Plan Ahead for Friday: Hirshhorn After Hours

Hirshhorn After Hours is an annual series of late-night events for locals interested in contemporary art, culture and music. Programming is presented throughout the museum and outside on the plaza. Exhibitions include: Takeshi Murata's short hallucinogenic films in the Black Box space for new media in the lower level; a last chance to see the lobby exhibition "Directions—Virgil Marti and Pae White" closing on July 29, and photography by Wolfgang Tillmans on the second floor.

Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door. Cash bar and dancing outdoors on the Hirshhorn's plaza. Detailed ticketing information at this website.

WHAT: Hirshhorn After Hours featuring musical performance by Great Noise Ensemble in collaboration with the opening night of the Capitol Fringe Festival.

WHEN: Friday, July 20, from 8 p.m. to midnight

WHERE: Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the National Mall (Independence Avenue at Seventh Street S.W.) in DC.

Haga Click

Essential differences

The Baltimore Sun's art critic is photographer Glenn McNatt, and he does a nice job in writing this piece on the Sondheim Prize and its latest prizewinner, Baltimore painter Tony Shore, who also came down last year to Bethesda to win the 2006 Bethesda Painting Awards.

In this Washington Post article, Michael O'Sullivan pointed out some key differences between Baltimore's Sondheim Prize and the DC region's Trawick Prize, focusing mainly on the exhibition venues for these two important prizes - the Sondheim is exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Trawick at the Creative Partners Gallery in Bethesda. O'Sullivan was correct in calling out this difference, but as the Sun's article points out, there are several other key differences.

For one, the Sondheim Prize is deeply interwoven and part of not only the city of Baltimore itself, but also of a major city wide art event: Artscape. The Trawick, which preceded the Sondheim by a few years, is run by the Bethesda Urban Partnership.

According to Baltimore's promotion office director Bill Gilmore, this year's Sondheim award was underwritten by the France-Merrick Foundation, a local philanthropy, and by gifts from local businesspeople. "The annual cost of the competition, including the award and the costs associated with paying jurors, mounting exhibitions and printing publications totals between $50,000 and $60,000, he said."

WOW!

The Trawick is totally underwritten by an annual endowment from Bethesda businesswoman Carol Trawick of $10,000. The total prizes total around $14,000 and the other funds are gathered from entry fees and from a $1,000 donation from Bethesda's Fraser Gallery for a "Young Artist Award." All costs associated with mounting the Trawick exhibition, including paying the three jurors, come from this pot, which I suspect is around $20,000 all together (I don't know the exact figures). Furthermore, although they have been approached, and called out here and in other places to add more funds to the Trawick, all the major businesses located and working out of Bethesda have essentially ignored the call as far as I know. I guess Lockheed Martin, and Comcast, and Marriott, and the Discovery Channel, and EuroMotorcars, and Chevy Chase Bank, etc. can't afford it.

Gilmore said this year's contributors included Walter D. Pinkard, a founder of the France-Merrick Foundation, and Amy Newhall. Bill Gilmore also stated that "Pinkard, Sandy Hillman and Nancy Roberts have also pledged to help raise an initial endowment of $500,000 to fund future prizes." And so the Baltimore people with the connections and the deep pockets to make the Sondheim Award become a yearly event have become involved.

As far as I know Ms. Trawick is the only backer of the Trawick Prize, although I suspect that the Bethesda area has more millionaires and multi-millionaires than all of the rest of Maryland added together. Where are they in pledging anything to the Trawick?

"We're certainly a lot closer to being an annual prize than we were a year ago," Gilmore said. "We kicked this off on a leap of faith last year and we have received some real support from people who have stepped up and said we want to help ensure the future of the prize."

That's the real difference: Baltimoreans have stepped up while Bethesdians (whose city for all intents and purposes is part of the Greater DC region) have not.

Elvis as a Nun

Below is one of my charcoal and conte drawings from a few years ago. It's a rather large drawing, about 40 inches by 30 inches. It is titled "Elvis and Buster Keaton, disguised as nuns, attend a Dan Flavin exhibition." It was sold many years ago.

"Elvis Presley and Buster Keaton, disguised as nuns, attend a Dan Flavin exhibition"
Charcoal and Conte on Paper by F. Lennox Campello

Tony Shore wins Sondheim Prize

Baltimore painter Tony Shore, a graduate of the Baltimore School for the Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the 2006 winner of the Bethesda Painting Awards, has won the $25,000 2007 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize.

Shore is currently on the faculty of the Foundations Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is the founding Director of Access Art, a youth art center in Baltimore's Morrell Park neighborhood. He is represented in Baltimore by the C. Grimaldis Gallery and (as far as I know) unrepresented in the DC area region.

Shore was somewhat of a surprise winner of the 2006 Bethesda Painting Awards. He paints large works on black velvet, which have been described as straddling "the fence between high-class and lowbrow."

You can see the exhibition of works by the winner and all other finalists here.

Congratulations to Tony Shore!

What a great definition, she said

During our radio talk last Thursday, someone called in and wanted a definition of what makes good art. On the fly, Washington City Paper critic Jeffry Cudlin came up with a terrific answer, and when Kojo asked Gazette newspapers critic Dr. Claudia Rousseau for her definition, she exclaimed (referencing Jeffry's) "what a great definition, I love it!"

Someone later on emailed us asking for the definition, and Jeffry graciously enough regurgitated it as best he recalled. I have posted it below... this is not a manifesto or otherwise anything but a terrific off-the-cuff answer:

1) How apt is the choice of medium?

For Clement Greenberg, art was all about specialization. He wanted work in any given medium to refer to its own method of construction and the characteristics of its component materials: Painting was about free-flowing or staining pigment in a resolutely flat pictorial space; sculpture was about volume and movement through three-dimensional space; literature was really about words, rhythm, meter.

Of course, Greenberg's brand of formalism died out in the late '60s. Now that we live in a cross-disciplinary, multi-valent art world, contemporary artists tend less and less to be specialists, winnowing out their problem set to a few spare material issues. Instead, they're typically trained as generalists who work from project to
project, idiom to idiom.

But this can't mean that the choice of medium doesn't matter. Instead, that choice becomes terribly important: Why is this object a drawing, painting, photograph, or sculpture? Why was that choice appropriate, or not appropriate? What about the history or physical properties of the medium seems uniquely bound up in the content of this work?

2) Does the artist show enough material mastery?

Economy and clarity are virtues: No artist needs to show the viewer everything they're capable of in a work, lavishing their object/project with bells, whistles and flourishes.

If I go all the way back to John Ruskin--why not?--he stated that the artist should work until the idea has been made clear, and go no further; he warned against work in which the only evident merits were "patience and sandpaper".

And, again, if we're going to accept this idea that an artist might make a photograph, or a painting, or a video, then how skilled do they need to be in each? Skilled enough to demonstrate some empathy with the materials, and to achieve an appropriate level of fit and finish--one that doesn't distract from the content
of their work, but instead enhances it.

3) How does the artist position him or herself in relation to history?

Every artist is making claims about the relation of their work to both that of their immediately present peers and to the canon. Every artist essentially chooses their grandparents, cobbling together selective (possibly arbitrary) genealogies out of the
past few centuries of artistic production.

A contemporary painting is almost always an argument--for what painting ought to be generally, and for how we should position the artist within this imagined genealogy.

The task of the critic is to determine whether or not this positioning -- an argument made by the artist, and amplified, tweaked, or otherwise refined by the curator -- is valid.

Choice of medium, material mastery, historical positioning: my big three.

Jeffry Cudlin

I'd like to open a dialogue and invite comments to the above definition. Email me and I'll post them.

GlassWeekend ’07

Since 1985, GlassWeekend, a biennial event, has brought together to New Jersey the world’s leading glass artists, collectors, galleries, and museum curators for a three-day weekend of exhibitions, lectures, hands-on glassmaking, artists, demonstrations and social events.

GlassWeekend events are held at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, home of the Creative Glass Center of America and the Museum of American Glass.

WheatonArts is located in Millville, New Jersey, 45 minutes from both Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and less than three hours from New York and Washington, D.C.

I'll be checking it out this weekend.