Just down the street from me...

The Amazing Spidergirl

I am almost finished with this piece from the new trompe l'oeil comic book superheroes series; to review:

1. Phase One: A series of duplicate watercolor panels from the comic books
2. Phse Two: Change the dialogue text in the text balloons to reflect something more interesting appropriate to the scene.
3. Phase Three: Insert an electronic component into the dialogue balloons, with a Powerpoint based "back and forth" dialogue between the characters.

Fallout: Leaving Roy Lichtenstein's formulaic and gorgeous 1960s pop art of the same genre in the dust-bin of art history. These, along with other artists working the Superhero theme, will be at a special curated exhibition (curated by me) at the Aqua Art Fair in Miami Beach in December.

Update: Here's the finished piece

"The Amazing Spidergirl." Trompe l'oeil watercolors and charcoal on paper. 4x6 inches. Circa 2012.

Opportunity for Prince George's Artists

Call for Entries   Under The Influence: The 24th Annual Prince George's County Juried Exhibition Arts/Harmony Hall Regional Center 10701 Livingston Rd. Fort Washington, MD 20744 Under The Influence is a juried exhibition of works that show all kinds of influences, including, but not limited, historic, aesthetic and cultural. The exhibition is sponsored by The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), Department of Parks and Recreation, Prince George's County, Arts and Cultural Heritage Division. The exhibition will be on display from November 5 through December 28, 2012. Juror Mr. F. Lennox Campello is an internationally accomplished artist, author, published art critic, teacher and one of the internet's leading art bloggers. His local, national and international knowledge of and experience with the pulse of the art scene is an invaluable contribution to this year's juried exhibition. Exhibition Dates: November 5 - December 28, 2012 Public Reception: Saturday, November 17, 3-5pm Artist Talk and Refreshments: Saturday, November 24, 12noon-2pm  Eligibility & Submission Criteria This call for entries is open to all artists 18 years and older who live, work, attend school or have studios in Prince George's County, MD. Artists may submit a maximum of 3 artworks for consideration. All works must be original (no reproductions). Proposals for installations or performance works should include sample images, video or audio of the type of work being proposed as well as a brief description of the proposed art work.   What to Send A CD/DVD containing images and/or segments of audio/video, each no longer than five minutes in duration. A bio, artist statement with contact info and a list of the works submitted with titles, media, and dimensions in MS Word. If you would like your materials returned, please include a SASE.   Where to Send It Materials can be submitted by mail or delivered in person to the arts office at Arts/Harmony Hall Regional Center, 10701 Livingston Rd., Fort Washington, MD 20744 or emailed to: Stuart.Diekmeyer@pgparks.com Submission Deadline: Monday, October 1, 2012 All submissions, in the form of digital images, must be received by 5pm on Monday, October 1. Notification of selected works: Friday, October 12, 2012 All selected artists will be notified via email Delivery of artwork to AHHRC: Friday, October 26, 9am-5pm All artists are responsible for the delivery of their artwork to AHHRC Exhibition closes: Friday, December 28 Artwork pick-up: Wednesday, January 2, 9am-5pm Guidelines for Digital Files Efforts will be made to review all submissions, regardless of format. However, please be aware that incompatible files may cause submissions to be rejected. Applicants are encouraged to format files as described below. Name each file according to the following format: "last name" underscore "document". Example: jones_statement.pdf. Please number each image file corresponding to the work sample list. Example: 01_jones_untitled.jpg Image files should not be larger than 1MB, and should be formatted as jpeg, tiff or png. Video and audio submissions may be submitted as a DVD or on a CD and formatted as Quicktime, Windows Media, .wave or .mpeg. Purchase Awards On the recommendation of the juror, the Arts and Cultural Heritage Division will purchase select works of art for the inclusion in the Parks and Recreation art collection. Delivery & Installation Artists are responsible for transporting work to and from the gallery. Art work must be delivered ready to hang and appropriately presented. For works that require projection, sound or other electronic equipment, those materials must be provided by the artist. Art works that differ significantly from the images submitted for judging, or are not ready for gallery installation, may be rejected. If you need to ship the work, please call us to let us know what arrangements you have made. The exhibition will be installed and dismantled by M-NCPPC staff unless the nature of the work requires special assistance. All work accepted for exhibition will remain for the duration of the exhibition. Sales & Insurance The M-NCPPC will retain a 25% commission on all art works sold during the exhibition. The M-NCPPC will insure all consigned artwork in the custody of Arts/Harmony Hall for 75% of it's sale value, from the time they are received by delivery, until the pick up date only. Additional Information If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact: Stuart Diekmeyer, Assistant Director, Arts/Harmony Hall Regional Center, 10701 Livingston Rd., Fort Washington, MD 20744 or email Stuart.Diekmeyer@pgparks.com. Participation implies agreement with all aforementioned conditions.

New Rockville Outdoor Art Show Opportunity

WHERE: Rockville Town Square in Rockville, MD 

WHAT: Juried Fine Art and Fine Crafts Festival 

WHEN:  May 4 - 5, 2013   

            Saturday: 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.; Sunday: 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. 

           

NOTEWORTHY:

*Organized and managed by the Bethesda Row Arts Festival team

  

*Limited to 175 artists and crafters

  

*Estimated Attendance:  30,000

  

*Jury/Booth Fees:  $25/$325

  

*Ample Parking - Metro access

  

*Artist amenities include hospitality for artists open entire show, ample free parking, overnight police security.

  

Rockville Town Square - is a sensory delight. A popular dining and gathering place, Rockville Town Square covers four city blocks and features more than 30 fine shops, upscale boutiques, unique restaurants. Low-rise retail and modern residential buildings create a very pleasing, human-scale, town-center feel. The architecture is eclectic, ranging from art deco to southwest to postmodern in style.  Attractive brick sidewalks, wooden and wrought-iron benches, trees and shrubbery round out the welcoming atmosphere.

Cultural events are an important dynamic in this affluent community on the Rockville Pike corridor, which has the nation's highest per square foot retail sales.

Marketing through newspapers, magazines, television, radio, web and transit is directed to these individuals with high disposable income and interest in art.    

APPLICATIONS  WILL OPEN AUGUST 27TH 

APPLY VIA: www.zapplication.org

Deadline: January 20, 2013

Notification: February 8, 2013 via e-mail

Accepted Artist fees due: March 1, 2013

Email inquires to: Robin@A-RTS.org

You may also contact by telephone:

Robin Markowitz, Festival Director

301-637-5684

Thoughts on the Trawick Prize

The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards is a visual art prize produced by the Bethesda Arts and Entertainment District (through the spectacular generosity of Ms. Carol Trawick)  that honors artists from Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. The annual juried competition awards $14,000 in prize monies to selected artists and features the work of the finalists in a group exhibition. The 2012 finalists and their bios are at the end of this posting.

The 2012 exhibition will be held September 1-29 at Gallery B, located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E, Bethesda, MD 20814 (the former space of the Fraser Gallery). Winners will be announced September 5.

The finalists were selected by:

Dawn Gavin
Dawn Gavin was born in Bellshill, Scotland, and currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She has received a Bachelor of Arts (First Class) in Drawing and Painting, a Master of Fine Art and a Master of Science degree in Electronic Imaging from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Scotland. Her work investigates issues of identity and displacement, employing a range of media from collage and installed drawings to digital video. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, The John Michael Kohler Art Centre (Sheboygen, MI), Maryland Institute College of Art, Meyerhoff Gallery (Baltimore, MD), The DCA Visual Research Centre (Dundee, Scotland), The Philadelphia Art Alliance and The Washington Project for the Arts (Washington D.C.). She is an Associate Professor in Drawing and Foundations at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Barbara Kelly Gordon
Barbara Kelly Gordon is an Associate Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian where she focuses on contemporary international art, and especially film, video and new media. She has worked on major exhibitions ranging from a retrospective of Douglas Gordon to Visual Music to The Cinema Effect, which completes a three-city tour of Spain in 2012. During the 2011-2012 season her exhibitions include Directions : Pipilotti Rist; Directions : Grazia Toderi; EMPIRE3 (with Andy Warhol); Directions: Antonio Rovaldi and Black Box shows with Hans Op de Beeck (Belgium), Larent Grasso (France), Nira Pereg (Israel), and Ali Kazma (Turkey). Gordon, who was born and raised in Washington D.C., has lectured widely on contemporary art and recently served on the jury for Emerging Italian Artists at the Strozzi Palace in Florence, Italy.

N. Elizabeth Schlatter
N. Elizabeth Schlatter is Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, where she has curated more than 20 exhibitions, including recent exhibitions of art by Carl Chiarenza, Andreas Feininger, Hans Friedrich Grohs, Sue Johnson, and Fiona Ross, and the exhibitions “Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists,” “LEADED: the Materiality and Metamorphosis of Graphite” and “Form & Story: Narration in Recent Painting.” Prior to working at the University of Richmond, she was an exhibitions project director for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in Washington, D.C. She has a bachelor’s degree in art history from Southwestern University in Texas, and a master’s in art history from George Washington University.

My picks from the finalists to win it all?: David D'Orio or Dean Kessman - both are intelligent conceptual artists who also have the rare talent to actually deliver a concrete and interesting product married to their conceptual ideas. However, usually the winner from any sort of allegedly objective art competition is determined by the biggest and most vociferous voice, and not personally knowing any of the three jurors, I don't know who's got the biggest mouth.

Another however: since five of the eight semifinalists come from the Baltimore area, I suspect that Scotland-born Dawn Gavin had the biggest and most vociferous voice over the two Sassenachs and the odds are (once again) stacked for a Baltimore-based artist to win the Trawick.

Who then? I'm betting Lillian Bayley Hoover, a brilliant and talented painter who now officially replaces Andrew Wodzianski as the "always the maid never the bride" of the major Bethesda Up! generous art prizes.

Lillian Bayley Hoover Lillian Bayley Hoover earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, Asheville and her Master of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Hoover’s work has been featured in the Baltimore area and beyond, and recently appeared in the 94th edition of New American Paintings and the Summer 2011 issue of the Little Patuxent Review. She is the recipient of a grant from the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, which enabled her to conduct research and make photographs in Istanbul, Turkey. Hoover has received many awards, including “Young Artist” for the Bethesda Painting Awards and two Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and she has thrice been a semifinalist for both Baltimore’s Sondheim Prize and Bethesda’s Trawick Prize.
David D’Orio David D’Orio is the executive director of DC GlassWorks, a public access glass blowing facility in Maryland, just outside of Washington D.C. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture and a Bachelor of Arts in sociology from the University of Hartford/Hartford Art School in Hartford, CT. His work has been shown at Artomatic in Crystal City, the Marlboro Gallery of Prince George’s Community College and as part of the Arlington Arts Center Fall Solos. In his work, D’Orio explores “the ideology of technology as the source of solutions for social problems (both real, invented and imagined). … This work has the sense of a forgotten or undiscovered manufacturer/inventor whose sole purpose is to create objects that defy classification.”
Skye Gilkerson Skye Gilkerson grew up at the edge of the known world, in the space that Thomas Jefferson thought would take 1,000 years to populate. After her childhood on a farm in South Dakota, she’s slowly migrated along the rust belt, landing in Baltimore, where she has a studio at Current Space. Skye has been an artist-in-residence with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Philadelphia Art Hotel. Her work is in the Robert F. Pfannebecker Collection, the Notre Dame of Maryland collection and numerous personal collections in the U.S. and Germany. She received her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and a Bachelor of Arts in studio art from Bethel University in St. Paul, MN.  Gilkerson was a finalist for the 2011 Trawick Prize.
Dean Kessmann Dean Kessmann lives and works in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida and Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. among numerous other locations across the United States. His work has also been featured in many group shows, including those at Strathmore in North Bethesda and Meyerhoff Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He received a Master of Arts from Sothern Illinois University, Carbondale and is currently the chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Nate Larson Nate Larson is full-time faculty in the photography department at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. His work with photographic media, artist books and digital video has been widely shown across the U.S. and internationally. He serves on the board of directors of the Society for Photographic Education. His current project GEOLOCATION, in collaboration with Marni Shindelman, tracks GPS coordinates associated Twitter tweets and pairs the text with a photograph of the originating site to mark the virtual information in the real world. Larson has a master of fine Arts from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Arts from Purdue University.
Joshua Smith Joshua Wade Smith was raised on the outskirts of a small border town in South Texas. He is a nationally exhibited object-based performer and sculptor and currently a fellow at Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, D.C. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Contemporary Museum-Baltimore and the Arlington Arts Center, among others. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Mt. Royal School at MICA in 2010. In his recent work, Smith explores themes of labor, masculinity and gymnastic investigations of landscape. His installations and performances feature contraptions and repetitious actions that emphasize the transfer of value through absurd or thankless tasks; his work is often about making a show of the “Work” itself through schematics, photo documentation and endurance based on drawings.
Diane Szczepaniak Diane Szczepaniak earned a Master’s degree in art education from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northern Kentucky University. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions including SCULPTURE NOW 2012 at Pepco Edison Place Gallery in Washington, D.C., InLiquid Benefit Auction in Philadelphia, PA, among others and in many solo exhibitions. She was named a semi-finalist for Baltimore’s Sondheim Prize in 2011 and received an Individual Artist Award in Visual Arts: Sculpture from the Maryland State Arts Council in 2009. About her work, Szczepaniak says: “Colors naturally hold meaning for me and I have painted in response to images from poems that I find mysterious, feelings aroused by music, that familiar experience Wallace Stevens calls ‘passions in rain, or moods in falling snow,’ and even meditations on thoughts.”
Hannah Walsh Hannah Walsh earned her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Indiana University. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions nationally and abroad, including The Boiler, Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn; Little Berlin in Philadelphia; The Wayfarers in Brooklyn; Nominimo Gallery in Quito, Ecuador and the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond. Walsh explains her interest in cheerleading as a subject: “All-star cheerleading squads are not affiliated with any sports team. They only cheer competitively, in other words, for themselves. These squads embody several of my interests: the simultaneous occurrence of sincerity and extreme artifice, skilled physicality, gender performance and American identity.”

Zhu Qi Slams Uli Sigg

Two months ago, Uli Sigg, the Swiss art collector and Switzerland’s former Ambassador to China, donated 1463 pieces of his Chinese contemporary art collection to Hong Kong’s M+ museum. The bequest, which included works by 350 artists such as Ai Weiwei and Zhang Xiaogan, initially received widespread praise. Then on June 25, the Art Critic column of the Oriental Morning Post, a Shanghai-based Chinese newspaper, slammed the affair.  “The donated works aren’t worth their HK$1.3 billion ($163 million) valuation.” the columnist Zhu Qi declared. “They are mostly junk.”

(Via) Check the whole story here.

Two things:

1. Zhu Qi needs to read some old reviews by Blake Gopnik and Jessica Dawson in order to learn the proper snarky etiquette required to label art as "junk."
2. The Oriental Morning Post clearly hasn't received the memo from the PC police and are not aware that Oriental is not a cool term to use anymore.

Volunteers for (e)merge art fair

(e)merge art fair is looking for energetic, efficient volunteers to assist with various aspects of the  fair. No experience is necessary, but knowledge of the art field or experience with art events is preferred. This is a valuable experience for anyone involved with or  interested in contemporary art. 

(e)merge will take place at the Capitol Skyline Hotel October 4-7, 2012. 

Volunteers will be invited to an orientation at the hotel prior to the event. Whether you want to assist for a day, or for the duration of the art fair, dedicated volunteers are essential to the success of the fair and deeply appreciated. 

If interested or have any questions please contact Irene Clouthier at irene@emergeartfair.com