Since 2003... the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet! And with over SEVEN million visitors, F. Lennox Campello's art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area.
Inactive Art Career Syndrome
Australian John: Art Scammer
Remember this art scam?
Now a "John" from Australia is doing the same scam... be careful if you get an email trying to buy artwork.
The address in the scam email is:
128 Salmon Street
Port Melbourne, Melbourne 3207
Australia
Phone: 61 2 9498 6830
Frida Kahlo Talk and Lecture
Come by tomorrow to the Smith Farm's Healing Arts Gallery, where you can not only check out "Figurative/Narrative: Memories of a Presence," featuring work by Billy Colbert, Michael Janis and Paul Andrew Wandless, but also starting at 5:30PM I will be giving a talk and presentation on Frida Kahlo, focusing on her pain and how it affected her artwork and life.
I will discuss Kahlo in terms of an artist defined and iconized by her artwork, in spite of tremendous hurdles and problems.
Free and open to the public.
See ya there!
Wanna go to a DC opening tonight?
The head out to Katzen Museum, where from 6-8PM there will be an opening at the Rotunda for the the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities FY2009 Visual Arts Applicants' Showcase.
Opening Reception: July 16, 2008, 6:30 PM
Exhibition Hours: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Monday - Saturday July 17 - August 1, 2008
Katzen Arts Center
American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20016
See ya there!
My quote... mea culpa
It has been brought to my attention that a paraphrased quote that compares Tim Tate's groundbreaking advancement of fine arts glass to the groundbreaking work of Stieglitz in bringing photography to the fine arts arena, and which I have been generously attributing to a Washington and/or Washington Post art critic was actually initally coined by me several years ago for an essay on the exhibition "Compelled by Content."
After talking or emailing today to several of the folks who I thought had first coined the comparison, it's my memory who appears to be flawed and the comparison was initiated by me.
My fault and my apologies! An overzealous dealer with an overzelous mind. I enthusiastically believe that what Tim Tate is doing to glass is exactly what Stieglitz did to photography, but it is all my own biased opinion.
I will try to correct the source wherever it has appeared.
Gallery Closes: Gallerist Tells All
(Via J.T.) Chicago gallerist Lisa Boyle closes her gallery after four years and in frustration writes about the causes for her failure... here are some tidbits from her words:
Why is it so GOD DAMNED hard to sell a piece of art around here?...Read the entire piece here.
...Oh now. To consider Chicago alone, it would be very easy to slide into that familiar unison of voices about how collectors here don’t collect, museums here don’t connect with the galleries and local artists, there’s not enough critical attention, Chicago can’t compete with LA and NY, etc. Actually, it come out as easily as my breath to shout out a mental “Here, here!” to accompany these tired voices of disappointment. And I could maybe also choose to take a trip down the path of righteousness and talk about people who’ve started galleries with seemingly limitless free financial support and how all the successful galleries are connected in an incestuous web of nepotism and homosexual ego stroking. After all, these are the things I gossip about in my spare time (to people who can’t get back at me, of course)....
...There is also this sea change regarding art fairs’ role in the life of a gallery. While a great load of fun for some people, they have grown over everything like a suffocating mold and swallowed up a whole heap of what an art dealer has to do on any given day. All for the honor of showing work in ramshackle booths along with a fuckthousand other artists. It’s a different job, being a gallery owner, than it was even five years ago...
Jennie Rose on Southern Exposure at SF
As we continue to expand our coverage, we'd like to introduce Jennie Rose, who will be reporting regularly from California. And if her first piece is an example of the shape of things to come, we've lucked out onto a terrific new voice in the visual arts!
Southern Exposure
By Jennie Rose
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, San Francisco galleries and non profit arts support centers like Southern Exposure (SOEX) were filled with work by “state of the art bohemian poets, underground music heroes, revolutionary skaters, and graffiti kings and queens,” wrote Aaron Rose co-curator of Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture.
Beautiful Losers, an exhibit first shown in San Francisco 2004, encapsulates that period twenty years ago when those at the edges of society were thought to be key to the forward movement of the culture in general.
Jo Jackson, Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee, Josh Lazcano, Alicia McCarthy, Clare Rojas, Thomas Campbell, Dan Flanagan, Symantha Gates, Nell Gould and Chris Johanson; These artists’ work showed that they shook off the parsing and packaging of the traditional art world.
The work attracted skaters, freaks and geeks, youth who made no distinction between a performance art piece by an industrial noise band and any other creative endeavors.
Though a few came to this through MFA prestige, Chris Johanson, a skateboarder with no formal art training, began by hanging up some drawings at Adobe Books, a bookshop in San Francisco’s Mission district.
Acting as a kind of ballast for the seismic seizures of the California arts scene, Southern Exposure stays true to its founding principles of the last 35 years: To provide artists--whether they are exhibiting, curating, teaching, or learning—an opportunity to realize ideas for projects that may not otherwise find support.
The organization, which started out like a coop and is now “a pillar in the arts community,” as described by the SOEX Associate Director Aimee Le Duc, is known for nurturing talent, which later becomes celebrated.
True enough, Johanson who has said that his work depicts “a world where nudist dancers, good vibes, emotionally centered people, forest energy and rainbows abut a sinister comic edge,” has a well- established career. In 2003 SF MOMA awarded him a SECA award, and his work was included in both the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 SITE Santa Fe biennial.
As one nurtured by the support for his ideas, Johanson is invested in the continued success of Southern Exposure. For its 15th annual fundraising auction this year, Johanson donated two pieces, one called “Perception #4,” a color sugarlift aquatint etching.
Other established artists, many who have affinity for or loyalty to SOEX, donated pieces including Catherine Wagner, Andrew Shcoultz, David Ireland and Ajit Chauhan. Chauhan donated “Safe Travels to the Now/Ass You Like It,” a piece in ink and graphite on paper.
The swath of work chosen for the auction always includes artists who participated in any SOEX exhibition of the last three years. Some are invited, such as Vanessa Marsh, a photographer and recent grad from California College of the Arts (CCA), who was invited to participate and is likely to have an exhibition in the future.
One of the most recent to come up through this tradition is Tara Foley who donated “Landscape number 12” a gouache, tape, pencil piece. A week ago Foley just wrapped up Say Hello to Neverending, a solo show at Fecal Face Gallery in downtown San Francisco. Say Hello… charts the symbiotic relationship between destruction and creation by mapping a world ruled by juxtapositions.
“Sometimes we do have work that is purely aesthetic, but then again, when it comes to the artist, it’s really about the work going on the community right now,” says Le Duc.
“Right now it is work which is socially aware, and politically active, such as the work by Hank Willis Thomas.” Thomas donated a digital print called “Black Power,” a close up of a mouth with a gold grill.
“Hank has an uncanny ability to unpack what it is about pop culture that institutionalizes racism,” says Le Duc. “He confronts the co-opting of the black male body. The words ‘black power’ in the grill, this hyper-hyper reality of seeing every pore and hair on this guy’s face takes it to ‘where is the power coming from?’”
Southern Exposure never worries about what sells or looks good, nor does it invoke ideas of a historic or aesthetic canon. “That’s more the business of a museum.”
As Le Duc simply puts it, “We’re in the business of supporting emerging artists and artists and as they create new work. There’s no sense of hierarchy. We stay focused on the overall goal.”
Beginning the move to a new space, Southern Exposure plans to open the doors to spacious Mission district digs in spring of 2009, where it will continue its self-described work as a “daring, nimble, and accessible arts organization.”
