Opening this weekend at Kaller Fine Arts

Latin America's most racist government continues its oppression...

Another piece of evidence against one of the planet's most racist and oppressive dictatorships...

(Via)Citizen journalist Juliet Michelena Díaz was detained earlier this month shortly after photographing a police operation in Havana. Díaz is a contributor to the Cuban Network of Community Journalists (La Red Cubana de Comunicadores Comunitarios or RCCC), a group known for its critical coverage of the government that has fallen victim to government harassment in recent months.

Díaz's arrest followed an incident on March 26 in which she and other contributors to RCCC witnessed police officers using dogs to break up a neighborhood brawl. The Miami-based daily El Nuevo Herald said the use of dogs resulted in one person being bitten. Díaz was briefly detained after the incident along with other observers and people involved in the fight, but she was able to hide her photographs from the police. However, two weeks later, the director of the group Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello said police returned to Díaz's home to arrest her after they learned that she still had photographs and was writing a report about police violence.

Who were the police dogs being used against? - Black Cubans.

Who was the only RCCC reporter arrested? - A Black Cuban woman.

Actually, I meant to say: A hero! Juliet Michelena Díaz: You are stronger than they are...

Why Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an "hijo de puta" to me...

The gift that we humans have to express and have opinions, and use our subjectivity to apply to all sorts of themes, issues and people are the perfect weapon to express my intense dislike and repugnance for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's personal behavior and standards, while at the same time admiring his written words, although I must admit that my "admiration" is often colored by my intense dislike for the man. 

Charles Lane's article in the WaPo details the main reasons for this attitude:

In 1968, just as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was propelling García Márquez to fame, Padilla published a collection of poems titled “Out of the Game.” Cuba’s cultural authorities initially permitted and even praised Padilla’s book, despite its between-the-lines protest against the official thought control that was already suffocating Cuba less than a decade after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Then instructions changed: The Castro regime began a campaign against Padilla and like-minded intellectuals that culminated in March 1971, when state security agents arrested Padilla, seized his manuscripts and subjected him to a month of brutal interrogation.

The poet emerged to denounce himself before fellow writers for having “been unfair and ungrateful to Fidel, for which I will never tire of repenting.” He implicated colleagues and even his wife as counterrevolutionaries.

Intellectuals around the world, led by García Márquez’s fellow star of the Latin American literary “boom,” Mario Vargas Llosa, condemned this Stalinesque spectacle. Many cultural figures who had backed the Cuban revolution soured on it because of the Padilla affair.

For García Márquez, however, it was a different kind of turning point. When asked to sign his fellow writers’ open letter to Castro expressing “shame and anger” about the treatment of Padilla, García Márquez refused.

Thereafter, the Colombian gradually rose in Havana’s estimation, ultimately emerging as a de facto member of Castro’s inner circle.

Fidel would shower “Gabo” with perks, including a mansion, and established a film institute in Cuba under García Márquez’s personal direction.

The novelist, in turn, lent his celebrity and eloquence to the regime’s propaganda mill, describing the Cuban dictator in 1990 as a “man of austere habits and insatiable dreams, with an old-fashioned formal education, careful words and fine manners, and incapable of conceiving any idea that isn’t extraordinary.”

To rationalize this cozy relationship, García Márquez offered himself as an ostensible go-between when Castro occasionally released dissidents to appease the West.

What Gabo never did was raise his voice, or lift a finger, on behalf of Cubans’ right to express themselves freely in the first place.

Far from being “a representative and voice for the people of the Americas,” he served as a de facto spokesman for one of their oppressors.

García Márquez went so far as to defend death sentences Castro handed out to politically heterodox Cuban officials — one of whom had been personally close to the writer — after a 1989 show trial.

 Read the entire article here.

72 Grams Per Pixel at Gallery B

"72 Grams Per Pixel" is a group exhibition by seven fine art photographers at Bethesda's Gallery B. The title playfully indicates the idea behind the exhibition to explore photographic images using a variety of mediums including prints, hand-made photo books, table-prints and a newly developed multi-screen display system. The gallery show is sponsored by ISProductions, the publisher of the popular FolioLink website service for artists and photographers.

There are some seriously blue chip photogs in this show:

•     Joe Cameron, fine art photographer and Professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design for over 30 years.   
•     Stephen Crowley, award winning photojournalist of the New York Times.   
•     Muriel Hasbun, fine art photographer and Professor and Chair of Photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design.   
•     Laurie Hatch, fine art photographer who has documented at length two of the world's great astronomical observatories.   
•     Raul Jarquin,fine art photographer, founder of FolioLink, and photo book maker.   
•     Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, fine art photographer and the founder of the Centro de la Imagen, a well-known venue in the field of photography in Mexico.   
•     Terri Weifenbach, fine art photographer, author of multiple photography books and educator at Georgetown University.

The sale of all photographic work will be conducted directly by the artists (neither the gallery nor ISProductions will be charging commissions) with the exception of subscription sales that provide subscribers with five surprise table print objects and a signed limited edition book, all delivered during a one-year subscription term. The subscription model is managed by ISProductions.

Private Opening Reception May 10th from 6-9pm

To request an invitation to the private opening please send an email to: reception@foliolink.com.

Alchemicals!!!!

Preview the works created for Alchemical Vessels 2014, make a list of your top choices, and visit http://www.smithcenter.org/benefit to learn how you can have a chance to own one of the pieces featured in this video!

Eyes On The Border

Opening Reception: Friday, May 16 from 7–9 pm
Show Dates: May 16 – June 1, 2014

Beyond landscapes, cultures, borders and boundaries lies the artistic language of the human race. Eyes On The Border art exhibit opens Friday, May 16 with a reception from 7-9pm at Del Ray Artisans gallery. In this collaborative exhibit, artist members from Del Ray Artisans (DRA) and Art Latin American Collective Project (ALACP) were invited to explore universal themes from the individual perspective of each artist. The show runs May 16 through June 1, 2014.

Eyes On The Border is both a celebration of Latin American art and culture and a look at how we are all influenced by places, borders and boundaries, political, or cultural, real or imagined. Latin American artists living and working in this area, and Del Ray Artisans with their own immigrant experience share their roots and translate their realities into a vision influenced by the virtual world and globalization.

The ALACP curator is David Camero; the DRA curators are Michele Reday Cook and Lesley Hall. A special display of masks from the collection of David Camero will accompany this exhibit.

The art exhibit is at Del Ray Artisans gallery in the Colasanto Center, 2704 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia 22301. Gallery hours are Thursday, noon to 6pm; Friday and Saturday, noon to 9 pm; and Sunday, noon to 6 pm.  The gallery is free, open to the public and handicap accessible.

For more details, please visit www.TheDelRayArtisans.org or contact the curators: David Camero (mactrovattore@yahoo.es), Michele Reday Cook (President@TheDelRayArtisans.org), and Lesley Hall (Curating@TheDelRayArtisans.org).

Iran is having an art fair!

I kid thee not... The Most Islamic and Only True Islamic Republic (cough, cough) of Iran is having an art fair!

It runs from 26-29 June 2014 and they are actually paying journalists to come to Iran and write about it! 

According to the invitation that I received via email (and no... fuck you, brutal Iranian Theocracy that enslaves the beautiful Iranian people and have kidnapped its brilliant culture... but I'm not going), someone will pay "selected media professionals" (I suspect Jewish and/or Ahl as-Sunnah are encouraged NOT to apply) to following perks to come to the art fair and write about it:

• round-trip economy-class airfare / train fare;
• accommodation for the inclusive dates of stay; lodging and meal
• transportation to and from airport

The fair is in cooperation with the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance... cough, cough. They might have their own "art critics," who instead of writing a bad review of artists whom they don't like, might also arrest the gallerist and if the artist is not there and can't be arrested, then put the artist on a holy hit list, which would then at least give Molly Norris some neighbors, wherever on the planet she's hiding from those who have kidnapped Islam and continue to try to keep it in the 7th century.