New Baltimore Gallery

The Baltimore City Paper's Jason Hughes delivers an extensive report on Baltimore's newest art space, the Metro Gallery, directed by Sarah Williams.

Read the article here.

Reminds me of the fact that in the last year or so about half a dozen new art spaces have opened in the Greater DC area. Maybe the Washington City Paper needs to write an article focusing some much needed attention on these new venues?

New Arts Blog

Central Intelligence Art is a new blog by talented DC area artist Rex Weil, who also teaches at Maryland and is the DC area editor for ArtNews.

Visit him often here.

Opportunity for Pennsylvania Artists

Deadline: August 1, 2007

The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts invites applications for the 2008 Individual Artists Fellowships. They are now accepting online applications to the 2008 Individual Artists Fellowship program, which offers $5,000 to $10,000 fellowships.

Discipline categories for this year's fellowship program are as follows: Dance -- choreography; Folk and traditional arts -- performing traditions and apprenticeships; Literature -- poetry; Media arts -- narrative and documentary; Music -- classical composition; Theater -- scriptworks; and Visual arts -- drawing, artists books, printmaking or new technologies or painting.

Artists applying for a PCA Fellowship must be permanent residents of Pennsylvania who have established residency for at least two years prior to the application deadline. Students in high school, undergraduate, or graduate programs at the time of application are ineligible to apply for a fellowship.

Application guidelines are available on the PCA Web site.

Jericho

I am a big fan of the CBS show "Jericho," which is a terrific and harshly realistic view of a small Kansas town in a post-nuclear America. It is a superbly crafted drama set in a very scary world where terrorists (or is it them?) have wiped out several key American cities with nukes. Because of its location, Jericho survives the fallout and must now face a post-nuclear America.

This SF show almost bit the dust due to sickly ratings in the right demographics, but when CBS announced that it was cancelling the series, fans began mailing CBS bags of peanuts as a protest.

Peanuts because in the last episode the lead character, when asked to surrender at the end of an assault by the neighboring town, echoes Gen. McAuliffe's famous WWII reply when also asked to surrender by the Germans when McAuliffe was surrounded during the siege of Bastogne: "Nuts!"

20 tons of peanuts later, CBS has the show back on the slate for six new episodes.

CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler called the online outcry a "probably unprecedented display of passion in support of a prime time television series" and said CBS has ordered seven more episodes of the show for mid-season.

Gets me to thinking about what we could mail the WaPo and other moribund paper media to get them to pay attention to the visual arts?

A View From Maryland

With an Opening Reception next Tuesday, July 10, 2007 from 5 PM - 7:30 PM, the University of Maryland University College presents "Landscape and Nature: A View From Maryland," curated by Sigrid Trumpy.

This exhibit is the result of a partnership among the state of Maryland, the Maryland Sister States Program, and the Japanese Prefecture of Kanagawa. Participating artists include Mary Arthur, Denee Barr, Karen Birch, Larry Chappelear, Donald Cook, Richard Dana, Kevin D. Augustine, David Driskell, Aline Feldman, Steven Fiscus, Peggy Fox, Kathryn Freeman, Inga Frick, Stephanie Garmey, Ken Giardini, Joshua Greer, Ronnie Haber, Steven Hay, Matt Hyleck, Edda Jakab, Susan Johnson, Chevelle Makeba Moore Jones, Jeanne Keck, Patrice Kehoe, Jinshul Kim, Philip Koch, Perna Krick, Dan Kuhne, Eugene Leake, Ralph McGuire, Raoul Middleman, Tom Nakashima, Susan Due Pearcy, Jan Razauskas, Beverly Ress, Charles Ritchie, Michael Rogovsky, Nancy Sheinman, Joe Shepherd, Tony Shore, Elzbieta Sikorksa, Laura Vernon Russell, William Willis, Edward Winter, and Sharon Wolpoff.

Print Saturday

Tomorrow, DC's Jane Haslem Gallery will host "Print Saturday," one of two events highlighting artists from Washington Printmakers Gallery. Jenny Freestone, Betty MacDonald, Max Karl Winkler, Martha Oatway, Joyce Ellen Weinstein, Lila Oliver Asher, Terry Svat, and Yolanda Frederikse will present portfolios of their prints and be on hand to talk about their work from 12 to 5 pm. This is a unique opportunity to meet the artists and see their latest prints!

Part of the proceeds from sales will benefit Union Printmakers Atelier, a printmaking facility in downtown DC providing studio access to artists who work in lithography, intaglio, relief, letterpress and book arts.

For more information call Jane Haslem Gallery at 202-232-4644 or Washington Printmakers at 202-332-7757.

Kahlo or Not?

A Happy 100th birthday to Frida Kahlo!

"Frida Kahlo 1907-2007: National Homage" - a massive Kahlo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, "fills all eight galleries of the ornate beaux-arts edifice that is the country's most prestigious cultural showcase. It encompasses nearly one-third of Kahlo's total artistic output, including 65 oils (divided into self-portraits, portraits and still lifes), 45 drawings, 11 watercolors and five prints" and it is part of a month-long series of events covering everything about Frida and marking the 100th anniversary of her birth on July 6, 1907.

The exhibition opened two weeks ago and it is already attracting not only huge crowds but also causing a lot of controversy, much like Kahlo did during her life.

Officials estimate that 300,000 people will view the show here through Aug. 19. Much of its contents then will be regrouped into smaller exhibitions that will open over subsequent months at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Reed Johnson, writing for the LA Times, discusses the controversy over two Kahlo pieces in the exhibition.

On Monday, the Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma published a story in which Raquel Tibol, a respected art critic and author of a new biographical study of Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, raised questions about the authenticity of two of the works in the Kahlo restrospective at the Palace of Bellas Artes.

One of those works, a portrait of one of Kahlo’s first lovers, Alejandro Gómez Arias, which she painted in 1928, reportedly was discovered in a piece of furniture by his heirs after his death in 1990. Gómez Arias was riding with Kahlo during the fateful bus accident that fractured her spine.

The painting was included in the large Kahlo show hosted by the Tate Modern in London in 2005. Tibol has challenged the provenance of that work as well as an undated drawing, “Portrait of Isolda Pinedo Kahlo.”

It is interesting to note that there are at least half a dozen "missing" Kahlos which are believed to be somewhere in the United States, but no one knows where or who has them.