The Amazing Work of Itsuki Ogihara

I walked into Projects Gallery the other day to deliver some of my artwork, as they are taking my work to a couple of fairs in Miami this weekend, and hanging was their "Paper" show.

The show opens today, which is First Friday for Philly galleries, with an opening reception from 6-9PM. The exhibition continues through December 20th. I have a few pieces in that show, so I wasn't really planning to write anything about it.

But when you first walk into the gallery you see this:



The work all the way on that far wall, seemingly a sort of artist wallpaper at first sight, is one of the most amazing conceptual pieces with a powerful delivery mechanism and one of the most innovative and intelligent works of art that I have ever seen.

Itsuki Ogihara. Population Series. 17”H x 17”W. Digital prints
Like all of you, I was initially fooled by the subject matter macro visual, and it wasn't until I zoomed in and understood what I was seeing, that this young Japanese-born artist (and a student at UPenn I believe) struck me with the powerful punch of that ellusive artistic goal: something new.

Itsuki Ogihara is her name, and this is her latest project (see earlier projects here) and after I describe it for you, I think you will see why I came away so impressed.

Each one of those 17" x 17" digital prints represents an American city. Each "city" has a different design.



Ogihara has taken data from the US Census to determine that city's racial and ethnic demographics, and using an artistic algorithm, she then designs each print to represent that city. The macro design in each city is made up of 100 tiny silhouetted figures in various poses and activities. As an example, in the Salt Lake City print, there are 83 white silhouettes, 2 black, and so on to describe that city's racial and ethnic make-up.



Pretty interesting so far. And then when you study each figure, you realize that they are each individuals. That's right, each individual figure is a separate and distinct image on its own.

What she has done is actually taken hundreds of portraits of people; real people and real photographs, and shrunk them down to the tiny size seen in the prints, and then colored them to represent each race (white for Caucasians, black for African-American, red for Native Americans and yellow for Asians) and one ethnicity (brown for Latinos).

It is such a labor intensive endeavor that it leaves me tired just to think of it. And it is also one of the rare conceptual ideas where the art actually delivers on a par with the idea or wall text about the concept.

Itsuki Ogihara's demographic wallpaper is an unexpected treat delivered in a superbly professional and unique delivery mechanism, which employs concepts of mass production generalization to delve deep into our shared consciousness about race and ethnicity and art.

I see great things in the future of this young artist.

Wanna do some bodypainting in DC tomorrow?

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA DC) over in Georgetown is not just having their opening reception for the December Member Holiday & Gift Show tomorrow, but also on Friday evening there will be body painting with many models & perhaps a "special duo performance." It all starts at 6 pm until late!

And on Sunday, December 7th, they will have a major "Meet the Models Party." Hors d' ouevres, wine, soft drinks for all. This is a meet-and-greet party - artists are welcome to come share in the festivities and draw until there's no more - They will have loads of models at hand and anyone interested in modeling can also show up.

Questions? - Call Dave at 202.342.6230 or email at mocadc01@comcast.net

And they're off!

All 25 or so art fairs in Miami are off and running and the art world holds its collective breath to see what happens next.

I'm staying home this year.

Email me your experiences at the various fairs and I'll publish them here.

Kuah on BAM

Laura Kuah has the run down on Baltimore's Contemporary Museum and its schedule of coming holiday events. Read it here.

How my football season is going so far

Street Artists

40+ street artists that you should know besides Banksy... see them here.

Giants in the City

Directly from Art Basel MB:

If the video doesn't load properly view it here.

DCist Exposed

DCist Exposed, under the guidance and development (pun intended) of Heather Goss has matured into one of the Greater Washington DC area's best photography events. They are now having their call for photographers for the next event.

All the details here.

Bader Fund

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund has awarded a total of $50,000 to three Greater DC and Baltimore area visual artists. The recipients of this year’s Bader Fund grants are sculptors Emilie Brzezinski of McLean, VA, and Richard Cleaver of Baltimore, MD and photographer Mark Power of Silver Spring, MD.

Congrats to all three!

The Colors of Wars to Come

Yesterday, when I mentioned the VFMA's Alex Nyernes segment on NPR I dropped the hint that I'd be coming down to Richmond for a day or two. The main reason is that this coming December 12 I will be having an opening of my recent paintings at Richmond's Red Door Gallery.

It is titled "The Colors of Wars to Come," and the work in the show focuses on the series of paintings that I started in the late 90s, initially based on my own military awards earned during my service in the United States Navy, and subsequently (last year) refocused on creating and inventing new awards and campaign ribbons for imagined, forecast or foreseen events of the future.

It is my own visual arts commentary on the futility and near inevitability of foreign policy and unforeseen world events, perhaps predicted (or perhaps avoided) by this line of work.

As I've told the story before many times, this series saw its beginning as a result of the fact that the the McLean Center for the Arts sponsors a very good painting competition every couple of years called "Strictly Painting." It is now in its sixth or seventh iteration.

About a decade ago, around 1999 or 2000, the juror for that year's version of "Strictly Painting" was Terrie Sultan, who back then was the Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran. I thought that this choice was a little odd, as Ms. Sultan, in my opinion back then, was not "painting-friendly."

In fact, with all due respect, I used to blame her for diminishing the Corcoran Biennials, which used to be known as the Corcoran Biennial of Painting. In fact, since then they have been so diluted that I think they no longer exist? (I should ask the Corcoran about this).

Anyway, for many decades they were essentially the only well-known Biennial left in the nation that was strictly designed to get a look at the state of contemporary painting, which was somehow surviving its so called "death."

It was Ms. Sultan who decided to "expand" the Biennial and make it just like all other Biennials: Jack of all trades (genres) Biennials. In the process, depending on what side of this argument you're on, she (a) did a great service to the Corcoran by moving it into the center of the "genre of the moment" scene - like all other Biennials, or (b) gave away the uniqueness of the nation's top painting Biennial title.

I'm aligned with the minority who supports camp (b) but understand those who defend her decision to become just another player in camp (a). Most people think that her decision and drive were the right thing to do in order to bring the Corcoran to a world stage, and perhaps it was. Since I haven't heard any Biennial talk lately, I should check with the Corcoran to see if they intend to continue doing them. If not, I think that the first stake was driven through its heart by Sultan back then.

But I digress.

When she was announced as the juror, I decided to see if I could predict her painting selectivity, sensitivity, process and agenda. It was my thesis that I could predict what Ms. Sultan would pick.

So I made a secret bet, and decided to enter the exhibition with work created specifically to fit what I predicted would be agreeable to Ms. Sultan's tastes. I felt that I could guarantee that I would get into the show because of the transparency of the juror's personal artistic agenda. It is her right to have one; I have them, in fact, we all have them.

I was trained as a painter at the University of Washington School of Art, but around 1992 or so, I had stopped painting and decided to devote myself strictly to my love for drawing.

So by 1999 I had not picked up a brush in several years and that's when I decided to enter this competition, designed to survey the state of painting in our region.

It was my theory that Ms. Sultan would not be in the representational side of painting. It was also clear that she (like many curators including often myself) was seduced by technology in the form of videos, digital stuff and such trendy things.

And therefore I decided to see if I could marry digital "stuff" with painting.

And what I did was the following:

I took some of my old Navy ribbons, and scanned them in to get a digital file. I then blew them up so that the final image was quite pixilated. I then printed about five of them and took slides of the printed sheets of paper.

I then submitted these slides to the competition, but identified them as oil on canvas paintings. My plan was that if accepted, how hard could it be to whip up a couple of paintings after the fact? I titled them with such titles as Digitalism: National Defense and Digitalism: Expeditionary Medal and so on.

From what I was later told, several hundred painters submitted work. And Ms. Sultan selected about only about seven or eight painters in total. And not only was I one of them, but she picked two of my entries.

I was elated! I had hit the nail right on the head! I felt so superior in having such an insight into this intelligent woman's intellect that I (a painter no more) could create competition-specific work to get accepted into this highly regarded show.

And then I began the task of creating the two paintings, using the pixilated images as the guide.

And it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

For one thing, I had submitted the "paintings" in quite a large size; each painting was supposed to be about six feet long.

And it didn't take me long to discover that there are a lot of color nuances and hues in an average pixilated image.

And I went through dozens and dozens of rolls of tape as I pulled off the old Washington Color School trick of taping stripes (in my case small one inch square boxes of individual colors - hundreds upon hundreds of them) in a precise sequence to prevent smudging and color peeling, etc.

I painted for at least six hours every day, switching off between paintings to allow the previous day's work to dry off enough to allow a new layer of tape to be applied. I did all the varnishing outside, which usually attracted all the small neighborhood ruffians.

It was incredibly hard work, and I was ever so sorry that I had even gotten this crazy idea. All my nights were consumed.

But eventually they were finished and delivered to MPA and Ms. Sultan even wrote some very nice things about them in the exhibition's catalog.

Me? I was in a mix of both vindication and guilt; exhausted but fired up with the often wrong sense of righteousness of the self-righteous.

After the show, I had no idea what to do with them, and they didn't fit my "body of works," but I ended up selling both of them through Sotheby's.

And today, some art collector in South Carolina and another one in Canada, each have one very large, exhausting and handsome oil painting of pixilated naval ribbons hanging in their home, in happy ignorance of the interesting story behind them.

It surprised me a little that I enjoyed this return to painting and I continued to create new work along this series, while slowly walking away from the "exactness" of replicating a pixilated image and drifting towards more towards brushwork and texture.

And then last year I came up upon the concept of inventing new ribbons and awards.

And I created this:

"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 above text also "replicates" what a "real" award's wording would look like.

At Red Door I plan to exhibit the most recent paintings in this series, as well as half a dozen or so small preparatory watercolors from the late 90s. Here's a video on the creation of some of the works.


The opening reception is December 12, from 6-9PM.

See ya there!

Belmar & Binstock

The beautiful spaces at H&F Fine Arts next present concurrent solo shows of works by Alan Binstock and Joan Belmar. Both artists’ work explores the circle of life and construct dialogue assessing the parallels of three dimensional abstract structures and human life.

Belmar’s own rich work will serve as a layered backdrop to the translucent sculptures created by Binstock, whose work explores the forms that express or reflect the sacred, the inner life and varied manifestations of the micro and macro worlds.

Opening reception: Saturday, December 6 from 5-8pm.

Opening in Norfolk this Friday

Alexander Rutsch Award

Deadline: February 6, 2009

This award consists of a solo exhibition May 15 - June 27, 2009 and $5,000 cash award. U.S. based artists 19 years of age and older. All work submitted must be available for exhibit. Entries must be received by February 6, 2009. Download submission guidelines and prospectus at www.pelhamartcenter.org or contact rutschaward@pelhamartcenter.org or 914-738-2525. Pelham Art Center, 155 Fifth Avenue, Pelham, NY 10803.

Mid City Artists Open Studios

DC's Mid City Artists all of which are within walking distance of the Dupont/Logan Circles will be open for visitors with over 20 artists exhibiting this coming weekend.

Around 40 artists in one weekend. Details here.

Alex Nyerges

Yesterday NPR had a really cool segment on Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' director Alex Nyerges where he managed to weave together a really interesting segment on the museum, a ghost, a Pollock, generous donors and a really strong path forward.

Details here.

I'll be visiting VMFA soon as I'll be in Richmond for a few days later this month and plan to write on the museum and Richmond galleries.

Down at the Factory this Thursday

Fragmented Idioms
I love the power of representational imagery to deliver a visually important work of art.

And to the left is "First Day" by Anthony Armstrong, whose works open at Howard University's Armour J. Blackburn Gallery with an opening reception December 7, 2008 from 5-8PM.

The gallery is at 2397 6th Street, NW in DC.

Here we go again: Dexter & the Cubans

I do realize that this issue of mine is such a jingoist thing, and I am also keenly aware that I've written about it before in a different scenario, but the more we become aware how culturally blind Hollywood is, the more they underscore their own cultural stupidity with minute mistakes that keep adding up to colossal mountains.

Last year I bitched when Jimmy Smits, a superb actor on his own, was chosen to play the lead part in the CBS drama "Cane."

My historical issue was that Jimmy Smits is a great actor, but not what your typical Cuban sugar magnate would have looked liked in the racist Cuban society of the late 1950s and the Cuban-American refugee wave of the early 1960s.

CBS picked Smits, a brilliant actor, I guess based on their perception of what a Cuban looks like (Smits is not of Cuban ancestry... his father, Cornelis Smits, was a Surinamese immigrant from Dutch Guiana, and his mother, Emilina, is Puerto Rican).

This is what the person that Smits' "Canes" character was loosely based upon really looks like...

That is him and his also Cuban wife to the left... but because, like a lot of Cubans, he looks too "Anglo" and not enough of what Hollywood (and CBS) want all of us to think that Latinos should all look like, they hired a terrific Emmy-winning Surinamese actor who fits the sterotypical image of what Hollywood thinks Cubans should look like, to play the lead part.

Latinos are a culturally, racially and ethnically diverse group of people, and we're not all made of one mold, as Hollywood wants you to think.

So that was then, and here's what has me all spun up in a tempest in my demitasse.

Currently my absolute favorite TV show is Showtime's "Dexter."

If you haven't seen this show, then go and rent seasons one and two out on DVD and then get hooked.

In the series, Michael C. Hall is absolutely brilliant as a serial killer who works as a blood expert for the Miami Metro Police while hiding the fact that he is also a serial killer. Dexter goes after bad guys, but he is still a truly disturbing psychopath pretending to be normal while killing bad guys left and right in a very orchestrated manner.

Dexter is television crime drama at its best.

Because this is set in Miami, several of the regular characters in the series are portrayed as Cuban characters, such as Dexter's boss, Lt. Maria LaGuerta, played superbly by Puerto Rican actress Lauren Velez and detective Angel Batista, also played superbly by Puerto Rican actor David Zayas.

Now enter season three, which introduced a new character, that of Asst. District Attorney Miguel Prado, another Cuban character played by, yep that's right: Jimmy Smits!

Smits is a terrific actor, and since by now he seems to be making quite a decent living playing Cubans on TV, the least that Showtime can do is hire some Cubans to write their Spanish dialogues for the series so that at least he can sound Cuban.

I know that this is pedantic, but everytime that the "Cuban" characters speak to each other in Spanish banter, it is grating to Cuban ears to hear "non Cuban" being spoken.

Imagine that you are watching a foreign movie, let's say a French movie... and all the dialogue is in French, and two British actors are in the film playing American parts, and every few minutes they speak to each other in English, and instead of American English coming out of their mouths, what comes out is cockney English.

That's what (in my pedantic world of Virgoes) I have to suffer everytime that LaGuerta, Batista and/or Miguel Prado talk in Spanish.

The straw that broke the camel's back a few episodes ago was when Miguel Prado (Smits) jokingly called Dexter a "filipolla" (or "gilipolla").

That's when I realized that whomever Showtime has hired to write the Spanish for the series, not only has no idea about what Cuban Spanish sounds like, but also zero idea of what Latin American Spanish sounds like.

Having lived in Spain for a few years in my 20s, I know what that word means, which is essentially a curse word used by Spaniards; let me repeat that: Spaniards, to mean asshole or jerk, etc.

I am almost 99% sure that no Cuban in Miami or Cuba or anywhere else in the Great Cuban Diaspora, has ever called anyone a gilipolla, unless perhaps they live in Spain and have picked up the term there... from Spaniards.

But in Miami? Naaaaaaaaaaaah...

A Cuban would have said "Maricon" or perhaps "Cabron." But fili/gilipolla? Nunca!

Now imagine those two Brit actors playing Yanks in my earlier French movie example, calling each other "arseholes" or "wankers."

Welcome to my pedantic hell.

And now for Showtime: My list of actor candidates who are actually of Cuban ancestry and thus a shoe-in for the part and who actually fucking speak Spanish with a Cuban accent:

Andy Garcia (duh!!!! perfect for the part!... but probably too classy and too expensive to do TV).

Nestor Carbonell. He was great in "Canes" and also in "Lost City," although I think that he wears eye make up?

Mel Ferrer... ah!... I think he's dead.

Desi Arnaz... fine, fine... he's definately dead; but how about Desi Jr.?????

Jorge Perrugorria

Cesar Romero ... fine! I know that The Joker is definately dead.

Julio Mechoso

Ruben Rabasa

Victor Rivers

George Alvarez...

Showtime: call me.

Meet the Artist

Jean Marie Barrett will be at her solo exhibition at the Arlington Ed. Center (1426 N. Quincy Street in Arlington, VA) today Monday, December 1 at 5:30pm with a few friends - join them!

Closing Reception for "Aqui Estamos" today

This afternoon, from 2-4PM H&F Fine Arts will host a closing reception for "Aqui Estamos," contemporary artwork by some of the best known Cuban artists from Cuba and from the Cuban Diaspora.

As I've said before, I called the show "Aqui Estamos" or "Here We Are," as sort of a footprint statement for these important artists making an exclamation point to the Greater DC area.

On the walls are drawings, photographs, paintings and etchings by Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kcho, Sandra Ramos, Cirenaica Moreira, Marta Maria Perez Bravo, Aimee Garcia Marrero and Roberto Acosta Wong.

Last chance to see the show before it travels to Philly!