Congressional Arts Report Card

The Americans for the Arts Action Fund PAC has produced the 2008 Congressional Arts Report Card to help you make arts-informed decisions at the ballot box in November. The report contains carefully evaluated legislative benchmarks that form a detailed arts record, including a numerical score and letter grade, for each Member of the House based on numerous arts and arts education issues.

Read it here. Neither McCain nor Obama are members of the Senate Cultural Caucus.

At the MFA

Quick video of the 8th Annual American Landscapes show that I just juried at the Maryland Federation of Art in Annapolis.

More like 29

Surprised to find out that my good buddy Philippa P.B. Hughes is 39; I had her pegged at 29.

Read the WaPo story here.

Photography at Black Rock

I've been hearing good things about the current photography exhibition at Germantown, Maryland's Black Rock Arts Center. They have B&W photography by Joanne Miller and Lauren Henkin through September 19. Their work pairs the natural world vs. the urban landscape of Charleston, West Virginia.

Their next exhibit, Portraits of Life (Artist reception: September 27, 5:30–7:30 p.m.) also sounds quite interesting: Portraiture consisting of 36 panels, providing visual imagery and personal histories of Holocaust survivors from Montgomery County. Each 24" x 36” panel contains photographs and a narrative of the individual survivor's story.

Iconic Trompe-l'oeil at Rehoboth Beach

Contemporary trompe-l'oeil work by Michael Fitts and Victor Spinski will be showcased at Gallery 50 in Rehoboth Beach September 18 – October 14. An artists' reception will be held Saturday, September 20, 5-8 p.m.

Michael Fitts is one of my favorite trompe-l'oeil painters around and is originally from Washington D.C. and now resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Why isn't Diebenkorn famous?

"Consider the case of Richard Diebenkorn, whose paintings are passionately admired by countless collectors and connoisseurs of modern art, not a few of whom place him close to the top of the short list of America's greatest artists. But Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, has never quite made it into the pantheon of American modernism. MoMA owns a half-dozen of his paintings and works on paper, all of them first-rate. And how many are hanging there today? Not a one.

Why isn't Diebenkorn famous? Because his work doesn't fit into the standard narrative that many critics, scholars and museum curators use to explain the history of 20th-century art. For openers, he was a West Coast artist who spent most of his adult life in California when New York was universally regarded as the creative center of American art. And though he started out painting boldly colored Abstract Expressionist canvases that made perfect sense to the critics of the early '50s, he took a sharp turn off the smooth road of history in 1955 and returned to figurative painting, producing an even more remarkable series of portraits, still lifes and suburban cityscapes."

Read this excellent WSJ article by Terry Teachout here.

ABMB stays in MB

Art Basel Miami Beach will stay in Miami Beach:

Art Basel, the country's biggest contemporary art show, will return to Miami Beach through 2011 under a hard-fought deal with the city that gives the show's owner a financial stake in the Miami Beach Convention Center.

The center's four-day art show has exploded into a week of festivals from the mainland to Miami Beach, with a global following paying sky-high hotel rates and generating a stream of private jets that tourism officials say rivals a Super Bowl.

But until now, Art Basel had refused to commit to the show for more than one year, leaving city officials to ponder losing the tourism draw to another U.S. location in their annual negotiations with Basel executives.

That changed Wednesday when city commissioners ousted the management of the convention center in favor of a partnership between Global Spectrum, a Comcast subsidiary, and Basel parent firm Messe Schweiz. The deal calls for Global to manage the facility and Messe Schweiz to market it abroad.

Read the Miami Herald story here.