Tim Taunton Opening in C'ville


Migration: A Gallery will be opening an exhibit of Tim Taunton’s new oil paintings. The exhibit, Through the Looking Glass, will open with a reception on Friday, November 7th from 5:30 – 8pm and will continue through November 26th.

Migration is really setting a new course for Charlottesville's galleries with their super exhibition program and aggressive art fairs presence. They are located at 119 5th St., SE, Charlottesville. More information is available at 434-293-2200 and info@migrationgallery.com.

Wanna go to a Philly Opening Tonight?

Airborne



Airborne today and heading to Beantown for a fund raiser function and a studio visit to Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Wanna go to a Halloween Show in Alexandria tonite?


ARTery 717 in Alexandria, VA is having a Halloween show today Friday entitled “EARTH Beings on Exhibit,” with live music, bodypainting, fire dancers, etc. Their last show “Voces de la Tierra” is still up in the front galleries and I hear that it is quite remarkable. Artery 717 is at 717 N. St. Asaph St., Alexandria, VA. 22314. From 8-12PM tonite!

Project 4

DC's Project 4 gallery has a new abode at 1353 U Street NW, 3rd floor and their next show and first there will be a solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Thomas Müller.

The Opening Reception is Saturday, November 8, 6:00 - 9:00 pm and there's an Artist talk earlier on Saturday, November 8, at 4:00 pm.

At Studio 4903

21st Annual Washington Craft Show

November 7-9 at Walter E. Washington Convention Center in DC.

Washington’s major fall showcase for the best contemporary American craft arrives November 7 to 9, 2008 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Demonstrating imagination and mastery, 190 artists chosen by jury will gather from 34 states and D.C. to exhibit and sell their one-of-a-kind and limited-edition arts at the 21st Annual Washington Craft Show.

The 2008 show theme, “Making It Personal,” highlights independent styles of both artists and visitors. Each piece, designed and created in the artist’s studio, represents a signature concept in glass, jewelry, ceramics, basketry, wood, furniture, fiber, metal arts, paper, mixed media, and wearable art.

Also new this year:
- In a special display by rising talent, craft students selected by jury from the Corcoran College of Art + Design exhibit their work.
- Artists will be identified who demonstrate Green Vision through creative use of recycled or sustainably harvested materials or renewable energy.
- An evening party, “Master Crafts and Music,” benefits the scholarship and outreach programs of Washington’s Levine School of Music on Friday, November 7. For benefit tickets and information: www.levineschool.org or 202.686.8000, ext. 1051.

For more Washington Craft Show information, visit www.craftsamericashows.com or call 800-832-7813.

Washington Craft Show hours are Friday, November 7, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, November 8, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Sunday, November 9, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Admission is $15, seniors and students $13. Children under 12 are admitted free.

Walter E. Washington Convention Center. located at 801 Mt. Vernon Place NW, is easily accessible by Metro: Mt. Vernon Square/Convention Center on Yellow or Green Lines.

Congrats!

Let me be the first arts blog on the planet to congratulate the Phillies on kicking butt and winning the world series.

Art jobs: Atlanta

Gallery Director for a new Atlanta photography gallery. The Director will manage both the artistic and business sides of this unique new photography gallery in Atlanta. They are looking for someone with at least 3-5 years in a similar capacity. The salary is $50-70K + benefits. Contact George Olmstead at george@olksearch.com

Iranian Campaign Medal

Tomorrow, Thursday Oct. 30th is the opening for Art Without Frontiers, put together by Joan Belmar to raise funds for The Family Place.

The opening reception is Oct. 30th from 6:30 - 9:30PM at the beautiful Cultural Institute of Mexico in DC. Details here and RSVP required to lfleitas@thefamilyplace.org. The Mexican Cultural Institute is located at 2829 16th Street, N.W., Washington, D. C. 20009.

Artists include Sondra Arkin, Joseph Barbaccia, Constance Bergfors, Salvados Casco, Nina Falk, Carles Guasch, Willem De Looper, Adrienne Moumin, Linn Meyers, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Minna N. Nathanson, Kevin Postupack, Katya Romero, Raimundo Rubio and I am proud to also be part of this effort.

For this show I am exhibiting "The Iranian Campaing Medal Ribbon."

As I've discussed here before, around 1997 I started a series of large non representational paintings which were based on the military awards, ribbons and medals that I earned while serving in the U.S. Navy. In 2007 my focus changed slightly, and I began to design and paint imaginary or futuristic medals, ribbons and awards based on imaginary (some would say anticipated) world events involving the United States of American armed forces.

In a sense my futuristic social commentary on the barbarity and regularity of armed conflict yesterday, today and now, tomorrow.

"Iranian Campaign Medal", Oil on Canvas, 24 x 48 inches, c.2007
By F. Lennox Campello (from the Digitalia series)

The Iranian Campaign Medal was established by Executive Order 13975 signed by the President on 13 January 2012. It may be awarded to American military and naval personnel for participating in prescribed operations, campaigns and task forces ranging in dates from 2 February 2011 to present.

The area of operations for these various campaigns includes the total land area and air space of Iran, and the waters and air space of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean within 12 nautical miles of Iranian coastline.

Personnel must be members of a unit participating in, or be engaged in direct support of, the operation for 30 consecutive days in the area of operations or for 60 non-consecutive days provided this support involves entering the area of operations or meets one of the following criteria:

• Be engaged in actual combat, or duty that is equally as hazardous as combat duty, during the operation with armed opposition, regardless of time in the area of operations;
• While participating in the operation, regardless of time, is wounded or injured and requires medical evacuation from the area of operations;
• While participating as a regularly assigned aircrew member flying sorties into, out of, within, or over the area of operations in direct support of the military operations.

One bronze service star shall be worn on the ribbon for qualifying participation during an established campaign. However, that if an individual's 30 or 60 days began in one campaign and carried over into another, that person would only qualify for the medal with one service star. The medal is not awarded without at least one service star.

The executive order provides that service members who qualify for either the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal for service in Iran between 2 February 2011 and 13 January 2012, remain qualified for those medals. However, upon application, any such member may be awarded the Iranian Campaign Medal in lieu of the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal or the Armed Forces Service Medal, but no Service member may be awarded more than one of these three medals for the same period of service in Iran.

The suspension ribbon for the medal's purple and gold colors were suggested by the historical Imperial colors of Iran’s millennial Persian history and the golden sunsets of the Persian Gulf.

The theory: speculation in art (and young art) is over

What is the silver lining in all this cloudiness? Perhaps a return to the importance of museums, critics and alternative spaces for validation and the introduction of new art.

Read Josh Baer's article in the Art Newspaper here.

For the first time ever an auction house will act as dealer for a living artist

"Phillips de Pury is to represent the photographer Annie Leibovitz in a move which further blurs the boundaries between auction houses and dealers. According to Simon de Pury, Phillips’s energetic chairman, Leibovitz approached the auction house through Charlie Scheips, its worldwide director of photographs, who joined in 2007 and has known the photographer since 1987."

You could see that one coming when Hirst started going solo and dealing directly with auction houses.

"The auction house would not disclose what commission it will take from these sales, although it is unlikely to vary dramatically from the usual contemporary gallery level of around 50%. Phillips says no Leibovitz works from its selling exhibitions will be offered at auction. The two strands of the business are completely separate, says Mr de Pury.

Read the full article here.

Antognoli at R. Coury Fine Art Gallery

Erin Antognoli's latest solo exhibit of her Holga artwork is now hung and ready to be seen by the public at R. Coury Fine Art Gallery in Savage, Maryland. There are 29 of her works hanging in all, some of them never before exhibited.

There's an opening reception from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM ON Friday, October 31st. The artist will be present for questions and conversation! R. Coury Fine Art Gallery is located in Historic Savage Mill in the Spinning Building suite 217A, 8600 Foundry St., Savage, MD 20763. The gallery is open by appointment, and is owned and operated by artist Jill Hackney.

Feel free to bring the kids as there will be trick-or-treating throughout the mill or if you're in the mood, there is a Halloween costume party at the Ramshead (also in Savage Mill)_ from 5:00 PM to Midnight. The exhibit will run from October 13 to November 14, 2008.

The Power 100

The November issue of ArtReview magazine, with the 2008 Power 100 list is out. Read a full report on the list here.

01. Science (Damien Hirst)
02. Larry Gagosian
03. Kathy Halbreich
04. Sir Nicholas Serota
05. Iwan Wirth
06. Jay Jopling
07. David Zwirner
08. François Pinault
09. Jasper Johns
10. Eli Broad
11. Jeff Koons
12. Steven A. Cohen
13. Daniel Birnbaum
14. Charles Saatchi
15. Brett Gorvy & Amy Cappellazzo
16. Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal
17. Marian Goodman
18. Gerhard Richter
19. Richard Prince
20. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin
21. Michael Govan
22. Marc Glimcher
23. Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler
24. Alfred Pacquement
25. Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp
26. Barbara Gladstone
27. Matthew Marks
28. Takashi Murakami
29. Agnes Gund
30. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan
31. Dakis Joannou
32. Bernard Arnault
33. Richard Serra
34. Sadie Coles
35. Julia Peyton-Jones & Hans Ulrich Obrist
36. Donna De Salvo
37. Simon de Pury
38. Don & Mera Rubell
39. Ann Philbin
40. Paul Schimmel
41. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
42. Michael Ringier
43. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
44. Chris Kennedy
45. Bruce Nauman
46. Cy Twombly
47. Ai Weiwei
48. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
49. Andreas Gursky
50. Olafur Eliasson
51. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
52. Jeff Wall
53. Peter Doig
54. Roman Abramovich & Daria Zhukova
55. Bruno Brunnet, Nicole Hackert, Philipp Haverkampf
56. Marlene Dumas
57. Gavin Brown
58. Victoria Miro
59. Mitchell Rales
60. Yvon Lambert
61. Mike Kelley
62. Paul McCarthy
63. Banksy
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. William Acquavella
66. Lucian Freud
67. Victor Pinchuk
68. Maurizio Cattelan
69. Cai Guo Qiang
70. Maureen Paley
71. Roberta Smith
72. Peter Schjeldahl
73. Thelma Golden
74. Ralph Rugoff
75. Robert Gober
76. Iwona Blazwick
77. Richard Armstrong
78. Massimiliano Gioni
79. Jerry Saltz
80. Reena Spaulings/Bernadette Corporation
81. Louise Bourgeois
82. Cindy Sherman
83. Okwui Enwezor
84. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn
85. Shaun Caley Regen
86. Liam Gillick
87. Miuccia Prada
88. John Baldessari
89. Francesca von Habsburg
90. Christian Boros
91. Nicholas Logsdail
92. Subodh Gupta
93. The Long March Project
94. Paula Cooper
95. Peter Nagy
96. Casey Reas
97. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
98. Guy & Myriam Ullens
99. Laurent Le Bon
100. Thomas Kinkade

Is number 100 a joke?

James Castle at the PMA

The nature of "outsider" art may be debatable, but self-taught artist James Castle was an outsider of sorts from the day he was born.

Castle, subject of a new exhibit organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was born profoundly deaf and never learned to read, write, sign or speak. But he spoke volumes through art, which he created ceaselessly from early childhood until his death in 1977 at age 77.

"James Castle: A Retrospective," which opened this week and remains on display through Jan. 4, brings together more than 300 evocative drawings, handmade books, collages and sculptural pieces from 60 public and private collections. The first comprehensive museum exhibition of Castle, it will travel to Chicago and San Francisco in 2009.

Read the review by Joann Loviglio here.

That one coming to Widener

"That one" is coming to Widener University (where my wife teaches) tomorrow morning.

Update: Photos from the rally here.

Aqui Estamos

As a result of the decades-long Cuban embargo, the work of contemporary Cuban artists has been noticed for many years by many important museums and curators around the world, but often remains a mystery to American collectors and art enthusiasts. And those who write about the commoditization of art, such as the Wall Street Journal, have been telling art collectors who buy art in the hope those prices will rise, to buy contemporary Cuban art.

The WSJ wrote:

"With art from Asia and Russia in demand, some in the art world are betting on Cuba to be the next hot corner of the market. Prices for Cuban art are climbing at galleries and auction houses, and major museums are adding to their Cuban collections. In May, Sotheby's broke the auction record for a Cuban work when it sold Mario Carreño's modernist painting "Danza Afro-Cubana" for $2.6 million, triple its high estimate.

Now, with a new Cuban president in power and some hope emerging for looser travel and trade restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba, American collectors and art investors are moving quickly to tap into the market. Some are getting into Cuba by setting up humanitarian missions and scouting art while they're there. Others are ordering works from Cuba based on email images and having them shipped.

The collectors are taking advantage of a little-known exception to the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba: It is legal for Americans to buy Cuban art."

This suggestion and idea is simple, and has been proven recently by the super hot rise of Chinese artists: when a closed society is opened up a little, its top artists see a substantial rise in exposure and thus in demand, and of course, in prices!

And it makes sense (if you buy art as an investment strategy rather than love of art).

Generally speaking, when an artist is in certain major collections around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Tate in London, and other such giants of the museum world, it attracts a certain level of collector interest, and it is almost always associated with a certain price range.

And there are many contemporary Cuban artists whose work has been in those and many other important museums around the world for a very long time, and whose work continues to attract curatorial, critical and savvy collector interest, but because of their lack of exposure to the American market in general (often created by their closed societies), their price range is not in par with their colleagues from other nations in the same level.

Several years ago, almost by accident, I became involved in the curatorial process of contemporary Cuban art, in an effort to help with fundraising efforts by the Havana Hebrew Community Center. Since then I have become an experienced curator in this genre and have acquired a wealth of good knowledge about the artists from that unfortunate and imprisoned island.

Aquí Estamos (Here We Are) is my latest curatorial project and brings to H&F Fine Arts and the Greater Washington, DC region recent work by several important Cuban artists working out of Havana as well as Cuban artists from the Cuban Diaspora.

How can this be done?

It’s a brutal, labor intensive touch and go process, as although art and books are the only two items exempt from the Cuban embargo, the heavy hand of the Communist dictatorship that runs everything on that unfortunate nation touches all aspects of life, including the creation and destination of art. Bypassing and escaping the government is not easy, but it can be accomplished if the artist is willing to risk it.

In the works that you’ll see at H&F Fine Arts we find narratives and imagery that represent many of these artists’ historical dissidence to the stark issues of contemporary Cuban life. The works are images that offer a historical and visual sentence in the history of an island nation behind bars with a powerful world presence in the arts and events of world history.

In Sandra Ramos’ works we see one of the most important contemporary Cuban artists in the world continue to visit themes dealing with racism in her homeland, the physical and intellectual drain caused by mass migration, and other austere realities of daily Cuban life. Ramos uses her body and her figure in many of her paintings and mixed media etchings to narrate the daily issues that confront her life in Havana. In her drawing "Larva," Ramos anticipates a future Cuba where she may be allowed to spread her artistic wings to full capacity, without fear of how her visual imagery may be interpreted by her own government.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who escaped from Cuba in the early 1990s, also uses her image and body to deliver powerful biographical and observational elements of the realities of being a black Cuban woman in America. She has been called “one of Boston’s most prominent artists,” and as evidence it has been submitted that the Cuban-born artist has shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian, the Venice Biennale, and many other prestigious venues around the world.

And last year the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted “Everything Is Separated by Water,” a mid-career retrospective of Campos-Pons’ paintings, sculptures, photos, and installations. And as an Afro-Cuban woman, Campos-Pons has used her cultural and racial background as the initial key theme of her own work, with long ties to her Cuban homeland, but also with a powerful influence of her evolving Americanosity.

Both Cirenaica Moreira and Marta Maria Perez Bravo also employ their bodies to become the canvas of their photographs, although in each case with a different goal. Moreira has been called “woman as vagina dentata” for the ferocity via which her images depict her themes of loss of freedom, feminism, and being a Cuban woman in a land of unabashed machismo.

Perez Bravo is considered by many to be the preeminent Cuban female photographer in the world, and her work addresses the fabulous rituals and images of Santeria, the unique Cuban mixture of Catholicism and African religions brought to the island by African slaves.

Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) is also considered by many to be among the leading Cuban artists in the world, and he first attracted international attention by winning the grand prize at South Korea's Kwangju Biennial in 1995. This will be his initial debut in the Greater Washington, DC region.

Other artists in the show include work by Roberto Wong, whose powerful paintings develop intelligent ways to showcase ways in which freedom is restricted and Aimeé Garcia Marrero, considered by many to be among Cuba’s most talented new crop of painters. Her technical skills are married to intelligent interpretations of daily Cuban life and even the influences of the giant to the North.


"Aliento" Oil on Canvas by Aimee Garcia Marrero
The opening, free and open to the public is on November 8, 2008 from 6-8PM. H&F Fine Arts is located at 3311 Rhode Island Avenue, Mount Rainier, MD 20712, tel: 301.887.0080 and on the web at www.hffinearts.com. They are open Thursday and Friday - 11:00 AM-7:00 PM, Saturday - 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM and Sunday - 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM. The exhibition is open through November 30.

Postcards from the Edge


The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge benefit for Visual AIDS will be hosted by Metro Pictures in NYC on January 9-10, 2009.

Preview Party
Friday, January 9, 2009 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show.

Benefit Sale - ONE DAY ONLY!
Saturday, January 10, 2009 from 11:00 - 6:00
Over 1500 original postcard-size works of art.
$75 EACH. Buy 4 cards and get 1 free!

Postcards From the Edge is a show and sale of original, postcard-sized artworks on paper by established and emerging artists. Offered on a first-come, first-served basis, each piece is exhibited anonymously, and the identity of the artist is revealed only after the work is purchased. With the playing field leveled, all participants can take home a piece by a famous artist, or one who’s just making his/her debut in the art world. Nonetheless, collectors walk away with something beautiful, a piece of art they love. For more details, visit this website

Attention Artists!
DEADLINE: Wednesday, December 10, 2008
They are looking for artists to donate a 4" x 6" original work on paper for the exhibition and sale. Painting, drawing, photography, printmaking and mixed media are all welcome. If you would like to participate in Postcards From the Edge, download submission forms at this website.

I always participate in this fundraiser and encourage all of you to do as well.

Mellema on Irvine Show

Kevin Mellema with an excellent review of Shepard Fairey, Al Farrow and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), at DC's Irvine Contemporary.

Read it here.

Eve Running Away From Eden

"Eve, running away from Eden" by F. Lennox Campello
Charcoal on Paper. 8x4 inches matted and framed to 14x11 inches. Circa 2008