Nine Months Old!


Anderson Lennox Campello, better known around here as "Little Junes" (for "Little Junior") is nine months old today. He is everything but little though... already tight in 12 month old clothes.

Relentless Continuity 2010 to be destroyed

This is the last weekend to see Relentless Continuity 2010, a site specific Drawing by John M. Adams at the Adam Lister Gallery in Fairfax, VA. The drawing will be destroyed late afternoon, May 30, 2010 by the artist.

A site specific drawing is created on location, for that specific location. Typically, they only last for the duration of the exhibition, and are destroyed when the exhibition is over.

Adam Lister Gallery
Old Town Fairfax Village Plaza
3950 University Drive
Fairfax VA 22030
*gallery entrance on North St. between University Dr. and Chain Bridge Rd.
(across from Panera and next door to Asian Bistro)

Artists' Websites: Heather Evans Smith

Check out the gorgeous photographs of North Carolina photographer Heather Evans Smith.

Ken Salazar and BP

Art & Soul Auction

The 8th Annual Art & Soul Charity Auction 2010 is Friday, June 25, 2010 6:00 PM at The Music Center at Strathmore in Rockville, MD just past Bethesda. This is an important charity auction for the National Center for Children & Families (NCCF).

Join Honorary Co-Chairs Fox 5 News Anchor Allison Seymour and renowned jazz keyboardist, composer and producer Marcus Johnson, on Friday, June 25, 2010 at 6 p.m., for NCCF's 8th Annual Art & Soul Charity Auction at The Music Center at Strathmore.

The live auction will feature artwork created by youth from the Greentree Adolescent Program (GAP). The silent auction will feature Gifts from the Soul (non-art items) and juried artwork pieces from regional artists. In addition, guests will enjoy music by Sony recording artist Julia Nixon, the premiere of NCCF's new image, and the presentation of this year's Spirit of Humanitarian Awards.

Art & Soul Charity Auction tickets are $100 per person and can be purchased by contacting Heidi Coons, Director of Development and Institutional Advancement, at (301) 365-4480, extension 114 or click here to purchase online.

Proceeds from the evening benefit the completion of the Freddie Mac Foundation Youth Activities Center (YAC), NCCF’s sole cultural arts and recreational facility located on the Bethesda Campus.

Pornography or Art?

Police have visited an exhibition of works by the late Irish photographer Bob Carlos Clarke at London’s Little Black Galleryafter the explicit sexual images on display provoked complaints from local residents. Police inspector Sean Flynn visited the gallery on Chelsea’s Park Walk after resident lodged a formal complaint to Kensington and Chelsea council, claiming that the images in the gallery’s windows were pornographic. The works will be on show until 5 June.

After inspecting the two works in question, Flynn said: “My assessment is that Whip Girl [2000] is acceptable, but I have some concerns about Tite Street [1990]. [It] appears to show a man having rear entry sex with a woman who is bent double and not wearing any knickers. Of course, this is not the appropriate place to have a debate about art versus pornography. It is my assessment that Tite Street should not be able to be clearly viewed from the street.”


Staying up: Bob Carlos Clarke's Tite Street, 1990 (c) The Estate of Bob Carlos Clarke
The Little Black Gallery is not the only establishment currently displaying Carlos Clarke’s work. Celebrity chef Marco Pierre White owns the largest single collection of the controversial photographer’s work, and more than 30 of his large-scale images are prominently displayed in the chef’s restaurant Wheeler’s of St James’s. The explicit subject matter of the works has received a far more welcome reception here than in formerly bohemian Chelsea. Hostess Bea Jarrett told The Art Newspaper that not a single complaint about the photographs has been received in the two years since they have been on display. “I guess that says a lot about our clientele too,” she added.

Read the article in the Art Newspaper here.

When Museums say no

Art-museum officials love to talk of the important works they are given by donors—the Mary Cassatt painting, the Alexander Calder mobile, the collection of Edward Weston photographs—and that talk (they well know) encourages similar donations. Cultivating gifts is a large part of being a museum curator or director. But not all donations are equally welcome, and another part of the job is figuring out how to say "no, thank you."

Read this very cool article by Daniel Grant in the Wall Street Journal here.

I've had that experience with rather interesting results. For example, a while back I had a major art collector who was retiring down to Florida and she had quite a bit of artwork that she wished to donate to museums. Among her collection were several early Sandra Ramos' works, including possibly the largest Sandra Ramos painting in the United States and a very early piece.

Since Ramos is already in the collection of MoMa in New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Thyssen-Bornemisza in Austria, and in quite a few University museums in the US, and considering how some people are always bitching about how some US museums are not "diverse" enough in its representation of women and ethnicities, I thought that a major gift like this would be a shoo-in for the Hirshhorn.

And thus I was very surprised when the Hirshhorn declined it very quickly, in spite of (in my opinion) the artists' pedigree and the museum's lack of any depth in the particular field that Ramos' works represents.


"Pecera" (Fish Tank) by Sandra Ramos
Oil on Distressed Muslim, circa 1997
65 x 76.75 inches (165 x 195 cm)
From there I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, thinking that VMFA would be a good logical alternative. I could have gone to the University of Virginia, which has a most excellent Cuban art collection, but I wanted to place her work on a new collection, as Ramos is already in the UVA collection.

When VMFA also declined it rather quickly, I was a little floored as well (and I'm even more floored now that I've learned from the WSJ article that they accept about 2/3 of all gifts offered), but this time I decided to go south quite a bit further and go for the easy out, and currently the piece is in the process of being acquired by the Miami Art Museum, which of course, demographically has an interest in this genre of work, so that was truly an easy pick.

But meanwhile both the Hirshhorn and VMFA could have added a significant work by a truly blue chip Cuban artist, whose presence has been cemented in the current difficult times of the brutal Cuban dictatorship as one of the few Cuban artists in the vanguard of questioning the stark realities of Cuban life, and whose stature, once the Castro brothers strangle hold on Cuba is broken, is almost certain to rise even higher.

Their loss.