London Blues

In this cruise that I just came back from, we all had a lot of fun in one of the bars singing drunken karaoke songs (I know... I know...) and it reminded me of something from my past.

Sometime around 1988 or so, I lived in England for a few months, and back then a lot of the English pubs were really into karaoke. And even though I am not a Texan, one of my past roomates is from Texas and he used to play "London Blues" all the time and I used to really love to sing it in English pubs.

Scary uh? A guy from Brooklyn singing a Texas song...

Unfortunately the cruise ship didn't have it in its inventory, but upon getting back I got myself a couple of Jerry Jeff Walker CDs and it brought back memories of the song that I think may be the greatest Texas song of all time --- and yes, I know that I've just made a zillion Texans disagree with me... or maybe not.

Listen to Barry P. Nunn sing it here the way that it's supposed to come out... lyrics below.

Well, when you're down on your luck,
And you ain't got a buck,
In London you're a goner.
Even London Bridge has fallen down,
And moved to Arizona,
Now I know why.
And I'll substantiate the rumor that the English sense of humor
Is drier than than the Texas sand.
You can put up your dukes, and you can bet your boots
That I'm leavin' just as fast as I can.

I wanna go home with the armadillo
Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene
The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever
Seen.

Well, it's cold over here, and I swear
I wish they'd turn the heat on.
And where in the world is that English girl
I promised I would meet on the third floor.
And of the whole damn lot, the only friend I've got
Is a smoke and a cheap guitar.
My mind keeps roamin', my heart keeps longin'
To be home in a Texas bar.

I wanna go home with the armadillo
Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene
The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever
Seen

Well, I decided that I'd get my cowboy hat
And go down to Marble Art Station.
'Cause when a Texan fancies, he'll take his chances.
Chances will be taken, that's for sure.
And them Limey eyes, they were eyein' the prize
That some people call manly footwear.
And they said you're from down South,
And when you open your mouth,
You always seem to put your foot there.

Repeat chorus 'til the cows come home.

And thank God they also didn't have Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers.

Openings in C'ville

Charlottesville, Virginia holds a dear place in my arts heart - back in the mid 90s when we were hunting for a place to open a gallery, I focused a lot of attention on Charlottesville before the space in Georgetown fell in our lap. I also seem to have a lot of collectors of my own work in that area for some odd reason.

Anyway... two interesting exhibitions taking place there.

At the Second Street Gallery, Rob Tarbell's appropriated stuffed animals that he usually finds at Goodwill assume new forms as their stuffing is replaced with porcelain slip and then fired in a kiln.

There will be an opening reception for Tarbell (who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Piedmont Virginia Community College) on First Fridays, February 1, 6:00 - 8:00 pm, with an artist talk at 6:30PM for Rob Tarbell: The Struggles Play Nice.

Migration: A Gallery, Laura & Rob Jones (who own one of my drawings) continue to offer the C'ville area a kick-ass exhibition program.

Currently they have the acrylic paintings of University of Mary Washington art professor Stephen L. Griffin in a show titled "Strata."

That show goes through Feb. 15, 2008.

Then check out the cool schedule of exhibitions coming down the road, including a Washington Glass School show.

White House Redux

You can just click onto this website or read on from the news release that I received:

I'm excited to announce that I'm on the jury for a new design competition,called White House Redux, the purpose of which is to design a new home for the U.S. Presidency.

It's a speculative project, to be sure - but a fun one, and I can't wait to see what comes up.

Here's the brief: What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today?

On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world's most powerful individual.

The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected by some of the world's most distinguished designers and critics and featured in a month-long exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in July 2008 and published in Surface magazine.

All three winners will be flown to New York to collect their prizes at the opening party. Register now and send us your ideas for the Presidential Palace of the future!

Continuing: Few people realize the extent of the White House, since much of it is below ground or otherwise concealed by landscaping. The White House includes: Six stories and 55,000 square feet of floor space, 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, twenty-eight fireplaces, eight staircases, three elevators, five full-time chefs, a tennis court, a bowling alley, a movie theater, a jogging track, a swimming pool, and a putting green.

It receives about 5,000 visitors a day. The original White House design, by James Hoban, was the result of a competition held in 1792. Over the centuries, presidents have added rooms, facilities and even entire new wings, turning the White House into the labyrinthine complex it is today.

What if, instead of in 1792, that competition were to be held today? What would a White House designed in 2008, year of election of the 44th President of the United States, look like?

That's the question, then: If you were to design a residential office complex for the U.S. President, what would it look like? Perhaps London's GLA? Or the CCTV Building? Or Selfridge's, Birmingham? Or the Kunsthaus Graz? Would it be stylistically European - or Latin American, or African, or Asian? Prefab? Rammed earth? Perhaps an updated Nakagin Capsule Tower? Or would it be a Walking City? Maybe a helicopter archipelago? Maybe algae-powered, or billboard-bound, or an inhabited dam? Would it be ironic, self-deprecating, imperial, solar-powered, walled off behind anti-missile batteries, or anachronistically neoclassical and made of limestone? All of the above?

Here are the specs. The jury consists of Beatriz Colomina, Stefano Boeri, Liz Diller, John Maeda, myself, Mark Wigley, and Laetitia Wolff. So step up and submit.

I'm genuinely excited about this. Show us your best! Think big, think small, think detailed. Think abstract. Change history.

Details here.

One closes and one opens in Baltimore

Touchet Gallery in Baltimore will close.

DB5K is a new space across the street from where Touchet was.

Touchstone

If you want to see 60 DC area artists all in one space (while you wait for the next Artomatic), then check out Touchstone Gallery's current show Double Vision, which is on now through Feb. 3, 2008.

Work by Mary Ott, Paul So, Cynthia Young, Alice Whealan, Jeanne Garant, Christine Cardellino, Janet Wheeler, Helen Corning, Marcia Coppel, Miriam Keeler, Mari DeMaris, Marie Straw, Melissa Widerkehr, Charles St. Charles, Walter Smalling, T. R. Logan, Kyoko Cox, Steve Alderton, Brian Martucci, Michael Lang, Emery Lewis, Chris Hutchinson, Marshe Hutchinson, Janathal Shaw, Malia Salam-Steeple, Antonia Macedo, Peter Karp, Dina Volkova, Helena Chenomazova, Maya Mackrandilal, Bill Bennett, Harriet Rosenbaum, Dina Rotklein, Harvey J. Kupferberg, Ulrich Stein, Rima Schulkind, Alice Bindeman, Aina Nergaard-Nammack, Lee Wayne Mills, Rosemary A. Luckett, Brigitte Pierrette Davis, Tory Cowles, and Kathy Beynette.

Sonya A. Lawyer at GRACE

About three years ago I came across the work of DC area photographer Sonya A. Lawyer and included her in a massive exhibition titled “Seven” that I curated for the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran. Then I lost contact with Lawyer's artwork.

And then last week I was invited to speak on contemporary art at the Greater Reston Arts Center in Reston, Virginia and came across the new work by Lawyer, which was on exhibition in GRACE’s beautiful new gallery spaces.

To say that I was simply impressed with the new directions in her work would be the first great understatement of 2008.

I was taken, absorbed, seduced, educated, revitalized and convinced that this talented photographer had accomplished a very intelligent marriage of her photographic skills, her gender and her culture, all succinctly wrapped up and presented for comment and absorption in this exhibition.

On view was a 21st century marriage of Mondrian design, African-American history, vintage photography, online appropriation, race relations, enviable presentation and well-honed artistic skills, and also a lesson on power and vision.

Oh yeah... and also an imaginative American photographer perhaps liberating the work of those earlier photographers on whose shoulders she stands, and also the subjects of their work.

Joanne Bauer, GRACE’s hard working curator told me that Lawyer had began collecting vintage photo albums of imagery of people of color from a variety of sources such as online auctions and antique stores.

Later Lawyer told me that after a couple of months of watching the online auctions, she realized that some participants would buy an album and then split apart the images in the album and re-sell them individually to make a larger profit.

She also told me that “the women, men, and children are for the most part nameless and only now known by their auction ID number and their seller’s quirky sign-on. The thought of families torn apart, albeit figuratively, and then sold to the highest bidder is very disturbing and repeats a very troubling part of history. Although I recognize my own complicity by participating in the auctions of my ‘ancestors,’ I do feel that I am rescuing the albums (people) I can, from further disturbance.”

Enter the power of art, as a healing process perhaps, for the artist and even for the nameless faces in Lawyer’s growing collection.

But this is not an easy step to take. She then struggled and says that as she looked over the albums for the past couple of years, she was never quite sure how to, and if she should, incorporate them into her own artistic practice.

At the GRACE show we now know that she did. And she succeeds triumphantly, and a key to the success is her presentation.

Lawyer has incorporated the vintage images into a very modern, Mondrianesque quilt-like presentation on fabric that manages to bridge modern ideas with the historical perspective of the Gee’s Bend quilters to deliver something new and refreshing and geometrical in contemporary photography.

She says that “In a quest to work with new materials, and because I never felt as I if was finding the right colors in fabric stores, I began hand-dying cotton fabric. The texture and the process finally felt right.”

The individuals chosen by Lawyer say something about her and about her focus. There are no victims in these images of a people who perhaps were being victimized by history when these photos were being taken almost a century ago. Instead, in the works on display are beautiful, empowered, and proud people, and one hard-looking individual that has known little fear of others in his hard life.

MR 096 (Cerulean Blue) from "Finding Authenticity (does anyone remember?)"
24" x 18", 2007, photo transfer on fabric by Sonya A. Lawyer

And curiously, as Lawyer says, except for the tell-tale signs of clothing and hairstyle, some of the photographs may have been taken “eight days ago instead of 80 years ago.”

Beautiful, empowered, and proud... not the kind of images that Hollywood and popular culture generally uses as historical references for people of color from decades in the past; not caricatures and stereotypes, but human and authentic. Lawyer notes that “their eyes twinkle with insight and intelligence as they gaze at the camera, dressed in their best, with hair perfectly coiffed.”

When one looks at old portrait photographs discarded to the bins of antique shops or the digital world of online auctions, we all seem to come up with the same questions about these long-forgotten and abandoned people. And Lawyer asks “What were their names? How long did they live? Where did they work? Were they religious? Who were their friends and lovers? And who were their enemies? Who disappointed them and discarded them like trash? And who did they truly trust and believe in?”

Unfortunately, we will never know the answers to those and many similar questions. But I submit that in rescuing them from the bins of discarded history, and incorporating them into the substrate of a new art process, and consciously marrying them into a historical presentation brought forth into a contemporary dialogue, Lawyer has not only rescued, but also liberated these images and given them the potentially infinite lifespan that great artwork delivers.

The exhibition at GRACE goes through February 16, 2008 and it is the kind of exhibition with the impact deserving of a trip to Reston, by both the public and Washington Post, Washington Times and Washington City Paper critics alike.

GRACE, under the leadership of John Alciati and Joanne Bauer has made a noticeable turn-around in the last couple of years after a handful of years of being slightly out of focus and even in confusion, and kudos to the current board, curator and President/CEO is well deserved.

Go to Reston and see this show.

Charles Albert Huckins' Favorite Artwork

This submission of a favorite artwork comes from Charles Albert Huckins, an active photographer in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area who has maintained the Stonelight Images web site for the continuous exhibition of his photography since 1999. He writes:

Although I, along with your other readers, have many favorite works of art, time and circumstances require me to narrow my submission down to two anonymous works few people have ever seen before.

Masquerade - © 2005 Charles Albert Huckins


Three Graces - ©2003 Charles Albert Huckins
Though virtually unknown, both of these works are priceless, in my opinion.

“Masquerade” is a painting on cinder block, replete with symbolism and, for me, is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. “Three Graces” is an ink drawing on enameled steel plate and has a dignity and simplicity of line that make it spell-binding. Although both are figurative works, they have all the energy and spontaneity of the abstract Gee’s Bend quilts, now so rightfully esteemed as icons of American folk art.

Both works were created by unknown former inmates of the Youth Correctional Facility of the District of Columbia Department of Corrections site in Lorton, Virginia. The entire prison facility was decommissioned in 2000 and has been owned and converted to other uses by Fairfax County since August, 2002.

What makes these remarkable works of art so unique at this time is the possibility of their being unavailable for future generations to appreciate firsthand.

In the process of transition from a prison complex to a multifaceted community resource, a number of intriguing artifacts within the prison’s walls have necessarily been destroyed. However, these two works of art, and several others scattered around the prison site, are still intact and salvageable.

Fairfax County is currently seeking input regarding the artistic value of these and other works before a final decision is made about whether or not to save them. Perhaps some of your credentialed readers might care to weigh in on the artistic merits of these works?

If any of your readers would like to express their opinions about the art-worthiness of these works in writing, I, as a volunteer assisting Fairfax County in the documentation of prison resources, will be happy to forward all such comments to the appropriate County authorities. I may be reached at cah@stone-light.com.

I will publicly testify that in my opinion these works not only merit being salvaged, but in doing so represent a triumph of art over adversity, in a sense.

Perhaps the Youth Correctional Facility of the District of Columbia Department of Corrections can simply isolate and protect these works, but leave them exactly where they are, maybe adding some wall text next to them so that future generations can be inspired and learn from the artwork of those who created it in far from enjoyable circumstances.