Bethesda Painting Awards prize winners announced

Did I call this or what?

The Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District announced the top Bethesda Painting Awards prize winners on Wednesday evening during the exhibition’s opening at Gallery B. Andrew Hladky of Kensington, MD was awarded “Best in Show” with $10,000; James Williams II of Baltimore, MD was named second place and was given $2,000 and Magnolia Laurie of Baltimore, MD received third place and was awarded $1,000. Additionally, Jeremy Jirsa of Baltimore, MD was recognized with the Young Artist Award and received $1,000.

New Gallery in the DMV

From my good friend Gabriella Rosso:

RoFa Projects  is very happy to announce the opening of our new space in the Kentlands, Gaithersburg, MD on Friday, June 17, 2022, in partnership with Beta Gallery.

RoFa Projects (founded in 2014 in Potomac MD) focuses on consolidating art as a powerful tool for social action and as a generator of critical spaces. Working with  artists that have different visions of the sociopolitical processes  that  we live  throughout  the world  and  who understand the importance of global thinking.

RoFa projects has three branches: RoFa Art, RoFa Projects and  La Morada.

Beta Gallery (founded in 2014 in Bogotá, Colombia) has focused its search on contemporary artists in the Colombian and Latin American scene. In 2016, it incorporated Proyecto ZETA linking urban artists to the gallery space.

Both galleries have joined to work together, bringing Latin-American Art to this beautiful new space.

Their next show,  In the Heart of the Beholder, brings together 10 contemporary artists that take us to the immense possibilities that the portrait offers. Painting on canvas, photography, sculpture and even stencil are placed at the mercy of creation, beauty and the heart of the beholder.

Pigments used in the Renaissance, metal printing, photo performance, oil and spray portray emotions,  identity, poetic intensity and beauty from a contemporary approach.

Artists: Ana De Orbegoso (Perú); Avelino Sala (Spain); Cecilia Paredes (Perú); DJLU Juegasiempre (Colombia); ERRE (Colombia): Fabian Ugalde (México); Muriel Hasbun (El Salvador); Natalia Revilla (Perú); Salustiano (Spain) and Walterio Iraheta (El Salvador).

In the Heart of the Beholder

Where: 361 Main St, Gaithersburg, MD 20878

When:  Opening date: June 17, 2022 - 4 - 9 pm

The exhibition will be open until August 6 , 2022

Wednesday - Thursday: 12:00 pm. - 6:00 pm

Friday - Saturday: 10:00 pm. - 7:00 pm

Or by appointment

$6.7 Million Budget for the Arts and Humanities Approved by Montgomery County Council

The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (AHCMC) in Maryland just announced a $6,747,706 annual budget appropriation which includes $6,339,106 for AHCMC grants and administration and an additional $408,000 for the Public Arts Trust. The $6.7M appropriation was unanimously approved by the Montgomery County Council and represents a significant increase over the FY22 budget and flat funding for public art.  

“We are especially grateful to receive a record increase in funding for FY23 from the County Executive and Montgomery County Council,” says Dana Pauley, Board Chair for the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. “Recovery remains slow for our creative economy and many other local industries; receiving this support demonstrates the county's commitment to invest in the full recovery and stability of our arts and humanities sector.”  

“The decision to include the creative sector in the county’s strong economic rebound strategies substantiates the essential role of our cultural community in Montgomery County,” states Suzan Jenkins, CEO of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. “The arts and humanities buoyed our local communities in our darkest hours and continue to do so today. AHCMC is exceedingly thankful and proud to continue supporting financial recovery for the artists, scholars and arts managers that make up our incredible creative industry.”  

The Arts and Humanities Council will award $5,646,737 of the FY23 appropriation in grants that support the arts and humanities sector. Grant funding is available for general operating support, creative project support, and capacity building projects. All funding will be distributed through AHCMC’s existing grant channels, which support cultural institutions and individual artists and scholars across the entire county. The FY23 budget will go into effect on July 1.  

Home-Land Exploring the American Myth

I am honored to have been invited to participate in American University's Museum at the Katzen Arts Center's exhibition Home-Land: Exploring the American Myth, June 11–August 7, 2022 and curated by Michael Quituisaca and Alexandra Schuman.

In addition to my work, the curators selected Sobia Ahmad, Elizabeth Casqueiro, Ric Garcia, Claudia "Aziza" Gibson-Hunter, Julia Kwon, Khánh H. Lê, and Helen Zughaib for the exhibition.

... the featured eight Washington area artists simultaneously honor and confront the American dream. The idea of “home” is a promise in America that often goes unquestioned. However, these artists reveal that home is not a privilege for all - for some it is taken, for others it is to be fought for and defended, and, for many artists in the show, it is reforged in a new land. This exhibition highlights how these artists have found their place within multiple frameworks of identity, both ascribed and subscribed.

There will be an opening - yep a real opening! The opening reception takes place from 6 to 9 p.m., June. 11, 2022 at the museum.

See ya there!

 

Submission Deadline Extended for FY 22 Relief and Recovery Fund (RFF)

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) is soliciting applications from qualified artists, humanities practitioners, and arts and humanities organizations for its Fiscal Year 2022 CAH-RRF grant program.

The submission deadline has been extended to 10pm on Friday, June 17.

Details here.

Homage to a powerful woman

 Six years ago my courageous mother died... this is my eulogy from that day:

When my father died last year, I began his eulogy by noting that another oak had fallen.

This morning, around 1:25AM, Ana Olivia Cruzata Marrero de Campello, his wife of over 60 years, and my beloved mother, passed on on the day of her 97th birthday.

If my father was an oak, then my mother was an equally strong, but also very pliable, and elegant tree.  When hurricanes attack the main lands of the world, the strong tall trees often fall, but the pliable ones, like plantain trees, always give with the wind, and survive the storms, and thrive in the drenching rains.

My mother was like a an aged plantain tree, not only immensely strong and pliable, but also giving and nurturing.

Like many Cuban women of her generation and her social-economic background, she had never worked for a living in Cuba, and yet within a few days of our arrival in New York in the 1960s, she was working long hours in a sewing factory, putting her formidable seamstress skills, honed in the social sewing and embroidery gathering of young Cuban girls, to use in the "piece work" process of the New York sewing factories.

As soon as we saved the money, one of the first things that my mother bought was an electric sewing machine - a novelty to her, as she had always used one of the those ancient Singer machines with a foot pedal.

I remember as a child in Brooklyn, that women used to bring her fabric and a page from a magazine with a woman wearing a dress. Without the benefit of a sewing pattern, my mother would whip up a copy of the dress that was more often than not probably better made than the original. As the word of her skills spread, so did her customers and soon she was making more money working at home than at the factory - but she kept both jobs.

I once noted to her that I admired the courage that it must have taken  her to leave her family and immigrate to the United States. "We didn't come here as immigrants," she corrected me. "We came as political refugees, and I initially thought that we'd be back in Cuba within a few years at the most."

When the brutal Castro dictatorship refused to loosen its stranglehold on her birth place, she became an immigrant, and from there on an American citizen from her white-streaked hair down to her heel bone (that's a Cuban saying). Like my father, she loved her adopted country with a ferocity, that I sometimes feel that only people who have been bloodied by Communism can feel for a new, free homeland.

As as I've noted before, Cubans are archaic immigrants... we love this great nation because we recognize its singular and unique greatness; perhaps it is because our forebears had the same chance at greatness and blew it.

I remember as a teenager, once I started going out to parties and things at night on my own (around age 16 or so), that my mother would wait up for me, sitting by the third floor window of our Brooklyn apartment, where she could survey the whole neighborhood and see as far as the elevated LL subway station a few blocks away, to watch me descend the station stairs and trace my way home.

My mother was always fit and, as once described by my father, "flaca como un fusil" (as slim as a rifle). She was strong and fast. She was also quiet, but never silenced, and when needed, could and would command attention.

My mother was always well dressed and superbly coiffed. When we'd go to parties and events, women would always ask her where she'd gotten that dress! The answer was always the same: she'd made it!

At least once a week, to my father's dismay, and in spite of his demands that my mother stop it, she'd get her hair done at the nearby peluqueria (hair dresser).

My dad knew, and respected his limits with my mother. 

I remember one time that my father and I were returning from shopping at the supermarket, dragging one of those wheeled folding carts that could carry four full paper grocery bags. It had been snowing, so the Brooklyn streets were wet and muddy.

When we got to our apartment my father opened the door. He then stood there.

"Go in!" I demanded.

"We'll have to wait," he said gloomily, "Your mother mopped the floor and it's still wet." This giant, tough, street-brawling Galician then looked at me sheepishly, "I'd rather walk through a mine field than step on your mother's wet floor."

I learned a lesson there.

She used to delight in telling stories how, as a child, she would often win the horse races that kids staged around the small country towns where she was raised in Oriente province, where her father was a Mayoral.

"I almost always won," she'd say, and then would add: "Even though I was a skinny girl."

Once, in her seventies, back in the days where you could actually accompany people to the departing gates at airports, we were escorting my oldest daughter Vanessa, who had come to visit, and we were running late. As we got to the airport, we ran to the gate, and to everyone's surprise, Abuela got there first. I still remember how delighted my daughter was that her grandmother could still run like a gazelle.

When I joined the Navy at age 17, my first duty station was USS SARATOGA, which at the time was stationed in Mayport in Florida, and thus my parents decided to migrate south to Florida and moved to Miami... just to be close to me.

They spent the next 40 years in the same apartment while I was stationed all over the world.

The mostly Cuban-American families that lived over the years in that apartment loved my mother, and would always tell me stories about my mother, ever the nurturer, bringing them food when she knew that they were going over tough times, or riding the buses with them, just to show them the routes.

This week, when I arrived in Miami, already somewhat knowing that this was approaching the end, I saw her with tubes coming out of her mouth and her eyes closed. When I spoke to her she opened her eyes, and in spite of the visuals that my eyes were seeing she somehow still managed to look strong. 

I showed her photos and movies of her grand children, and talked to her for a long time.

I thanked her for having the courage to leave her motherland and afford me the opportunity to grow as an American.

When she was being extubated, a young woman came into the room with a guitar and played and sang the haunting free prose of Guajira Guantanamera (The peasant girl from Guantanamo); a most fitting song, since my mother was from Guantanamo, and she came from strong Cuban peasant stock.

"Guajira pero fina (A peasant, but a very refined woman)", noted a neighbor and my mother's loving caretaker. 

The song, which can start with just about any prose, started with the Jose Marti poem:

 Yo quiero, cuando me muera, sin patria, pero sin amo, tener en mi tumba un ramo de flores y una bandera

I want to, when I die, without my motherland, but without a master, to have on my tomb a bunch of flowers and a flag.

She died without a master, a strong and pliable woman who not only gave me the gift of life, but also the gift of freedom.

And as my mother died in her sleep in the early hours of the morning, in the capital city of the bitter Cuban Diaspora, all that I could gather to say to her was mostly the same that I said to my father when he passed last year: "Thank you for your courage... from me, and from my children... and soon from their children. You opened a whole new world for them."

I love you Mami... Un Abrazo Fuerte! Thank you for your gifts to me and my children, and happy birthday in Heaven!

Margaret Dowell to Exhibit at Mattawoman Creek Art Center

Margaret Dowell is one of the most talented, exquisitely gifted, and technically proficient painters that I know.  Add to that hardworking!

“Margaret Dowell: An Art Continuum” is a retrospective of sorts of this brilliant artist. And, it is the first showing of a body of Dowell’s work in Southern Maryland.

Self Portrait with Bush Hog and Ancestor by Margaret Dowell

The Sunderland artist grew up working with her family on the tobacco farm where she now paints. Her representational works which have addressed both the likes of social commentary and farming have been exhibited regionally and nationally, but never locally – until now.

Speaking about her art this well respected artist and educator says: “The making of Art for me is a physical, spiritual, intellectual and psychological process which can be simultaneously humbling and elating. If I have a lofty goal it would be that the works contribute in some way to the shaping of a more tolerable existence.”

Dowell’s solo show will be held in MCAC’s front gallery. In the back gallery Dowell is joined by Frederick photographer Donald Dunsmore for “Addiction and Art” – an exhibition that utilizes art to promote dialogue about substance abuse and recovery.

Show Dates: May 27 – June 26 (Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 AM – 4 PM)

Reception: Sunday, June 5, 1-4 PM

MCAC is located in Smallwood State Park, Marbury, MD. (301)743-5159. www.mattawomanart.org.