Best burrito in the world?

The massive carnitas burro in San Diego's Santana drive through?

There used to be only one Santana - on Rosecrans - but now I think that the little drive through has grown into a chain.

No matter, the food is still great and cooked just as you order it, not pre-cooked, and the carnitas are just amazing.

New Hirshhorn Museum director

Richard Koshalek has been named director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, effective April 13.

Koshalek, 67, was president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., from 1999 until January 2009. Before that, he served as director of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years.

"Richard Koshalek has vast experience in both the education and museum worlds," said Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough. "His creativity brought modern and contemporary art to bear on issues of the day and will help the museum and the Institution reach broad audiences in technologically and aesthetically exciting new ways."

"I am immensely excited to come to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden," said Koshalek. "This institution, more than most, is at the perfect time and place to make a unique contribution not only to the history of modern and contemporary art, but to the larger appreciation of the role of the arts in society. Given its place in the nation's capital, as well as its proximity to a peerless range of cultural, diplomatic and civic resources, the Hirshhorn can be a catalyst for new creative and collaborative energy in many arenas."

We are also hoping that Koshalek discovers the museum's proximity to a large number of world class art galleries and an immense number of DC area artists, both of which, with a few and notable rare exceptions, have been largely ignored by the Hirshhorn in the past.

"In the past it seemed that Hirshhorn curators found it easier to visit Berlin or New York, or any place for that matter, rather than their own city, when looking for emerging artists or new innovative work in commercial galleries," Campello Vulcan-melded into Koshalek's mind. "Not anymore," he added, "there's a new sheriff in town."

PMA Woes

Facing a dramatic downturn in its endowment and waning city support, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is cutting staff, delaying exhibitions, curtailing programs, trimming salaries and — subject to city approval — increasing admission fees.

The cuts will bring the museum’s operating budget down by about $1.7 million to $52 million for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, and, the museum hopes, will stave off a deficit the following year forecast as high as $5 million.

The museum will eliminate 30 positions — about seven percent of the staff — in all areas, though no curators are being let go. Of those 30 jobs, 16 are layoffs of current personnel, with the remaining positions lost by not filling vacancies.

Senior staff will take salary cuts of between five and 10 percent, said interim CEO Gail M. Harrity yesterday.

Read the Inky report here.

Dobrzynski on the Art Fairs

The crowd was cordial, happily sipping from glasses of Champagne, white wine, and soda. Big collectors like Marty Margulies, Agnes Gund, Frances Bowes, Don Marron, and Helen Schwab roamed the art-filled aisles. As everyone walked around during the gala opening of the annual Art Dealers Association of America art fair in New York last week, they were smiling, laughing, pausing frequently to chat and to look at the art in the gallery booths.

What they weren’t doing, despite valiant new strategies by some dealers, was buying much art.

Read the Judith Dobrzynski report on The Daily Beast here.

Blows

A blow to the Greater DC area art scene... in the making... unless we all do something.

Arlington County Manager Ron Carlee has proposed the closing of the Ellipse Arts Center in the FY2010 recommended budget. This closing includes a complete budget cut of the Ballston, Virginia area Ellipse Arts Center facility rent, a complete budget cut for visual art exhibition programs and a complete budget cut for visual arts educational programs.

Cynthia Connolly, Ellipse Arts Center Manager & Curator, and LisaMarie Thalhammer, Ellipse Arts Center Education Programmer, are graciously but urgently asking for your written support in proving that Arlington County’s continued funding of the visual arts is a value to our community. Please consider writing a short statement in support of the Ellipse Arts Center program.

I hope you will take a moment before the end of the day tomorrow to send a note of support to Lisa. Please email Lisa Marie at lthalhammer@arlingtonva.us with your supportive statement by the end of the day tomorrow, Thursday, February 26, 2009.

Please call with any questions or concerns at 703-228-1861. You can also contact Ron Carlee directly 703.228.3120, fax: 703.228.3218 or email Ron Carlee - County Manager at countymanager@arlingtonva.us

A Public Thank You to Kim Ward

As we all know by now, the WPA's Kim Ward will soon leave as the head honcho for that terrific artists' organization.

I can’t exactly recall the first time that I met Kim Ward, but the first time that she made a distinct impression on me was back when she was one of the several WPA people working under Annie Adjchavanich’s leadership and the WPA was at the Corcoran and they had just published their first Artists Directory.

They were distributing boxes of the books through galleries in the District and Greater DC area, and I was working that day at my old and first gallery in Canal Square in Georgetown. We had asked for a couple of boxes, and Ward came into the gallery carrying one of the boxes, with that huge smile that she always seems to have.

“I’m illegally parked!” she announced in her hypnotizing Southern accent.

“You’ll get a ticket,” I predicted. “Let me go back with you to the car and I’ll bring the second box over.”

I walked with her across the street and picked up the second box from her car. She zipped away to her next delivery spot.

“Damn,” I said as I struggled with the weight of the box of books, “How’d in the hell did that tiny thing carry this box?”

It was the first of many instances where Kim Ward would show me and others the toughness, resiliency and hard working ethic of a woman in love with her job and the huge number of artists that the WPA represents. I’ve seen this woman scrubbing floors, painting walls, patching up holes, washing dishes, hammering at walls, cleaning spills, serving food… hanging artwork, all the stuff that makes the life of the director of an artists’ organization a glamorous job.

Ward worked her way up the WPA ladder until she became the executive director and new leader of the WPA, and in the five years since that happened she re-crafted that organization into a very important part of what makes the Washington, DC art scene “tick.”

Ward’s accomplishments at the helm of the WPA have been nothing short of spectacular; all the way from guiding the organization to the digital age to guiding it right out of the heavy shadow of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

It can be probably argued that the Corcoran provided a life line to the WPA after several directors almost ran the organization into extinction. The Corcoran relationship allowed the WPA to rediscover itself, and to breathe a little easier in financial terms.

First under the dizzying leadership of my good friend Annie Adjchavanich and then under Kim Ward’s strong and steady hand the WPA began to rise again, and eventually it regained its independence last year.

And once again, it would be hard to imagine Washington, DC without a WPA. And hard to imagine a WPA without Kim Ward.

I am proud to call her my friend and on behalf of the thousands of WPA artist members, and of the Greater DC area art dealers, and every symbiot of the District’s art scene: Kim Ward, thank you!

If you wear a Che Guevara T-Shirt

Unless it is one like the one on the left, then you are wearing the image of one of the 20th century's worst psychopaths, who (like Hitler) never hid his hate and goals in his writing and speeches, which if you took the time to read, you'd find jewels like this (on the subject of the Cuban missile crisis:

"If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York. We must never establish peaceful coexistence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims."

             -- Che Guevara, Interview in London Daily Worker, 1962