Predicted Mini Controversy

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced a design competition, in partnership with the Joint Committee on the Library and the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, for a statue of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. Commissioned by the U.S. Congress, the sculpture will be permanently installed in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building. The Chrysler Foundation has provided $100,000 to support the administration of the competition.

Chances are that the selected winner will be a classic sculpture to complement the works already there. But, and this may be a bit of a stretch considering the site and the probable set of jurors, if a jury dares to select something a little different from a classical statue, then expect the usual angst and fight over contemporary art.

This event could be an instant career-maker a-la-Maya-Lin and the Viet Nam War Memorial, but only if the jury sidesteps the tradition of traditional statuary (yes, yes.. I know) and selects - as an example - a life size glass reliquary featuring objects that belonged to this amazing lady, plus a running video of her life couple with motion detectors to kick in a little audio when someone stops in front of it.

Details for the competition here, and if I was an art professor teaching some 3D class somewhere, I may just make this a school assignment and have my students each submit a proposal for this call.

Application Receipt Deadline: May 30, 2008
Notification of Semi-Finalists: August 1, 2008

PMA and regional artists

Here's something that you will never see in a Washington, DC museum: This spring the Philadelphia Museum of Art collaborates with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists -one of this region’s artist organizations - to present "Emerging to Established: Twenty-Five Years of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists."

Organized in conjunction with the CFEVA in celebration of this milestone anniversary, the exhibition includes works on paper by 25 artists, including current and former Fellows from CFEVA’s Career Development Program, as well as members of its Board of Artistic Advisors, who select the Fellows. It will be on view through July 6 in the Director’s Gallery.

While the CFEVA program encourages work in all mediums, this exhibition concentrates solely on those making works on paper: drawings, prints, photographs, and mixed-media.

The Center For Emerging Visual Artists, formerly Creative Artists Network, was founded in 1983 by Felicity R. “Bebe” Benoliel to encourage the career development of emerging visual artists. Since then, the organization has worked steadily harder to provide the support essential to talented individuals building careers in the visual arts.

Artists' Talks: Philadelphia

Bill McRight and Alex Lukas are both members of the artist collective Space 1026, McRight creates strange and fantastical creatures for magazines, sidewalks, walls and skateboards. He has worked with Cannonball Press, Saturday Skateboards, Swindle Magazine and Mishka NYC. Lukas, originally from Cambridge, MA, creates ‘zines under the name Cantab Publishing. His work has been seen in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles as well as in Swindle Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times Book Review.

This Saturday, April 19, from 2:00–3:00pm, they will be discussing their work at The Print Center in Philly. Free and open to the public; to register, contact Eli VandenBerg at evandenberg@printcenter.org or 215.735.6090 x1

Artomatic update

The District of Columbia's massive arts extravanganza known as Artomatic already has almost 700 visual artists and nearly 150 performing artists signed up to participate in the coming AOM, and in order to accommodate the large number of 2-D artists that still needed space and for those on the wait list they met with the building owners and got permission to expand.

Artomatic will now be on the 4th - 12th floors of the Capital Plaza I Building. The massive Opening party is Friday, May 9, Noon, the Meet the Artists Night is Friday, May 16th, the Artist Social I is Sunday, May 18th, and Artist Social II is Thursday, June 12th.

AOM Closes on Sunday, June 15, 2008.

Details here.

Huge Arts Friday in Philly tomorrow

This Friday is crazy in Philly... first is the opening weekend for the Heartworks series of multimedia events. On Friday there's an ecletic mix of sights and sounds that will greet you during the HeartWorks Opening Weekend events, taking place over two days at two different venues. Musical performances, video art, mixed media presentations and DJ sets by Gang Gang Dance, Douglas Armour, Cory Archangel, Professor Murder, Chad Brown, Megawords. All the details are here and online auction here.

Then also on Friday is the Center City District gallery night from 5-8:30PM, with the City Paper's after-party with free food and drink specials at Vango (116 S. 18th Street) - must RSVP as space is limited. Visit this website for details.

My picks? Drop by and see Dennis Beach at Schmidt Dean, also the Philadelphia Sketch Club's 145th Annual Exhibition of Small Oil Paintings and Amanda Means at Gallery 339.

Art Businesses Across the Nation

"As of January 2008, the Creative Industries are a formidable industry in the United States — 2.98 million people working for 612,095 arts-centric businesses (2.2 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively, of U.S. employment and businesses)."

From the top 50 most populated US cities, Seattle (first) and San Francisco (second) and Atlanta (third) are way ahead in the Arts businesses per 1,000 residents; Seattle has 6.98 and SF has 6.5 and Atlanta has 5.0 - all other cities are below 5.

By comparison, DC has 4.06, Philadelphia 1.71, NY 3.25, Minneapolis 4.84, Miami 3.35, LA 4.72. The US city with the least interest in doing business with an arts business? That would be Detroit at 1.19 art business per 1,000 residents.

Want to know how many creative industries are located in your community?

Want to know how your community compares to other regions in the country?

Then visit this website.

Trib does Tim Tate

I am not familiar with the Chicago Tribune's art critic Alan Artner, but apparently much like his counterparts in DC and Philly, he rarely does galleries. But last week he did in writing about Narratives at Marx-Saunders Gallery

The easy seductiveness of glass as an artistic medium has in 20 years given rise to a virtual industry in sculpture in which prettiness is all. But what is there beyond technique? One answer comes in the four-artist exhibition at the Marx-Saunders Gallery: Narratives.

Each of the artists — Carmen Lozar, Catharine Newell, Minako Shirakura, Tim Tate — is to some degree a storyteller. So glass is less important in and of itself than in how it conveys the artists' tales, either alone or in combination with other materials. This shifts the works' emphasis from physical appeal to presumably something more inward.

The pieces incorporating video by Shirakura and Tate accomplish this best, still without convincing us that glass was essential to the enterprise. Could their glass components have expressed as much if they had been executed in another medium? Yes. And in Newell's pieces the new material could have been as simple as paper, as chief interest is in her representational drawing. Even so, only Lozar's cartoonlike tableaux disappoint with an equal coyness in execution and idea. If not there yet, Shirakura and Tate are clearly onto something to deepen the discourse. Here narrative is interesting enough to be periodically revisited.

Read the entire column of reviews here.