Call for Art

The Third Annual Metamorphosis Art Show has a call for artists.

Details here.

Baltimore Studio Spaces

The Baltimore Sun tells us that

Artists seeking studio space in Baltimore will have a new option to consider this fall when the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower opens for its first tenants.

Renovation work is nearing completion on a $1.25 million conversion of the landmark tower at 15 S. Eutaw St. from municipal offices to studios for painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, writers and other artists. The first two floors will have a cafe and gallery space.

Read the article here. More information about the studios and the application process is available from the Office of Promotion & the Arts at 410-752-8632.

Trawick and Sondheim

Tomorrow the Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan will have this excellent piece on the Sondheim Prize in Baltimore. And O'Sullivan makes a couple of key observations about the two major art prizes in the Mid Atlantic region:

The Trawick Prize better watch out. There's an upstart contemporary art award in town, and it stands to give the Bethesda-born competition -- which has been handing out $14,000 in prize money to artists from Maryland, Virginia and Washington since 2003 -- a run for its money.

Okay, so maybe the Baltimore-based Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize isn't exactly "in town." Now in its second year, the art contest, named for the late Baltimore public servant and civic leader and his late wife, is open to visual artists working in the Baltimore region. (This year that includes two D.C. artists.) Examples of work by the 2007 finalists are on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The winner of the Sondheim Prize's $25,000 purse, which unlike the Trawick does not get divided among first-, second- and third-place finishers, will be announced Friday at the museum.

There's another critical difference between the contests, beyond the disparity in the cash value of the prizes. It doesn't have to do with the caliber of the entrants either. (Baltimore sculptor Richard Cleaver, whose painted and bejeweled ceramic-and-wood figures are part of the BMA show of Sondheim finalists, took home the Trawick's $10,000 first prize in 2003. So there's a lot of cross-fertilization of the talent pools, which is good.) Rather, the edge that this year's Sondheim Prize exhibition has over any version of the Trawick competition I've ever seen is in the choice of venue. The art just looks better in the BMA's spacious galleries than anything ever will at the Creative Partners Gallery, the cramped storefront on the ground floor of a downtown Bethesda office building that has been the Trawick's unfortunate exhibition space of choice since its inception.

I agree with O'Sullivan about the Trawick's exhibition location, and in fact I have some strong indications that next year's Trawick may "upgrade" and move to a better location, mostly because (I am told) Creative Partners no longer wants to host the show. But it will probably be to one of Bethesda's top galleries (that leaves 2-3 choices).

But O'Sullivan's article says also something about the difference between the way Baltimore museums looks at Baltimore artists and events and the way the DC area museums do.

Bethesda doesn't have a museum. So the Trawick will just move to another gallery.

But DC has more museum space per person than any other city in the world. That is a mathematical fact.

And yet, while Baltimore's main museum is part of that area's main art prize, no DC area art museum is involved in exhibiting the Trawick Prize exhibition.

Let this be a call for the Hirshhorn or the Corcoran or the Phillips to work out a deal with the Trawick Prize to host the finalists of the DC area's main art prize in one of those museum's galleries.

If Baltimore can do it, so can DC. And I am also making a call to my fellow DC area art bloggers and writers to join me in this call - let's see if we can make something like this happen.

If you think that this is a bad idea, then ignore it; otherwise, please join me in calling for a museum venue for next year's Trawick Prize.

Audio files of the radio discussions

Unfortunately the online segment starts about 15 minutes into the show, but you can listen to the rest of today's highly animated Kojo Nnamdi show with Jeffry Cudlin, Dr. Claudia Rousseau and myself here.

It starts with us arguing about the Bethesda Painting Awards.

I think that this was the best show so far and I also think that Jeffry, Claudia and I make up a great radio argumentative team! Now all we need is a sponsor to talk to WAMU about sponsoring an "Art Talk" show once a month or so.

Call me

Around one o'clock today I'll be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show discussing the Greater Washington area visual arts and artists and art stories as I usually do once or twice a year. Tune in to WAMU 88.5 FM around one. I'll be there together with my good friends Jeffry Cudlin from the Washington City Paper and Dr. Claudia Rousseau from the Gazette newspapers.

You can call us during the show at (800) 433-8850 or you can email us questions to kojo@wamu.org.

Pool woes

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, our neighbors on Sackman Street (Paula and Augie) had one of those above ground pools. Because our backyard and theirs was only separated by a chain link fence, it was easy for me to climb it and use their pool at will, which was OK with Augie, but not OK with Paula, which was a weird thing, because she was always feeding me alongside her kids, as she was a stay-at-home-mom, while my Mom had a job as a seamstress at one of the nearby factories that used to exist in Brooklyn where people like my Mom would work and get paid by what was then called "piece work."

But Augie was the one always working and doing stuff all year round to keep the pool working for those really hot NY summers, although he really hated me dive-bombing into the pool from the second floor fire escape ladder... you had to be good, and sort of belly-flop the water entry (the pool was only around five feet deep), otherwise you'd break your legs or seriously pop your knee caps. But Augie loved kids enjoying his pool!

Anyway, when I was house-hunting last year, I quickly discovered that houses in Media, PA are a lot more affordable than Potomac, MD, so I ended up in a cool house. And yet I was reticent to sign up, because the house came with a pool.

Pools are money pits.

And we quickly discovered that this pool, like many other pools, an hour after the warranties expire, leak. It's hard to hold water in a concrete bubble.

First estimates to fix the pool came in around a ton of money... as time went by, and more and more crap was removed from the pool (apparently built somewhere in the 60s) the "this-is-what's-wrong" stuff kept piling up and now we're up to around two tons of money and I am one good drunk away from filling the fucking thing with soil and planting pachysandras in the hole.

Wanna go to a DC opening tomorrow?

Carolina Mayorga will be having her opening event at Transformer tomorrow at 6:30PM. And then Robert Parrish's opening will be a week from tomorrow at the same time, same place.