AOM Registration Opens Soon

Registration to be part of Artomatic 2009 opens online Friday March 27th.

The tenth anniversary event will run from May 29 to July 5 at Half Street's 55 M Street, S.E. - blocks from Nationals Park - atop the Navy Yard metro in D.C.'s Capitol Riverfront neighborhood.

Artomatic is unjuried, unfettered, popular, crazy, and all artists are welcome. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and will end when space is filled. The artists and the public love this amazing art explosion, while the critics usually hate it in their Freudian need for a curatorial hand or someone in charge.

Artomatic.org will have all you need to know by March 27. For registration questions, e-mail register@artomatic.org. To volunteer, e-mail volunteer@artomatic.org.

Major Art Fair coming to DC


The third annual International Caribbean Art Fair is coming to the nation's capital later this year, a change of venue from its usual New York location, where ICAFair has been held for the last two years.

ICAFair, a first-of-its-kind art fair exclusively for the representation of Caribbean Art, will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center from September 10-13, 2009.

ICAFair provides exhibition opportunities to galleries and art dealers representing artists of Caribbean heritage.

At $2,400 for a 12' x 12' booth, this fair is a steal compared to the booth prices of every other fair around, so it may attract enough galleries willing to take a chance in today's negative-driven economy. From what I hear, the fair has done well in the last couple of years.

If you're curious what constitutes "Caribbean heritage," see the definition here.

I also know that ICAFair organizers have already been working hard and have been meeting with Cultural Attaches at the Caribbean embassies in DC to forge partnerships and help create awareness in their home countries. They've also just announced a joint-lecture partnership with the IDB Cultural Center scheduled for June 11th at 6:30pm at their location in Washington, DC.

This is great news for the District's arts scene, and I really hope that some sponsors and the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities step up to the plate to help make this art event a success.

Opportunity for Artists

Sign up Deadline: April 15th 2009
Postmark Deadline: July 1st 2009

The Canvas Project - Your work at the world's busiest airport!

Sign up to receive five 3"x3" canvases and a list of 5 user generated words that you are to interpret onto each canvas. The goal of the exhibition is to create a visual encyclopedia using mini canvases and artists from all over the world. At least one of your canvases will be published in an Art House book and one will be on display at the world's busiest airport, The Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Everyone who signs up and sends back their work will be included in the book and the exhibition. They do not jury any of the work. Art House is all about community and you don't have to be a professional artist to participate in the exhibition. This project is about being creative and inspiring yourself and others.

Fee: $18

Sign up Deadline: April 15th 2009

Postmark Deadline: July 1st 2009

To sign up to participate, visit this website.

Black and Italian and Beechcroftian

Brewing around for a couple of months...

Vanessa Beecroft had better prepare for some serious damage control, since director Pietra Brettkelly's documentary on Beecroft, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, opens at Sundance tonight. The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist. The film is brutally effective because it lets Beecroft hang herself with damaging quotes and appalling behavior.

The documentary explores Beecroft’s experiment in Sudan, in which she attempts to adopt two Sudanese orphans and use them as subjects in her work. Wise to theory, Beecroft says her adoption will be “not just fetishization of the blacks. It will be a beginning of a relationship with that country.” The film documents the significant gap between Beecroft's theory and her actions.

Upon her arrival in the Sudan, Beecroft hurries to set up a photo shoot, hiding the cameras from the orphanage's sisters, calling the babies “these poor creatures.” Which baby should she photograph? “Either one or the other,” she says, “it doesn’t matter.”

Repeatedly, Beecroft claims that she “loves this culture” — but, in the film’s most disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo shoot. Beecroft refuses, complains, starts shooting again, and eventually loses a physical confrontation with one of the sisters, who takes the children away from her, furious that Beecroft is stripping children naked inside a church. “Christ, these people,” Beecroft moans, as she barricades herself inside, pushing a pew up against the door to keep the sisters out of their own abbey.

Read the report in NY Magazine here and Black Cat Bone here and the WaPo here.

"Many people are enraged," Amnau Eele, head of the Black Artists Association, told Page Six. "She wants to be famous on the backs of poor black children."

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: March 13, 2009

UNICEF is seeking artists of all levels (beginner to professional) to contribute artwork to promote the Tap Project — a campaign to provide clean drinking water to children around the world. All of the works submitted will be eligible for a $500 juried prize and exhibition during World Water Week, March 22-28, at the Pepco Edison Gallery located at 701 Ninth St., NW in DC. Submissions will also be considered for use in print and online advertising in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

During World Water Week participating restaurants will ask diners to voluntarily pay $1 for the tap water they would usually enjoy for free. For every dollar raised, a child will have clean drinking water for 40 days.

All artwork should pertain to drinking water. Due date is March 13. Details here.

At the D'Art Center in Norfolk


In the many years that I have been jurying or curating art exhibitions around the nation, I have never ceased to be impressed each and every time by the diversity of the human mind when putting pen to paper, or brush to canvas or chisel to stone, or eye to camera view finder.

And yet, after well over 300 exhibitions in which I have had a hand in orchestrating, I can say with an enthusiastic attitude that the recent exhibition for Norfolk's D’Art Center (which opened last Friday) provided me, the juror, with one of the most pleasant and interesting and intelligent juried competitions that it has been my honor to put together.

Hundreds of artists from 17 states submitted work for the competition, so the talent pool was diverse and geographically diverse.

My first pleasant surprise in jurying this exhibition was the high number of really good entries from which I was to select the exhibition, or better said, competition. Those artists which I selected really brought their best to the show and competed well. And having said that, there were at least a dozen more artists, had space allowed it, that could have been included.

My second surprise was the significant number of really good three dimensional entries in the pool of submissions. I express this as surprise because generally, most of these national level jury shows are comprised of 90% two-dimensional work and a handful of sculptures or other 3D pieces.

The 3D pieces competed well, also a pleasant change of pace for me and my experience on this subject. Super entries such as Lesley Hildreth’s “Hares, multiplying like rabbits while waiting for the Tortoise,” a remarkable clay piece with multiple sculptures which marry oddly zoomorphic imagery with intelligent composition and design and a superb title that would have made Barnett Newman proud of the often ignored art of titling art.

Or in an almost 180 degree artistic U-turn, Sarah Haven’s elegant and minimalist “Ideal,” a ceramic, glaze and decal sculpture which uses clues to have the viewer interpret her work, rather than forcing her ideas upon us.

Another unusual surprise came to me in the work of Virginia painter Mark Miltz, whose trompe l’oeil work is very familiar to me. In his sculptural installation “Game,” Miltz brings something new to me, and certainly sure to raise some eyebrows in Norfolk, or anywhere else for that matter.

Mark Miltz. The Game. Sculptural Installation
Having said all that, the two dimensional artists represented themselves very well in this competition, from Chris Register’s superb “Vespa,” one of the best examples of how pen and ink can really flex its artistic muscles in the hands of a talented artist, to Art Werger’s flawless work, which really showcases what the art of printmaking can deliver in the gifted hands of a master printmaker.

In this postmodern world in which sometimes ideas and concepts receive more attention than the art itself, and where technical virtuosity is sometimes denigrated, Werger is a great example of how a real contemporary master can marry technical virtuosity with ideas, composition and creativity to deliver artwork of the highest caliber.

To those of you chosen for the exhibition, my congratulations on a well deserved accomplishment – it was a tough decision in a tough competition against your fellow artists. To those of you whose work did not make the show, I applaud your continued development as an artist and your desire to compete and show your work. It has been my honor and pleasure to look at all of your work.

Jury Duty

Deadline: March 27, 2009 (postmark).

I'm going to be jurying an art show for The Fine Arts League of Cary in North Carolina, and they are seeking entries for its 15th Annual Juried Art Exhibition to be held from May 8th to June 27th, 2009 in Cary/Raleigh, NC. Show awards and purchase awards will total over $5,000. Entries can only be mailed via CD. The postmark deadline for the mail-in registration is March 27, 2009.

Full details and a printable prospectus are available on the web here or call Kathryn Cook at 919-345-0681.