Better Home & Gardens tells us how to hang pictures in our homes.

Target Gallery, the national exhibition space of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, will host Transformed by Fire: Glass Today from September 1 through October 3, 2004. The exhibition includes pieces by 31 artists from across the United States, with 19 from the Washington, DC area. Sally Hansen, owner of The Glass Gallery in Bethesda, MD, selected all of the works on view. A reception and gallery talk will be held on Thursday, September 9, from 6-8 PM.

Congratualtions to area photographer Prescott "Scott" Lassman, whose photograph White Horse has won Third Prize at TPS 13: The National Competition, a national juried photography competition sponsored by the Texas Photographic Society and juried by Sue Brisk, editorial director at Magnum.

It's always fun to see what the art teachers are doing with their personal work. The Corcoran Faculty Biennial Exhibition opens at the Hemicycle Gallery on August 18, 2004 and runs to September 13, 2004. Opening reception on September 2,2004 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm.

Talking about openings, tonight is the Bethesda Art Walk from 6 - 9 PM.

Sarah Godfrey has a very informative and well-written profile of Iona Rozeal Brown in the current issue of the City Paper.

Brown's newest work (based on Japanese erotic prints) will be on exhibition locally at G Fine Art this coming October. She also has shows coming in New York and Los Angeles and is clearly an artist developing a major (and well-deserved) reputation. She's also a "former local artist," who graduated in 1991 from Maryland before heading out West.

Brown's success, in no small part, has been through the niche use of her imagery depicting the Japanese ganguro subculture, where Japanese youths associate with African-American culture though the use of clothing, signs, and makeup or visit tanning salons to keep their skin artificially dark.

It has been her main thoroughfare to artistic success, and over the future years, could also become her Achilles' heel if she allows her unique artistic theme to dominate her arts vision and thus expose her work to becoming Mondrianized.

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And last week in the WCP, someone named Gadi Dechter had an extraordinarily informative profile of Andrew Krieger, whose work is currently on exhibition at the Corcoran.

As Dechter points out, Krieger has been relatively anonymous and quite unknown for the last 25 years, and it is only through curator Eric Denker's intimate and personal knowledge of Krieger's work (the two have known each other ince the mid-1980s, when they were working at the National Gallery of Art bookstore), that this exceptional artist's works have come to a brighter light and more focused scrutiny. Read Jessica Dawson's earlier review in the Post here.

Pilfered from AJ:

A Seattle newspaper's freelance critic writes a negative review and is then threatened with a lawsuit. When she asked the newspaper to guarantee that it would represent her should the lawsuit be made, they declined - and she quit!

Read the story here.

J.T. Kirkland, over at "Thinking About Art," has a very valid point about Glenn Dixon's first ever "Galleries" column review of Alison Clay at Numark Gallery.

J.T. writes:

"Is it too much to ask for an opinion? Sure, he's working with tight space constraints, but couldn't he say "I liked it" or "it works"? In all honesty, didn't he just re-word the press release? Wouldn't it be cheaper for the Washington Post to just print the press release of the show?"

And he's right! After reading his posting, I went back and re-read Dixon's review and Kirkland nailed him with one of (our shared) pet peeves: the "review" that describes a show rather than offering a critical opinion.

Somewhat surprising coming from Dixon, who is (in my experience) one of the most opinionated and one-sided critical writers in our area. Perhaps it is the seminal signs of the "Washingtonpostizing" of his work as opposed to the more aggressive style of writing usually employed by WCP writers.

Kirkland's own and earlier review of the same show can be read here.