Friday, April 06, 2007

First Fridays at Philly and DC

Projects Gallery in Philly presents Tom Judd’s solo exhibition "The New World." This exhibition features Judd’s new work, including a 6 x 15 foot painting entitled “The New World." The exhibition opens with a First Friday artist reception April 6th from 5-9 p.m. and a Second Thursday reception April 12th, 5-9 p.m., and continues through April 29th.

In DC, as usual, the Dupont Circle Galleries will also have their first Friday openings and extended hours.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Airborne
Airborne again today and returning home. More later...

Tortillism

Painter Joe Bravo is raising eyebrows with his current exhibit at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Los Angeles because Bravo paints on tortillas.

His tortilla paintings sell for as much as $1,800.

No truth to the rumor that a new series of pico de gallo installations are forthcoming.

MacO'Sullivan?

What's it with Washington Post art critics wanting to wear kilts? First Blake Gopnik wants to be a MacGopnik and now I get the below image showing WaPo art critic Michael O'Sullivan.

O'Sullivan at Red Clover Gallery's exhibit of Henry Wingate
Seen here, Michael O'Sullivan (on the left getting ready to photograph the gent wearing the utilikilt) contemplates the possibilty of adding a utilikilt to his DC wardrobe.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

It's a rare thing

For DC area TV stations to pay any attention to the visual arts, and thus we applaud the fact that tomorrow morning (Thursday April 5) Fox 5 Morning News will be broadcasting the morning news from the Washington Glass School.

From 6 am to 9 am, reporter Tony Perkins will be doing live segments where Tony tries his hand at new skills. Tony is scheduled to make cast glass awards, lampwork, draw with glass powder, and try other glass related workings with the gang at the Washington Glass School.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Grant for Artists

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation invites painters, sculptors, mixed media, installation artists, and artists who work on paper to apply for grants ranging from $1,000 to $30,000. The sole purpose of the foundation is to provide financial assistance to individual working artists of established ability. For more information, contact:

Pollock-Krasner Foundation
863 Park Ave.
New York, NY 10021

Fax (212) 288-2836; email: grants@pkf.org

Modernism at the Corcoran

As soon as I get back East I will have a review of the show, meanwhile, enjoy the video.





Courtesy of 205 Lavinia Street, Videos for Artists/Galleries/Events.

Wanna go to an Arlington, VA opening on Thursday?

The Ellipse Art Center’s "Hand Pulled," is a Juried Mid Atlantic Print Show that was selected by Joan Boudreau, the Curator of the Graphic Arts Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

The opening reception is Thursday, April 5, from 6 - 9 pm, and there’s a Juror's Talk on April 19, 7 - 9 pm. The exhibition runs through Saturday, May 26, 2007.

Wanna go to a Delaware opening this coming Thursday night?

"Tapestries of a Higher Plane," by Mid Atlantic Art News contributor William Anderson opens this coming Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 205 Lavinia Street Gallery in Milton, Delaware, with an opening reception from at 5-8 pm.

On exhibition are images brought to Delaware from Maine by William Anderson. The interesting aspect of these images are their tuetonic size, as many are over 8 feet square, and are not framed, but hanging like tapestries.



The artist is an accomplished image-maker since the early seventies, who has been printing on a large Giclée printer since 2000. For more info call the gallery at 302-684-3379.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Imagine all the people

Who would have crowded the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden on the National Mall had they known ahead of time that today, between 2:30 and 2:45pm, Yoko Ono dedicated a "Wish Tree for Washington D.C." in the Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden as part of "Yoko Ono: Imagine Peace.”

According to the press release (sent out a few days ago):

This ongoing series, which she began in the 1990s, encourages the public to become participants in the art making process by inviting visitors to write wishes on paper and tie them to the tree. The dedication will begin with Ono tying the first wish onto the Hirshhorn’s tree. Ono will exhibit 10 trees around Washington, D.C., for the 2007 Cherry Blossom Festival.
The dedication was open to the press, but not to the public (unless I imagine, a tourist or two happened to be there and someone shouted “Hey there’s that lady who broke up the Beatles”).

As most Beatlephiles will testify, Ono was quite a revolutionary and imaginative artist prior to meeting and eventually becoming wife to John Lennon, and then having a best-selling Beatle ballad written about her wedding.

As it unfairly happens to most celebrities, I suspect that now Ono struggles to be recognized as an artist first, rather than a celebrity who also happens to be an artist. In her case she was a respected artist first and foremost, and her peripheral Beatle fame, in her case, was probably an artistic curse to her.

This DC project by Ono is part of “Street Scenes: Project for DC,” a public art program curated by Nora Halpern and Welmoed Laanstra. The trees will be installed at the steps of the Jefferson Memorial at the Tidal Basin as part of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, at THEARC in Anacostia, and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on the National Mall.

In addition, Ms. Ono will visit the site at the Japanese Lantern Lawn, just west of the Kutz Bridge at Independence Avenue & 17th Street. SW, on the other side of the Tidal Basin, where the first now famous DC cherry blossoms were planted in 1912. The artist will ask participants to "whisper a wish to the bark of the trees."

Someone needs to confirm an urban legend for me about the 1912 cherry trees. When I was a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, I was told that the cherry trees on the campus (there are hundreds and hundreds of them) were also a gift of Japan, and that sometime in the early 20th century, not long after they were planted in Washington, the DC cherry trees all died of some tree disease and then a new set of cherry trees were transplanted from the UW campus and replanted in DC to replace the original trees. Does anyone know if this is true?

Ms. Ono will also present text pieces, including disseminating “Imagine Peace” posters, and ribbons that read, “this line is a part of a very large circle.” These textual artworks will be free to the public and will be distributed at three locations: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, THEARC and Provisions Library.

Can someone grab one for me?

An “Imagine Peace” billboard will be installed on the Verizon Center (at the intersection of 7th Street and G Street, NW) and will be on display through April 30, 2007, and a poster page was placed in the March 29 edition of The Washington Post Express.

“This project,” say Street Scenes co-curators Nora Halpern and Welmoed Laanstra, “is part of our effort to turn the streets of Washington, DC, into a living art gallery. For more info call 301-651-8275."

The Beatles - The Ballad Of John And Yoko

Standing in the dock at Southampton,
Trying to get to Holland or France.
The man in the mac said, "You've got to turn back."
You know they didn't even give us a chance.

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Finally made the plane into Paris,
Honey mooning down by the Seine.
Peter Brown called to say,
"You can make it O.K.,
You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain."

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,
Talking in our beds for a week.
The newspapers said, "Say what you doing in bed?"
I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace."

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Saving up your money for a rainy day,
Giving all your clothes to charity.
Last night the wife said,
"Oh boy, when you're dead
You don't take nothing with you
But your soul - think!"
Made a lightning trip to Vienna,
eating chocolate cake in a bag.
The newspapers said, "She's gone to his head,
They look just like two gurus in drag."

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Caught an early plane back to London.
Fifty acorns tied in a sack.
The men from the press said, "We wish you success,
It's good to have the both of you back."

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.


Update:
Capps with a super funny report on Mrs. Lennon's performance(s). Read it here.

Modernism at the Corcoran

Provided that I can work out the software bugs from Google and Blogger, later today I should have a video walkthrough of the Modernism exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art led by the Corcoran's director Paul Greenhalgh.

This will be the first of many videos that Mid Atlantic Art News will be doing in collaboration with our newest contributor: William Anderson of BB's Video Press and 205 Lavinia Gallery.

Look for future videos on gallery and museum openings, discussions with curators, artists' interviews, etc.

Tuss on Women’s Work at Nevin Kelly Gallery

By Katie Tuss

Six distinctly talented women younger than 30 have come to the forefront via Nevin Kelly’s current group painting exhibition Women’s Work. Nevin Kelly Deputy Director and the show’s curator Julia Morelli teamed up with five local female artists to create a show of varied sensibilities and styles, yet linked by a woman’s unique touch.

The five young artists include Abbe McGray, Laurel Hausler, Mary Chiaramonte, Molly Brose, and Jenny Davis — who is the youngest in the group at 18. Together they are eloquent, and yet a bit bashful, but all insistent that although they are women, gender does not have to be the central focus of their work.

The artists explained that gender enhances and enriches but certainly does not inhibit them in the larger art arena. “I was thinking about the show in terms of being women’s art, not necessarily feminist art or girly art, but possessing a sense of femininity in the work,” said Morelli.

Some of the artists had never met one another, and the work was created separately.

Brose’s work waxes nostalgic about family, friendships, and significant others in two groups of five paintings with titles all beginning with the directive ‘keep.’


Molly Brose painting

In Keep in Mind, Brose’s two grandmothers are represented precisely in graphite against Brose’s abstracted watercolor ground. A rendering of a classic set of aluminum measuring spoons bridges the empty space between the two portraits. Brose is “trying to measure where I got what from these two people,” she said.

McGray and Davis both contributed portraits to the group effort. McGray explained that she paints people that “may be disadvantaged or looked over.” She wants to bring these people forward and give viewers the opportunity to look at them. Her subjects are inquisitive and somewhat beseeching, yet never asking for pity.

Conversely, Davis paints meticulous watercolors of her friends. The subjects are young women themselves, and are thoughtfully depicted down to the delicate links of a silver necklace or a wind blown strand of hair. Davis’s colors are seductive and her controlled hand impressive.

Mary Chiaramonte’s paintings are intensely personal, Thanks A Lot being a response to a negative response to one of her paintings. Chiaramonte mixes subtle collage elements and a slightly distracting signature with refreshing layers of graphite sketches under a thin paint application.

Laurel Hausler’s five paintings were all made with the show’s title in mind. Hausler’s liberal experiments with beeswax further the mysterious light in which her narratives unfold. Even while uprooting radishes or cavorting with an oversized rabbit, women seem to float through Hausler’s ethereal world with elongated lines, curved figures, and haunting eyes. Hausler concedes that “maybe there is something about storytelling that is inherent in some female art.”

Women’s Work is on view through this Sunday, April 8.

Go listen to Zoe

The super talented Philly photogstar Zoe Strauss’ latest project is the 10-year long I-95 Project, an annual installation underneath I-95 in South Philadelphia. Strauss received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2005, and her work was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial in New York.

From April 13 through May 4, 2007, her work will be featured in Gallery 1401 at the University of the Arts, in an exhibition entitled “If You Break the Skin,” co-sponsored by the Equality Forum. But, and more importantly, today, April 2, at 1pm at the CBS Auditorium of the University of the Arts, Zoe will be giving a lecture on her photography as part of the Paradigm Lecture series.

Oh yea; the lecture is free and open to the public.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Airborne
Airborne again today and heading to Denver. More later...

Saturday, March 31, 2007

A couple more Eakins could be heading out of Philly

"We're not a museum. We're not in the business of art education. That's what Thomas Jefferson University president Robert L. Barchi said in November in explaining the university's decision to sell Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic."
In spite of the fact that the sale of The Gross Clinic sort of blew up in their faces, according to the Philly Inquirer, "Barchi says that the school intends to deaccession two other pieces in the multimillion-dollar collection: Its remaining Eakins works, Portrait of Benjamin H. Rand and Portrait of William S. Forbes."

In fact Barchi stated that "We do not intend to sell any of our artworks other than the Eakins paintings, even if approached."

You can view a slide show of some of the art at Jefferson in this this website and you can read the excellent Inquirer report by Peter Dobrin, the Inquirer Culture Writer here.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Frida Kahlo Coming to Philly

Sometime in mid February 2008 (and running through May) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "the first American exhibition solely dedicated to Kahlo’s work in over a decade... will explore the relationship between her art and her life by examining hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits in addition to works that amplify her sense of her own identity."

The show is coming to Philly from the Walker Art Center, where it was curated by Michael Taylor; from Philly it will travel to SFMOMA. I am a little disappointed that this show is not traveling to any DC area museum (it would have been a perfect blockbuster for the Corcoran or for the NMWA).

Lenny Campello is one happy camper. Read here how I became an addict of her work when I was 19. Below is "Seven Fridas," a huge drawing that I did in 1980-1 while at the University of Washington School of Art (click on the image for a larger version of the drawing).

It depicts Kahlo in seven incarnations as Nordic, Moslem, African, Punk (hey! it was 1980), Native American, Vulcan and Beatle. It is currently in the collection of Seeds for Peace.


Seven Fridas by F. Lennox Campello - click for a larger version
"Las Siete Fridas (The Seven Fridas)"
Pen and Ink Wash, F. Lennox Campello, circa 1980-1981

Most recently, in 2005 I curated a worldwide call to artists for an "Homage to Frida Kahlo" exhibition hosted by Art.com with the sponsorship of the Cultural Institute of Mexico and the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City.

Thus my interest and happiness!

PMA to open new galleries

In early September 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will open the new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, which will house expanded galleries and state of the art study centers in an art deco building acquired by the Museum and then renovated and expanded by Gluckman Maynor Architects.

Next Week: Tomás Rivas opens in DC

The very talented and award winning Chilean artist Tomás Rivas' first DC area solo exhibition, "Left to my Own Devices," opens next week (April 5) at Douz and Mille and there's also a round-table discussion on April 25 from 6:30-8:30 PM. Details here.

The opening reception is Thursday, April 5, 2007 6:30pm - 8:30pm and it is at the space formerly occupied by Numark Gallery in DC. A full color catalogue will be published at the conclusion of the exhibition, featuring essays by David Gariff Ph.D., Lecturer, National Gallery of Art; Robin Rhodes Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame; and my good friend Laura Roulet, Independent Curator, with an introduction by the hard-working Rody Douzoglou, who is the "Douz" in Douz and Mille.

New art blog

I think.

DC area "performance artist F.W. Thomas" has a blog (new to me) at fwthomas.blogspot.com detailing coming multimedia performances and other random thoughts.

I am told that at the next performance (Monday, April 9, 2007 at DC's Warehouse Theatre and Galleries) they will be circulating a petition banning any further use of the Queen/Bowie collaboration "Under Pressure" as the soundtrack to any commercial, television show, movie or public radio segment. This alone is worth the visit!

Vist the blog often!

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Opportunity for recent Art grads

Introductions is Irvine Contemporary’s annual summer show of works by recent art college graduates in the Washington, mid-Atlantic, and East Coast region.

For Introductions3 this year, Irvine has posted a web page with application instructions and information to assist artists with submissions for the show. The gallery tries to see as many thesis shows and do as many studio visits as possible, but they clearly can’t see everyone and they want to open the process to as many artists as possible.

Visit this website for information on submitting work for the show. This year the selection committee will include Washington area collectors as well as the Irvine Contemporary crew.