Seventh Annual Bethesda Painting Awards

Deadline: Friday, February 25, 2011

The Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District is currently accepting applications for the seventh annual Bethesda Painting Awards, a juried competition honoring four selected painters with $14,000 in prize monies. Deadline for submission is February 25, 2011. Up to nine finalists will be invited to display their work at a Bethesda gallery.

The competition will be juried this year by Philip Geiger, an art instructor at the University of Virginia; Evelyn Hankins, associate curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Jinchul Kim, a painting professor at Salisbury University.

The first place winner will be awarded $10,000; second place will be honored with $2,000 and third place will be awarded $1,000. A “young” artist whose birth date is after February 25, 1981 may also be awarded $1,000.

Artists must be 18 years of age or older and residents of Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. All original 2-D painting including oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, encaustic and mixed media will be accepted. No reproductions.

Each artist must submit five digital files or slides, application and a non-refundable entry fee of $25.

Applications are available online at www.bethesda.org.

The Bethesda Painting Awards were established by my good friend and Bethesda philanthropist, art collector and community activist Carol Trawick in 2005.

Book Cover


Here's the book cover for the 100 Artists of Washington, DC book.

Book Details

ISBN: 9780764337789
Size: 8 1/2 x 11
Illustrations: 735+ images
Pages: 224
Availability: Jun 2011
Binding: Hard Cover
Price: $50

You can order the book from the publisher here. It will also be at most major DMV area bookstores after it is released. You can also get it at various other online book dealers here and at Amazon at a really good price here.

Galleys are in

They changed the name from 100 Washington Artists to 100 Washington DC Artists, but in any event, the galleys for the book are ready for proof reading.

I also have to cull down a significant number of images from the book. That will be the hardest editing.

Feh!

Jacobson on MEG's Small Works

When the Multiple Exposures Gallery says it’s putting on a Small Works Show, they aren’t kidding. In an era when digital technology has pushed prints ever larger, none of the 39 photographic works in the show – curated by D.C art fixture F. Lennox Campello – is bigger than a breadbox, and some, like Karen Keating’s 1930s-snapshot-looking image of cabanas in Florida, are quite petite.

The CP's Louis Jacobson reviews the show I curated at Alexandria's MEG.

Corcoran seeks Canadian help

The financially precarious Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has retained an outside consultant group to determine how the institution can continue to survive, and whether its operation should remain linked to that of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. The gallery and college also plan to lease their adjacent parking lot to a local developer, who will erect an eight-story office building on the site, which was once slated for a Frank Gehry-designed expansion to the Corcoran. In a recent telephone interview, the Corcoran's director and CEO, Fred Bollerer, said that the deal will reap around $1 million per year in rent, but will not provide more space for the institution.

While Bollerer declined to identify the developer until a deal is signed, he said that the Corcoran has hired Toronto-based consultants Lord Cultural Resources to develop ideas for the institution's future. The college has been growing, but the museum operation is "unsustainable," he says, adding that while there is no plan to divest the collection it is not clear what form the museum will take in the future.

Read the whole piece by Jason Edward Kaufman in artinfo.com here.

I have a few ideas of my own; easy ideas; homegrown ideas that I suspect will not be on "Toronto-based consultants Lord Cultural Resources"'s radar.

They know my email address.

Cuban Pollo Anaranjado

Just sort of made this up the other night when I had to use half a bottle of Naranja Agria (sour orange) juice, which is one of the key not so secret ingredients of Cuban cooking. I had a couple of bottles that I picked up in Miami last December. You'll need 3-5 boneless chicken breasts or any other boneless chicken (I wonder what they do with the bones?).

Start by making a mojo of 2 cups of sour orange juice (Naranja Agria). If you can't find it in the DMV area (I haven't been able to find it anywhere, as it seems that none of the Central American/Mexican focused supermarkets and bodegas around here don't carry it, as it must not be used in their cooking), then just mix 2/3 orange juice with 1/3 lime juice.

Anyway, two cups naranja agria, four tablespoons brimming with chopped garlic, and 2 tablespoons dried oregano. Put that in a big ziplock baggie with the chicken and marinate overnight.

The next day, start by making a sofrito. The basic sofrito recipe has green and/or red peppers in it, but I don't like either, so I skip them, but you don't have to. Here's a basic sofrito recipe.

I just heat up a few bottle dashes of olive oil in a large pan, some salt and pepper to taste, add one large chopped onion (chopped very small) and lots of chopped garlic and cook them until onions are translucent, then add some tomato sauce and chopped cilantro and that's a basic sofrito without peppers.

Then take the chicken out of the mojo bag and add and brown the chicken in the sofrito.

Once it is browned, add the naranja agria mojo to the pan; it should cover the chicken.

Add a couple of laurel leaves and bring to a simmer and cook for about 30 minutes or so, then add olives (the manzanilla kind stuffed with pimentos work the best) and also add about half a cup of raisins.

If you want to eat this as a main course, then add a few chopped potatoes at this point and cook in low heat until the chicken is tender and the potatoes are done.

Otherwise make some rice (and a salad) and put the chicken and the naranja agria sauce on top of the rice.

Enjoy!

Best guitar picks ever?

Nothing fancy, no fancy picking... but perhaps the best guitar notes in the history of rock...