Coming to Gallery 555

Early look

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center will have the AU Art Department's Student Exhibitions opening soon, with first year MFA students: April 2 through May 15
and MFA theses: April 23 through May 15.

Victor Gomez opening at Cafritz

I keep hearing good things about an exhibit of gorgeous monoprints by Miami based Cuban artist Victor Gomez which are on view right now in the atrium gallery at the Cafritz Art Center.

The artist is coming in for the opening reception, which is being held on March 24th (Thursday) in coordination with another exhibit of Latin American art "El Corazon del Pueblo" which is up in the main gallery.

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 24, 5:00—7:30 PM.

The cost of art fairs

I was just talking on the phone to gallerist friend who's been doing the Scope Art Fair for the last few years, and as a result of sales at the art fairs, barely being able to keep her gallery open, as sales in her hometown are all but non-existent.

Last December she had a small booth in Miami. This basic booth (200 Sq. ft.) has a basic cost of $10, 600. That's the start.

In her case she didn't add any extra walls (additional cost), but just added some extra lights (additional cost). By the time she finished paying the additional mandatory advertising fee ($1,000 for a small booth - it grows proportionally as the booth gets larger), and the mandatory insurance, she was looking at $12,000 for a basic small booth.

Now add airfare for her and an assistant (it is physically nearly impossible to do an art fair with just one person manning the booth - believe me... I've done once and know the impossibility of this task). Then add hotels (share the room) and transportation (share the rental car) and food for her and her assistant. Now tack on the shipping price for the artwork from the Mid Atlantic to Miami, Florida (and back for unsold work). The cost is now around $15,000 for this basic booth, plus the assistant's salary (undisclosed).

She had decided to take just one artist to Scope (the fair has a pretty tough minimalist hanging policy), and had applied with just the one name. She was glad that Scope accepted this "new" artist, because this was an artist with strong representational imagery and thus good possibilities for sales.

When they hung the works - you can't overhang at Scope, so about seven paintings were displayed - she realized that she had made one major error. More on that later...

In the first two days of Scope, all of the paintings sold, and the "extra" two which had been shipped also sold later on. The artist was jubilant.

What was the gallerist's mistake?

With a $15,000 (plus the assistant's salary) expense, she needed to sell at least $30,000 worth of artwork in order just to break even (plus more to cover the assistant's salary).

With her artists' prices starting at $800 for a small oil and $3-4,000 for the other larger paintings, even though she sold out of all the work that she had shipped, she still lost about $4,000 in the event, and considered herself lucky to escape with this loss, which she attributed to failing to deduce that she had to sell at least $10,000 per wall in order to break even; a very basic mistake for an experienced gallerist.

In the old days, when an artist sold out, you raised his/her prices up a little the next time (she did this for the second hanging of the extra paintings); in these days of extreme financial austerity, that's not always a perfect formula anymore.

This is one of the many reasons why galleries go under: the enormous financial risk involved in participating in just about the only venues left where a gallery can sell art.

Art Scam

Some artists in the DMV and Baltimore area are being seduced by this scam email; make sure you ignore it:

From: Nelson Bateman
Date: March 20, 2011 8:13:24 AM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
Subject: Interested in your work

Hi
The images in your website is so fascinating and so vivacious looking at each piece of work make me know you added so much dedication in making each work come out to life but unfortunately i lost the weblink but i was able to save your email address am writing you because i need your help to get back to your website so that i can be able to see more of your work and purchase some for my apartment. I reside in Queensland Australia hope to read from you soon.
Regards
Nelson

For a link explaining how the scam works, click here.

Opportunity for Artists

Out of Order is the Maryland Art Place's Annual free-hung Benefit Exhibition, Silent Auction and Party!

Silent Auction and Gala: Friday, April 1st, 8 – 11pm. Join them for a fantastic evening of great art, music, food, and an open beer & wine bar.

Hanging Dates and Times: March 29, 7am – midnight. All Artists are invited to participate. During the One Day Only, Do‐It‐Yourself installation, March
29, 7am – midnight, each participating artist hangs one original piece in the MAP galleries. For submission guidelines, please visit MAP’s website www.mdartplace.org. Note: Artists are asked to support MAP by paying $10 to participate in Out of Order. Each participating artist receives one free ticket to the April 1 event.

Participation: There is a $10 participation fee to hang artwork in Out of Order. As a participating artist, you will be given one complimentary ticket to the gala on April 9th. ($40 value!). Proceeds will be split 50/50 between the artist and MAP.

How to Get Tickets: Purchase Tickets Online: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/156249
Current MAP Members must call to reserve their tickets. New or renewing members must join MAP by March 24 to receive complimentary ticket(s) to the event. Artist/Student/Individual members receive 1 Free Ticket; higher membership levels receive 2 Free Tickets. No tickets are mailed; names of ticket holders are held at the door.

For More Details: access their website: www.mdartplace.org or call 410-962-8565.

Patricia Tobacco Forrester (1940 - 2011)

Patricia Tobacco Forrester, one of the DMV's best-known artists, and one with a huge artistic footprint outside the DMV as well (represented by some of the top art galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, New Mexico, and locally by Addison/Ripley) died yesterday.

Born in 1940 in Massachusetts, Patricia Tobacco Forrester received her B.A. from Smith College (Phi Beta Kappa), where she had gone via a scholarship, in 1962 and her B.F.A. in 1963 and M.F.A. in 1965, both from Yale University. A 1967 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she focused her artistic eye with a love for nature that translated into gorgeous and daring watercolors of fauna from a viewpoint that transformed what she saw into grand fields of color.

She painted directly from nature, usually on very large scale sheets of up to 40 x 60inches paper. And she painted all the way until the end of her life, as she became as almost daily visitor to the The U.S. Botanic Garden, on the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol. Even though Tobacco Forrester's last years were difficult as a result of a seizure that she suffered while visiting Costa Rica (to paint that antion's lush flowers and fauna), she nonetheless and almost daily carried her paints and paper to the Botanic Garden, set up and continued to create art all the way to the end of her immensely creative life.

Her travels, such as the trip to Costa Rica, was part of her routine to travel to exotic locales seeking the beuty of nature, though her home base has been Washington, DC, since 1982.

Prior to that (from the mid-sixties to 1981) she lived in San Francisco and she often returned to the Northern California region to paint the rocky coast of Santa Barbara or the rolling hills of Napa and Sonoma valleys.

Forrester became a member of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1992. Her work has been shown widely in hundreds of museum and gallery exhibitions across the United States and abroad for over thirty-five years.

Her work is in the collection of many major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, British Museum, London, Brooklyn Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Library of Congress, National Academy of Design, Oakland Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and The White House, Executive Office Building in Washington, DC.

Forrester was also the recipient of a 2005 and 2009 Artist Grant from the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities and she is represented locally by Addison/Riple Fine Art in Georgetown, where she had a solo show earlier this year in January.

I've curated her work into a few exhibitions in the last decade or so, most notably at my "Survey of Washington Realists" which I organized about a decade ago and which hung, in a gorgeous salon style manner, work by over a hundred noted Washington realist artists. For that show Patricia submitted one of her gigantic watercolors, which due to its brilliant colors and size, managed to catch a lot of attention in a show full of gems from floor to ceiling.

About her life and her work, she said it best when she observed that "You cannot get closer to a landscape than sitting within it while you are painting it."