Wanna be in a show this weekend?

16x16 Small works call for entry! 

Details here.

In this all-inclusive show, artists are invited to submit art limited to 16x16 inches! Each 16”x16” space in the show will have a $14 hanging fee. 

Submit work including, but not limited to, photography, painting, mixed media, sculpture, lead, ceramics, glass, and more. 

This show has a 0% commission for sales in the gallery. All transactions for this show are direct to the artist! If you sell something and value the experience, feel free to pay them whatever commission you think is fair! No price limit!

The 16” x 16” will coordinate with the Gateway Open Studio Tour.
Details here: www.gatewayopenstudios.org May 10, 2014   12-5pm

Install Sunday May 4, 2014 1pm

Reception May 10, 2014   12-2pm (They’ll be open till 5pm for those who can’t make it).

It is an all Madrid final

Has this ever happened before? 

Over in Europe, the UEFA Champions' League Cup is the world's second toughest soccer competition (after the World Cup), some would say the toughest...

And this year it is an all-Madrid final, as the city's storied Real Madrid Football Club (who destroyed the reigning champion - Bayern of Germany) will fight it out with Madrid's other soccer team, Atletico de Madrid (who beat England's Chelsea FC).

That's like the NY Giants vs the NY Jets at the next Superbowl... only bigger... or the Brooklyn Nets vs the NY Knicks.... cough, cough.... or the LA Clippers vs the LA Lakers...

Anyway... congrats to all the Madrilenos!

Iranian Campaign Medal Ribbon finds a home

"Iranian Campaign Ribbon" by F. Lennox Campello
Oil on Canvas, c. 2007
24 x 48 inches

This painting was exhibited first in 2008 at the "Color Invitations" exhibition at the R Street Gallery in Washington, DC and subsequently at the Red Door Gallery in Richmond, VA at my solo show there. It continued the series commenced in 1999 based on my own military awards. With this 2007 work, this series began to create new imaginary military awards conceived as future ribbons and medals to be awarded in future military campaigns. I call this series "The Colors of Wars to Come" and it is discussed here.  

That show at Richmond's Red Door Gallery was reviewed in the Richmond Style Weekly by Amy Biegelsen. Read it here.

The painting is now heading to a major collection in New Jersey.

The Iranian Campaign Medal was established by Executive Order 13875 signed by the President on 13 January 2015. It may be awarded to American military and naval personnel for participating in prescribed operations, campaigns and task forces ranging in dates from 2 November 2014 to present.

The area of operations for these various campaigns includes the total land area and air space of Iran, and the waters and air space of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean within 12 nautical miles of Iranian coastline.

Personnel must be members of a unit participating in, or be engaged in direct support of, the operation for 30 consecutive days in the area of operations or for 60 non-consecutive days provided this support involves entering the area of operations or meets one of the following criteria:

• Be engaged in actual combat, or duty that is equally as hazardous as combat duty, during the operation with armed opposition, regardless of time in the area of operations;

• While participating in the operation, regardless of time, is wounded or injured and requires medical evacuation from the area of operations;

• While participating as a regularly assigned aircrew member flying sorties into, out of, within, or over the area of operations in direct support of the military operations.

One bronze service star shall be worn on the ribbon for qualifying participation during an established campaigns. However, that if an individual's 30 or 60 days began in one campaign and carried over into another, that person would only qualify for the medal with one service star. The medal is not awarded without at least one service star. 

The executive order provides that service members who qualify for either the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal for service in Iran between 2 November 2014 and 12 January 2015, remain qualified for those medals. 

However, upon application, any such member may be awarded the Iranian Campaign Medal in lieu of the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal, but no Service member may be awarded more than one of these three medals for the same period of service in Iran.

The suspension ribbon for the medal's purple and gold colors were suggested by the historical Imperial colors of Iran’s millennial Persian history and the golden sunsets of the Persian Gulf.

Copy Me: a Web Series about Copying

Copy Me: a Web Series about Copying recently launched a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo. Their goal is to develop eight informative animated shorts on the questions people have surrounding copying. Is copying a file fair? Is copyright hurting anyone? Is the public domain a good thing? They hope to debunk the myths of copying and look at copyright in the context of the new “sharing” generation. The Copy Me Indiegogo Campaign lays out some of the topics they will cover including: fairness in the digital realm, how artists can make money without restricting their work, and the effect of copyright on society.

On the surface, these topics sound innocuous, but the producers may be hiding a more controversial message, as this quote written by the producer in the site’s comment section suggests; it’s not wrong to ASK people to pay, it’s wrong to MAKE people pay for creative works.  That message may not go over very well with many production companies, galleries, studios or other business entities who want more control over their properties’ pricing, marketing, production and distribution efforts.  But alternate approaches are starting to become very popular.

Read the whole article here.

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.