Artomatic memories

Wednesday, November 9th and Busboys and Poets from 6 - 8 pm.

This Artomatic event is FREE to the public.

In 1999 a handful of visual artists decided to take control of their need for space to be seen, heard and experienced. Douglas Development offered them the 90,000 square foot Historic Manhattan Laundry on Florida Avenue, NW between 14th and 13th Streets. 

On Wednesday, November 9th they will discuss their unique effort to provide open access to all artists, on a first come-first-serve basis. Structured so participating artists would contribute their time and skills to organize the space that would be free to the public. 

HEAR THEIR STORY Wednesday, November 9th and Busboys and Poets from 6 - 8 pm. This Artomatic event is FREE to the public.

I did AOM 2 and 3 waaaay back.... Many of today's top DC artists have Art-O-Matic in their resume: the late Manon Cleary, Dan Steinhilber, Adam Bradley, Scott Hutchison, the Dumbacher brothers, Renee Stout, Tim Tate, Michael Clark, Allison Miner, Jordan Tierney, Richard Dana, Graham Cladwell, Judy Jashinsky, Richard Chartier, and many, many others.

Here's my review of the third AOM from 20 years ago!  A different review for another long-gone magazine is here.

Review of Artomatic 2004

This is a teaser of my review of Artomatic 2016, which is coming up after I make my third visit to the the show... can you pick how many blue chip artists have emerged from that AOM over a decade ago? Can you see why I like Artomatic?

Artomatic Energymatic Daggermatic

Art critics, like most writers, usually get paid by the word, sometimes by the article, and occasionally by an infinitesimal percentage of whatever profits their writing generates. And most art critics and writers visit a gallery show or museum exhibition, get a few handouts and spend about half an hour studying the works on the wall before heading home or to the office to pound the word processor’s keys and earn their buck-a-word for the review.

You can’t do that with Art-O-Matic, the huge, almost every two years, open visual arts extravaganza that this year hosted over 600 visual artists and another 400 performance artists at the laberynthic former convent building that last housed the Children’s Museum on 3rd and H Street, NE.

The idea behind Art-O-Matic is simple: find a large, empty building somewhere in the city; work with the building owners, and then allow any artist who wants to show their work help with staging the show and with some of the financial needs. This year, AOM artists paid a $60 entry fee plus worked a few hours assisting with the show.

And this year around 600 visual artists brought their art to the public.

In order to write a proper, ethical review of AOM, a writer must spend hours walking five floors of art, jam-packed into hundreds of rooms, bathrooms, closets and stairs. And I think that this is one of the main reasons that most art critics love to hate this show. It overwhelms them with visual offerings and forces them to develop a "glance and judge" attitude towards the artwork. It’s a lot easier to carpet bomb a huge show like this than to do a surgical strike.

Add on top of that an outdated, but "alive and kicking" elitist attitude towards an open show, where anyone and everyone who calls him or herself an artist can exhibit, sans the sanitizing and all-knowing eye of the latest trendy curator, and you have a perfect formula for dismissing a show, without really looking at it.

This quaint and elitist attitude towards art is not new or even modern. It was the same attitude that caused the emergence of the salons of the 19th century, where only artists that the academic intelligentsia deemed good enough were exhibited. As every art student who almost flunked art history knows, towards the latter half of that century, the artists who had been rejected from the salons (because they didn’t fit the formula of good art) organized their own Salon Des Refuses, sort of a 19th century Parisian Art-O-Matic.

And a lot, in fact, most of the work in the Salon Des Refuses was quite bad, but amongst the dreck were also pearls like Manet's Le Dejeuner sur 'Herbe (Luncheon in the Grass), Monet's Impression: Sunrise, (and we all know what art "ism" that title gave birth to) and an odd and memorable looking portrait of a young lady in white (The White Girl, Symphony in White, No. 1) by an American upstart by the name of James McNeill Whistler.

Everyone who was anyone in the art world hated and dismissed this anti-salon exhibition; except for the only "anyone" who actually counted: art history.

But then somewhere in the next century, the salons and their formulas returned. Only their name and their display styles had changed. They were now called Biennials, Biennales, Bienales, Documentas and their settings were in museums, entire cities or pristine white cubes around the world.

Only their reasoning and misguided logic remained constant: "Only we know what is good art."

And that is why these modern salonists and their acolytes will never respect, like, or understand Art-O-Matic: they recall that the Salons des Refuses almost broke their control over art; it won’t happen again.

And like the poet Marti wrote: "I know the monster well, for I have lived in its entrails." You see, over the last two decades I have been the juror, curator, decision-maker for hundreds of shows. And as a freelance art critic I have written and evaluated hundreds of artists and shows. I have been a minute gear in the world-wide machinations to keep control of what is art and never let a new Salons des Refuses wrest control again.

OK, OK, I know that am going overboard here; but... do you get the point?

But I am also an artist, and I like the concept of Art-O-Matic.

And not just because of the miles of artwork on display, much of which is mind numbing bad art; in fact, so bad that it is sometimes almost good in its exorbitant mediocrity. The main reason that I like Art-O-Matic is the palpable amount of artistic energy that it delivers to Washington, DC every couple of years. It is as if some invisible visual art battery in this ignored art scene comes to the forefront and gets recharged with brilliant white light (made as we all know, of all colors in the spectrum), and 50,000 people who generally would not set foot in a gallery or museum come and see art and artists and absorb the positive energy that only creative minds can generously give away.

So I enter my fourth Art-O-Matic with several preconceived ideas in my very subjective agenda:

(a) It’s going to take several visits and many hours to write my fourth review of Art-O-Matic in as many shows.

(b) There’s going to be a lot of dreck in the show. But art is in the eyes of the beholder; my dreck could be your pearl.

(c) I’m going to find several pearls in the show

(d) I’m going to re-charge my visual arts battery

(e) Our gallery will pick up some new artists from this show

On visit one, during the press preview, glass sculptor Tim Tate (Disclaimer: whom we represent and whom we "discovered" at a past Art-O-Matic) whizzes a group of us through the five floors of the show. It still takes three hours or so, but I have taken notes. Five visits and more than twenty hours later, I feel comfortable to start writing about the show.

A lot of the artists in the show are well known to me, and so I begin to discover "new" ones – at least new to me. Judy Jashinsky, who is one of the firebrand organizers who keeps this (and past) Art-O-Matics running, grabs me and asks me if I’ve seen Mark Jenkins’s pubic hair tapestries.

And Jenkins is one of the first memorable discoveries in this show. Tucked away in a corner space, Jenkins has created two noteworthy entries into the show. First in everyone’s lips are his photographic explorations of close-ups of pubic hair (loupe included in the installation) that through the magic of digital manipulation become interesting designs of elegant abstracted qualities. A second Jenkins emerges from his crowded little room: the tape sculptures.

Jenkins uses common transparent packing tape (yards and yards of it) to create superbly crafted and visually attractive figurative sculptures, as well as the odd, unusual organic shaped one. Through documentary photography, we see what happens when Jenkins places these plastic figures in a public venue. A passing man stares incredulously at a plastic man inside a dumpster; or a beach jogger is surprised by an alien looking tape creature that the sea has washed ashore.

Iver Olson is another talented discovery for me. He gets the award for the best porn in the show, although his display is also peppered with some otherwise just plain sensual photo-collages. It is almost as if there were two Olsons in the show: a really torrid, sensual photographer, and a brilliantly inventive pornographer.

In one of his photos, Olson has a woman with her hand buried inside the vagina of a second woman, who is sitting on a couch, seemingly bored, while her friend is searching inside her vagina, with (as an artist friend of mine put it) a "did a leave my keys in there?" sort of look. Somehow Olson has transformed the hardcore act of lesbian fisting into an almost funny scene of lustless abandon. Other good porn in the show is offered by Eduardo Rodriguez, Alexis Bine and Rudy K.

Another discovery is Ira Tattelman’s installation titled "They taught me to wash away my desires." I don’t know if it is because the building was once a convent, but there is certainly a strange, palpable energy in some parts of the building; people like Stephen King feed on this sort of energy and produce brilliant books; it is clear that Ira Tattelman also absorbed and channeled this energy into his installation.

"They taught me to wash away my desires" is inside a smallish bathroom furnished with a shower, a tub and some archaic 19th-century type bathroom stations (such as an enema station). Tattelman has installed a small pump in one of the stations that keeps re-circulating brownish, brackish water and add a watery sound to the room. To the right, inside and around the dirty tub is what at first sight appears to be a dismembered human body (they're actually some sort of artificial legs).

Put together the Stephen Kingesque feel of the room, the moist sound effects, the outdated chrome and dirty tile bath stations, and the human parts, and you have an installation that would give Hannibal Lechter a nightmare. It’s brilliant and somebody better put police ankle trackers on Tattelman now.

A couple more artists who deserve to be mentioned in the Hannibal Lechter art list are the very good and macabre sculptures by Stephon Senegal: this is a young artist to keep an eye on; in my opinion possibly the best sculpture in the entire show. Some other pieces by very good artists in this new trend of Lechterism are "Joroko" and also the installation "Sun Ray" by retro-recycling master Ray Jacobs.

M. Rion Hoffman really impressed me with her photography negative boxes installed along one of the main hallways. Hoffman’s boxes are delicate and have that ability to bring the viewer in for an intimate, close-up exploration of whatever story this talented artist wants to deliver. However, her large photo-collages, displayed next to her boxes, appear brutish and heavy handed by comparison, although part of me kept being re-directed from them to her brilliant boxes.

Matt Dunn is a mother load of photographic talent with a built-in magnet to attract, discover, capture on silver gelatin film, and then show us, the really interesting, throat-clearing substrata of human society that makes Diane Arbus’ photographs look like Sears portraits. This is a master portraitist in his element.

In the glass room, Washington Glass School directors Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers have created the most professional looking set of rooms in the entire building and provided the means to discover a couple of new talents in that beautiful genre. Another fact that surfaces very quickly is that the Washington Glass School is certainly stamping its own imprimatur, its own "school brand" in a sense, upon many of our area’s young glass artists. I particularly liked the figurative "man" vessels of Michael Janis, where Janis takes Tate’s seminal idea of narrative biographical wall panels and marries it with Tate’s apothecaries (nine of which were acquired by the Renwick Alliance) to deliver a fresh, new set of ideas in glass.

In these rooms I also liked Syl Mathis, who reminds us that the true beauty of glass lies mainly in its simplicity. Mathis delivers a series of pieces exploring the "boat" theme in glass. I preferred the simpler, more elegant forms by Mathis over some of the more elaborate pieces, perhaps made a bit distracting by their complex support stands and crafty materials.

Allison B. Miner is a very talented painter, and at the last Art-O-Matic, where I first discovered her small, in-your-face paintings, I singled her out as one of the best painters in that show. Miner is still one of the best painters in this show, and her talent with the brush and composition is clearly evident to the most casual observer. I do however, think that it is time for Miner to move on and push her enviable painting skills beyond the tight, close-up routine that she has come dangerously close to boxing herself in. This is a very good painter at the beginning of her career and I am sure that we are but seeing but a tiny bit of what Miner can and will deliver.

Joseph Barbaccia is another artist whom I have been observing for the last few years and this year his crayon self-portrait – literally made out of hundreds and hundreds of crayons in a postmodern pointillist style – easily qualifies as one of the best pieces of art in the whole AOM.

Barbaccia is hard to pin down as a painter, sculptor, uh... crayonist? He explores and pushes art in all dimensions.

Staying within two dimensions, and doing a magnificent job of it are three enviably talented painters: Margaret Dowell, Michal Hunter and Jeffry Cudlin. All of these artists have that spectacular technical mastery of the brush that it is so easily dismissed by people who have never tried to mix cerulean blue with Payne’s gray and ended up with mud. Dowell’s paintings show not only extraordinary technical skills, but also a hungry sense of desire and intelligent understanding of her subjects – who are often transgender and cross dressing personages around our area.

Michal Hunter is also a technical virtuoso of the brush, with only one painting in the entire show; tucked away so far and so difficult to find, that had I not run into Hunter while she was on hallway monitor duty, I would have missed it completely. I am glad that I didn’t, as it is a very powerful work by a woman who is slowly re-affirming her once solid place in the Washington, DC art scene.

Jeffry Cudlin surprised me by delivering some very strong compositional works that are really excuses for Cudlin to use a representational subject to offer works such as "Author, Author," that are really more about the intelligent employment of color and shapes and composition. I write that he surprised me because I am not usually a big fan of these sorts of "interior" works. However, because the paintings are all about shape, color and composition, I found myself admiring them for those points, rather than for their subject matter.

Creating a new place for himself is an illustrator named Scott Brooks, who in this new Art-O-Matic incarnation is like a strange, macabre John Currin, but can paint and draw a lot better than Currin ever learned to. A lot of people were talking about Brooks' disturbing images; this is usually a sign of success for any visual artist. Both the police and art collectors need to keep an eye on this talented artist.

But quite possibly the most talked about (well, at least the most listened to) pieces in the show are the two robotic installations by Thomas Edwards.

Located on the main hallway of the fourth floor, Edwards first greets the passerby with an installation of several of those mechanical talking fish that move their heads and sing songs. He has changed the original recordings and instead of a Christmas carol, the fish now beg you to stop eating their eggs or complain that they’re dying, etc. It is funny and inventive. Edwards’ second piece is a motion sensing robotic head that follows you along a wall track and peppers you with irritating questions like "where did you get your hair done?"

Edwards’ installations are intelligent creative and they fit well right into the Hollywoodism tradition of past Art-O-Matics.

There is a lot of channeling of well-known artists in this AOM. Two artists stand out: Mark Stark channels Dan Flavin and Erin Hunter continues to somewhat channel Erik Sandberg.

I also enjoyed Bridget Vath’s very inventive use of Kevlar to design and construct dresses and other clothing apparel; I suspect that Vath could start a very successful line of Kevlar clothing with good markets in Baghdad, Beirut, Bogotá, Atlanta and most of the Balkans.

The funniest piece in the show, other than Thomas Edwards’ annoying talking fish is also one of the most famous paintings in the world.

I am referring to Kayti Didriksen’s now infamous portrait of Bush and Chaney titled "Man of Leisure: King George," where Didriksen has regurgitated Manet’s famous painting Olympia and has Vice President Chaney serving an oil well to a nude Dubya.

This image, a few weeks ago, at the height of the Funky Furniture controversy with the City Museum, was the most downloaded Internet image in the world.

It is a terribly funny, badly painted and highly successful work. Didriksen not only captures Bush’s likeness perfectly but also delivers an interesting expression (that’s perfect for the subject) in the much abused President (abused by a lot of AOM artists that is) and also offers a hilarious VP Chaney with a neck that seems inflamed by gout.

As with past AOM’s, a lot of artists explore the nude human figure in both paintings and photographs. This is a subject not usually seen in Washington area galleries, and I can't recall the last time that I saw an exhibition of nudes in any of our area’s museums. I noted Peggy McNutt, Shannon Chester (especially well done is "No. 10, Chair 2"), Adrienne Mills, Chris Keely, Dana Ellyn Kaufman and Candace Keegan.

Of these, Kaufman and Keegan both use their own bodies to deliver interesting ideas and suggestions. In Kaufman’s case, extremely acidic, caustic and pointed commentaries with provocative titles married to insane figurative paintings. In Keegan’s case, she pushes a lot of moist buttons in our psyche by playing with stereotypical Hustlerian depictions of women: See Keegan suggestively sucking on her necklace; see Keegan in pigtails offer her breasts to the viewer. However, in the end what we do see are two strong women who use their art intelligently and use the taboo nude to converse elegantly with the viewer.

There is a lot of forgettable abstraction at AOM. Two artists who stand out from the masses (and happen to be sisters) are Andrea Cybik and Jan Sherfy. Their work explores colors and action and also stands out by their very professional presentation.

In summary, I’ve been to every single Art-O-Matic ever staged, and I am in the minority opinion that they’ve improved each time, and each time they give us a most precious gift: the energy that only several hundred creative minds working together can deliver. I hope Art-O-Matic grows to become a national level open show and then grow some more and become a worldwide showcase for the world’s largest open international art exhibition and a new dagger to the heart of the 21st century salons.

Collectin 101: Inspiration and Passion

AOM Panels

The Pink Line Project has been presenting a series of panel discussions to educate the emerging and experienced art collector at Art-O-Matic. Click on the image below for details.



On Saturday, May 31 at 2 pm Phillipa will be moderating Collectin 101: Inspiration and Passion with collectors Minna Nathanson, Veronica Jackson, Mel & Juanita Hardy and Brian Aitken & Andrea Evers.

After that's over and starting at 4PM at the Cabaret Stage in AOM, I will be having a discussion with artists about anything that you want to talk about: how to get affordable framing, how to get a review, how to price your art, how to expand your resume, the who's and what's of DC and Philly art galleries, website design, press, museums, copyright, contracts, artists' success stories and how they did it... anything and everything that you want to ask or talk about.

Afterwards I will also be available to personally criticize and give you feedback on your work (bring thick skin). This is all free and open to anyone,not just AOM artists.

A lot of panels spend a lot of time talking and then at the end people have tons of questions, so this time we will start with questions and move on.

Remember, my stuff will take place at the Artomatic Cabaret Stage, 1st Floor instead of the Education Room. AOM is doing this in order to accommodate more people, so come early; it starts at 4PM.

Art-O-Matic Saturday Sked

AOM is in full swing and in addition to the great and the not-so-great artwork, there are loads of free music events and dancing scheduled for Saturday.

Today's schedule is here and it includes live music by Circus of Saints, Mary Shapiro, Opposite Sex, Layne Garrett, The Mesmers, Hailcon, Alona, Medium Underground, and Jeremy Parker.

Free and open to the public.

Art-O-Matic is Rockin' Now

Just back from my first quicklook at AOM, and the 2007 location is just amazing and wait until you see the views that one gets from the 6th and 8th floor of 2121 Crystal Drive.

There are dozens of parties going on right now even as I write this and there will be a lot of parties this weekend, as well as performances, music and other artistic efforts.

Soon I'll be writing my first take on this amazing show, based on this first walk-through and also tell you about the rumor sweeping through AOM.

As usual there's a lot of great art and a lot of dreck, and a lot of Kelly Towles-wannabes, but already one can feel the palpable great artistic energy that is AOM's true gift to the visual arts community of the Greater DC region.

Art-O-Matic Opens Today

As I am pounding into your heads by now, AOM, the region's most energetic artist-driven visual arts display opens today at 3PM in Crystal City at 2121 Crystal City Drive, just a couple of blocks from the Crystal City Metro station and also boasting plenty of free parking after 4PM. Expect a huge, multi-party at many levels, set of events to start later in the evening.

As there are around 600 artists, plus bars, music stages, performance stages, etc. it helps that ArtDC has an interactive map of AOM here (thanks Jesse!).

Lately I've fallen into the habit of predicting how the regional DC art press, both online and printed, will react (or not) to particularly interesting shows.

- At the last AOM, the WaPo's chief art critic, Mr. Blake Gopnik, brutalized the show in one of the bloodiest art reviews that I have ever read. And yet Gopnik's review had the usual opposite effect, and it in turn galvanized several hundred artists and WaPo readers against Blake and it also probably delivered several thousand extra curious visitors to AOM, so in the end, the Gopnik review was a good thing for AOM. I think that this year, Gopnik will not venture into AOM at all, since he is conceptually against the concept of AOM. It is a shame that the area's largest homegrown arts event will thus be ignored by the world's second most influential newspaper's chief art critic, who tends to forget that it is also a local newspaper. In the unlikely event that his boss (my good friend John Pancake, the WaPo's Arts Editor), actually tells Blake to go and review AOM, I suspect that Gopnik will once again tear it up, as conceptually, his mind is already made up that this most democratic and liberal of art shows is flawed from the beginning by a lack of a traditional curatorial hand.

- Also at the WaPo, we can pretty much count on a review by art and movie critic Michael O'Sullivan, as O'Sullivan is perhaps the only one in that newspaper that understands that AOM is not just about the artwork that hangs and is presented on the walls, but about the spectacular footprint that it leaves upon the region's art scene and the breath-taking success that it has had over the years in bringing art to the public, and artists to the eyes of collectors and gallerists. Leave it to O'Sullivan's keen eye to spot the potential "new" art star to emerge from this year's AOM.

- The WaPo's freelancer charged with covering DC art galleries is the fair Jessica Dawson, currently a graduate art history student at GWU. If history teaches us anything, it is that Dawson has been pretty regular in covering all the previous AOM's, usually led around by the indefatigable Judy Jashinsky. And so I think that Dawson will once again write about AOM, and probably deliver her standard "what I didn't like" report, mixed in with a couple of lukewarm maybes.

- The Washington City Paper will probably give AOM decent coverage, and I'm sure that we'll see a profile of either the show itself or some of the more colorful characters that inhabit AOM. Art critic Jeffry Cudlin is also an artist, and he participated in the last AOM, but since his name is missing from this year's AOM artists' list, I suspect that Jeffry will review this year's AOM provided that he can arrange his schedule so that he can get his skinny buttocks over to Crystal City (Note to Cudlin: start planning the trip now). As usual, we can expect a brooding, intelligently written review, which (since he was an ex-participant), we hope will explore the impact of AOM on the regional art psyche and public, besides the art on the walls.

- The bloggers I suspect have already made up galvanized minds, and if we liked it before, we'll like it again, and those who hated it before, will most likely hate it again, and already do, even before they set foot in Crystal City. Curious to me is how many of them/us seem to focus on the artwork, and completely miss the true impact of AOM. Also curious to me is how writers who are generally lefty pinkos in almost all they profess, become neoconartcritics when it comes to a massive open show organized by artists, lacking a curatorial Big Brother and essentially a 21st century rebirth of the democratic artistic movement that dethroned the academic art salons of Europe back in the late 1800s.

See ya there!

Art-O-Matic Update

As everyone knows by now, AOM opens this coming weekend in Crystal City at 2121 Crystal City Drive, just a couple of blocks from the Crystal City Metro station and also boasting plenty of free parking after 4PM.

Herewith some updates:

- The Right Reverend Bailey challenges the WaPo's chief art critic to give AOM a fair critical eye (good luck with that!). Details here.

- If you see some naked painted people walking around, don't freak out as I am told that there's going to be some body painting going on around the 6th floor of AOM on Friday.

- After 4pm there is free underground parking in the Crystal City Shops across the street.

Artomatic will open to the public at 3pm, Friday, April 13, 2007. It is free and open to the public (donations accepted).

Art-O-Matic Countdown

AOM opens this coming weekend in Crystal City at 2121 Crystal City Drive, and the exciment to one of the nation's most energizing artist-driven events is already building up as artists design, paint and create their spaces, and artneocon critics sharpen their journalistic fangs in their galvanized minds, and gallerists open their eyes to try to find the emerging star in this year's version of AOM.

Held regularly since 1999, Artomatic is the region’s one-of-a-kind multimedia art extravaganza, featuring more than 600 regional artists and performers. The free five-week event, to be held April 13–May 20, will feature nearly 90,000 square feet of paintings, sculptures, photography and cutting edge videos, computer and even self-creating artworks. And as AOM veterans know, a ton of parties and fun.

As DC ubercollector Philip Barlow eloquently pointed out in this letter to the WCP, many of today's top DC artists have Art-O-Matic in their resume: Manon Cleary, Dan Steinhilber, the Dumbacher brothers, Renee Stout, Tim Tate, Michael Clark, Richard Dana, Graham Caldwell, Judy Jashinsky, Richard Chartier, and many, many others, including online superstar and multi best-selling author: Frank Warren of Postsecret.

During the last AOM, I asked a variety of curators, gallerists, collectors and other artsy folks to email me their top 10 lists of their favorite ten AOM artists. The lists were then published here, and eventually they generated a variety of separate art shows in several DC, VA and MD commercial galleries and even catapulted some artists into solo shows.

So this year we're going to do it again, and if you sent me a Top 10 List during the last AOM, consider yourself invited and please email me your Top 10 once you visit AOM this year.

Artomatic will open to the public at 3pm, Friday, April 13, 2007.

While I was gone

And nu, I am back from Sedona after an unexpected one day stop at Phoenix courtesy of US Airways.

I have tons of interesting stuff to discuss and report, but first I'd like to make sure that no one misses on the good stuff that happened while I was gone and playing hooky on blogging duties.

DCist Exposed opened at the Warehouse Gallery and it appears that Heather not only did a great effing job, but all of us in the rarified atmosphere of the fine arts arena may have seen the shape of things to come. From the volume of emails that I have received about this show, the opening was a spectacular success and has once again proven the power of the web. I add my vote to those hoping that DCist does this again and maybe even expand the concept, say to my idea about videos and DC, or painting, or sculpture. Bravo to DCist and Heather Goss! Go see this show and buy some really good affordable photography.

One of DC's best-known artists (with hundreds of Indie films about him) Tim Tate opened at Fraser Gallery [formerly co-owned by blah, blah, blah], sold a ton of stuff and had a cool article about the show at the Washington City Paper and a nice mention in the WaPo. Which brings me to the question: This is Tate's fourth solo show in DC and still he has never, ever been reviewed by the sole WaPo art critic charged with reviewing DC area art galleries. Why is GWU art history student Jessica Dawson ignoring Tim Tate? Who knows? Is the fourth time a charm? Maybe Jessica will now take the Metro to Bethesda and offer her thoughts on the artist bringing glass to the 21st century like Stieglitz brought photography to art. Go see this show and this may be the last chance for budget-minded collectors to acquire an original piece at very, very reasonable prices by this artist - news to follow!

My good friend Staff Sgt. Capps has a really good update on the hot issue of the Randall School, the Corcoran and the artists who have studios there. Read Capps' piece here and artist Karen Joan Topping's issues here and also artist Ellyn Weiss issues here.

Artomatic is one of the United States of America's premier visual art events, especially for emerging artists and beginning art collectors. It is usually denigrated by repressive art neocons and traditional art writers stuck on the mental payroll of an elitist artworld itself stuck on the shift gear of booshwah museum curators, symbiotic writers and critics, and a handful of NYC art dealers, all so far removed from 9to5 jobs and glued to oversized glossy magazines and books, that they (we) have failed to realize and actualize on the beauty and raw power and energy of the common human and their visual art creations. If you live anywhere near the DC area and want to know what being an artist, feeling like an artist and rejoicing in the spectacular sensuality and power delivered by being able to create and showcase art, then make sure that you become part of (as a participant, volunteer or visitor) Artomatic. And don't let the Hamelin-pied-piper minded neoconcritics scare you away from Art-O-Matic; I can fill pages of this blog with the success stories of artists who first surfaced through this most plebian and democratic of art events, including the top three new DC area 3D artists (artists that these same critics now (probably) wish they had acquired back in those seminal AOM exhibits). Who will be the new star of this coming AOM?

Artomatic is on!

Just in! There will be an Art-O-Matic this year!

The location is the Old Patent Building in Crystal City, Virginia from mid April to mid May, 2007. The installations will take place at the beginning of March.

I am also told that there will also be a second AOM within the district itself later in the fall.

Two Art-O-Matics in 2007.

Woo Hoo!

Curated Artomatic opens tomorrow

In Bethesda... read the WaPo's report on the subject here.

Traditional critics dismissed the earlier Artomatics because (mainly) it lacked a curator's hand. I'll be curious to see what they think now that it has the experienced hand of several successful and experienced gallerists as well as fellow artists.

My predictions (and I was really wrong in predicting media coverage of the DC City Hall Art Collection):

- Blake Gopnik, the intelligent and erudite Chief Art Critic of the Washington Post will (a) ignore it, or (b) write about it and dismiss it, or use it to continue to preach his dated Greenbergian agenda, or tell us about a work that could have been seen in a NYC gallery "a few years ago."

- Joanna Shaw-Eagle, the elderly and experienced Chief Art Critic of the Washington Times will cover it, and offer us a detailed description of the various shows at the various venues.

- Michael O'Sullivan, the savvy Washington Post's Weekend section Chief Art Critic (and the only WaPo critic in "tune" with the DC area art scene), will probably cover it and offer the only true insight into this mini AOM.

- Jessica Dawson, the young freelance writer who pens the "Galleries" column for the Style section of the Washington Post will either (a) ignore it, or (b) cover it in a small dismissive little mini-review.

- Jeffry Cudlin, the award-winning Chief Art Critic for the Washington City Paper, and who has participated in the last Art-O-Matic, may cover it (if his packed schedule as an Adjunct Professor at Maryland allows it), and offer us an intelligent review, but will probably highlight the weaknesses that exist in a commercially curated effort of a egalitarian idea.

- The bloggercritics who liked it before will like it again, and the ones who dismiss it before will come to it again with a pre-poisoned well and attack it again.

Let's see over the next few weeks if I've nailed this.

WPA\C Presents: PostSecret

At last!

Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran Association (WPA\C) is hostng the PostSecret exhibition, a public art project founded and curated by Frank Warren and first debuted in the much maligned (in the DC press that is) Art-O-Matic.

Nothing like spectacular success to make all the AOM critics eat crow, uh?

The opening reception (and fundraiser for Kristin Brooks Hope Center) will be held on Wednesday, December 14, from 6:00-10:00 p.m. ($10.00 suggested donation).

Warren's instructions were simple, and judging from his spectacular achievements, the results have been perhaps one of the most successful public art projects in history!

"You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything --- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative."

In November of 2004 Frank Warren printed 3000 postcards inviting people to share a secret with him.

He then handed these out at Artomatic, in art galleries, slipped them in pages of library books, then slowly, the secrets began to find their way to his mailbox. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and some of the cards are themselves works of art. As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project.

PostSecret has grown into a global phenomenon and (in my opinion) is the most flagrant missing piece of the 2006 Whitney Biennial!

Exhibition Information:
LOCATION: 3307 M St. NW Washington DC (The former Georgetown Staples store)

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, December 15th, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

FUNDRAISER: Wednesday, December 14th, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

Exhibition Dates: December 15, 2005 – January 8, 2006
Exhibition Hours: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday 6:00 – 10:00 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 2:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. or by appointment through WPA\C.

The book, PostSecret Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives compiled by Frank Warren, with a foreword by Anne C. Fisher, Ph.D. will be available for purchase during the exhibition, along with the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran Artist 2006-2007 Artist Directory.




See ya there!

Artomatic 2004 Review

A slightly different version of the below review will be published by the Crier Media newspapers, which also syndicates it. If it follows the usual pattern, it will also be then picked up by a few Latin American newspapers, translated and published in Spanish.

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Artomatic Energymatic Daggermatic

Art critics, like most writers, usually get paid by the word, sometimes by the article, and occasionally by an infinitesimal percentage of whatever profits their writing generates. And most art critics and writers visit a gallery show or museum exhibition, get a few handouts and spend about half an hour studying the works on the wall before heading home or to the office to pound the word processor’s keys and earn their buck-a-word for the review.

You can’t do that with Art-O-Matic, the huge, almost every two years, open visual arts extravaganza that this year hosted over 600 visual artists and another 400 performance artists at the laberynthic former convent building that last housed the Children’s Museum on 3rd and H Street, NE.

The idea behind Art-O-Matic is simple: find a large, empty building somewhere in the city; work with the building owners, and then allow any artist who wants to show their work help with staging the show and with some of the financial needs. This year, AOM artists paid a $60 entry fee plus worked a few hours assisting with the show.

And this year around 600 visual artists brought their art to the public.

In order to write a proper, ethical review of AOM, a writer must spend hours walking five floors of art, jam-packed into hundreds of rooms, bathrooms, closets and stairs. And I think that this is one of the main reasons that most art critics love to hate this show. It overwhelms them with visual offerings and forces them to develop a "glance and judge" attitude towards the artwork. It’s a lot easier to carpet bomb a huge show like this than to do a surgical strike.

Add on top of that an outdated, but "alive and kicking" elitist attitude towards an open show, where anyone and everyone who calls him or herself an artist can exhibit, sans the sanitizing and all-knowing eye of the latest trendy curator, and you have a perfect formula for dismissing a show, without really looking at it.

This quaint and elitist attitude towards art is not new or even modern. It was the same attitude that caused the emergence of the salons of the 19th century, where only artists that the academic intelligentsia deemed good enough were exhibited. As every art student who almost flunked art history knows, towards the latter half of that century, the artists who had been rejected from the salons (because they didn’t fit the formula of good art) organized their own Salon Des Refuses, sort of a 19th century Parisian Art-O-Matic.

And a lot, in fact, most of the work in the Salon Des Refuses was quite bad, but amongst the dreck were also pearls like Manet's Le Dejeuner sur 'Herbe (Luncheon in the Grass), Monet's Impression: Sunrise, (and we all know what art "ism" that title gave birth to) and an odd and memorable looking portrait of a young lady in white (The White Girl, Symphony in White, No. 1) by an American upstart by the name of James McNeill Whistler.

Everyone who was anyone in the art world hated and dismissed this anti-salon exhibition; except for the only "anyone" who actually counted: art history.

But then somewhere in the next century, the salons and their formulas returned. Only their name and their display styles had changed. They were now called Biennials, Biennales, Bienales, Documentas and their settings were in museums, entire cities or pristine white cubes around the world.

Only their reasoning and misguided logic remained constant: "Only we know what is good art."

And that is why these modern salonists and their acolytes will never respect, like, or understand Art-O-Matic: they recall that the Salons des Refuses almost broke their control over art; it won’t happen again.

And like the poet Marti wrote: "I know the monster well, for I have lived in its entrails." You see, over the last two decades I have been the juror, curator, decision-maker for hundreds of shows. And as a freelance art critic I have written and evaluated hundreds of artists and shows. I have been a minute gear in the world-wide machinations to keep control of what is art and never let a new Salons des Refuses wrest control again.

OK, OK, I know that am going overboard here; but... do you get the point?

But I am also an artist, and I like the concept of Art-O-Matic.

And not just because of the miles of artwork on display, much of which is mind numbing bad art; in fact, so bad that it is sometimes almost good in its exorbitant mediocrity. The main reason that I like Art-O-Matic is the palpable amount of artistic energy that it delivers to Washington, DC every couple of years. It is as if some invisible visual art battery in this ignored art scene comes to the forefront and gets recharged with brilliant white light (made as we all know, of all colors in the spectrum), and 50,000 people who generally would not set foot in a gallery or museum come and see art and artists and absorb the positive energy that only creative minds can generously give away.

So I enter my fourth Art-O-Matic with several preconceived ideas in my very subjective agenda:

(a) It’s going to take several visits and many hours to write my fourth review of Art-O-Matic in as many shows.

(b) There’s going to be a lot of dreck in the show. But art is in the eyes of the beholder; my dreck could be your pearl.

(c) I’m going to find several pearls in the show

(d) I’m going to re-charge my visual arts battery

(e) Our gallery will pick up some new artists from this show

On visit one, during the press preview, glass sculptor Tim Tate (Disclaimer: whom we represent and whom we "discovered" at a past Art-O-Matic) whizzes a group of us through the five floors of the show. It still takes three hours or so, but I have taken notes. Five visits and more than twenty hours later, I feel comfortable to start writing about the show.

A lot of the artists in the show are well known to me, and so I begin to discover "new" ones – at least new to me. Judy Jashinsky, who is one of the firebrand organizers who keeps this (and past) Art-O-Matics running, grabs me and asks me if I’ve seen Mark Jenkins’s pubic hair tapestries.

And Jenkins is one of the first memorable discoveries in this show. Tucked away in a corner space, Jenkins has created two noteworthy entries into the show. First in everyone’s lips are his photographic explorations of close-ups of pubic hair (loupe included in the installation) that through the magic of digital manipulation become interesting designs of elegant abstracted qualities. A second Jenkins emerges from his crowded little room: the tape sculptures.

Jenkins uses common transparent packing tape (yards and yards of it) to create superbly crafted and visually attractive figurative sculptures, as well as the odd, unusual organic shaped one. Through documentary photography, we see what happens when Jenkins places these plastic figures in a public venue. A passing man stares incredulously at a plastic man inside a dumpster; or a beach jogger is surprised by an alien looking tape creature that the sea has washed ashore.

Iver Olson is another talented discovery for me. He gets the award for the best porn in the show, although his display is also peppered with some otherwise just plain sensual photo-collages. It is almost as if there were two Olsons in the show: a really torrid, sensual photographer, and a brilliantly inventive pornographer.

In one of his photos, Olson has a woman with her hand buried inside the vagina of a second woman, who is sitting on a couch, seemingly bored, while her friend is searching inside her vagina, with (as an artist friend of mine put it) a "did a leave my keys in there?" sort of look. Somehow Olson has transformed the hardcore act of lesbian fisting into an almost funny scene of lustless abandon. Other good porn in the show is offered by Eduardo Rodriguez, Alexis Bine and Rudy K.

Another discovery is Ira Tattelman’s installation titled "They taught me to wash away my desires." I don’t know if it is because the building was once a convent, but there is certainly a strange, palpable energy in some parts of the building; people like Stephen King feed on this sort of energy and produce brilliant books; it is clear that Ira Tattelman also absorbed and channeled this energy into his installation.

"They taught me to wash away my desires" is inside a smallish bathroom furnished with a shower, a tub and some archaic 19th-century type bathroom stations (such as an enema station). Tattelman has installed a small pump in one of the stations that keeps re-circulating brownish, brackish water and add a watery sound to the room. To the right, inside and around the dirty tub is what at first sight appears to be a dismembered human body (they're actually some sort of artificial legs).

Put together the Stephen Kingesque feel of the room, the moist sound effects, the outdated chrome and dirty tile bath stations, and the human parts, and you have an installation that would give Hannibal Lechter a nightmare. It’s brilliant and somebody better put police ankle trackers on Tattelman now.

A couple more artists who deserve to be mentioned in the Hannibal Lechter art list are the very good and macabre sculptures by Stephon Senegal: this is a young artist to keep an eye on; in my opinion possibly the best sculpture in the entire show. Some other pieces by very good artists in this new trend of Lechterism are "Joroko" and also the installation "Sun Ray" by retro-recycling master Ray Jacobs.

M. Rion Hoffman really impressed me with her photography negative boxes installed along one of the main hallways. Hoffman’s boxes are delicate and have that ability to bring the viewer in for an intimate, close-up exploration of whatever story this talented artist wants to deliver. However, her large photo-collages, displayed next to her boxes, appear brutish and heavy handed by comparison, although part of me kept being re-directed from them to her brilliant boxes.

Matt Dunn is a mother load of photographic talent with a built-in magnet to attract, discover, capture on silver gelatin film, and then show us, the really interesting, throat-clearing substrata of human society that makes Diane Arbus’ photographs look like Sears portraits. This is a master portraitist in his element.

In the glass room, Washington Glass School directors Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers have created the most professional looking set of rooms in the entire building and provided the means to discover a couple of new talents in that beautiful genre. Another fact that surfaces very quickly is that the Washington Glass School is certainly stamping its own imprimatur, its own "school brand" in a sense, upon many of our area’s young glass artists. I particularly liked the figurative "man" vessels of Michael Janis, where Janis takes Tate’s seminal idea of narrative biographical wall panels and marries it with Tate’s apothecaries (nine of which were acquired by the Renwick Alliance) to deliver a fresh, new set of ideas in glass.

In these rooms I also liked Syl Mathis, who reminds us that the true beauty of glass lies mainly in its simplicity. Mathis delivers a series of pieces exploring the "boat" theme in glass. I preferred the simpler, more elegant forms by Mathis over some of the more elaborate pieces, perhaps made a bit distracting by their complex support stands and crafty materials.

Allison B. Miner is a very talented painter, and at the last Art-O-Matic, where I first discovered her small, in-your-face paintings, I singled her out as one of the best painters in that show. Miner is still one of the best painters in this show, and her talent with the brush and composition is clearly evident to the most casual observer. I do however, think that it is time for Miner to move on and push her enviable painting skills beyond the tight, close-up routine that she has come dangerously close to boxing herself in. This is a very good painter at the beginning of her career and I am sure that we are but seeing but a tiny bit of what Miner can and will deliver.

Joseph Barbaccia is another artist whom I have been observing for the last few years and this year his crayon self-portrait – literally made out of hundreds and hundreds of crayons in a postmodern pointillist style – easily qualifies as one of the best pieces of art in the whole AOM.

Barbaccia is hard to pin down as a painter, sculptor, uh... crayonist? He explores and pushes art in all dimensions.

Staying within two dimensions, and doing a magnificent job of it are three enviably talented painters: Margaret Dowell, Michal Hunter and Jeffry Cudlin. All of these artists have that spectacular technical mastery of the brush that it is so easily dismissed by people who have never tried to mix cerulean blue with Payne’s gray and ended up with mud. Dowell’s paintings show not only extraordinary technical skills, but also a hungry sense of desire and intelligent understanding of her subjects – who are often transgender and cross dressing personages around our area.

Michal Hunter is also a technical virtuoso of the brush, with only one painting in the entire show; tucked away so far and so difficult to find, that had I not run into Hunter while she was on hallway monitor duty, I would have missed it completely. I am glad that I didn’t, as it is a very powerful work by a woman who is slowly re-affirming her once solid place in the Washington, DC art scene.

Jeffry Cudlin surprised me by delivering some very strong compositional works that are really excuses for Cudlin to use a representational subject to offer works such as "Author, Author," that are really more about the intelligent employment of color and shapes and composition. I write that he surprised me because I am not usually a big fan of these sorts of "interior" works. However, because the paintings are all about shape, color and composition, I found myself admiring them for those points, rather than for their subject matter.

Creating a new place for himself is an illustrator named Scott Brooks, who in this new Art-O-Matic incarnation is like a strange, macabre John Currin, but can paint and draw a lot better than Currin ever learned to. A lot of people were talking about Brooks' disturbing images; this is usually a sign of success for any visual artist. Both the police and art collectors need to keep an eye on this talented artist.

But quite possibly the most talked about (well, at least the most listened to) pieces in the show are the two robotic installations by Thomas Edwards.

Located on the main hallway of the fourth floor, Edwards first greets the passerby with an installation of several of those mechanical talking fish that move their heads and sing songs. He has changed the original recordings and instead of a Christmas carol, the fish now beg you to stop eating their eggs or complain that they’re dying, etc. It is funny and inventive. Edwards’ second piece is a motion sensing robotic head that follows you along a wall track and peppers you with irritating questions like "where did you get your hair done?"

Edwards’ installations are intelligent creative and they fit well right into the Hollywoodism tradition of past Art-O-Matics.

There is a lot of channeling of well-known artists in this AOM. Two artists stand out: Mark Stark channels Dan Flavin and Erin Hunter continues to somewhat channel Erik Sandberg.

I also enjoyed Bridget Vath’s very inventive use of Kevlar to design and construct dresses and other clothing apparel; I suspect that Vath could start a very successful line of Kevlar clothing with good markets in Baghdad, Beirut, Bogotá, Atlanta and most of the Balkans.

The funniest piece in the show, other than Thomas Edwards’ annoying talking fish is also one of the most famous paintings in the world.

I am referring to Kayti Didriksen’s now infamous portrait of Bush and Chaney titled "Man of Leisure: King George," where Didriksen has regurgitated Manet’s famous painting Olympia and has Vice President Chaney serving an oil well to a nude Dubya.

This image, a few weeks ago, at the height of the Funky Furniture controversy with the City Museum, was the most downloaded Internet image in the world.

It is a terribly funny, badly painted and highly successful work. Didriksen not only captures Bush’s likeness perfectly but also delivers an interesting expression (that’s perfect for the subject) in the much abused President (abused by a lot of AOM artists that is) and also offers a hilarious VP Chaney with a neck that seems inflamed by gout.

As with past AOM’s, a lot of artists explore the nude human figure in both paintings and photographs. This is a subject not usually seen in Washington area galleries, and I can't recall the last time that I saw an exhibition of nudes in any of our area’s museums. I noted Peggy McNutt, Shannon Chester (especially well done is "No. 10, Chair 2"), Adrienne Mills, Chris Keely, Dana Ellyn Kaufman and Candace Keegan.

Of these, Kaufman and Keegan both use their own bodies to deliver interesting ideas and suggestions. In Kaufman’s case, extremely acidic, caustic and pointed commentaries with provocative titles married to insane figurative paintings. In Keegan’s case, she pushes a lot of moist buttons in our psyche by playing with stereotypical Hustlerian depictions of women: See Keegan suggestively sucking on her necklace; see Keegan in pigtails offer her breasts to the viewer. However, in the end what we do see are two strong women who use their art intelligently and use the taboo nude to converse elegantly with the viewer.

There is a lot of forgettable abstraction at AOM. Two artists who stand out from the masses (and happen to be sisters) are Andrea Cybik and Jan Sherfy. Their work explores colors and action and also stands out by their very professional presentation.

In summary, I’ve been to every single Art-O-Matic ever staged, and I am in the minority opinion that they’ve improved each time, and each time they give us a most precious gift: the energy that only several hundred creative minds working together can deliver. I hope Art-O-Matic grows to become a national level open show and then grow some more and become a worldwide showcase for the world’s largest open international art exhibition and a new dagger to the heart of the 21st century salons.

Philip Barlow's Top 10 Artomatic List

Philip Barlow is a well-known DC art collector, arts activist, a great supporter of our area artists and art scene, and nearly a curator. He is one of the most vocal supporters of Art-O-Matic and after many trips to AOM, he sends in his top 10 list. Barlow passes that he did not consider artists whose work he has collected and most of the artists on his list are artist who are unfamiliar to him (prior to AOM)

1. Elizabeth Lundberg Morrisette
2. Kathryn Cornelius
3. Dylan Scholinski
4. Mary Beth Ramsey
5. Mona El Bayoumi
6. Nader Hadjebi
7. Robert Redding
8. Megan Rains
9. Jeff Wolfram
10. Darren Smith

Tim Tate's Top 10 Artomatic List

Tim Tate (represented by us) is the Director and co-founder of the Washington Glass School, the 2003 Mayor's Arts Awards Outstanding Emerging Artist of the Year, and is one of this year's Out Magazine 100 Most Remarkable People of the Year. Tate has also been a fixture at Art-O-Matic for many years (in fact, we "discovered" him a couple of Art-O-Matics ago), and has walked this current version of AOM at least 20 times. Here's his top 10 non-glass artists list:

Thomas Edwards
Ira Tattleman
Dylan Scholinski
Mark Stark
Sondra Arkin
Sheep Jones
Philip Kohn
John Bata
Scott Brooks
Chris Edmunds

DC BLOGs on AOM

City Desk: The Progressive Review on Artomatic. Read it here and here.

Conspiracy of Sound on Artomatic. Read it here.

Art of the Possible on Artomatic. Read it here.

DC Musica Viva on Artomatic. Read it here.

Photo Net on Artomatic. Read it here.

And... the Art-O-Matic artists on Artomatic. Read it here.

Michael O'Sullivan's Artomatic List

If anyone truly knows Washington art spaces, art scene and artists, it is Washington Post art critic Michael O'Sullivan. And in addition to his review of AOM, he submits the following list and notes about his top choices for this year's Art-O-Matic:

Michael O'Sullivan's Artomatic List

Best installations: Ira Tattelman/Kathryn Cornelius
Best Abstract Paintings: John Adams/Louise Kennelly
Best Portraiture: Allison Miner/Ian Jehle
Best Serendipitous Pairing: Kelly Towles/Dale Hunt
Best Thematic Spaces: Eye Candy/Girlz Club/Washington Glass School
Best Photography: Matt Dunn/Dennis Yankow (aka Dns Ynko)
Best Sculpture: Liz Duarte/Betsy Packard
Best Found-Object Sculpture: Elizabeth Lundberg Morisette/Joroko
Most Searing Use of Autobiography: Dylan Scholinski

And a couple of Bests (some of whom I [O'Sullivan] mentioned in my article) that aren't on anyone else's list:

Lynn Putney
Gregory Ferrand
Ben Claassen
Jen Dixon
Dave Savage
Kevin Irvin

...and finally, a special thanks to Brash, the poet who goes around writing
diamond-hard little poems in response to Artomatic artists, and then taping
them to the walls.

Nevin Kelly's Top 10 Artomatic List

Nevin Kelly, director and owner of the Nevin Kelly Gallery walks Art-O-Matic and sends in a AOM Top 10 List. For disclosure purposes, Kelly states that the gallery currently represents Allison B. Miner and Sondra N. Arkin, and that Dylan Scholinski and Kelly have plans to cooperate in a 2005 exhibition.

Nevin Kelly Gallery Art-O-Matic Top 10 Picks

Sondra N. Arkin
Allison B. Miner
Dylan Scholinski
Ellyn Weiss
Christopher Edmunds
Michal Hunter
Kathryn Cornelius
Mary Beth Ramsey
Joyce Zipperer
Robert Cole

Honorable Mention

Scott Brooks
Will Winton
Joroko
Dns Ynko
Tom Wells
Lisa Shumaeir
Abby Freeman
Louise Kennelley
John Adams
Inga McCaslin Frick

Jesse Cohen from ArtDC delivers ArtDC's List of Top Artomatic artists:

In Franklin North Carolina, there is a historical tradition with roots in emerald mines. As a tourist, you can visit, view the real veins, and then buy a bucket of dirt. Hours are spent sifting your dirt at a sleuth to find sapphire chips, and ruby specs, “salted” by the local tourist industry. Occasionally, as I did, one lucky summer day, I found a 100 plus karat sapphire.

A trip to the ’04 Art-O-Matic lent the same feeling, sifting through, and recovering great beauty. It will take several passes through the water to uncover the wealth. Starting on the 5th floor, we ran into the Glass Attic, a group of fine glass artisans; full of colors, patterns, and appeal.

Half way through the bucket, we found Stephon Senegal. I was shocked by the mortality of his sculpture. His booth is worth a second visit.

Through the journey of the veins, more goodies were found, along with nice collections of photography. Such as, Gay Cioffi, and her Glass Quilts, an excellent study of form. Along with Frank Fiorentino who produced a collection of, well, Barbie Porn; dolls in suggestive poses. I’ve seen this by other photographers at Conner Contemporary art, but less suggestive.

And then there was Thomas Edwards, Sycophant Head, and School of Fish Pain installations. The annoying slum head that follows you around the room, and the fish dying out of water. Original: The one word sums it up.

Finally, as we were pushed out for closing, I entered John Aaron’s Congressional Confessional, brilliant, with a sense of humor. I cast my vote in the journal, and chatted with John and Andrea. I’m glad to see politics roll into AOM.

15 minutes into our trip, we found our 100-karat stone. The atmosphere, and environment created by piling 1000s of artists, spectators, collectors and friends in one space with a reason to be there made the show valuable. It was, a happening.

Far from a list of ten, six stood out from a 2-hour time period through the sleuth. With more time, there will be no problem uncovering many lists of 10.