Hyattsville Arts Festival

Where: Hyattsville, MD - on Longfellow Street and Route 1 (or take the metro to Hyattsville)

When: Saturday, April 19th from 12-5pm


For more info visit this website.

Colloquium on African American Art

The Howard University Department of Art is going to host the 19th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art to be held on April 17 – 19, 2008 on the campus of Howard University.

The James A. Porter Colloquium is the leading forum for scholars, artists, curators, and others in the field of African American Art and Visual Culture. The theme of this year’s Colloquium is “From FESTAC to DOCUMENTA: Crossing Boundaries, Constructing Identities, Expanding Discourse in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora.”

It honors the pioneering achievements of Richard Long, Professor Emeritus, Emory University and Leslie King-Hammond, Graduate Dean, Maryland Institute College of Art. For registration & more information, visit www.portercolloquium.org.

NYC Art Program Slide Registry

The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program Slide Registry is accepting slides from professional artists who wish to be considered for Percent for Art Commissions. No residency requirements.

For more information, contact:

Percent for Art
Department of Cultural Affairs
31 Chambers St., 2nd Fl.
New York, NY 10007

Phone: (212) 513-9300 or check website here.

Slides? It is 2008 NYC... how about a digital image registry?

Open House at the Torpedo Factory

On Friday the 25th of April is the annual Spring Open House at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia and there's also a book signing in Margaret Huddy's studio of a new art book about her of Sycamore Series.

The book includes 29 full color images of the paintings she's done of the same tree in the past 22 years. It incudes some words from me about this amazing series.

The open house party is on Friday, April 25 from 6-9PM.

Common Waters at Mayer Fine Art

Below is a quick video showing the exhibition "Common Waters: An Ocean Apart" at Norfolk's new Mayer Fine Art.

Works by Sandra Ramos, Aimee Garcia Marrero, Cirenaica Moreira and Marta Maria Perez Bravo.

To Biennial or Not to Biennial

Kyle MacMillan over at the Denver Post asks and raises some really good points over the need for the new Denver Biennial. Kyle writes:

At least 50 major biennials take place internationally, and more are being added to the list all the time, making it easy to wonder: How many biennials are too many? And with each new one, isn't the drawing power of such events becoming increasingly diluted?

Read the whole article here.

Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art hosts the Corcoran Biennial, which they've hosted for many years. The biennial used to be strictly focused on painting, and as such it had a good niche in the overflowing scene of world biennials - it was just a biennial to sample the state of contemporary painting.

Unfortunately, in my opinion (which is generally not shared by many museum curators or probably other art writers), under the guidance of former Corcoran curator Terry Sultan, the Corcoran Biennial was "modernized" to become just like every other biennial and overly expanded to include everything that passes as fine art these days.

The result? Now the Corcoran Biennial is just another one of the 50+ biennials around the world, desperately lacking focus and usually bringing to DC a lot of art and artists recycled from other biennials plus a severe sprinkling of "newish" work.

In my opinion it would have been better to resist the temptation to expand to become a Jack of all art trades and keep it focused on the state of contemporary painting in all its vampirical refusals to die.

Time for Norfolk to be embarrassed

Norfolk newspaper The Virginian-Pilot sponsors an annual Student Gallery competition hosted at the Chrysler Museum of Art.

The top awards were announced a couple of weeks ago at the Chrysler Museum of Art, where works by the contest’s 62 finalists are on display. Erin Ayres “Unveiled Tokens of Lonely and Deserted Past,” was among two works that earned her the $1,000 first-place award.

Now the controversy part... Teresa Annas, art critic for the same newspaper courageously writes that:

This year’s top winners resulted from a third round of judging. The first two jurors selected nude artworks for first place. Those judges were Aaron De Groft, director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, and Scott Howe, director of education and public programs at the Chrysler Museum.

The Virginian-Pilot, the contest’s main sponsor, declined to honor those choices.

“One was a nude self-portrait of a 17-year-old girl, and we didn’t feel that was appropriate,” said Pam Smith-Rodden, director of marketing, the department that runs Student Gallery. The other piece was a sculpture.

“We’re thinking about the audience, and all the kids and the younger siblings who will see these pieces,” Smith-Rodden said.

Those artworks are still on display at the Chrysler. “We honestly don’t believe those two pieces are appropriate to be held up as the winners of a high school art show, because they do depict the nude,” she said.

Student Gallery has no policy against nude imagery, Smith-Rodden said. “It hasn’t been an issue in the past, but we’re going to revisit it for future shows.”

Three days after the story came out, Norfolk began to respond and Annas reported that "Local art lovers rushed to donate money this week to a high school artist who was chosen as a winner in The Virginian-Pilot Student Gallery but was not given the award because the newspaper’s publisher deemed her work inappropriate. By late Friday, $700 had been collected. The goal was to raise $1,000. "

A day later Annas reported that:

Nancy "Beth" Reid, the teen artist whose nude self-portrait was denied top prize in an art contest, will be given $1,000 in a private ceremony today at Churchland High School in Portsmouth.

Beth, 17, was the first top winner chosen for The Virginian-Pilot Student Gallery, which is open to any high school junior or senior in the region. Her work was rejected for first place by the newspaper's publisher, Bruce Bradley. He deemed the work "inappropriate" for the show because it is a nude image of a minor.

A similar private award will go to Jasmine Childs of Chesapeake. She was the top choice of a second judge, but her sculpture of a nude torso also was rejected by Bradley.

And thus a sour story turns out a little better at the end thanks to the intervention of art lovers who saved the day at the last minute and thanks to the brave reporting by a writer employed by the same newspaper that caused Norfolk to be embarrassed in the eyes of the art world.

Bravo to the people of Norfolk!