-Matic this year!

The location is the Old Patent Building in Crystal City, Virginia from mid April to mid May, 2007. The installations will take place at the beginning of March.

I am also told that there will also be a second AOM within the district itself later in the fall.

Two Art-O-Matics in 2007.

Woo Hoo!

Whitney Biennial Curators Announced

Because the 2006 Whitney Biennial was without a doubt, and by far, the worst museum show that I have ever seen, I was curious about the direction of the 2008 Biennial.

Unlike that disaster, which was "curated" by two European-born curators (who had both been living and working in the United States), according to the NYT's Carol Vogel, the 2008 Biennial will go back to locals: leading the effort will be two Whitney curators: Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, and Donna De Salvo, the museum's chief curator, will oversee the curatorial effort.

Three outside advisers will help: Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem (and a former curator at the Whitney); Bill Horrigan, director of the media arts department at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University; and Linda Norden, a curator and writer who was the commissioner of the United States pavilion for the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she organized an exhibition on Ed Ruscha that traveled to the Whitney.

I am excited that there's a non New Yorker in the pack of advisors, and sincerely hope that this Whitney Biennial finally recognizes that there's artwork being produced in the few thousand miles that exist between New York and LA. However, I'm already gloomy, as the fact that Horrigan is the director of the media arts department at a major midwestern University already prejudices my opinion in that here we'll have yet another guy who still thinks that videos are "new."

And to make it even more likely that this will turn out to be yet another New York-centric artists' home movies exhibition, consider that Henriette Huldisch was responsible for coordinating the film and video program for the 2006 Biennial and Momin was one of the three curators for the 2004 Biennial.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Feh!

WPA/C Auction

Judging from the small number of works that remain available, the WPA/C Auction was a resounding success.

Details on work that is still available here.

New blogger

Tracy Lee has a new visual arts blog. Visit her often here.

New Baltimore Gallery

Gallery 211 just opened last week in Baltimore. They will be featuring contemporary and traditional fine art of emerging and established artists.

By now we're used to it

Only Blake Gopnik, the intelligent and erudite Chief Art Critic of the Washington Post could get away with writing an introduction to the Spring Arts Preview for the Greater DC area for a Washington, DC newspaper and then tell his readers that "If you've decided it's finally time to come to terms with current creativity, this summer is the time to do it and Europe's the place."

If you read Gopnik's writing over the years, it is easy to detect that he has a special personal antipathy (amongst many) towards two subjects: painting, and especially portraiture.

He's also embarked on what seems like a critical personal crusade against the National Portrait Gallery, and in writing about the coming "Portraits of Sandra Day O'Connor," opening in late March at the National Portrait Gallery, he not only tells us that he will do his best to miss this coming show, but also labels the work of two of the portrait artists in the show that he will apprently never see, as "insipid" and "toadying made flesh."

Gopnikmeister strikes again. Read him here.

On the positive side, the WaPo's listing of visual art shows had for the last few years degenerated into a listing of museum shows, and almost excluded area galleries from the mix. A while back Gopnik told me that he was trying to include more and more galleries in the preview listings, and he has delivered on that promise, as the local exhibition calendar is jam packed with good exhibitions, both museums and galleries, to catch this spring.

A well done to Gopnik for this refreshing and important change!

Save this page and refer to it often.

PS - Gopnik also has a really good article on the Corcoran and its new direction in which we find out all about the future that Greenhalgh is planning (and also that he skipped a traveling Frida Kahlo show over the coming "Modernism" exhibition - AAAARGH!). Read it here.