Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Studio space available

If you are a glass artists, and have always wanted a studio space to work on your glass, but didn't have room where you live, or didn't have a huge amount to invest in a giant glass studio.....then you might like the thought of becoming one of the studio artists at the Washington Glass School.


Your table/studio space runs $300 per month, and not only do you finally have a dedicated space for you to work in, but you also join a vibrant and successful community of glass artists and opportunities.


Details here.


3700 Otis Street, Mount Rainier, MD 20712202-744-8222
WashGlass.com

Monday, October 03, 2016

Two down and three to go!

This weekend we did both the Affordable Art Fair in NYC and the Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston (thank you Jodi Walsh for manning the booth in TX!).

Brutal work doing an art fair, but nearly always a benefit to an artist and to an art gallery.

Next?

SOFA in Chicago, CONTEXT Art Miami in Miami, and SCOPE Art Fair in Miami Beach!

Sunday, October 02, 2016

Art Scam Alert!

Stay away from this scam artist:

From: dave@daveclemsonllc.com
Am interested in some of your products, do you ship to Switzerland and accept US issued credit card as payment?, you will contact my shipper who handles all of my shipment, they pick up the items at your location and deliver directly to my store doorstep without hassle.

Let me know if i can e-mail you what am interested in ordering.

Dave

Saturday, October 01, 2016

Top picks for the Affordable Art Fair NYC

The Affordable Art Fair New York opened last Wednesday in Chelsea and runs through the weekend.

This popular art fair, versions of which run in multiple American and international cities, is clearly (based on my observations over many years) one of the key venues to acquire reasonably-priced art, both by new collectors as well as seasoned collectors looking for new talent.

I will also admit that this is one of my favorite art fairs on the planet: cool, trendy, well-organized, and superbly run.

As most seasoned art critics, artists, gallerists and art symbiots know, when you walk through art fairs over a period of years, in diverse cities and settings, often trends and connecting lines appear that are clearly obvious to the most casual observer.

The trend here this year seems to be an over abundance of pop art derivatives from artists all over the planet. There are also many artists, in all sorts of media and substrates, whom are rather effectively channeling the epic artists of the Washington Color School. There is stripe art everywhere, in every shape and form and drip factor!

There are also multiple flat brushes channeling Carmen Herrera minimalist style, which remained ignored though most of her life until the Brits "discovered" her work a few years ago, and suddenly the octogenarian became darling of the New York art scene (she's currently at The Whitney).

Warhol look-alikes are also all over the place, but this Warholian footprint is visible in every single art fair on the planet, from the most exclusive to the lowliest ABMB satellite fair.

Overall though, the fair remains a cornucopia of really good talent at very good prices, and AAFNYC continues to earn its reputation as a solid, good art fair for both emerging artists and emerging galleries. And it is also a place where we also always see some of the top blue chip galleries in the world showcase their new talent.

Here are some pieces that caught my eye:

Michele Mikesell ("Enmascarado" is depicted above) shows with DECORAZON, which has galleries in both London and New York. I was immediately attracted to her work, which reminded me a little of the DMV's Matt Sesow or the early work of Alabama's Michael Banks. Mikesell's wet sanding process delivers a beautifully crafted oil painting whose images are intelligent, disturbing and hypnotizing.

Michael Lukasiewicz

London Contemporary Art, obviously based in London, is showcasing the work of Michael Lukasiewicz, a very talented painter who could teach a lesson or two to the Washington Color School channellers about how a contemporary painter can stand on the shoulders of giants from the past and deliver something related, but fresh and new. Look at the way in his "Breathless" (acrylic and gesso on canvas) uses a little of Sam Gilliam's draped paintings color to offer a radical new approach to the use of color.

Queen by Dagmar Van Weeghel
"Queen", depicted above, is from a series of gorgeous photographs by Dagmar Van Weeghel, represented by Amsterdam's The Public House of Art gallery. The power, presence and scale (very large photo) make an unforgettable impact from the very beginning. At the risk of revealing my childhood heroes, Conan The Barbarian is not too far from this powerful woman, and in some universe she might be his queen.

I also liked Marek Zya's sculptures with Carmel, Indiana gallery Evan Lurie, and the mixed media pieces by Ruben Ireland with NYC's CURIOOS gallery.

The fair is at the Met Pavilion in Chelsea and runs through Sunday.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

"Tipping Point" finds a home in NYC


That's Alma Selimovic's "Tipping Point" being packed up and heading to the home of an NYC collector! We're at the Affordable Art Fair in NYC, booth 1.36

Wanna show your work in Miami?

 Update: All done with the below call...

We have an opportunity to sponsor an artist for a solo exhibition at the "public spaces" of the next Context Art Fair in Miami during Art Basel week. Context is the sister fair to Art Miami and in my opinion one of the top fairs during ABMB. It's the fair that we do each year!

Artist would be responsible for all logistics, costs, etc., and keeps 100% of all sales - we're just the sponsor... Anyone interested send me an email to lennycampello at hotmail dot com for all details...

Hurry! Will pick one person in next 24 hours!

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

In NYC #aafnyc

Whitney Museum of Art, one street over from my NYC hotel
Arrived at NYC after a surreal drive where I never slowed down all the way from Maryland, all the way through the empty Holland Tunnel, and eerily empty Manhattan backstreets... made it all the way to the hotel on Jane Street in 3.5 hours or so!

$60 bucks a day to park the gallery van across the street from the Met Pavillion, where the Fall edition of the Affordable Art Fair starts tomorrow!

The Affordable Art Fair, specifically designed and curated for those just beginning to collect art as well as seasoned collectors looking for emerging artists, is back in New York, from September 28th to October 2nd!

Van's packed

The van is packed, and we're heading to NYC later tonight - the Affordable Art Fair NYC opens tomorrow. We're featuring Lori Katz, Dulce Pinzon, Elissa Farrow-Savos and Alma Selimovic!


Come see us in booth 1.36.


Tipping Point
2016 by Alma Selimovic
110x60x75in
Welded steel, wire, copper patina, stone

Sunday, September 25, 2016

We're going to the fair!

Lori Katz
Wall of Squares
55” x 45” x 2.5"

Stoneware with slips, underglaze, glaze, and mixed media including high-temperature wire,
oil paint, cold wax, metal leaf
You will be able to see this piece and many others works by DMV master ceramic artist Lori Katz in New York at the coming Affordable Art Fair. We will have works by Katz, Dulce Pinzon, Elissa Farrow-Savos, Alma Selimovic and The Lenster.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

UUUUUUyyyyy!

Check out this call for artists....

If I was a politician.... then:

One side: This is a scandalous rip off designed to charge a huge commission (66%) to artists....

Other side: This is an opportunity for artists to support an arts organization via your artwork, while at the same time "seeding" your art through new collectors.

Everything has a ying and a yang, everything has two sides, for every action there's an equal, but opposite reaction.

Moral of the story? ====> Dogma in politics sucks! (Brought to you by a fine arts example...)

Cough, cough.... 

PS - I plan to participate and support this call.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Artomatic@Baltimore

CALL FOR ARTISTS
Artomatic@Baltimore
Artomatic is pleased to announce Artomatic@Baltimore as the first 
independently organized and licensed Artomatic event.


Artomatic@Baltimore 
is happy to announce the 
Call For Artists! 
 Be a part of the first ever 
Artomatic event of its kind to be held 
in Baltimore, within the historic 
Montgomery Park building 
November 4, 2016-December 10, 2016

Online registration began Monday, September 19th!

Thursday, September 22, 2016

New Altar piece heading to Texas

The Affordable Art Fair is in New York City next week (send me a note if you'd like some passes). And the Texas Contemporary Art Fair is in Houston also next week and at the exact same time! (send me a note if you'd like some passes). 

In New York we will debut new work by Mexico's amazing photographer Dulce Pinzon and in Texas we will showcase her epic True Superheroes series

Also in NYC, there will be new work by the very talented Lori Katz, Elissa Farrow-Savos and Alma Selimovic!

In Texas we will also showcase work by the superbly gifted artists Jodi Walsh and Georgia Nassikas.

The below new piece is heading to Texas... it has several hundred digital files of artwork randomly selected from the web using Google Images and script that does random search on parameters such as "famous artist", etc. The digital image changes every five seconds.

“At the Altar of Modern Art" by F. Lennox Campello
2016. Charcoal, Conte and Embedded Electronics. 36 X 18

“At the Altar of Modern Art" by F. Lennox Campello
2016. Charcoal, Conte and Embedded Electronics. 36 X 18

“At the Altar of Modern Art" by F. Lennox Campello
2016. Charcoal, Conte and Embedded Electronics. 36 X 18

“At the Altar of Modern Art" by F. Lennox Campello
2016. Charcoal, Conte and Embedded Electronics. 36 X 18

“At the Altar of Modern Art" by F. Lennox Campello
2016. Charcoal, Conte and Embedded Electronics. 36 X 18
 

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Opportunity in the other Washington

 Deadline for application: Monday, October 17, 2016

The City of Auburn is seeking artists and/or artist groups working in two-dimensional media to exhibit their work at three City of Auburn gallery spaces during 2017. Galleries are within City operated buildings including City Hall, Auburn Senior Center (Cheryl Sallee Gallery) and Community and Event Center. Artists and/or artists groups of diverse mediums are encouraged to apply, including but not limited to: paint, ink, pencil, mixed media, textiles, mosaic, glass, recycled materials, photography, calligraphy, collage, fiber art, etc.

Details here.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Opportunity for Artists

The City of Mountain View’s Visual Arts Committee is inviting artists and artist teams working in a variety of media to exhibit public art in the lobby of the Center for Performing Arts for the 2017 season.

This year the Visual Arts Committee is requiring a theme of Global Cultural Art. Global Cultural Art is described as how cultures and communities have defined and derived their art, art representitive of different cultures. All artwork must be able to be hung on the Center for Performing Arts system per the requirements listed under Installation on the Floor/Site Plan.

The rotating exhibits are approximately nine weeks in length and are viewed by thousands of people visiting downtown Mountain View and attending shows at the Center for Performing Arts. The Visual Arts Committee would like to encourage exhibits by all local professional artists residing in the 11 San Francisco Bay Area counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Benito, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano and Sonoma) and, the City will provide insurance, installation and will offer a small stipend to help defray costs.


Apply here - No fees!

Monday, September 19, 2016

Artomatic in Baltimore!

CALL FOR ARTISTS: Artomatic@Baltimore!

Artomatic@Baltimore is happy to announce the Call For Artists! 
 
 Be a part of the first ever Artomatic event of its kind to be held in Baltimore, within the historic Montgomery Park building. 

Online registration starts today Monday, September 19th!

Sunday, September 18, 2016

In process

Two new drawings in process and which will be hopefully ready for the Affordable Art Fair in NYC in two weeks...
The Batman Naked and The Boy Wonder Naked - unfinished - by F. Lennox Campello, c. 2016
The Batman Naked and The Boy Wonder Naked - unfinished - by F. Lennox Campello, c. 2016

Saturday, September 17, 2016

31st Annual Mayor's Arts Awards special honorees and finalists

Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) have announced the special honorees and finalists of the 31st Annual Mayor's Arts Awards.

My good bud, printmaker and visual artist (and DMV treasure) Lou Stovall will receive the Mayor's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement. Stovall is the founder of Workshop, Inc., and it a master printmaker who has been commissioned to print works of such noted artists as Josef Albers, Peter Blume, Alexander Calder, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Loïs Mailou Jones and others.

Theatre producer Julianne Brienza will receive the Mayor's Arts Award for Visionary Leadership. Brienza is a founder and current president and chief executive officer of Capital Fringe, which connects multi-disciplinary artistic experiences to over 40,000 audiences annually and has grown to become the second largest unjuried Fringe Festival in the United States.

Poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller will receive the Mayor's Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. Miller is the author of several collections of poetry, and his anthology "In Search of Color Everywhere" was awarded the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 1994. He has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine in the United States, and was founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, which presented African American poets and poets of color to the general public.

"Our three special honorees represent some of the brightest, most accomplished talents in the District of Columbia," said Arthur Espinoza, Jr., Executive Director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. "The impact of their work is felt locally, nationally and internationally. They, along with all this year's award finalists, represent the incredible richness and depth of our city's creative communities."
In addition to the special honorees, awards will be presented to DC-based individual artists and organizations in the following categories: Outstanding New Artist, Excellence in the Humanities, Outstanding Student, Excellence in the Arts. Excellence in Arts Teaching and Excellence in the Creative Industries.

The 2016 Mayor's Arts Award finalists are: Story District, Michael Janis, DC Jazz Festival, Washington Improv Theatre, Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital, Washington Performing Arts, DC Shorts, Pan American Symphony Orchestra, Post Classical Ensemble, Cory L. Stowers, Falun Dafa Association of Washington, Carolyn Malachi, One Common Unity, Sandy Bellamy, Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, Dance Metro DC, Stone Soup Films, Leron Boyd, DC SCORES, Project Create, Amanda Swift, LifePieces to Masterpieces, Washington Performing Arts, Dawn Johnson, Inner City-Inner Child, Young Playwrights' Theater, Split This Rock, Max Tyler Gibbons, Tara Campbell and Maverick Lemons.



My bet is on Michael Janis... of course!

The 31st Annual Mayor's Arts Awards will be presented on Thursday, September 22 at 7:00 PM at the Historic Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U Street NW, Washington, DC. Admission is free and open to the public. This year, the annual awards are presented as part of 202Creates, a new initiative of Mayor Bowser's that showcases the diversity of the District's creative economy. For more information, visit
www.dcarts.dc.gov or call 202-724-5613.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Aubrey Beardsley at auction

A series of drawings that launched the professional career of fin de siècle artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) are up for sale at Swann Auction Galleries in New York on September 29.

Chapter ornaments for a publication of Thomas Mallory’s medieval masterpiece, Le Morte d’Arthur, the drawings carry motifs that were to recur in Beardsley’s work throughout his short-lived career, as well as displaying the individual style that took him from the Arts & Crafts movement to the Aesthetic movement and Art Nouveau.

Fresh to the market after nearly 30 years, the works will appear in Swann Galleries’ Illustration Art auction. They are not just the accomplished creations of an emerging artist, but important historical documents casting light on a seminal moment in art history.

In his 1988 article Thomas Mackenzie and the Beardsley Legacy, art historian Colin White describes how, in 1893, the newly established publishing house JM Dent commissioned the 21-year-old Beardsley to illustrate the 12-part edition of Mallory’s work, instructing him to use woodcuts by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Coley Burne Jones as inspiration.

So successful were Beardsley’s initial drawings, says White, that they enraged William Morris, the leader of the Arts & Crafts movement, in whose Kelmscott Press volumes the Burne Jones woodcuts had appeared. Morris saw Beardsley’s work as little more than plagiarism of the Kelmscott house style.

Eventually overcome with enormity of the task ahead of him, Beardsley started to fill in areas of detail with black, emulating Japanese woodblock prints, an exercise that led him to experiment with a new style and direction in his work.

With a provenance directly back to JM Dent, this is the first time that the drawings offered in the Illustration Art sale have appeared at auction since 1988.

The first up for sale is Rose Bush, an ornamental device for Book VI, chapter VI of Le Morte d’Arthur. In pen and ink on paper, it comes estimated at $3,000 to $4000. The rose is a recurrent symbol for decadence in Beardsley’s work, and the almost abstract nature of this design shows the mastery of his hand.

The following lot is another ornamental device, this time of Three Stylized Clematis Flowers, created for Book VI chapter XVIII, and it carries the same estimate.

The slightly smaller ornamental device for Book VI chapter XII is of Four Large Lillies and is guided at $2,000 to $3,000, while the final lot, encompassing two slightly cruder ornamental devices, Dog Roses, and Three Stylized Leaves, for Book II, chapter VI and VII are being offered together at $1,200 to $1,800.

By coincidence, the sale also features a stunning watercolor illustration by Thomas Mackenzie (1887-1944), the greatly admired Bradford-born contemporary of Beardsley.

Mackenzie illustrated works such as Arthur Ransome’s Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp in Rhyme and Arthur and his Knights, by Christine Chaundler. He landed his first commission, The Crock of Gold, an Irish folk tale by James Stephens, after the intended illustrator, Arthur Rackham, died.

Mackenzie’s richly colored, dreamlike illustrations evoke a sense of magic and other-worldliness that echo both Rackham and Beardsley. The lot on offer shows why he is ripe for rediscovery by a wider audience.

He saw Cairilin Ni Murrachu walking a little way in front comes from The Crock of Gold and is a watercolor and pencil on board. At 15¼ x 10 inches, and dated 1925, the signed image is estimated at $3,000 to $5,000.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Colin Kaepernick doesn't know this...


Wanna know about one of the world's most racist dictatorships? Click here.

Also, I believe that 400,000+ heroes buried at Arlington Cemetery is more than 400,000 reasons to stand for the national anthem.