Modernizing Picasso
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and The Martin Agency announced yesterday a joint social media effort that brings to life the upcoming exhibition of 176 works from Picasso’s personal collection, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris.
The only east coast venue for the exhibition’s seven-city international tour, VMFA partnered with The Martin Agency to develop a marketing campaign that Picasso fans can see from anywhere, using Facebook, QR codes and Layar applications to drive information about the exclusive exhibition.
The print and out-of-home elements use a portrait of Picasso made entirely of QR codes. When a phone scans the QR image, it is re-directed to a landing page featuring Picasso’s work and an invitation to buy tickets to the exhibition.
“To honor the progressive nature of Picasso’s work, we created art out of modern technology,” said Keith Cartwright, SVP/group creative director at Martin. “Just as Picasso once took found objects – bicycle handlebars, etc. — and brought them together to create works of art, we were able to take something technologically functional, QR codes, and use them as building blocks to create something arresting and beautiful.”
Social media supports the campaign by extending the marketing reach all along the east coast, where multiple out-of-home elements will raise awareness of the exhibition. On the corner of Grand and Wooster streets in New York City, a QR code portrait of Picasso will be painted on the side of a building. In a SoHo neighborhood, as well as in Richmond and Washington, D.C., 22 geo-coordinates will be activated for detection by Layar phone applications. When the Layar application detects the geo-coordinates, augmented reality images from Picasso’s collection will appear on surrounding buildings.
In Philadelphia, an entire storefront and empty store space have been designated as a virtual exhibit, using augmented reality. When scanned using a phone, the QR code on the storefront enables the device to display Picasso’s artwork on the walls inside the space, as if it were the museum itself.
Throughout Richmond, all 33 Starbucks locations will partner with VMFA to promote the exhibition. Each store will display the Picasso QR code on the storefront, and once inside the store, works of art will appear on the walls of Starbucks in a similar fashion to the Philadelphia virtual exhibit. Facebook.com/myVMFA goes live this week with a “Picasso” tab to serve as a home base for the social media technology. Here, art enthusiasts can view Picasso’s works, as well as a Google Map guide to the geo-coordinates laid out in New York, Richmond and D.C.
“The Virginia Museum’s Picasso exhibition is the most ambitious show in the 75-year history of our museum,” VMFA Director Alex Nyerges said. “The occasion of this landmark exhibition is an ideal time to deepen our presence throughout social media. The innovation of the Picasso QR campaign and augmented reality is in keeping with the innovative genius of this master artist and our quest to be on the leading edge of technology for art museums.”
Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris, will be on view from February 19 through May 15, 2011 and is co-organized by the Musée National Picasso, Paris and VMFA.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Go to this opening tonight
I'll be at Old Town Alexandria's Gallery West for its 14th Annual National Show, which was juried by yours truly.
The prizes will be presented to the winners at the Artists Reception and Awards Presentation, which is tonight, Saturday, February 12 from 5-8pm. Please join me there for a bite, a glass of wine and some excellent artwork from around the nation.
The prizewinners are:
1st Place - Eric Standley, "Poseidon"
2nd Place - Amy Swartele, "Breath"
3rd Place - Margaret Dowell, "Joseph and Naked Aggression"
Honorable Mentions:
Kimberley Bush, “Squatty Copperhead”
Francesca Creo, “Washed Up”
Annie Evans, “Masque”
Daniel Filippone, “American Kestrel”
Robert Madden, "Twisted Vision"
Drew Parris, "Tempest"
Nicole Santiago, "Anniversary Cake"
Fierce Sonia, "Material Things"
Tore Terrasi, "Grid Study (Gradient)"
See ya there!
Friday, February 11, 2011
Come join me
A while back I spent a long but fun four hours jurying 555 works of art submitted to Old Town Alexandria's Gallery West call for artists for its 14th Annual National Show.
I had juried an earlier version of this show, maybe around a dozen years ago, and so it was fun to return and see the state of the nation from this unique perspective.
The quality of the entries was superb, and I've already eyed a couple of artists whose work I'm going to recommend to some local gallerists.
A few days ago I dropped in to see the actual work and picked the prize-winners. This was a very tough job, but let me tell you that Eric Standley, the First Prize winner has some of the most obsessive and technically perfect work that I have ever seen, especially in the rather odd media of cut paper. But even as good as he is (and I doubt that there's anyone else on the planet who is better, maybe just as good, but his degree of technical prowess just can't be any better), I would have some good advice for this artist, and suggest a new subject focus for his astonishing and obsessive facility with cutting paper.
Second Prize winner Amy Swartele could have easily won the top prize, had I not been so hypnotized by the intricacy of Standley's obsession with cutting paper and also by seeing something that one doesn't see everyday in an art show in his work. But Swartele also has a deep mastery of the her technique, and she also pushes it into a modern dialogue with her unusual subject matter pairings and associations. This is a painter with a mission! There is a little bit of nightmare blended into her primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, and her color harmony has a little of Goya and Stephen King hiding behind the brush strokes.
Margaret Dowell won third prize, thus "representing" for the local artists, as the other two are from outside the DMV. I am a big fan of her work and once wrote that "Dowell is an enviably talented painter. Her paintings show not only extraordinary technical skills, but also a hungry sense of desire and an intelligent understanding of her subjects..."
What else can I say after that? I can tell you that McDowell continues to impress me with the courage and depth of her subject matter.
So without having a preconceived idea of what my agenda for this show would be (I didn't have one), I ended up awarding the top three prizes to artists who have spent the thousands of hours needed to master anything - in one case cutting paper and in two others painting - of the three, two won because their artistic vision and subject matter impressed me, and they had the technical facility to deliver their idea with enviable ease. One won because I had honestly never seen such a degree of skill applied to a singular genre with such ferocity and control.
The prizes will be presented to the winners at the Artists Reception and Awards Presentation, which is this coming Saturday, February 12 from 5-8pm. Please join me there for a bite, a glass of wine and some excellent artwork from around the nation.
The prizewinners are:
1st Place - Eric Standley, "Poseidon"
2nd Place - Amy Swartele, "Breath"
3rd Place - Margaret Dowell, "Joseph and Naked Aggression"
Honorable Mentions:
Kimberley Bush, “Squatty Copperhead”
Francesca Creo, “Washed Up”
Annie Evans, “Masque”
Daniel Filippone, “American Kestrel”
Robert Madden, "Twisted Vision"
Drew Parris, "Tempest"
Nicole Santiago, "Anniversary Cake"
Fierce Sonia, "Material Things"
Tore Terrasi, "Grid Study (Gradient)"
See ya there!
New Artists, New Art
Longview Gallery will be showcasing the works of several standout new artists showing with Long View Gallery including Ryan McCoy, Shaun Richards, Jordan Bruns, Zach Sherif, Tom Burkett, Amy Genser, Shawna Moore, Michelle Peterson-Albandoz, and Clyde Fowler. In addition to highlighting the work by each of these new artists, several of Long View Gallery’s favorites will be showing as well.
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 17th, 6:30 - 8:30pm
Show Dates: February 17, 2011 - March 13, 2011
Look for Ryan McCoy to steal the show here as well...
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Cuban artists on racism in Cuba
For years now, I've been writing about the harsh racist attitudes and realities of contemporary Cuban society in Cuba's "Worker's Paradise". And a while back I barked at the Congressional Black Caucus' spectacular ignorance of the plight and long history of oppression of Afro-Cubans by a long line of racist Cuban governments, including the Castro brothers' never-ending brutal dictatorship.
I sent a copy of this post and commentary to every single member of the Congressional Black Caucus; not a single one responded.
And now, a traveling art exhibition, by Cuban artists, partially showcases what I have been talking about for a long time:
"Rebellion is in the air. Whether in the cities of Africa and the Middle East, or within disparate communities of artists, people are examining the current status of human rights and finding it lacking.
While street crowds are forcing political change, the literati are prodding more benign conversation about perceived inequities.
A case in point is the taboo-bashing exhibition "Queloides: Race & Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art" at the Mattress Factory. "Queloides" translates as "keloids," protruding scars caused by trauma, which exhibition curators apply to the wounds racism has inflicted upon the body politic."
Armando Marino's The Raft, part of the Queloides exhibit at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh - Photo by Tom Little
Read the review by Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, here.
