Barlow and O'Sullivan on AOM

Terrific article in the WaPo on Artomatic from Michael O'Sullivan, who cleverly uses Phillip Barlow's intimate knowledge of the DC area art scene to deliver some brilliant AOM tips.

Read it here.

Congrats!

To DC's own hoogrrl, who has been appointed to be a DC Arts Commissioner!

That is the perfect pick! Go get them PH!

Wanna go to a Bethesda opening tomorrow?

Artists' Websites: Susan Lamont

Susan Lamont's technical virtuosity is easily evident in her work as is the deep intellectual seed that germinates in nearly all of her work. Check it out on level two of Artomatic.

He Searched the Room For Her Auburn Hair © 2009, oil on linen, 40" x 50"
Check out her website here.

Best pizza in America

I've been searching for the best pizza in the United States since my teens, when a slice of pie was a quarter and there were a dozen pizza places along Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn.

Best pizza that I ever tasted was in Sicily, and the worst one was in London.

Best pizza in America is at Little Anthony in Media, PA.

Anthony is a Napolitano, and his pizzas are amazing, especially the garlic white pizza. His is the best pizza that I have ever eaten in the US.

Best pizza in the South?

Andrea's Pizza, located in the Riverdale Shopping Center off West Mercury Blvd in Hampton, Virginia.

Oportunidad para artistas

Deadline: July 13, 2009

NALAC Fund For the Arts offers funding to Latino arts organizations and to Latino artists for the creation and presentation of work, as well as career development. Funding available for the following disciplines: Visual Arts, Dance, Interdisciplinary Arts, Literary Arts, Media Arts, Music, Performance Art, and Theater Arts.

Funding for the one-year grant period (runs from Nov. 1, 2009-Sept. 30, 2010) is up to $10,000. Application deadline: July 13, 2009. For more information, contact:

NALAC Fund for the Arts
Grant Program Manager
1208 Buena Vista St.
San Antonio, TX 78207

Phone: (210) 432-3982; email: grantmanager@nalac.org; or check website: www.nalac.org.

Art advice for the Obamas

Waaaaay back I gave the Obamas art advice for the White House walls. They essentially ignored me.

Maybe it is because Cuban-Americans are the only Latino/Hispanics who overwhelmingly vote Republican (in the 90s percentwise).

Kiddin'

Here's what some other folks think the Obamas should acquire for the White House walls.

I still think that my recommendation is the best; the most plebeian and the clearest and closest to the ground and what I think the new White House tenants need to bring to the White House walls.

What art or artist do you think that the Obamas should acquire? Tell me in the comments.

DC Gallery moves

DC's Long View Gallery will relocate to a currently vacant building directly across from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center at 1234 Ninth Street, NW. The gallery’s new space will undergo major renovation, more than quadrupling the gallery’s exhibition capacity, enhancing its custom framing and special event offerings, and making it one of the area’s largest art spaces.

“With many other businesses closing, we have been able to swim against the economic tide, demonstrating that art is indeed a great investment. After three successful years in Shaw, Long View Gallery simply outgrew its current location,” said gallery director Drew Porterfield. “Thanks to Douglas Development, we were able to secure a building with great potential in a location that is impossible to beat—half a block south on Ninth Street from our current location, directly across from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and closer to existing and planned fine restaurants,” Porterfield said. “Shaw has been a wonderful home, and we are thrilled to contribute to its renaissance.”

The gallery’s renovation, designed by local architect Will Couch, will maintain the raw feel of the new location's building while transforming it into a premier gallery space. The new gallery will occupy the southern portion of the building, comprised of nearly 5,000 square feet, more than quadrupling the square footage of the Long View Gallery’s current location.

Call to Artists: In the Spirit of Frida Kahlo

Deadline: June 6, 2009

Frida Kahlo remains one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, but her spectacular life experiences, her writing and her views on life and art have also influenced many artists throughout the years.

From July 1 - August 29, 2009 The Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery at Smith Farm Center in Washington, DC will be hosting Finding Beauty In A Broken World: In the Spirit of Frida Kahlo.

This exhibition hopes to showcase the work in all mediums of artists influenced not only by Kahlo’s art, but also by her biography, her thoughts, and her writing or any other aspect in the life and presence of this remarkable artist who can be interpreted through artwork.

This will be the third Kahlo show that I have juried in the last decade and we are seeking works of art that evoke the prolific range of expression, style and media like that which Frida Kahlo used as an outlet for her life’s experiences.

Get a copy of the prospectus by calling (202) 483-8600 or email gallery@smithfarm.com or download it at www.smithfarm.com/gallery/FINALProspectus.pdf.

Read this

Tom Wolfe, author, man-in-white, and social observer, has always had a keen and clear insight into the social undertows of contemporary society.

Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word, is the one that I consider the one of the most influential book on art, nepotism, networking, manipulation and 20th century art history (OK, OK art observations), that I have ever read.

If you want to understand the true historical beginnings (from someone on the scene at the time) of what we now call "contemporary art" and the seminal birth of the elitist attitudes of many intelligent members of the high art apparatnik, then read this book.

"The painter," Wolfe writes, "had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall's avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century.... At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching."

I read it when I first started Art School and it saved my Art Life and it cemented the foundations of what has become my opinions, judgements and attitudes towards art.

After you read the book, then and only then, you will understand why "traditional" art critics, desperately seeking approval from their colleagues, hate such an egalitarian art show such as Artomatic, when and if it takes place in our own backyard, but would love it in another location outside the US.

New art space in Georgetown

It is at 3146 Dumbarton Place, NW (2nd Floor), Washington, District of Columbia 20007 and they're having a champagne toast to the new space tomorrow (6-8PM) to celebrate the new space and new paintings by Michael Weiss.

PostSecret at Hillyer Art Space

Artomatic's greatest launching success story: Tim Tate or Frank Warren?


Warren's spectacular worldwide success and multiple best-sellers with PostSecret comes to DC at Hillyer Art Space. PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God has a First Friday Reception on June 5, 2009, 6-9PM. Soundscapes by DJ Underdog. Food and refreshments will be served.

Postcards and materials will be available for all to confess their own secrets (Postcards will be displayed at Hillyer throughout the show and then given to Frank Warren to add to his collection. Details here.

2009 William H. Johnson Prize

Deadline : July 31, 2009

The 2009 William H. Johnson Prize is 25,000 USD and the winner will be announced in September 2009. Early career African American artists who work in painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, installation and/or new genre are eligible to apply.

Details here.

Wanna go to a Bethesda opening tomorrow?

"Searching for Doctor Dean" 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 inches
Tomorrow, Saturday, May 30, 2009, from 5-8 pm is the opening of Carol Brown Goldberg: Recent Works at Osuna Art, 7200 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814. The show runs through July 31, 2009.

The show includes large-scale, abstract paintings, created within the past 8 months, as well as a number of hand-made pulp-paper works.

Whimsical works of art at AU Museum through August

The exhibitions open to the public on Saturday, June 6 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center.

Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker features 52 one-of-a-kind sculptural chairs created by Garry Knox Bennett, one of the foremost contemporary studio furniture makers in America. Inspired by well known furniture designers and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, George Nakashima, and Gerrit Rietveld, Bennett makes his wit and imagination come to life with such chairs as the “Great Granny Rietveld” and “Wiggle Wright.” By using bold new forms and constantly expanding traditional boundaries, Bennett makes furniture a form of art and brings new meaning to the words “sitting pretty.” The exhibition closes Sunday, August 16.

The Washington Print Club’s 20th biennal exhibition, Love, Let Me Count the Ways, is a compilation of approximately 100 prints, drawings, and pastels from print club member collections. Images of love range from the maternal and sexual to the mythological, patriotic/political, and psychological. The exhibition includes prints dating from the sixteenth century to contemporary productions. While most of the pieces are by Americans, works on paper by Spanish, German, French, Japanese, English, and Norwegian artists also are represented. The exhibition closes Sunday, August 9.

Robert Hudson and Richard Shaw: Collaborations brings together more than 60 collaborative and individual sculptural works created during the 40-year careers of Robert Hudson and Richard Shaw. Highlighting the unique and inventive partnership of these renowned San Francisco Bay area artists, the exhibition features works in porcelain and glaze that challenge perceptions of art, craft, and the conventional modes of artistic production. Collaborations has been made possible through the support of Braunstein/Quay Gallery in San Francisco, California. The exhibition closes Sunday, August 9.

The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free.

Call for artists

ArtDC.org has another call for artists. Check it out here.

Glass Art Tours of Artomatic

Meet in the lobby of Artomatic for a guided glass tour. Hosted by members of the Washington Glass School, these informative tour guides will lead you directly to all the great glass on exhibit this year!

Every wonder how a piece of glass art was made or what was the artist's motivation? This is your chance to ask and learn. All tours leave from the Lobby of Artomatic, 55 M Street SE, Washington, DC. Wear comfortable walking shoes and join in the fun!

Saturday May 30, 2009 @ 5:30pm, Allegra Marquart and Lisa Osgood Dano will be your tourguides.

Artomatic Opens Tomorrow!

If you are an artist or art lover reading this post, then chances are that you already know what Artomatic (or AOM) is and all about this amazing spectacle.

But just in case, a little review.

About once a year or so, under the guiding hand of a board of hardworking artists and volunteers, a large, unoccupied building in the Greater Washington, DC area is identified, and eventually filled with hundreds of artists’ works, loads of theatre and dance performances, panels, and everything associated with breathing a powerful breath of energy into the Greater DC art scene.

Let’s review: The idea behind AOM 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, pay a small fee and work a few hours assisting with the show itself.

Any artist.

Artists love AOM, but most DC area art critics hate it.

Why?

I think that in order to write a proper, ethical review of AOM, a writer must spend hours walking several 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 to try to find the great art buried by the overwhelming majority that constitutes the great democratic pile of so so artwork and really bad artwork.

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 elitist dismissing of this show, without really looking at it.

This harsh 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-Matique.

And a lot, in fact, most of the work in the Salon Des Refuses was quite so so, 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 one that really counts: Art History.

But how does a writer cover an arts extravaganza of the size of AOM once the eyes and mind become numb after the 200th artist, or the 400th or the 1,000th?

As an art critic, I once started a review of a past AOM by complaining how much my feet hurt after my 5th or 6th visit to the show, in a futile attempt to gather as much visual information as possible in order to write a fair review of the artwork. Over the years I have discovered that it is impossible to see everything and to be fair about anyone; the sheer size and evolving nature of the show itself makes sure of the impossibility of this task. But AOM is not just about the artwork.

As a gallerist, I also have visited AOM looking for new talent amongst the vast numbers of artists who come together under one roof. Over the years, together with my fellow DC area gallerists, we have plucked many artists from the ranks and files of AOM. Artists who since their first appearance at past AOMs have now joined the collections of museums and Biennials and have been picked up by galleries nationwide. Names like Tim Tate, the Dumbacher Brothers, Kelly Towles, Michael Janis, Kathryn Cornelius, Richard Chartier and that amazing worldwide phenomenon and best-selling author Frank Warren of PostSecret fame. But AOM is not just about the emerging superstar artist.

As an artist, one year I decided to participate in AOM, just to see what the guts of the machine looked like. "I know the monster well," wrote the poet Jose Marti, "for I have lived in its entrails."

My volunteer hours patrolling the halls on a Wednesday night at midnight, and still seeing people come in and out, and explore art on the wee hours of the morning, also left a footprint on the public impact of the exhibition. Dealing with prima donna artists, recharging my own artistic batteries from hundreds of fellow artists, many of them in their first public exposure, also left an impression. But AOM is not just about the public.

AOM is two things to me:

It is perhaps the nation’s most powerful incarnation of what it means to be a creative community of hundreds of working creative hands all aligned to not only create artwork, but also put together a spectacular extravaganza that re-charges the regional art scene as no museum or gallery show can. AOM is a community of artists employing the most liberal of approaches to art that there exists: the artists are in charge, and the artists make it work, and the artists charge the city with energy and zeal. And these descendants of those brave souls who challenged the academic salons of the 19th century face the same negative eye from the traditional art critics and curators of our museums, who challenge not just the art, but the concept of an open, non-juried, most democratic of art shows: a community of artists in charge of energizing the community at large. All good group shows must be curated! shout these chained critical voices.

And AOM is certainly the easiest and most comprehensive way to discover contemporary art at its battlefront lines, right at the birth of many artists, paradoxically showcasing the area's artworld's deepest and also its newest roots. This is where both the savvy collector, and the beginning collector, and the aspiring curator, and the sharp-eyed gallerist can come to one place with a sense of discovery in mind. And the ones that I missed in the past, and who were discovered by others, are ample evidence of the subjectivity of a 1,000+ group art show.

Viva AOM!

This year’s AOM runs from May 29 through July 5, 2009, and it is located at the new building at 55 M Street, S.E. - essentially on top the Navy Yard Metro - celebrating its tenth anniversary in a newly built 275,000 square foot "LEED Silver Class A building", whatever that means. It is all free and open to the public and all the details and dates and parties and performances and panels, as well as all the participating artists can be found at Artomatic.org.

Artists' Websites: Claudia Hart

Ophelia (detail) by Claudia Hart, c.2008
Claudia Hart has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She creates virtual paintings that take the form of 3d imagery integrated into photography, animated loops, and multi-channel animation installations. Featured above is an out-take from Ophelia (2008), a single-screen work.

Visit her website here.

The UK comes to Artomatic

Remember Glass3, the international glass show in Georgetown that incorporated artists from the UK's National Glass Centre last February?

Well, they are back!

24 glass artists are part of this year's Artomatic and the DC art extravaganza's first international participants. The artists will be also performing demonstrations of their unusual techniques at the Washington Glass School in Mount Rainier and at DC GlassWorks in nearby Hyattsville.

Saturday, May 30, 2009: starting at 1.30 pm, Phil Vickery and Roger Tye will be glass blowing at DC GlassWorks. RSVP to info@dcglassworks.com.

On Sunday, May 31, 2009, starting at 2:00 pm, Stephen Beardsell and Karin Walland will be demonstrating their techniques at the Washington Glass School.

Karin will show how to cast small objects in frozen glass powder (an alternative to the messy lost wax method). Stephen will be showing and describing his method of creating great depth with frit casting and inclusions.

RSVP to washglassschool@aol.com

Both events are free and open to the public.