Me in the Med


That's me and my second-born (Elise) floating in the Mediterranean around 1992... Check out that tan line! And below is a pic of her now as an actress and model...

Elise Lenna Campello

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: Friday, October 28, 2011

The gorgeous BlackRock Center For the Arts is accepting entries for their October 2012 - August 2013 exhibit season.

You can download the prospectus here.

Eligibility: Open to all artists 18 years and over residing in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC.

Special Consideration: Artists who are willing to conduct a lecture or workshop for a BlackRock standard fee will receive special consideration during the selection process.

About the Gallery: BlackRock Center for the Arts gallery is 1500 square feet of exquisite gallery space located in Germantown, Maryland. With its high neutral walls and beautiful windows strategically placed it allows in just the right amount of natural light. The windows are located above the walls which makes it an ideal space for fiber art. BlackRock Center for the Arts takes pride in the eclectic group of artists we have exhibited in the gallery since 2002.

Jurors: Jack Rasmussen: Director and Curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC.

Jodi Walsh: mixed medium artist, curator, national speaker, owner and Gallery Director of Gallery 555 in Washington, DC.

Carol Brown Goldberg: professional fine artist and lecturer, Carol has been exhibiting her work locally and internationally over the past 36 years.

Artomatic baby!

Now that the Big Bang of (e)merge and 30 Americans has taken the DMV by storm and following in the footsteps of the DMV's amazing Artomatic's footsteps, Artomatic @ Frederick opens its doors on September 28 and runs through November 6.

Artists are occupying 27,000 sq ft in the former Frederick County Public School Central Office Building at 115 E. Church St. in historic downtown Frederick. This mega, mega, mega arts event includes 300+ visual artists and 100+ performing artists.

Did you get that performance art lovers?....... 100+ performing artists!

A ribbon cutting ceremony and "Meet the Artists" night is being held on Saturday, October 1, starting at 5 PM. More information: www.artomaticfrederick.org!

Five gets you ten that the WaPo ignores this...

Artinfo on (e)merge

So, will (e)merge return? The nation's capital, according to the fair organizers, has youth, vitality, a "tremendous interest in culture," and, perhaps most importantly of all, wealth (the suburbs of Washington include many of the wealthiest communities in the nation). All that is left is convincing the D.C. upper crust that they should be spending their money on art.

That, it seems, might prove to be harder to do than to say. As Mayer Fine Art's Lenny Campello said during a Friday lull, "A curator here would rather take a cab to Dulles to see an emerging artist in Berlin than take a cab to Georgetown to see an emerging artist at a local gallery." Still, (e)merge was a step in the right direction.

Read the whole article here.

Anne Marchand at King Street Gallery





Anne Marchand will give a short talk about her work in the show, "Of Shining Worlds: Recent Paintings by Anne Marchand" curated by Claudia Rousseau. Artist Tom Block, a scholar of medieval literature, will do a reading of poems by Rumi, the great early thirteenth century Persian mystical poet. Maurice Sedacca, a musician and composer from New York, will play a prelude and accompanying music on the the guitar and the oud, a middle eastern instrument that is the forerunner of the lute.

Location: The King Street Gallery is located on the ground floor of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center on the west side of the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus off Georgia Avenue at 930 King Street. Parking is available in the West Garage, which is located immediately behind the Arts Center.

RSVP Facebook Event Page here

The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center
The King Street Gallery
930 King Street
Silver Spring, MD 20910
240-567-5821

DC in American Contemporary Art magazine

Read it online here.

until every shape has found its city

Reston, VA: GRACE (Greater Reston Arts Center) is pleased to present until every shape has found its city with Evan Reed from September 29 through November 12, 2011. The exhibition explores the intersection of art, literature, and architecture through complex sculptures and drawings that transcend literal interpretations.

Using commonplace materials – lumber, plaster, wall board, and nails – Evan Reed creates fantastical sculptures that reference reality but travel beyond into the realm of imagination. His “impossible buildings” with skewed framing, walled-off rooms, and disappearing passages invite the viewer to slip through reality and enter an alternative space where architectural forms become departure points for dreams.

Reed’s diverse influences range from poetry and literature to sacred geometry and visionary architecture. His title, until every shape has found its city, is borrowed from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a novel featuring imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and The Kublai Khan. In the book, the explorer describes his travels to the emperor through a series of evocative stories. In a similar manner, Reed invites his audience to discover his works through multiple viewpoints. By building sculpture as Calvino organized his novel through complex interlocking sections, Reed draws the viewer deeper into the mystical meanings of his work.

until every shape has found its city (all in lower case) features six large-scale sculptures and twelve drawings which incorporate diverse, multi-cultural sources. Visitors entering the gallery are met by the soaring, thirteen foot “Burj al-Shawq” (Tower of Desire) growing and evolving from its solid, spiral base into a tower of cluttered construction cranes. Drawing on a trip to Dubai during its building boom, Reed explores the conflicts between the old and the new Middle East in architecture, culture, and political upheaval.

Towards the rear of the gallery “October Hive” hangs in space just as its name implies – like a beehive suspended from a tree. In an unplanned coincidence, the sculpture’s eight interconnected chambers precisely mirror the hexagonal architecture of the GRACE gallery space. Although “October Hive’s” eight peaks resemble dormers on a traditional Cape Cod home, Reed is also referencing the round Hakka houses in

Fujian, China and eighteenth century Panopticon architecture designed so that prison guards could secretly observe inmates from a central tower.

Filling the gallery’s main front window “A Corner for Gaston and Gonzalo” extends over a built-in bench and five feet into the gallery. The sculpture’s simple, overall form is based on Reston’s nineteenth century Bowman distillery building while its center niche (the corner referred to in the title) references Reston’s more recent architecture – in particular the built-in planting boxes on Heron House balconies and the decorative sculpture and niches designed by Gonzalo Fonseca in Lake Anne. Reed made several exploratory trips around Reston gathering ideas for this site-specific work including visits to the Reston Museum and a meeting with Reston’s founder, Robert E. Simon, who discussed his intentions for the community.

The niche in “A Corner for Gaston and Gonzalo” also holds a surprise – an etched glass panel which reveals a street scene projected by a hidden camera obscura. Here Reed has brought the outside cityscape into his sculpture and given form to his title while alluding to the community’s history and hopes.

“Using architectural forms has given me a way to create a dialogue between many distinct impulses. The viewer can move through time and location. Memories of familiar forms yield to frameworks that describe a potential future or reveal a desertion of plans.” Reed’s beautifully crafted, intricate sculptures and drawings offer a rare opportunity for dialogue about our complex relationship to structures

A twenty-four page catalog accompanies the exhibition and includes an essay by Vesela Sretenovic, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.