Opportunity for Photographers

Deadline: December 17, 2010

Call for entries for the Fifth Annual Photography Exhibition at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Entries must be received by December 17, 2010. The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop is seeking submissions of any and all photographic processes, black and white or color, traditional or alternative, material or digital, time-based, performance based, any work exploring the act of photography. The exhibition will open on January 8, 2011 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. and will run through February 4, 2011. Cash awards will be announced at the opening.

The juror for the exhibition is Bruce McKaig, local artist and art educator. Bruce McKaig chairs the Photography Department at CHAW and teaches at Georgetown University and the Smithsonian Associates. He has exhibited nationally and internationally for over thirty years and every once in a while reviews a DMV show in this blog. For more information about his work, please visit his website here.

HOW: Submit the following:
➢ Three to five jpegs on a CD
➢ Image inventory list specifying title, size, medium, date and price (or insurance value)
➢ Contact info including a mailing address, phone number and email
➢ An entry fee of $25.00 for up to five images, payable to CHAW

WHERE: Please hand deliver or mail these materials to:

CHAW
545 7th Street SE
Washington DC 20003

Jury Duty

At the BlackRock Center for the Arts to select the exhibits for the gallery for September 2011 through August 2012.

More later...

Wanna go to an opening this Friday?

Curated by Zoma Wallace and featuring work by Jamea Richmond Edwards, Kristen Hayes, Amber Robles-Gordon, and Danielle Scruggs, FOCUS GROUP: Four Walls, Four Five Women opens at the DC Arts Center (2438 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009) this Friday with an opening reception from 7-9PM.

Presented by the Black Artists of DC (BADC), this exhibition "seeks to spark a visual discussion between artworks created by black women and a verbal dialogue between those that view and purchase artwork. The topic of discussion is material. What are artists using? What materials do they feel drawn to? How does black femininity affect or reflect itself in the chosen materials, if at all? How does femininity affect the delivery and/or reception of the message?

The voice of each woman in this exhibition is heard primarily in material form. Embracing both visual and verbal discussion, FOCUS GROUP: Four Walls, Four Five Women hopes to determine how effectively unique material languages are deciphered/valued/appreciated/ or acquired by a universal audience and market."

Through January 9, 2011.

Small Works at the Art League

Selected by Emily Conover, who is an adjunct professor of art at the University of Maryland, where she teaches drawing and painting, the Art League's Small Works show, and much like the Target Gallery's 5x5 show reviewed here, proves that if the talent is there, size doesn't really matter in art.

Conover awarded the Eleanor Boudreau Jordan Award to Untitled I a very cool silver gelatin print by Andrew Zimmermann. The Second Place Award went to a superb oil titled Playing with Dandelion by Kim Stenberg. She also passed Honorable Mentions to the entries by Diane Blackwell, Kathy Clowery, Marcia Dale Dullum, Avis Fleming, Janice Sayles, Jean Schwartz and Xiaolei Zhang and from the 530 works of art entered, she accepted 158 for the show.

With prices as low as $35 for an original work of art (check out the images, titles and prices here), this is a terrific show to visit and come away with either an unique art present or a small addition to one's own art collection.

In this show I was once again floored by the technical ability of Wendy Donahoe, whose entry titled Haley is a breath-taking small graphite portrait that jumps out of its tiny environment because of the artistic prowess of Donahoe.

The woman doesn't just draw well, she draws spectacularly well and then she manages to go beyond being simply a talented hand and also manages to cross the line into the realm of solid composition and that psychological "it" that is so hard to capture in a portrait.

Keep your eye on Donahoe and somebody better go buy this drawing now.

The tiny monumentality of Xiaolei Zhang's Single Pear, a gorgeous little oil painting that you can pick up framed for $80, underscores the fact that most good painters know: a tiny, small oil can be just as difficult and challenging to deliver well as a large painting. In fact you can even make the case that it is even harder because of the scale.

Zhang's pear succeeds because Zhang knows how to paint and now the challenge becomes delivering with skill on a small scale. It is a success in this case.

The image here is terrible (it should have been scanned rather than photographed), but I also liked T. Pham's Beach Season Begins, a brilliant little pastel that crams a lot of visual information into one very small piece. Even up close hanging on the wall, it has the feel of a large work, not an easy trick to accomplish in such a small scale.

I also liked U. Dehejia's gorgeous employment of wet on wet watercolors to submit an impressive flash of color in this tiny landscape.

And I have no idea how H. Rodkin's diminutive photograph Mist Of The Potomac manages to come across like a giant Thomas Cole painting, but it does.

The show goes through December 6, 2010.

Chicken Wars

I am surprised to report that Giant's rotisserie chicken is much better tasting than Whole Foods.

Little Junes in the Fall

Anderson Lennox Campello, c. November 2010. NFS

Aaron Gallery to re-open

DC's Aaron Gallery, which for years and years operated on Connecticut Avenue, a couple of blocks north of Dupont Circle, has announced the Grand Opening of their new location, and they're inviting art lovers to join them as they celebrate with a reception to be held November 18, 2010 (6 pm to 8 pm).

You gotta R.S.V.P. to info@aarongallerydc.com or 202.234.3311 by November 17th in order to get on the list and be let in at the door.

AARON GALLERY
2101 L Street NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20037
www.aarongallerydc.com