A door just opened
The biggest thing that has ever happened to my career as an artist will take place this weekend as a gigantic opportunity, a once in a lifetime change, just opened up.
More later if it is good news... or bad news.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Let's get together over at Neptune
Pencil in December 13 at 2 PM at the gorgeous Neptune Gallery in Bethesda.
The event starts with a presentation and tasting with Cacao, fine European Chocolates, immediately followed by "A Conversation with Lenny Campello" in which I will answer any and all questions about anything dealing with art: framing, approaching galleries, collectors, collecting, etc. or even about the art fairs and how to get your gallery to do them, or even some guerrilla tactics on the subject.
Open forum, any and all questions answered if I know the answer.
See ya there!
Future Generation Art Prize
The Future Generation Art Prize established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation is a worldwide contemporary art prize to discover, recognize and provide long-term support to a future generation of artists.
Artists around the world, under 35 years of age, without restriction of gender, nationality, race or artistic medium may enter the competition through online application.
20 shortlisted artists will be selected to show their work in an exhibition at the PinchukArtCentre (Kiev). These artists will be judged by an international Jury who will award one main prize and up to five special prizes.
The first prize will receive $100,000.
Details here.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Washington Glass School Open House
This is where I usually get 75% of my Christmas gifts and this year plan to get 100% and get my Xmas shopping out of the way all at once.
Join the Washington Glass School in its 8th annual Holiday Sale - artwork and craft from over a dozen studio artists and instructors. Artists exhibiting include: Michael Janis, Tim Tate, Erwin Timmers, Syl Mathis, Nancy Donnelly, Sean Hennessey, Rania Hassan, Jennifer Lindstrom, David Pearcy, Anne Plant, Cheryl Derricotte, David Cook, Allegra Marquart, Chris Shea, Lillian Fitzgerald, Jim Manning, Nancy Krondstat, Debra Ruzinsky, Marty King and more!
The surrounding artist studios (Red Dirt, Flux Studio, Weiss/Stewart/Sinel, Janis Goodman, Blue Fire Studio) will be participating in the huge event, along with the Gateway Arts District’s Holiday events along Rhode Island Avenue.
Washington Glass School & Studio
Holiday Show /Open Studio / Sale
3700 Otis Street, Mount Rainier, MD 20712
202.744.8222
2 pm til 6 pm , Saturday, December 12, 2009
Free and open to the public
SCOPE reports
From the SCOPE folks:
SCOPE Art Show and ART ASIA closed Sunday, December 6, reporting doubling and tripling of gallery sales. SCOPE, Miami’s longest-running global fair in its eighth year, and second-year standout ART ASIA increased traffic by 20%, bringing in over 30,000 visitors. Both shows attracted prominent institutions, museums, and private collectors from the Americas, Europe and emerging markets from the Middle East to Japan, including Charles Saatchi, Agnes Gund, Marty Margulies, Marc & Livia Straus, The Oppenheimers, MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA New York, Guggenheim Museum New York, and artist Chuck Close.
Positioning museum-quality programming alongside an international roster, SCOPE hosted 75 galleries from 25 countries, including a section devoted to Latin American art. Founder, Alexis Hubshman enlisted curator and critic David Hunt to assemble a curatorial board of “the best up-and-coming, next-generation curators,” and Hunt’s four choices, Hubshman said, “were like kernels that popped while they were with us.”
Gallerists offered positive reports, including:
* First year exhibitor Anonymous Gallery from New York, commissioned three works by David Ellis with one going to collector Charles Saatchi, and sold several other pieces including a Romon Kimin Yang for $60,000.
* Mike Weiss Gallery sold $400,000, with two works by the newly discovered German painter Stefanie Gutheil going to Kansas’ Nerman Museum; and artist Liao Yibai selling three editions of Ring, and one Fake Bag.
* Aureus Contemporary sold 75-80% of the work they brought to SCOPE and 80% of that was new buyers.
* First year exhibitor Galeria Christopher Paschall from Bogota, Colombia sold seven pieces to a German museum.
* Irvine Contemporary and Elizabeth Houston reported a 50% increase in sales over last year.
Sister fair ART ASIA, the only Asian art fair outside its own continent, launched an entirely new curatorial platform with independent curator Leeza Ahmady titled TRULY TRUTHFUL that showcased internationally recognized artists whose works contest categorical presentations of truth and reality in the world. ART ASIA continued its film series with Yi Zhou’s THE EAR, featuring Pharrell Williams with music by Ennio Morricone, and costumes designed by Rick Owens and BBC Ice Cream. They also had a Contemporary Arab Art exhibition of non-political works focused on the humanizing factors of the culture.
Gallerists offered positive reports, including:
* Sundaram Tagore Gallery and Grotto Fine Art tripled in sales from last year (around $250,000 and $100,000 respectively).
* Kips Gallery sold six sets of work, selling more in their first time at ART ASIA than at any other fair they have attended in the past.
* Sculpture was a standout medium with RCM Gallery selling multiple pieces priced around $50,000 each. Grotto Fine Art from Hong Kong sold and had commissions for over $100,000 worth of sculptural works.
* 95% of the galleries reported strong sales including X-Power ($500,000) and Kashya Hildebrand ($200,000.)
* While Asian art might be new to the Americas, it sold to a wide variety of buyers, from local Miami collectors and buyers from NYC and CT, to Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, France, Lebanon, Switzerland, Japan, Korea and New Delhi.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Monday, December 07, 2009
Sunday, Sunday
Sunday appeared to be the slowest day for most galleries at the fair, and it rained quite hard again.
We sold an Erwin Timmers glass piece to gallerist George Billis, who is also the organizer of the Red Dot fair, then a Sandra Ramos piece to close an otherwise slow day.
One of the key reasons why galleries need to take the huge financial risk involved in attending these art fairs (our booth was over $16,000 by the time one adds up all the details, and that doesn't include travel costs, hotels, staff, food, etc.) is that in addition to exposing the gallery and artwork to more collectors over a weekend than in an entire year in the gallery itself, the fairs also afford the opportunity to expose the artwork to curators.
As we all know, at least in the Greater DC area, our museum curators seldom take the opportunity to visit our local galleries and artists' studios. They do all go to the Miami and other fairs and thus it affords the galleries some precious exposure to them.
To underscore this point, as a result of this fair I am now negotiating the purchase of three original paintings by one of the artists that I represent by the curator of an University museum!
More on that later, once the deal is closed.
At 6PM the fair ended, and soon afterwards an army of worker bees descend upon the floors and begin packing the artwork for shipment back to home base. This is hard work after 4-5 days of working long hours standing on your feet, but by 8:30PM or so I was done and all the art was loaded in my van.
I then drove it to a storage site in Miami Beach, as I'm leaving all the work in Miami and I am returning in January to participate in the Miami International Art Fair, sponsored by Art in America magazine and the New York Times.
Yes friends, next month we get to do it all over again, this time inside the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Video moves
Yesterday was a good day as the Tim Tate video "I see Myself as an Author," which is a very cool piece with both a micro camera and and audio component, sold to the art dealer who had it on hold since Thursday.
Also sold two cool photographs by Cuban photographer Cirenaica Moreira, whose Miami family had come by earlier to say hello.
"Vive en Cincinnati y ni siquiera me escribe" - (He Lives in Cincinnati But he Doesn't Even Bother to Write)
Signed, Numbered and Titled. Circa 1999. Edition of 15. Printed on 20x16 inches (51x40.5 cm)
And also moved several of my drawings, including a very large St. Sebastian, the largest drawing that I brought to Miami.
And also moved a small recycled glass sculpture from ubergreen artist Erwin Timmers. That piece has become the first work of original art in a new collector of art.
Yesterday it rained a lot. Heavy, powerful Florida rain that thundered on the tent's roof with amazing intensity, trapping visitors inside and slowing down the flow of people to the area.
Sunday is the last day.
Art fair horror story
On Friday a gallery at the fair makes a substantial double sale of two very large paintings to a local collector. He tells them that he's hosting a party on Saturday night and asks if the gallerists can deliver the painting after the fair closes later that night.
They drive to his home, which is clearly the home of someone of considerable financial health. Once there, the gallery's staff volunteers to install the two pieces, which actually becomes quite difficult as the large paintings, installed side by side have little room for maneuvering.
The next day the collector contacts them and let's them know how everyone at the party really liked the work, and was complimenting the home owner on his artistic acumen and taste.
Later this afternoon the collector's neighbor (yes, his neighbor), calls the gallery and informs them that the paintings are being returned as the "energy of the paintings is disturbing the home owner."
Later that day, the neighbor (yes again, the neighbor) shows up at the fair and returns the two works.
The perils of the artworld.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Friday, December 04, 2009
One at a time...
Today the person who had Sandra Ramos' "El Bote" on hold actually called and purchased the piece, but wanted it unframed so that they could reframe it to their own taste. Of course, "El Bote" is the largest framed piece that I brought down to Miami, and because of interruptions it took me almost two hours to unframe it, roll up the etching, store the big frame in the van and hang some new pieces in the area vacated by the piece.
But a sale is a sale and "El Bote" joins several other works by Sandra Ramos in this couple's collection.
Then we sold a Tim Tate video to a Miami collector. It is the sexy and mesmerizing Ophelia video; one of my favorites.
Tate has also been attracting the attention of the dealers themselves. There's a piece on hold by the owner of a local Miami gallery, and then a well-known video collector who already owns a Tate piece brought Tim's work to the attention of a super New York gallery currently showing at Pulse and that connection happened and hopefully something will come out of it.
Then a British gallery from Art Miami came from across the street - tipped off by Tate's Philadelphia gallery - and she wants to take all unsold Tate pieces with her back to London at the end of the fair. We'll need to seal the arrangements between now and Sunday.
Russian-born Alexey Terenin's work has also been attracting a lot of attention from art dealers, and Mayer Fine Art may have found Terenin a couple of American galleries to show his work. Two Terenin oils sold today as well.
I also sold one of my watercolors from the Cuba series and my Philadelphia gallery (Projects Gallery) also sold another watercolor from the Cuba series.
I also visited Art Miami across the street today, and was very impressed with the level of work at that fair, although I did find a few galleries showing work that was in the awful range, bordering on Artomatic as its detractors see it. More on that later...
Camper Contemporary at Art Basel Miami Beach
They've already been threatened with arrest by overzealous Miami cops; they've already been interviewed by the local press and NPR; they've already driven all the way from MICA and they've already hit a lot of the ABMB side fairs, and certainly the MICA students who are part of Calder Brannock's Camper Contemporary are one of the hits of this year's ABMB extravaganza in Miami.
"Camper Contemporary is a mobile gallery created and curated by Calder Brannock. It is a fully functional art gallery set up inside an altered 1967 Yellowstone camper. Camper Contemporary gallery poses a solution for many problems a gallery faces in the modern art market. It allows the gallerist to showcase work in a clean controlled gallery environment without being tethered to rents or a geographic location. The mobile gallery model allows the gallerist to maintain a physical space where work can be displayed with all the benefits and gravitas of a traditional gallery while easily reaching collectors at art fairs and other large art markets."Brannock's terrific idea and initiative was funded by the MICA office of Research, which funded the Rinehart graduate school of sculpture's trip to Miami with Camper Contemporary.
See the students' work here.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Dreaming
Red Dot was quite hot for a while today.
Reason for that was that the air conditioning system took a few hours to cool the space down, although I heard that across the street Art Miami's AC system actually died in the afternoon!
We managed to put another Tim Tate on hold and are working on a commission deal for Tate as well. Also have a large Sandra Ramos' piece on hold pending measurements of available wall space.
Also sold the below piece by Michael Janis to a well-known Cuban-American collecting couple who live in one of the spectacular homes on Fisher Island here, as well as a home back in DC. I delivered the piece to their home after Red Dot closed, which meant driving to the ferry point and getting a spectacular view of the Miami skyline in a full moon, arriving at Fisher Island and upon arrival getting escorted by security to their home.
Cubans Dreaming of Liberty. Glass, powdered black glass and metal.
Michael Janis
Inside there was a massive treasure of an art collection, including one of the largest and best Jose Bedia's paintings that I have ever seen, in good company with Miro, Picasso, many Latin American artists and a surprising number of DC area artists, betraying the couple's DC roots. I saw work by DC area artists Yuriko Yamaguchi, Rick Wall, Carol Goldberg and several others whose name escapes me now.
And now Michael Janis' beautiful Cubans Dreaming of Liberty joins this spectacular collection overlooking downtown Miami from the bay.
Carlos Finlay
Medical history originally credited Dr. Walter Reed as the doctor whose work solved the scourge of 19th century warm weather, yellow fever, by proving that it was transmitted by mosquitoes.
This work eventually gave birth to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine.
But Cubans and even Dr. Reed himself knew that the real research hero here was a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay.
Finlay was born 176 years ago today in Puerto Principe, Cuba, the son of a Scottish immigrant father and a French immigrant mother. He studied medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1855. Ten years later Dr. Finlay "sent a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Havana outlining his theory on weather conditions and the yellow fever disease. He was the first to theorize that a mosquito was the way by which yellow fever was transmitted; a mosquito that bites a victim of the disease could bite a healthy person and spread the disease...
... In 1871 he spoke at medical conferences in Havana and Washington, D.C., but his theory of mosquito transmission of the virus met with silence from the medical and scientific community.
In 1900, during the first U.S. occupation of Cuba, a U.S. medical commission led by Dr. Walter Reed went to Havana to study the disease. At first the U.S. scientists didn't pursue Dr. Finlay's "mosquito" theories, certain that it was "filth" that spread the yellow fever virus.
When all their experiments failed, they began to look over Dr. Finlay's 19 years of research. Eventually they concluded that yellow fever is contagious only in the first 3 days of illness, and this became the first layer of proof for Dr. Finlay's theory.
When Dr. Reed proved that Dr. Finlay had been right all along, mosquito control programs were introduced throughout Cuba, (and in the Panama Canal zone, where worked had stopped due to yellow fever outbreaks and many deaths) and the disease brought under control.
Sadly, however, Dr. Reed's original report failed to even mention Dr. Finlay's theories and/or research, and it wasn't until 1954 (39 years after Dr. Finlay's death) that the International Congress of Medical History granted him the proper credit.
At the end of the day
The VIP night was last night and the beer, wine and absinthe was flowing in large quantities at Red Dot.
Funny how things work out, but I had predicted that this piece below would sell right away, and it did, but not before I got loads of comments about it from the crowd. Most were anti-Guevara types - this is Miami after all - but I did get into an interesting discussion with an elder gentleman who seemed offended that I had taken such stance against the icon known as Che.
“ASEre ¿SI o NO?
6x16 in. framed to 14x22. Charcoal and Conte on Paper. 2009.
F. Lennox Campello
I asked him if he had ever read Guevara's own diaries, writing and speeches.
No.
I win. At the end, as he walked away he handed me his card. He was a visitor from Cuba. No wonder.
At the end of the day you get nothing from nothing.
At the end of the day we also sold a major Tim Tate to an Alabama collector and several Heather Bryant lithos.
A Question Of Evolution. Blown and Cast Glass. electronics and video. Tim Tate. 2009.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Giant head finished
On Monday I showed you Philly artist Frank Hyder working on his giant inflatable sculpture for the Giants in the City art project at Bayfront Park in Miami this week. As you can see, Hyder finished his work, and the piece looks great.
Giants in the City
That city is Miami and tomorrow the Giants in the City project, curated by my good friend Alejamdro Mendoza, returns to the ABMB festivities with the mobile sculpture project at Bayfront Park in Miami.
Inflatable art sculptures by Gustavo Acosta, Angel Ricardo Rios, Miguel Fleitas, Maite Josune, Tony Kapel, Anaken Koenig, Frank Hyder, Karen Starosta Gilinski, Maki Hachizume, Noor Blazekovic, Tomas Esson, Federico Uribe, Jose Bedia and the curator, Alejandro Mendoza.
By the way, these inflatable sculptures are looking for a venue to be shown in Washington, DC. Everything travels in suitcases and it is super easy to set up, in case some DC gallery or museum is interested in hosting these gigantic works.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Report from the war art front
And nu, so today was hanging day at the Red Dot Art Fair in Miami, and by the time that I got there at 1PM or so, most studious gallerists had already done a lot of hanging so I got a sweet Doris Day parking spot right by the door.
Red Dot is right across the street from Art Miami and nearby to Scope,. Art Miami is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. All three fairs in such a new area of Miami's Wynwood Arts District that the Garmin GPS couldn't find it and I had to find the fair the old school way, which reminded me how scary it is to rely on GPS and then one forgets how to navigate the old fashioned way.
Inside it was a sauna, as the air conditioning won't be turned on until all doors are closed sometime tomorrow.
Anyway, by seven PM or so most of the hanging, wiring, light adjusting, etc. was done, and I walked around the fair to get an early look at what was being displayed. It was a quick look, and certainly more will come later.
The first glance found some really excellent artwork in some galleries and some really questionable work in a small number of booths.
Of early note, I saw some very good Mendives, Fabelos and a great Kcho at Miami's Oñate Fine Art. These were really world class pieces by some of the biggest names in contemporary Cuban art and so far stay in my head as some of the top work at Red Dot.
Tomorrow is press preview at 5PM and VIP party from 6-9PM.
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