we make it art

If I were you...

2011-01-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

I'm not based in Baltimore anymore, at least not for this year which is why I have taken a long hiatus from this blog. But I still like to know what interesting art happenings are going on in the Baltimore/DC area. I recently read this great interview in Art in America with Alexis Rockman, promoting his current exhibition A Fable for Tomorrow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. If I were you... I'd see this show.

on view at the American Art Museum in DC

Alexis Rockman
by Dan Tranberg, Art in America 12/1/10

Washington For more than 25 years, Alexis Rockman has been making lush figurative paintings depicting dubious moments in human and natural history, from the Industrial Revolution through today’s unfolding eco-disasters. Informed by his entwined passions for art history, activism and the natural sciences, the work reflects a persistent questioning of painting’s possibilities, both as a historically charged narrative medium and as a vehicle for raising social and political awareness.

“Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow,” the first major survey to trace Rockman’s career from the mid-1980s to the present, opened last month at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Among the exhibition’s 47 works are Rockman’s first mural-size painting, Evolution (1992), and his most recent, Manifest Destiny (2004), commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which depicts that New York borough projected 3,000 years into the future, submerged as a consequence of global warming.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Rockman attended the Rhode Island School of Design (1980-82), earned a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1985 and has since presented over 50 solo exhibitions worldwide. An early career turning point was the 1985 group exhibition “From Organism to Architecture” at the New York Studio School, organized by Ross Bleckner, in which Rockman’s work was displayed alongside paintings by Max Beckmann and Cy Twombly.

During his childhood, his mother, Diana diZerega Wall, an anthropology professor at the City College of New York, worked at the American Museum of Natural History. The museum, with its dramatic dioramas and dark, labyrinthine halls, became Rockman’s playground. He credits his stepfather—the late Russell Rockman, an Australian-born jazz enthusiast—with teaching him the value of being a specialist, of cultivating one’s own territory and of practicing. He also introduced the young Rockman to science-fiction movies.

As a teenager, Rockman considered channeling his interests into a career in the film industry, possibly creating stop-motion animations. He eventually concluded that being a painter would better suit his temperament, but recently an opportunity arose to revisit his childhood aspirations. Rockman received a call from filmmaker Ang Lee, who asked him to create a series of inspirational drawings—watercolors to help visualize the appearance and atmosphere of various scenes—for Lee’s film adaptation, currently in production, of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel The Life of Pi, a fantastical story about the adventures of an Indian zookeeper’s precocious son.

I first met Rockman on a visit to his Tribeca studio in March. We talked at length again in late June, as he intermittently worked on a new painting.

DAN TRANBERG Almost everything written about you mentions your mother and your experience growing up running around the American Museum of Natural History, as that connects to the subject of your work and its populist flavor. I wonder if you can tell me about your stepfather and his influence on you as an artist.

ALEXIS ROCKMAN My stepfather was often in his own world, “doing his thing,” practicing and listening to the music he loved, which was a very specific kind of bebop. He taught me that it mattered to have your own interests. There was the idea of one’s subjectivity, but also the idea that there is such a thing as greatness, and that it’s a combination of intellectual rigor and feeling. You have to be in the moment, but you also have to be prepared for the moment. So, repetition is a big part of learning to be a jazz musician, and that was an important lesson for me as an artist. On the other hand, I rebelled against jazz in general because I really didn’t relate to it as music. It wasn’t that accessible. But I admired his love of it.

DT The dioramas you saw at the natural history museum have plainly informed your work, providing a model for creating a dramatic and engaging way to communicate to a broad audience. How else did the diorama format inspire you early on in your career?

AR One of the things about the diorama that always seemed like fertile ground to me, in terms of being an artist, was that it influenced how I saw the world. I also noticed that not many artists regarded the diorama format as an opportunity. Because I felt so close to it, I was really overjoyed to feel that I could stake out that territory as my own in the early ’80s.

DT Because no one else was using the diorama?

AR No one else was using it for painting. I was very encouraged that Robert Smithson had alluded to the implications of the format in natural history museums in his early writings. He talked specifically about looking at dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and then going to Central Park and seeing garbage in the pond and imagining that as a primordial landscape. So, I felt an affinity with him even though my work wasn’t anything like his.

DT Were you interested primarily in the subject of natural history, or did you also feel that the diorama offered formal opportunities as a model for your paintings?

AR It was both. I felt that using it as a format for painting had so much potential—for being about a specific place, but also being a very theatrical type of space that has a foreground, a middle ground and a background, and often a miraculous vision of above and below.

DT That kind of theatrical space is very apparent in your early work, but in your most recent series of paintings, “Half-Life,” the background has gone from a scenic image to a Color Field painting. Tell me about that.

AR I have always seen the background, or the space behind whatever I’m painting in the foreground, as a piece of history. You could see it as a diorama background or just the wall behind the object, but I’ve never really believed it as space. It’s always a placeholder. That’s why the background in my paintings can appear to be a Hudson River School painting, a Color Field painting or a even a photographic blur.

DT In your early work, there seems to be a more direct connection between the imagery you’re presenting and what we typically see in dioramas. For example, the distant background will often clearly appear to be the sky beyond a scenic terrain. When you put a Color Field painting in the background, doesn’t the implication change for the audience, or for the kind of conversation you’re encouraging?

AR No, it’s just that the background is a placeholder for a different history, a different place or a different geography. Color Field painting is a post-WWII American idea. Looking back even further, it’s a type of space that became possible only after the Industrial Revolution. From my perspective, it’s about toxic by-products, and things like the development of acrylic paint, which first became commercially available in the 1950s but arose from wartime technology. When acrylic paint first came out, it quite literally was toxic. It killed people. So for me, Morris Louis is the toxic sublime. Color Field painting represents technology as opposed to retinal vision. I never really thought of the scenic backgrounds as space—they’re always history.

DT What happens when the viewer has absolutely no idea who Morris Louis is?

AR I think, whether you know who Morris Louis is or not, you can still get the sense that it’s a trippy, psychedelic, hallucinatory space. I’m interested in the idea that children and the non-art-going public will be able to understand that regardless of their education. When you’re having a show at a place like the Smithsonian, you understand that at least part of the audience is outside of the art world. I think, because of my reaction to my stepfather’s elitism, and because I couldn’t relate to jazz, I’ve always felt that I don’t want to do that to, or be that for, other people. So if you don’t know anything about Color Field painting, that’s fine. You can see those backgrounds as toxic spills.

DT A lot of writers tend to regard your work as illustrating an environmental position. How do you feel about that?

AR It’s a mixed blessing. There are times when I feel it’s a ghetto, but it’s part of the baggage that comes with being direct. That’s the history of activism. You have to be blunt.

DT When things like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are happening in the world, it’s hard not to make a connection with your images.

AR That’s just one piece of the puzzle. There are versions of that happening in dozens of places all over the world right now, and there’s such a long history of this stuff. It’s human history. It’s been the story ever since humans crawled up and jogged out of central Africa.

DT Still, almost all of your paintings clearly are saying “take a look at this,” whether it’s genetic modification, as in your painting The Farm [2000], or global warming, as in Manifest Destiny. So, by spotlighting those issues, your paintings do, in a sense, serve the cause of alerting the public.

AR Right, and I accept that to a certain extent, but it also gets tiresome. I care about the issues, obviously, but I have mixed feelings about being viewed exclusively that way. When I first started out, to have something like environmentalism in mind as a painter was considered so wrong that I felt it was radical. I was very aware that Clement Greenberg would not approve, and lots of people would be shaking their heads, saying, “you can’t do that.” But that was exciting to me.

DT It seems very lucky to me that you were able to establish a platform so early in your career that has served you for so long.

AR It’s lucky, but it also has taken discipline. As an artist, to know what you want is 90 percent of the psychological battle. But I didn’t just arrive at it. It was a struggle. I had to come around to it. And in order to take myself seriously, I had to reject my childhood at first, and then I had to go back and embrace it. That’s when I think my work really started, when I embraced my own history.

DT Looking back at New York in the 1980s, there were all kinds of things happening in art that were not even close to what you were doing as a figurative painter. You were not part of Neo-Expressionism, or Neo-Geo, or the East Village scene. I’m wondering how you situated yourself amid everything that was going on.

AR I really wanted to be on my own. I was happy to be one of the very few painters at my gallery, Jay Gorney, when he first opened in 1985. He was interested in post-conceptual work, very smart, and very eclectic, which I really liked. And I considered myself to be a conceptual painter. But I also wanted to be a real painter. I looked to people like Polke, Taaffe, Bleckner and even Kiefer for the idea of making highly subjective history. I looked at their works carefully to have a sense of how to make something feel credible. I thought that there was a way to have it both ways.

Then I met Mark Dion, who I had heard about. We’d been at the School of the Visual Arts at the same time, but we met later, in ’88, I think, and I was surprised that there was another artist who was interested in many of the same things, like ecology, biology and conservation. He came to it from a very different place, and even though our work looked quite different, it was nice to not be completely alone. And it was great that what he was doing wasn’t painting. We’d go on trips and expeditions. He introduced me to the idea that you could actually travel somewhere and do something in the tradition of the 19th- or early 20th-century adventurer/researcher, and that was exciting, because it was a way to get out of the studio.

DT Can you tell me about some of the places you visited with Dion, and some of the work you did during those trips?

AR We went to Belize in 1990, but the biggest trip was in ’94, when we went camping for six weeks along the Essequibo River system in Guyana. That was where Charles Darwin and [American naturalist, explorer and author] William Beebe [1877-1962] had been—two people from the worlds of ecology and biology whom Mark and I both admired tremendously. The idea for me was to go to a place and create work based solely on empiricism—on what I could see with my own eyes. That’s where I started making the “Field Drawings,” which were done from observation. I had run out of materials, and Mark had pulled some mud from the riverbank. We just were kidding around and started making drawings with it. So many of my best ideas come from joking around.

DT I’m curious about who and what else has inspired you.

AR In the mid-’80s, I was looking at people like Kenny Scharf, and that would be inspiring because his work was so crazy, and he was so unabashedly enthusiastic about what he was into. And I think there’s a transgressive, childlike element that is really what some parts of the 20th century were all about. On a certain level, I felt encouraged by that to do things with my work, like showing a pig fucking a duck. One side of it, though, is very serious, because it’s about the frustration of artificial selection.

DT That’s an interesting example, because many images in your work are horrific to me, but then there’s a suggestion of humor.

AR Oh, there’s a lot of humor. At least I hope there is. I mean, I was laughing so hard. For me, humor is a way to give yourself permission to say things that you wouldn’t say if you were being serious. You would censor yourself.

DT Tell me more about the “Field Drawings,” which depict isolated motifs—animals, insects, plants—on stark white grounds with an abbreviated vocabulary of marks. They’re very beautiful.

AR Yeah, they’re almost like calligraphy, like pictograms or fossils. When I started them in the mid-1990s, I was taking a cue from the Earth artists, in terms of using materials that are about the specificity of place. So, instead of paint, the “Field Drawings” are made from things like wombat poop, pulverized fossils and garbage juice. And I’m combining that with a type of pictorialism that feels uniquely American, which is the idea of the field guide.

DT I’m intrigued by these shifts in your process, from the “Field Drawings” to a mural-size visionary painting like Manifest Destiny to your “Weather Drawings,” which feel quite spontaneous in their depictions of tornadoes, toxic emissions and landslides.

AR A painting like Manifest Destiny was a real challenge because there was so much architecture, and it was so much about articulating intellectual space. Making that was very much a forward-looking, goal-oriented process. The “Weather Drawings” are a direct response to the tedium of that process—the desire to make something very quickly and very directly. I wanted alchemy.

DT Manifest Destiny is very clearly a history painting in that it depicts an epic historical event, albeit an imagined one, which is the destruction of Brooklyn as a result of global warming. You’ve talked before about the idea of official and unofficial versions of history. Can you elaborate on that?

AR It’s not an original idea, but history is written by the winners. History is manipulated by those who have the power. It’s like the Public Enemy song—to quote Chuck D, “most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.” That’s why I try to make history paintings that are about failure and disappointment.

DT What is history painting today? How do you think it functions now?

AR My thinking about history painting is that you can paint something that’s in the past or something that’s in the future. I just finished one called Mesopotamia for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, a commission through the Art in Embassies Program. It’s a painting of what used to exist in and around the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the ecosystem that was dependent on the water, which is all gone now. So, you see a Caspian tiger, for example. Saddam had drained the whole ecosystem before America put a nail in the coffin. Now, the whole area is just dead.

DT I’m wondering what it means to you to be placing all of this in the form of a painting versus, say, a film or video.

AR I think that one of the great privileges of being a painter is that it’s so intimate. It’s so visceral. I think about Dutch still-life painting and the idea of illusionistic space, of lovingly describing surface. It’s about intimacy, and it’s about painting something that’s transient—a memento mori. So, much of my thinking about these paintings has to do with something that will be lost. That’s why certain elements in my paintings, like the loving description of feathers or rat hairs, feel so wrong in the shadow of modernism, because modernism is really about denying biology.

DT You use photographs as sources for your paintings, but in many cases you’re painting something that doesn’t truly exist. For example, The Farm includes a cow shaped like a box and tomatoes shaped like slices of pie.

AR I’m interested in that tension between what’s possible and what’s not possible. Sometimes you have to give yourself a basis of credibility in one area in order to suspend disbelief in another area. And I like the idea of painting the un-photographable, painting time travel. That’s why something like science-fiction illustration is interesting to me. It’s about looking for ways that painting can matter.

DT One of the things that really interests me about your paintings is that they don’t function solely in the esoteric social space of the art world.

AR Right, but who knows whether or not that’s going to seem interesting in 50 years, or if that’s going to make any sense. But from my perspective, those seemingly irreconcilable impulses are what create my body of work. If my paintings were all so tasteful and safe and predictable then they wouldn’t be challenging. And I was brought up in a context where you have to challenge. You have to be skeptical. On the other hand, many of my heroes have been relegated to the dustbin of history, and I don’t know what that means.

“Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow” is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,Washington, D.C. [Nov. 19, 2010-May 8, 2011], and will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio [Sept. 24, 2011-Jan. 1, 2012].

DAN TRANBERG is an artist and critic who teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

We will miss you, Mme. Bourgeois

2010-06-01T03:11:00.000-07:00

Louise Bourgeois, Influential Sculptor, Dies at 98
by Holland Cotter
Published: May 31, 2010
New York Times

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on the work of younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 98.The cause was a heart attack, said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Among her most familiar sculptures was the much-exhibited “Nature Study” (1984), a headless sphinx with powerful claws and multiple breasts. Perhaps the most provocative was “Fillette” (1968), a large, detached latex phallus. Ms. Bourgeois can be seen carrying this object, nonchalantly tucked under one arm, in a portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe taken for the catalog of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (In the catalog, the Mapplethorpe picture is cropped to show only the artist’s smiling face.)

That retrospective brought Ms. Bourgeois, in her early 70s, the critical and popular acclaim that had long eluded her. In 1993 she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In an art world where women had been treated as second-class citizens and were discouraged from dealing with overtly sexual subject matter, she quickly assumed an emblematic presence. Her work was read by many as an assertive feminist statement, her career as an example of perseverance in the face of neglect.

Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of pain as the subject of her art, and fear: fear of the grip of the past, of the uncertainty of the future, of loss in the present.

“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said. “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” She added: “The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.” Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.

Louise Bourgeois was born on Dec. 25, 1911, on the Left Bank of Paris, the second of three children born to Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. Her parents, financially comfortable, owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth the family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration in Choisy-le-Roi. Ms. Bourgeois remembered as a child drawing fragments of missing images to help in the repairs.

She often spoke of her early, emotionally conflicted family life as formative. Her practical and affectionate mother, who was an invalid, was a positive influence. Her father’s domineering disposition, as well as his marital infidelities (he had a 10-year affair with the children’s English governess), instilled a resentment and an insecurity that Ms. Bourgeois never laid to rest.

Her nightmarish tableau of 1974, “The Destruction of the Father,” for example, is a table in a stagily lighted recess, which holds an arrangement of breastlike bumps, phallic protuberances and other biomorphic shapes in soft-looking latex that suggest the sacrificial evisceration of a body, the whole surrounded by big, crude mammillary forms. Ms. Bourgeois has suggested as the tableau’s inspiration a fantasy from childhood in which a pompous father, whose presence deadens the dinner hour night after night, is pulled onto the table by other family members, dismembered and gobbled up.

Similarly, for a 1994 exhibition titled “Louise Bourgeois: Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” she created a single sculpture and suite of drawings in which the central image was a spider, a creature she associated with her mother, a woman of ever-changing moods.

New York Times Slideshow

PBS Art 21

This Weekend

2010-04-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

4.23.10

2010 MFA Thesis Exhibition @ University of Maryland, College Park

Thesis Exhibiton for 2010 MFA candidates at University of Maryland. The Exhibition includes: Jack Henry, Joe Hoffman, Tim Horjus, Sarah Laing, and Stewart Watson.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 23, 2010 5-7pm

UMD Art Gallery
1202 Art-Sociology Building, 2nd floor Atrium
College Park, MD 20742

MFA THESIS III @ MICA

Whisk by Natalie Andrews

Featuring: Natalie Andrews (Rinehart School of Sculpture), Calder Brannock (Rinehart), Deng-Yao Chang (Mount Royal School of Art), Graham Coreil-Allen (Mount Royal), Steven Cummings (Photographic & Electronic Media), Ben Kelley (Rinehart), Jeffrey Kent (Hoffberger School of Painting), Lawrence Lee (Mount Royal), Joshua Lefchick (Hoffberger), Joe Letourneau (Rinehart), Christina Martinelli (Rinehart), Michel Modell (Hoffberger), James Singwald (Photographic & Electronic Media), Ailsa Staub (Rinehart), and Neil Jones (Photographic & Electronic Media).

liar liar pants on fire by Michel Modell

Abandoned by Steve Cummings

Exhibition Dates: Friday, April 23-Sunday, May 2, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, April 23, 2010 5-7 p.m.
Gallery Talks: Tuesday, April 27, 3-5 p.m. and Wednesday, April 28, 1-3 p.m.

Fox Building
1303 W. Mount Royal Ave.
Baltimore, MD

Graham Coreil-Allen's Public Sites thesis project has select tour dates. Click here for more information. And Deng-Yao Chang's Gallery Intimacy Acts performance piece invites the public to sleep over in the Decker Gallery. Click here for more information.)

For an online slide show of artwork in this exhibition, click here

4.24.10

Composites @ Katzen Art Museum, American University

American University Art Department is proud to present Composites: American University 2010 MFA Thesis Exhibition featuring work by Brendan Loper, Mindy Hirt, Amy Kreiger, Claire Feng, Rachel Sitkin, Jerri Castillo, Carlie Leagjeld, Yumi Hogan, Meaggan Rees Eckert, Matthew Shelley and Annette Isham.

Closing Reception: Saturday, April 24, 2010 4-6pm

Katzen Art Museum
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington, DC 20016

Lotta Art @ School 33
This annual event raises funds for the support and growth of School 33, the renowned Baltimore arts institution that has championed the arts for nearly 30 years through exhibitions, studio space, and arts education.

Lotta Art features juried art by more than 120 local artists who have generously donated their work to benefit School 33 Art Center. Each art ticket holder is guaranteed a work of art in this lottery-style drawing.

Continuous Cocktail Buffet and art viewing begins at 6pm. Drawing begins promptly at 7:30pm

Tickets

Silo Point
1200 Steuart Street
Baltimore, MD

This Weekend

2010-04-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

4.15.10

7th Annual Transmodern Festival @ All Over Town

The 7th Annual Transmodern Festival (Live.Art.Auction) will be held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the H & H building galleries and the Baltimore Waterfront from Thursday April 15th to Sunday, April 18th. Following last year’s record attendance and crowds, the festival expands programming to the Baltimore Museum of Art, continues programming on all four floors of the H&H Building and moves outdoor site-specific work to selected areas of Baltimore waterfront. The festival’s visionary approach to presenting new multi-disciplinary work continues to attract regional art lovers, local cultural mavens, occasional passers-by, critical acclaim, and on-going academic interest.

The festival kicks off on Thursday, April 15 at the Baltimore Museum of Art with an hour-long experimental film program including three recent Guggenheim fellows. The evening continues with cutting-edge performance art and experimental pop music from Dynasty Handbag (NYC), Lexie Mountain Boys (Balto.), Melissa Dyne (NYC), and Khaela Maricich (aka The Blow, NYC).

On Friday, April 16th Nudashank Gallery, Gallery Four, The 5th Dimension, and the Whole Gallery will open for three floors of sensory delight, interactive art, roaming performances, and other major installations. A sample of featured local artists include: April Lewis, Sarah Jablecki, Jen Kirby, and the Annex Theater presenting a full immersion theatrical production with a live band based on the 1973 film “Fantastic Planet.” National artists include: Harrison Haynes (NC), Dan Gluibizzi, Benjamin Phalen (NYC), Laura Brothers, Suzy Poling (Pod Blotz), Robert Lowe (Chicago), Stephanie Rothenberg (NYC),Ben Russell (Chicago), and Zaïmph aka Marcia Bassett of the critically-acclaimed NYC underground band Double Leopards

Saturday evening, April 17th brings the opening of all four floors of the H&H. Major installations from previous nights will be available for viewing and a stage-oriented show will take place at Floristree on the 6th Floor at 8:30pm. Artists presenting at Floristree: People Like Us (UK) comprised of Vicki Bennett a major voice in European multidisciplinary A/V work. Ms. Bennett’s work has been featured at the Tate Modern, Pompidou Centre, Sydney Opera House, and she also presents a regular radio program on WFMU in NYC – also featured – Carly Ptak (Balto.), Joseph Keckler (NYC), Robby Rackleff (Balto.), and Blues Control (Philadelphia).

Sunday, April 18th from noon-4:00pm brings Pedestrian Services Exquisite, a site-specific afternoon of events dedicated to exploring the public spaces in Baltimore. PSE 2010 features an urban safari of the nooks and grannies in, around and in-between Baltimore’s Locust Point and FellsPoint waterfronts. With over 40 different artist projects, expect an afternoon of extraordinary situations, performances, excursions, tours and intriguing whatnots! The event will feature Fluid Movement’s LOVE PARADE with the Westsiders, as well as a mobile art center – the Urban Engine.

The Transmodern Festival will partner with Johns Hopkins University later on Sunday, April 18th at 4:00pm to present a lecture by Vicki Bennett of People Like Us (UK.) This special free lecture will be available to the general public.

On Sunday, April 18th in the evening, the Transmodern Festival will be partnering with the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at UMBC to present “Maggots and Men” an experimental, historical narrative set in post-revolutionary Russia. The film re-tells the story of the 1921 uprising of the Kronstadt sailors with a subtext of gender anarchy. The film screening is free and will occur at 6:00pm at UMBC.

The Transmodern Festival continues to be a one-of-a-kind Baltimore phenomenon presenting experimental, expectation-defying work from local and national artists. We continue to hold fast and proud to our mission of highly representing women, minority, and GLBTQ artists.

www.transmodernfestival.org

David Brewster & Elizabeth Wade @ C. Grimaldis Gallery

Elizabeth Wade, St. George and the Dragon

David Brewster, Removing Safes from the Ruble: Great Baltimore Fire (1904)

C. Grimaldis Gallery is proud to present two simultaneous solo painting exhibitions- Elizabeth Wade: Bete Sauvages & David Brewster: Conflagration.

Exhibition Dates: April 15 - May 15, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday April 15, 2010 6-8 pm

C. Grimaldis Gallery
523 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

4.16.10

Horror Vacui @ Nudashank

Nudashank will be presenting Horror Vacui, a group exhibition featuring Laura Brothers (NY), Harrison Haynes (NC), Benjamin Phelan (NY), Dan Gluibizzi Jr (NY), and Charles Broskoski (NY). This multimedia exhibition will include painting, sculpture, photography, video and digital prints. The title Horror Vacui refers to a fear of empty spaces, each of the works use retro sci-fi aesthetics to examine the fear of the emptiness of a contemporary existence so heavily enmeshed with technology.

Exhibition Dates: Friday April 16 - May 7, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday april 16, 2010 6-8:30 pm

Nudashank
H & H Arts Building 3rd Floor
405 W. Franklin St.
Baltimore, MD

Beki Basch: Vision Quest Lundi: Baltimore @ Open Space
Open Space is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and film by the Baltimore-based artist Bekí Basch. The exhibition will premiere the video Vision Quest Lundi: Baltimore along with a series of drawings and sculpture made in response to this work.

Exhibition Dates: April 16 - April 30, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday April 16, 2010 7-10 pm

Open Space
2720 Sisson St
Baltimore, MD 21211

4.17.10

Animal Collective's Oddsac @ The Senator Theater

Opening with torch-wielding villagers and a wall bleeding oil, ODDSAC attaches vivid scenery and strange characters to the wonderful melodic wavelengths of the band Animal Collective, revitalizing the lost form of the "visual album.

Working on the project for three years with friend Danny Perez, Animal Collective pushes the boundaries of the music video and joins music visionaries like The Residents, Devo, and Daft Punk, who previously connected film imagery with their songs. Animal Collective's music is a glittering mix of pop rock, experimental noise,
and horror-movie soundtrack.

Perez's visuals mirror that, incorporating intense scenes of vampires, campfires, and screaming prophets to form themes and a distinct vision, rather than following a traditional plot and dialogue. The characters are interlaced with flicker effects
that mimic pressure phosphenes, the magic colors produced by rubbing your closed eyes.
A true physical experience, ODDSAC turns the theatre into a sensory submarine.

With special guests director Danny Perez and members of Animal Collective. Produced in association with The Friends of the Senator and Fortune5Fifty. After-party at the theater following screening.
Screening: Saturday April 17, 2010 8pm $15, Get tickets.

The Senator Theater
5904 York Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21212

This Weekend

2010-03-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

3.25.09

Connie Imboden @ The Baltimore Camera Club
Photographer Connie Imboden presents images from her new book, Reflections: 25 years of Photography.

Thursday, March 25, 2010 8 pm

The Baltimore Camera Club
Mount Washington United Methodist Church
5800 Cottonworth Ave
Baltimore, MD 21209

3.26.10

MFA Thesis I @ MICA
MICA will host three MFA exhibitions this spring presenting work from both 1st year and graduating students.

The first show opens this weekend and features the work of Heidi Fancher (Photographic & Electronic Media), Matthew Fishel (Mount Royal School of Art), Molly Hawthorn (Graphic Design), Jason Irla (Mount Royal), Justin Kropp (Graphic Design), Cyle Metzger (Mount Royal), Virginia Sasser (Graphic Design), Andrew Shea (Graphic Design), Jonathan Stonely (Mount Royal), John Walser (Graphic Design), Micah Walter (Photographic & Electronic Media), Chloe Watson (Mount Royal), Jennifer White-Torres (Graphic Design) and Ting Zhang (Photographic & Electronic Media).

Exhibition Dates: March 26 - April 4, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, March 26, 5-7 p.m.
Gallery Talks: Tuesday, March 30, 3-5 p.m. and Wednesday, March 31, 1-3 p.m.
Decker, Meyerhoff, and Fox 3 galleries

Maryland Institute College of Art
1303 W. Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD

Table of Contents @ Nudashank

Nudashank presents Table of Contents: Artists Who Make Books. Featured Artists: Andrew Laumann, Cody DeFranco, Jordan Bernier, Molly O'Connell, Lizz Hicky, Jamie Felton, & Paul Koneazny.
In conjunction with "Fresh Prints" at Open Space and the BMA Print Fair
Exhibition Dates: March 26- April 9, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, March 26 7-10pm

Nudashank
405 W. Franklin St. 3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201

WAMM Festival @ The Senator Theater
Towson University College of Fine Arts & Communication, Electronic Media and Film Department is proud to present the Women And Minorities in Media Festival, with featured guest artists and Peabody award winning radio producers- The Kitchen Sisters. The festival will present screenings of Student and Professional Audio & Video Winning Submissions

Screenings: Saturday, March 27, 2010 2:30 - 7 pm
Reception and Q & A with the Kitchen Sisters: 7-10 pm

The Senator Theater
5904 York Road
Baltimore, MD

3.27.10

Prints & Multiples Fair @ Open Space
Featurings Works from:
Gottlund Verlag
Kingsboro Press
Medium Rare
Nero Magazine
Paperback Magazine
Lost Ghosts Records
Watercolor Records
Important Comics
Golden Age
Nieves Books
Glaciers of Nice (aka SUMI INK CLUB)
Schematic Quarterly
Closed Caption Comics

Saturday, March 27, 2010 11am - 12am
Sunday, March 28, 2010 11am - 6pm
Admission is FREE but bring $ to buy

Open Space
2720 Sisson St.
Baltimore, MD

The Baltimore Fair for Contemporary Prints & New Editions @ The BMA

Discover limited-edition portfolios and single-image prints from 14 major contemporary art dealers, galleries, and presses from around the U.S. This unique event encourages new and seasoned collectors to peruse works in an intimate setting, talk personally with dealers, and learn more about contemporary artists and printmaking techniques.

Alumni and students from the Maryland Institute College of Art are among the established and emerging artists represented at the fair.

A complete list of participants follows:

Center Street Studio, Milton, MA
Cade Tompkins Editions • Projects, Providence, RI
Charles M. Young Fine Prints & Drawings LLC, Portland, CT
Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, PA
MICA Works on Paper, Baltimore, MD
Tandem Press, Madison, WI
Goya Contemporary & Goya-Girl Press, Baltimore, MD
Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moysant Weyl, New York, NY
Dolphin Press & Print, Baltimore, MD
Jungle Press, Brooklyn, NY
Robert Brown Gallery, Washington, DC
G.W. Einstein Company, Inc., New York, NY
VanDeb Editions, New York, NY
Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis, MN

Saturday, March 27 & Sunday, March 28, 2010 11am - 6pm

The Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218

Terms of Use @ Gallery Four

Terms of use features sculpture, installation, and works on paper by four artists from Norway, Chicago, and Baltimore. The show surveys our relationships to materiality and technolog through naturalist meddling, sci fi curiosity, and salty humor.

Gallery Four
H & H Building
405 W. Franklin St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

New Art Dialgoue Series at The Contemporary Museum

2010-03-22T06:05:00.000-07:00

New Art Dialogue Series
Lectures with Art in America Editor Richard Vine and artist Mel Chin

The Contemporary Museum will host lectures with two distinguished figures in the world of contemporary art on back-to-back evenings as part of its New Art Dialogue Series on March 31 and April 1, 2010.

At the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mel Chin will discuss blending art with social activism. Chin will share a survey of his socially conscious, community-based works, including The Fundred Dollar Bill Project, his current campaign to increase awareness of lead poisoning in America’s inner cities and aid the ongoing restoration of New Orleans. The Contemporary Museum is an official production center of “Fundred Dollar Bills.”

At the Walters Art Museum, Richard Vine, Managing Editor of Art in America, will examine the exponential growth of contemporary art in China and its cultural impact. This new era of Asian contemporary art will be illustrated by Vine’s firsthand accounts with installations, exhibitions, and encounters with emerging artists. He will also review movements that have shaped the rapidly-evolving contemporary art scene in post-Tiananmen China.

Admission to the lectures is $10 for the general public, $5 for students, and free for members of the Contemporary Museum. The lecture with Mel Chin is also free for MICA students; the Richard Vine lecture is free for members of the Walters.

The Contemporary’s New Art Dialogue Series presents lectures and conversations by distinguished artists, critics, art historians, and curators whose work is defining the field of contemporary art. The series will cultivate critical discourse responsive to the cultural, social, and political issues of our time.

The New Art Dialogue Series is sponsored by the Louise D. and Morton J. Macks Family Foundation.

Mel Chin- Art and Social Reform

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 7:00 p.m.

Falvey Hall
Maryland Institute College of Art
1300 Mount Royal Aven

Richard Vine- New China/New Art

Thursday, April 1, 2010 6:00 p.m.

Graham Auditorium
Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles Street

This Weekend

2010-03-11T09:10:00.000-08:00

3.11.10

Specimens of Infrastructure @ Metro Gallery

Metro Gallery presents the work of Creative Alliance Resident Michelle Hagewood. For the past year, Michelle has been photographing, collecting, and considering modes of urban infrastructure and its interactions with the “natural” landscape. Simultaneously concerned with the invisible and psychological structures of communication, play, desire, and control, Michelle has been working to materialize and question these systems through drawing and compositing. The hand continually disrupts a fractal and digitally inspired process, and each evolution diverges from its source indeterminately; moving from familiar to foreign, retaining or suppressing traces of its parent, and often walking a fine line between finding and losing itself completely.

Exhibition Dates: March 4 - April 30, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 11, 2010 7-10pm

The Metro Gallery
1700 North Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

3.12.10

Tools, Trash & Technology @ The Legg Mason Tower

This 25-year retrospective represents Marque Cornblatt's return to exhibiting on the East Coast and his first major exhibition in Baltimore. The show includes interactive web-based robots, sculptures, video installations and conceptual self-portraits spanning Cornblatt's career, as well as recent projects dedicated to do-it-yourself lifestyle and design.

Cornblatt will also be presenting the Sparky project, his pioneering interactive videochat robot. First shown in 1996, Sparky has evolved from an assemblage of mixed parts into a worldwide network of telepresence robots capable of connecting people face-to-face in real time over the internet.

Exhibition Dates: March 10 - April 4, 2010
Hours: Wed thru Sat 11 am – 7 pm, Sun 11 am – 5 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12, 2010 5-8pm

Legg Mason Tower
Harbor East on the Circle
100 International Drive
Retail Suite 102
Baltimore, MD 21202

3.13.10

Shallow Spaces @ The Hexagon

The Hexagon presents Shallow Spaces, new work by Adam Beaver, Joe Delano, John Calvin Jones, and D'Metrius Rice. Shallow Spaces features mixed media paintings and works on paper by four Baltimore artists who find content at the boundary of abstraction and representation. Using fine line work, distorted portraiture, and a vivid palette that is prevalent in contemporary Baltimore art, these artists distill spatial relationships and psychological layering. The works in Shallow Spaces pair flat imagery with intricate color work, inviting viewers to explore a dialogue between concrete experience and metaphysical tension.
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13, 2010 6-8:30pm

The Hexagon Space
1825 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201

Closing for New Painthings: Ted Gahl & Tatiana Berg @ Nudashank

Ted Gahl is a painter based in Providence, RI, on the verge of finishing his MFA at RISD. His work was recently featured in Postcards from the Edge @ Zieher Smith, NYC, Not Abstract1 @ Parker's Box, Brooklyn, and the publication MFA Now: The Next Generation of Painting.

Tatiana Berg is an artist based in NYC and recently received her BFA from RISD. She recently was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.

Closing Reception: Saturday, March 13, 2010 7-10 pm

Nudashank

H&H Arts Building 3rd Floor

405 W. Franklin St.

Baltimore, MD

This Weekend

2010-03-04T05:16:00.000-08:00

3.5.10

Child's Play @ CCBC

The Community College of Baltimore County's Art, Design and Interactive Media Gallery is proud to presentChild's Play, an invitational group exhibition featuring works by Kristina Bilonick, Scott G. Brooks, Jaime Llevano Cabrera, Robert Stuart Cohen, Erin Fostel, Grendel's Mother: David Friedheim and Trisha Kyner, Jenny Kanzler, Alexandria Levin, Megan Marlatt, Sharon Trumbull, and Yoram Wolberger. Curator by Nicole Buckingham.
Exhibition Dates: March 5 - April 9, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, March 5, 2010 6-8 pm.
Inclement weather date: Friday, March 12, 2010 6-8 pm.

CCBC Catonsville
800 South Rolling Rd.
Baltimore, MD

Claire Feng: Happy People @ School 33

Claire Feng questions what is beyond the obvious in an image. From ordinary images of leisure and contentment, she chooses the ones to which, with the medium of painting, she can inject her personal reading. Through expression and gesture rooted in realism, her painting gives breath and energy to these fleeting moments. In the Members' Gallery.
Exhibition Dates: March 5 - April 2, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, March 5, 2010 6-9pm

School 33
1427 Light Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230

Los Solos @ The Hexagon
Los Solos Series continues with performances by Ayako Kataoka, Jenny Graf, & Samita Sinha.

Ayako Kataoka is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Tokyo. Born into a family of Buddhist priests and artists, she grew up immersed in an atmosphere of shaka drawings, chant depicted in japanese calligraphy, and the milieu of traditional Japanese temples. Realized in sound, video, installation, and dance performances, her works are often embodied with her heritage dealing with the concept of bringing invisible to visible.

Jenny Gräf, a dynamic improvisor and stalwart of the Baltimore freek music scene, creates vivid, compelling soundworlds using intuitive/primitive homebrewed electronics, guitar and voice. J. Gräf is one-half of the noise duos Harrius (with Chiara Giovando, two LP’s on Ehse Records) and Metalux (with MV Carbon, recordings on Hanson, Load and 5RC/Kill Rock Stars, etc). She is also known for her interactive social interventions such as The Guitars Project, in which she worked with a group older women with Alzheimer’s to produce music using electric guitars, Threshold, a piece performed at last year’s High Zero event in which the audience triggered sounds by ordering food, and her Rock Carving Oraclestra, which uses psychic channeling through stone to generate readings for selected audience members. Her recent releases include Proud Flesh, a movie soundtrack to her Western film collaboration with Chiara Giovando (ehserecords.com), a split 7? with Zaimph as well as a split Metalux/K.K. Rampage.

Trained in classical Hindustani vocal music, composer/ performer Samita Sinha uses the range of her voice together with electronics and multilingual text in solo performance and multichannel vocal pieces. Besides her solo work, Sinha has a duo project with Marc Cary called ANATOMY (electronic/ Hindustani/ jazz), uses her voice as an improvising instrument in jazz ensembles (in Marc Cary’s FOCUS Trio, Sunny Jain Collective, and Eternal Now), and has toured internationally as a vocalist with the late performance poet Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state.
Performance Date: Friday, March 5, 2010 doors open at 8pm, show starts at 8:30 $6

The Hexagon
1825 North Charles St.
Baltimore, MD

Personal Effects: The Photography of Jack Radcliff @ Gallery 1448
Jack Radcliffe’s intimate portraits of family, friends, fellow artists and performers reveal so much more than what facial expressions may convey. In fact, the expression on a subject’s face may act as a barrier to the feelings preserved behind the façade. Like the short story writer, Raymond Carver, Radcliffe weaves tales by illuminating the not-so-commonplace details that define his subject’s space and time. Radcliffe conjures an image that appears somehow familiar, so that rather than feeling like a voyeur watching a stranger, the viewer recognizes fragments of the private situations, and is enticed to relate them to his/ her own personal experiences.
Exhibition Dates: March 5-21, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday March 5, 2010 6-9pm

Gallery 1448
1448 East Baltimore Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21231

Baker Artist Awards Winners!!!

2010-03-04T03:58:00.000-08:00

They announced the winners of the 2010 Mary Sawyer Baker Prize last night on MPT and they were.....

Animator/Drawer, Karen Yasinsky
view her Baker Artist Nomination here

Sculptor, Richard Cleaver
view his Baker Artist Nomination here

Chamber Musician- Viola, Peter Minkler
listen to his Baker Artist Nomination here

About the Prize:
Mary Sawyers Baker, one of Baltimore's early philanthropists, studied voice as a young girl in Paris, traveled extensively, and embraced the arts throughout her life. She established the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund in 1964 to honor her husband, a well-known Baltimore civic leader. In 2007, the Fund narrowed its philanthropic mission to focus on arts and culture. In 2008, the Fund’s Board of Governors established the annual Mary Sawyers Baker Artist Prize to honor its founder and to support Baltimore artists. Up to three artists are awarded up to $25,000 each—money that winning artists may use at their discretion. The Mary Sawyers Baker Prize winners were selected by a private jury.

The 5 Baltimore's Choice Winner's of $1000 each were...

Kelly Walker
view her nomination

Shodeko Talifero
view his nomination

Amanda Fair
view her nomiation

Steven Parke
view his nomination

Kaveh Haerian
view his nomination

Congratulations everyone! And thank you to the William G. Baker Memorial Fund and all the artist that participated! Baltimore is rapidly becoming a nationally recognized center for contemporary arts & culture with your help.

This Weekend

2010-02-25T07:50:00.001-08:00

2.25.09

The Earth is Flat and Other Truths about the Environment @ The Park School, Richman Gallery

Rick Delaney, curator at the Richman Gallery at the Park School is proud to present The Earth is flat and Other Truths about the Environment. The show, an exhibition about sustainability, environment and landscape features the work of Chris Jordan, Lynn Geesamen, Ken Hale, Jessie Lehson, Jackson Martin, Trace Miller, Ellen Lupton & Abott Miller, Lawrence McFarland, Paul Rutovsky, Shannon Young and Rachel Sitkin.

Exhibition Dates: February 11- March 31, 2010.
Artists' Reception: Thursday, February 25, 2010 6pm

The Richman Gallery
The Park School
2425 Old Court Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21218

34th Annual American Craft Council Show @ The Baltimore Convention Center

Dandelion Blu Jewelry

The American Craft Council Retail Show in Baltimore
More than 700 of the country's leading craft artists will gather under one roof to present their latest designer, handmade work at The American Craft Council Show in Baltimore, the largest juried, indoor craft show in the nation. The highest quality of handmade jewelry, furniture, clothing, home décor, and more, will be available for purchase at the Baltimore Convention Center. This year's show will feature the works by Baltimore locals Sherry Insley- Dandelion Blu, Juliet Ames- The Broken Plate Pendant Company www.ibreakplates.com, Danamarie Hosler- Greenstarstudio www.greenstarstudio.etsy.com, Elisa Shere- Elisa Shere Jewelry, elisasherejewelry.etsy.com & Shannon Delanoy- Sweet Pepita, www.sweetpepita.etsy.com

RETAIL DATES AND SHOW HOURS
Thursday, February 25 (10 am - 6 pm)
Friday, February 26 (10 am - 9 pm)
Saturday, February 27 (10 am - 6 pm)
Sunday, February 28 (10 am - 5 pm)

Click Here for tickets

Baltimore Convention Center
1 West Pratt St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

Adornamental @ The Silber Gallery

Adornamental features the work of seven artists who are breaking new ground in the decorative and ornamental arts. At times considered primarily feminine and removed from fine art, the decorative arts began to achieve an elevated status in 1975, with the creation of the Pattern and Decoration Movement. The movement was, in part, a reaction against the impersonal nature of Minimalist art. Originating in New York, the Pattern and Decoration Movement involved mostly female artists creating complex and multicolored patterns, but it was not long before the decorative arts were embraced by male artists as well. Contemporary artists continue to employ decorative and ornamental aspects in their work, demonstrating pattern as a tool for expression and showing that there is no distinction between fine art and decorative art.

Adornamental features the work of artists Liz Ensz, Stephanie Liner, Xavier Schipani, Piper Shepard, René Treviño, Emily Uchytil, and Kelly Walker.
Exhibition Dates: February 16 - March 28, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday February 25, 2010 6pm

Silber Art Gallery, Goucher College
1201 Dulaney Valley Road
Baltimore, MD 21204

2.26.09

Three Simultaneous Openings! @ The Creative Alliance
Up The Ante, Blood Weather & Forum of 40 Champions all open this Friday at The Creative Alliance.

Up The Ante- The hi-octane artists at The Patterson step it up a notch for this exhibit, each submitting a piece of art on the titular theme, and inviting a colleague from outside the building to do the same. Artists include Lauren Boilini, Michael Burmeister, Michelle Hagewood, Erica Hansen, Matthew Freel, Magnolia Laurie, Joseph Norman, Richard Sawka, Rachel Schmidt, Rachel Sitkin, Melissa Sugar, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rene Trevino, Marty Weishaar & Troy Wingard. The exhibition, in the Amelie Rothschild Gallery, coincides with the annual party celebrating the Residency Program.

Blood Weather- As observers of human activity, Lauren Boilini and Becky Alprin view the world from opposite ends of the telescope. Boilini, who transforms the Main Gallery with a single massive painting covering 2000 square feet, is known for epic canvases—her mark making intense, all encompassing, and fast. She places herself, and the viewer, at the center of the action, like the jostled referee in a boxing match. Alprin, on the other hand, takes the long view. Epochs are compressed and conflated in her fragmented sculptures, which recall both archeological digs and architectural models, recognizable as the fractured cities we live in. As close and passionate Boilini is, so Alprin’s work is pointed and analytic; together, they expose a startling cross section of forces that make and unmake the world every day.

Forum of 40 Champions- Forty champions, each possessing a special power, have been invited to create a warrior to enter the Minstallation Gallery and face the special powers of their peers. Participants will create their warriors to occupy a 4 square inch hexagon of space, flying included, working with the size and shape parameters of Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons and Dragons. Participants may use Warhammer stands and modify figurines from any of the gaming and fantasy products or may create their own using Sculpy or other materials. 20 sided dice and measuring sticks will be provided. Gaming rules and booklet will be developed during the course of the exhibition. Gary Kachadourian, guest curator.

All shows will have opening receptions Friday, February 26, 2010 7-9pm

The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21224

2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Semi-Finalists Announced

2010-02-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Semi-Finalists

Alzaruba; Baltimore, MD
Christine Bailey; Baltimore, MD
Kathryn Bell; Baltimore, MD
Amita Bhatt; Baltimore, MD
Travis Childers; Fairfax, VA
Leah Cooper; Baltimore, MD
Brent Crothers; Bel Air, MD
Oletha DeVane; Ellicott City, MD
Annie Farrar; Baltimore, MD
Shaun Flynn; Baltimore, MD
Dawn Gavin; Baltimore, MD
Breon Gilleran; Baltimore, MD
Amy Glengary Yang; Washington, DC
Ryan Hackett; Kensington, MD
Michelle Hagewood; Baltimore, MD
Matthew Janson; Baltimore, MD
Evan La Londe; Baltimore, MD
Nate Larson; Baltimore, MD
Christopher LaVoie; Baltimore, MD
Lawrence Lee; Baltimore, MD
Kim Manfredi; Baltimore, MD
Ben Marcin; Baltimore, MD
Christina Martinelli; Baltimore, MD
Sebastian Martorana; Baltimore, MD
Alexa Meade; Chevy Chase, MD
Maggie Michael; Washington, DC
Ledelle Moe; Baltimore, MD
Cory Oberndorfer; Washington, DC
Matthew Porterfield; Baltimore, MD
Siobhan Rigg; Washington, DC
Michael Sylvan Robinson; Baltimore, MD
Rachel Rotenberg; Baltimore, MD
Adam T. Rush; Baltimore, MD
Christopher Saah; Washington, DC
Hadieh Shafie; Baltimore, MD
Dan Steinhilber; Washington, DC
Melissa Webb; Baltimore, MD
Karen Yasinsky; Baltimore, MD

This year’s jurors are Robert Nickas, Magdalena Sawon and Hamza Walker. The Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize is designed to assist visual artist or visual artist collaborators working in the Greater Baltimore region by awarding a $25,000 fellowship. The prize is in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced with The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

Approximately six finalists will be reviewed for the prize. Their work will be shown in the Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Galleries of The Baltimore Museum of Art, located at 10 Art Museum Drive. In addition, an exhibition of the semi-finalists’ work will be shown during the Artscape weekend in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries of the Maryland Institute College of Art, located at 1303 W. Mount Royal Avenue. The prize is part of Artscape, America’s largest free celebration of the arts, taking place Friday, July 16 through Sunday, July 18, 2010 on Mount Royal Avenue and North Charles Street.

The fellowship winner will be selected after a review of the art installed at the BMA and an interview with each finalist by the jurors. The remaining finalists not selected for the fellowship will each receive a $1,000 honorarium. Artist collaborators will receive a single $25,000 prize if chosen as the winner or a $1,000 honorarium that will be equally divided among the members of the group.

Congratulations to all the Semi-Finalists!

Finalists will be announced Tuesday, April 13, 2010

This weekend (now that you can leave your parking space and hopefully find a new one...)

2010-02-18T19:57:00.001-08:00

2.19.10

Baltidelphia @ The Hexagon
The Hexagon, in conjunction with My House Gallery (Philadelphia), presents: Baltidelphia, an experimental collaboration curated by Phuong Pham (the Hexagon) and Alex Gartelmann (My House). The Baltidelphia exhibition features 22 Baltimore artists paired with 22 Philadelphia artists who were asked to collaborate/correspond through whatever means they chose—facebook, text message, twitter, carrier pigeon, postal mail, sky-writing, etc. Rather than get lost in the flood of tweeting that flickrs to your tumbl that feeds to your blog (LOL smileyface), Baltidelphia embraces communication, distance, and geography as points of departure to create a project. Baltidelphia will be exhibited in both Baltimore and Philadelphia, with selections of the projects being displayed in each spaces.

Philadelphia artists will travel to Baltimore, Saturday, February 6th for the closing. Participating artists (Bmore & Philly): Kathy Beachler & Martha Savery, Emily Claire Dierkes & Jim Grilli, Miguel Sabogal & Bryan Patrick Rice, Jon Bevers & Damian Weinkrantz, Kathleen Mazurek & Daniel Potterton, Sarah Magida & Kristen Neville, Mike Riley & Tim Pannell, Jared Fischer & Tyler Kline, Freda Mohr & Andrew Brehm, Heather Von Marko & Hannah Heffner, Julie Pahr & Fernando Ramos, Andrew Geddes & Daniel Petraitis, Na Kim & Mike Ryan, Jennifer Mullins & Leah Mackin, Ric Royer & Beth Heinly, Robert Brulinski & Piper Brett, Magnolia Laurie & Nike Desis, Megan Lavelle & Jen Gin, Sean Scheidt & Masha Badinter, Monique Crab & Hope Rovelto, Phuong Pham & Alex Gartelman

Closing Reception: Friday, February 19, 2010 6-8pm

The Hexagon
1825 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201

Grundelhammer @ 2640 Space

In October, Grundlehammer opened at the 2640 Space with three sold out shows and over 1,000 people in attendance. The production returns, this time with a sprawling 2-disc studio recorded album featuring all the original songs of Gründlehämmer! The album will be available for the first time ever at the Gründlehämmer remount, February 19th-21st, 2010 at the 2640 space.

Tickets Available Now!
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/95486

2.20.10

Agglutinate @ The Creative Alliance

With inky black shadows, and a limitless range of gray washes, Amanda Burnham’s crumbling urban and exurban landscapes are almost entirely void of people, like cartoon snapshots taken a month or so after the rapture. Here Burnham combines drawing with installation to ghostly effect, with dangling street signs or tangled chain fence etched onto the wall and enfolding the viewer.

Closing Reception: Saturday, February 20, 2010 8:30pm

Amelie Rothschilde Gallery
The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Ave.
Baltimore, MD

2.22.10

Magic Eye is proud to present a night of short films and videos created by Baltimore artists. This group features work by Kari Altmann, Kristen Anchor, Mark Brown, Lauren Friedman, Jenny Graf, Clarissa Gregory, Justin Kelly, Andrew Mausert-Mooney, Catherine Pancake, Jimmy Joe Roche, Paul Sharitis, Stan Vanderbeek, Fred Worden and Karen Yasinsky.

The films, dating from the early 60s to contemporary work, range from experimental narrative to animation, music videos and performance documentation. In celebration and remembrance, Magic Eye will screen Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N.G (1968) featuring the Baltimore poet David Franks.
Screening: Monday, February 22, 2010 9:30-11pm $5

The Charles Theater
1711 N. Charles st.
Baltimore, MD 21217

This Weekend

2010-01-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

1.29.10

AFTER IMAGE @ School 33

The term afterimage describes when an image persists in one's vision, even after exposure to the original image has ceased. The focus of this exhibition is how communication, memory, and history are manipulated or reconstructed through aggressive means--remixing, erasing, repetition, translation, and so forth--and how these interventions disorient viewer expectations, and offer new interpretative and narrative possibilities.

Participating artists include Lucas and Jason Ajemian, Alessandro Bosetti, Patrick Cadenhead, Keren Cytter, Caitlin Denny, Nicolas Djandji, Joseph Ernst, Claire L. Evans, Martijn Hendriks, Gareth Long, Matt Lipps, Rashaad Newsome, Alee Peoples, Kristine Thompson, and Wu Ingrid Tsang. Curated by Jamillah James, as a part of School 33 Art Center's Annual Call for Curators.

Exhibition Dates: January 29 - March 27, 2010
Opening Reception: January 29, 2010 6-9pm
An accompanying screening and talk with the curator, Jamillah James, is scheduled for March 5, 2010.

School 33 Art Center
1427 Light Street
Baltimore, Maryland

Recent Works: Julie Benoit & Leah Cooper @ John Fonda Gallery

Recent Works: Julie Benoit and Leah Cooper
Exhibition Dates: January 28 -March 7, 2010
Opening Reception Friday 29 January 2010

John Fonda Gallery located at Theatre Project Baltimore
45 West Preston Street
Baltimore, Maryland. 21201

1.30.10

A Friend in Need @ American University Rotunda Gallery

The MFA students of American University are pleased to present A Friend In Need: 2nd Annual MFA Invitational. The exhibition culls work from 18 artists from 15 different academic institutions and invites a dialogue on the current plurality of "academic art"
Featured Artists:
Meaggan Busch, Bradley Chriss, Mary Helena Clark, Laura Cox, Peter Cullen, Alyssa Denis, Eleonore Gailet, Ellen Hunt, Matt Kalasky, Christine Kesler, Linling Lu, Oliver Pesret, Cecelia Phillips, Ben Piwowar, Erin Raedeke, Lisa Rosenstreich, Stacey Torma, and Virginia Wagner

American University MFA students will be holding open studios during the reception.

Exhibition Dates: January 18 - February 14, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 30, 2010 6-9pm

American University
Katzen Center Rotunda Gallery
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington, DC 20016

This Weekend

2010-01-21T18:05:00.000-08:00

1.23.09

Call + Response @ Hamiltonian Gallery
Sixteen writers and sixteen visual artists from Washington, D.C., and beyond have paired to create artworks that resonate with each other for a new exhibition, Call + Response. The show includes the work of a Guggenheim fellowship recipient and seven Hamiltonian Fellows.
Exhibition Dates: January 23 until February 13, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday January, 23 2010 7-9pm

Hamiltonian Gallery
1353 U St, NW, Suite 101

This Weekend

2010-01-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

1.14.10

Love & Heartbreak @ METRO Gallery
Metro Gallery is pleased to present Love & Heartbreak: New Works by Katy Keefe and Samuel Payne. Intensely personal and layered with texture, Keefe’s paintings, drawings and photographs are inspired by the romantic, as an answer to Payne’s heart-wrenching, violent paintings and works-on-paper inspired by heartbreak and scorn. Despite the immediate contradictory nature of the two perspectives, the works are thematically united under the auspices of passion, devotion and enlightenment. Using totems and hero worship, Keefe glorifies while Payne simultaneously destroys. The dense works of the two artists are aesthetically complex compositions constructed meticulously of accumulating detail and narratives. The work is both genuinely personal and universally metaphorical. Keefe and Payne utilize their joint belief in the constant presence of separation and division to establish a dialogue regarding heaven and hell, the dichotomy of brokenness, and the question of power and rule in daily life. “Love & Heartbreak” is an exhibition of journeys, failures, enlightenment, and common experience.
Exhibition Dates: January 14- February 27, 2010
Opening Reception: January 14, 2010 at 7pm

Metro Gallery
1700 North Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

Love & Loss (I miss you, Hugh Grant) @ Hood College

The artists include Rebecca Nagle, Hermonie Only and Kylie Lockwood, sculpture; Lissa Corona, photography; Melody Often, Steven Ketchum and Zachary Storm, drawing; Gina Denton, Sarah Matson and Emily Slaughter, soft sculpture; and Heather Boaz, multimedia.
Exhibition Dates: January 8 - February 3, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 28, 2010 6 - 8pm

Hood College
Hodson Gallery: Tatem Arts Center
401 Rosemont Ave
Frederick, MD 21701

1.15.10

Madeline Keesing and Carrie Seid @ Goya Contemporary

Carrie Seid, New Light

Madeleine Keesing, Plums

Exhibition Dates: January 15- March 30, 2010
Opening Reception Friday, January 15, 2010, 6:00-8:00 pm

Goya Contemporary
Mill Center, Studio 214
3000 Chestnut Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21211

1.16.10

Püss Füst @ Open Space

Open Space is pleased to present the second annual Püss Füst, a festive marathon of all-girl phenomena. In addition to artwork on floors and walls, ladies will be taking over all of the Remington based gallery, presenting dance routines, musical performance, interactive kiosks, and doo wop.
Artists will include: Rahne Alexander, Alisa Alig, Kristen Anchor, Mia Ardito, Diane Barcelowsky, Michelle Belfield, Annika Blomberg, Hannah Brancato, Muffy Brandt, Ingrid Burrington, Mylinh Chau, Theresa Columbus, Caitlin Cunningham, Pilar Diaz, Liz Donadio, Timmy Dougherty, Lara Emerling, Eleanor Farley, Samantha Garner, Mollie Goldstrom, Liz Hayes, Maya Hayuk, Kendra Hebel, Christine Herz, Elizabeth Hollon, Jungil Hong, Ann Kelly, Stefani Levin, Amy Lockhart, Xander Marro, Keelin Mayer, Sarah Milinski, Monica Mirabile, Jamie Mohr, Maire O'Neill, Beth Pakradooni, Shana Palmer, Claire Plumb, Erica Prince, Natalie Purkey, Katherine Anne Ralston, Lindsay Rowinski, Molly Siegel, Hayley Silverman, Kat Sotelo, Hillery Sproatt, Brina Thurston, Sarah Tooley, Eden Veaudry, Caitlin Williams, & Liz Zacharia + more!
Exhibition Dates: January 16- February 6, 2010
Opening Reception (and only time to catch all of the performances): January 16th, 2010.

Open Space
2720 Sisson St.
Baltimore, MD 21211
gallery hours: Friday 4-8, Saturdays and Sundays 12-4.

This Weekend

2010-01-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

1.8.10

Lordz of the Flyze @ Nudashank

Nudashank is psyched to present its first two-man exhibition.
Julian C. Duron and Matthew Craven, both emerging NY artists, are taking over the space with a full-on painting installation. The opening will also feature the debut screening of new video work by Julian Duron.
Exhibition Dates: Jan. 8- Feb. 5, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, Jan. 8, 2010 6-10pm

Nudashank
H&H Arts Building
405 W. Franklin St.
3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201

1.9.10

Inside Mouth @ Flashpoint DC

Flashpoint Gallery is pleased to present Inside Mouth, Jackie Milad’s first solo show in Washington, DC. The exhibition features Milad’s spare, but lyrical line drawings, photographs and an interactive installation.
Exhibition Dates: January 9 – February 13, 2010. More information at flashpointdc.org.
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 9, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, February 13, 1-2pm

Flashpoint DC
916 G Street NW
Washington, DC 20001

In The Studio with Cara Ober

2010-01-05T18:13:00.000-08:00

Cara Ober is an artist and person extraordinaire in Baltimore. She is represented by Gallery Imperato in Baltimore, Civilian Art Project in Washington, DC and Randall Scott Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. She writes the bmoreart blog as well as contributing to the Baltimore City Paper, ARTNews, and Art Papers. She let me have a sneak-peek into her studio before her paintings were shipped off to New York for her upcoming solo show, Glittering Generalities, on view at Randall Scott Gallery January 7- February 13, 2010.

(all "quotes" are from C.O., paraphrased by Rachel Sitkin)

Cara and Uncle Louie

"I collect ephemera, bits of nonsense"

"I want people to think, 'why are all these things together?' I feel like my life is that way- it never makes sense"

"I am trying to achieve an authentic experience"

"...and I like pretty things. People like pretty. So what?"

"I am pointing out the 'truths' that people used to believe, the odd bits of information that were once valued"

"I like to think of the paintings as poetry, where there can be any combination of things, of words and they find a meaning together"

"I know it's good when I feel guilty, like I've gotten away with something. I know you're not supposed to do these things in painting"

to see more:

www.caraober.com

www.bmoreart.blogspot.com

This Weekend

2009-12-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

12.9.09

MICA Art Market @ The Brown Center

Maryland Institute College of Art presents its third annual MICA Art Market!

The sale, featuring 250 MICA students, alumni, faculty and staff, includes jewelry, illustrations, paintings, prints, posters, sculptures, mosaics, stationery, T-shirts, ceramics, textiles, book arts, toys and wrapping paper.

The market, sponsored by the MICA Alumni Association, fosters student professional development and peer-to-peer networking, and provides funding for need-based student scholarships. Last year scholarships of $2,500 each were awarded to three MICA students who had participated in the event: Sarah Machicado '12 (illustration and graphic design), Nisha Ramnath '10 (animation) and Michele Stidham '10 (graphic design).

Vendors will accept the following forms of payment: Visa, MasterCard, cash and check. Admission to the market is free.

For more information, visit the website here.
Wednesday, Dec. 9-Saturday, Dec. 12, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Leidy Atrium and Falvey Hall lobby of Brown Center
1301 W. Mount Royal Ave.

12.10.09

Instant Messages and Reinvent @ MAP
Maryland Art Place presents Instant Messages and Reinvent an exhibition and installation created by students in MICA’s Graphic Design MFA program, directed by Ellen Lupton. These two special projects explore the empire of signs and messages in which we live.
Participating artists: Lauren Adams, Christina Beard, Chris Clark, Elizabeth Herrmann, Ann Liu, Chris McCampbell, Ryan Shelley, Wesley Stuckey, Beth Taylor, Isabel Uria, Supisa Wattanasansanee, Krissi Xenakis
Rush Hour: Art Beats Traffic- Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009 5-8pm
Celebrate the exhibition Instant Messages and the unveiling of MAP’s first public art installation in our entrance hallway. Interact with original works of art and design in the galleries.

Maryland Art Place
Power Plant Live!
8 Market Place, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21202

12.12.09

Heady Mugs @ Nudashank

An overwhelming show of psychedelic portraits and trippy faces featuring work by:

Henry Gunderson / Michael Skattum / Luke Ramsey / Benjamin Edmiston / Shaun Flynn / D'Metrius Rice / Lesser Gonzalez / Eric Shaw / Bill Dunlap / Robby Rackleff Ryan De La Hoz / Matthew Feyld / Bill Fick / Lizz Hickey / Nick Mann (Doodles) / Edward Max Fendley / Ryan Riss / Christian Herr / Caitlin Cunningham / Jordan Bernier / Felipe Goncalvez / David Ubias / Marcello Velho / Mike Bull
Exhibtion Dates: December 11, 2009 - January 1, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday Dec. 11th, 7-10pm

Nudashank
H&H Arts Building
405 W. Franklin St.
3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201

This Weekend

2009-12-02T09:41:00.001-08:00

12.3.09

Hybrids of Tutela @ McLean Project for the Arts

Hybrids of Tutela: New Works by Melissa Dickenson
Melissa Dickenson exhibits works made of acrylic paint and ink on cut paper, mounted on acrylic backing. The resulting pieces are uniquely shaped and dimensional, moving out from the wall and breaking free of the traditional rectangular picture plane. A fantastical world inhabited by imaginary flora and fauna is created within the confines of these flowing, meandering and intricate structures, wholly original and at once both sweet and slightly sinister. In the Atrium Gallery.
Exhibition Dates: December 3, 2009 - January 8, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday Dec. 3, 2009 7 - 9pm

McLean Project for the Arts
1234 Ingleside Avenue
McLean, VA 22101

12.4.09

Moth a film by Hilton Carter @ MICA

MOTH Trailer from FRESH KILL on Vimeo.

MICA 2002 alumni Hilton Carter presents his new short film Moth at MICA.
STORY LINE: Sophie, a beautiful drug abusing young actress, flies into Los Angeles from New York, for a job. While staying at the home of some family friends, who just happen to be out of town, Sophie finds her boredom and unhappiness to the least of her problems.
Screening: Friday December 4, 2009 7:30-9:30 pm

The Brown Center
1301 Mt. Royal Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21217

Sarah Hammond @ Unicorn Gallery

Unicorn Gallery presents the new work of Baltimore artist Sarah Hammond created this past summer at a residency in Rochefort-en-Terre, Bretagne France.
Opening Reception: Friday December 4, 2009 6-9 pm
Unicorn Studio
626 S. Broadway
Baltimore, MD 21231

Los Solos @ LOF/T
Los Solos presents Shana Palmer (Childe Bride) and C. Ryder Cooley for a night of performance at the LOF/T.
Shana Palmer is a multidisciplinary artist and self-taught musician. Her solo music project Childe Bride is going on its third year with releases in the US and in the UK. Her improvised music is described as mysterious tribal drone and sometimes noise folk.
C. Ryder Cooley is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and performer. Weaving together chimeric images with found props and forgotten objects, she creates cinematic performances and installation spaces. She will present Animalia, Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure, performed with Natalie Agee. Animalia is an inter-species fairytale that combines live music on singing saw, accordion and strings with movement and projection. Performed within a landscape of mesmerizing video and archival film, Animalia invokes visions of secret bee societies and haunted circus scenes.
Friday December 4, 2009 8:30pm (doors open at 8pm) $6

Los Solos Series
the LOF/T at Load of Fun
120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21217

12.5.09

Holiday Heap @ St. John's Church
Charm City Craft Mafia presents Holiday Heap. Holiday Heap brings together highly talented and infinitely creative artists and crafters from Baltimore and beyond to sell their wares in a festive indoor market. This year’s event will feature the finest in handmade jewelry, apparel, housewares, papergoods and soft sculpture. And at price points to fit every budget, and products to suit from the youngest on your list to the greatest of grandparents, you’ll be sure to find exactly what you’ve been hoping for.

Saturday December 5, 2009 10am- 5pm

St. John's Church
2640 St. Paul St.
Baltimore, MD

www.charmcitycraftmafia.com

12.6.09

Passerine @ LOF/T
MAGIC EYE presents “Passerine”, a projector performance by Raha Raissnia with live sound by Kenny Wollesen
"Passerine" is Raha Raissnia and Kenny Wollesen's Baltimore debut. Raissnia is Brooklyn-based expanded cinema artist. Influenced by the work of Harry Smith, Bruce Conner, Jim Davis and Paul Sharits, she incorporates painting, live projection and installation in her performances. Combining collaged and hand-painted 35mm slides with 16mm film projections, Raissnia’s projections produce a “slow-moving montage during which scenes are at once temporary and aleatory. The arrangement underscores cinema’s inherent paradoxical structure of manipulating stillness to conjure up the illusion of movement.” (R.R.)

Sunday December 6, 2009 8-10 pm

Magic Eye
The LOF/T at Load of Fun
120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore, MD

2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize

2009-12-02T09:38:00.000-08:00

Call-for-Entry for the 2010 Sondheim Prize
Application deadline – December 18, 2009

The Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, Inc. (BOPA) is proud to announce the fifth edition of the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize. The prize will award a $25,000 fellowship to a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Baltimore region. The prize is in conjunction with the annual Artscape juried exhibition and is produced with our partners, The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Approximately six finalists will be selected for the final review for the prize. Their work will be exhibited in the Thalheimer Gallery of The Baltimore Museum of Art. Additionally, an exhibition of the semi-finalists’ work will be shown in the Decker and Meyerhoff galleries of the Maryland Institute College of Art during the Artscape weekend.

The fellowship winner will be selected from The Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition after review of the installed art and an interview with each finalist by the jurors. The remaining finalists not selected for the fellowship will each receive a $1,000 honorarium. Artist collaborators if chosen as the winner will receive a single $25,000 prize or $1,000 honorarium that will be equally divided among the members of the group.

The Artscape prize is named in honor of Janet and Walter Sondheim who have been instrumental in creating the Baltimore City that exists today. Walter Sondheim, Jr. had been one of Baltimore’s most important civic leaders for over 50 years. His accomplishments included oversight of the desegregation of the Baltimore City Public Schools in 1954 when he was president of the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City. Later, he was deeply involved in the development of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor. He continued to be active in civic and educational activities in the city and state and served as the senior advisor to the Greater Baltimore Committee until his death in February 2007.

Janet Sondheim danced with the pioneering Denishawn Dancers a legendary dance troupe founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Later, she turned to teaching where she spent 15 years at the Children’s Guild working with severely emotionally disturbed children. After retirement, she was a volunteer tutor at Highlandtown Elementary School. She married Walter in 1934, and they were together until her death in 1992.

Jurors
The Jurors will be announced on December 1, 2009.

An application can be downloaded HERE.

this weekend

2009-11-18T05:38:00.000-08:00

11.19.09

Ambiguous Bodies @ Silber Gallery, Goucher College
The human body can be interpreted in multiple and diverse ways, for the exhibition Ambiguous Bodies the artists employ the idea of ambiguity, dismantling notions of the classical and ideal form, while simultaneously broadening the scope of the human form to include differences of beauty, race, sexuality, and gender. Artists include: Heather Boaz, Jeanne-Marie Burdette, Zoë Charlton, Elizabeth Crisman, Joshua Crown, Ellen Durkan, Jason Horowitz, Jackie Milad, Jenny Mullins, Lynn Palewicz, and April Wood.

Exhibition Dates: November 3 - December 13, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday Nov. 19, 2009 6-9pm

Silber Gallery, Goucher College
121 Dulaney Valley Rd.
Baltimore, MD

11.20.09

Functionless Form @ School 33
The works in this exhibit reconsider the questions of art as décor, and décor as art. These four artists consider their creative output and its relevance to space, aesthetic, and taste. They perceive and appreciate the prospective place in which their artwork will reside. Like the pop artists, they remove familiar from its context and isloate the objects to provide contemporary interpretations and definitions of fine art. Artists include Chiara Keeling, Allison Reimus, M. Angelo Arnold & Shannon Donovan. Curated by Philippa P.B. Hughes.

Exhibition Dates: November 20, 2009- January 16, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, Nov. 20, 2009 6-9 pm
School 33 Art Center
1427 Light Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230

this weekend

2009-11-05T12:07:00.000-08:00

11.6.09

Merill Feitell & Maria Chavez @ The LOF/T
Los Solos Series presents it's 3rd installment of performances by groundbreaking female artists.

MERRILL FEITELL (BALTIMORE) Merrill Feitell’s first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Award for short fiction. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Byrdcliffe, Bread Loaf, and the Taos Writers Conference. Her short stories have appeared in many publications, including the Best New American Voices series and have been short-listed in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards. She teaches in the MFA program at University of Maryland in College Park and is Fiction Editor at Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety. She has spent the past eight years at work on a novel called Any Minute Now. She lives in Baltimore. http://www.merrillfeitell.com/main.php

MARIA CHAVEZ (NYC) Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. With a collection of new and broken needles that she calls “pencils of sound” and a selection of records, she harnesses the electro-acoustic sounds of vinyl and needle. Chavez made her NYC debut in a duet with Thurston Moore, collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide as part of the 2007 Wien Modern Festival, and recently shared a stage with Pauline Oliveros and Lydia Lunch during Vienna’s Phonofemme Festival 2009. She has performed at San Francisco’s Electronic Music Festival, T.I.T.O., a turntable festival in Berlin, STEIM (Amsterdam) and the Kitchen (NYC), and was an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room in 2006. In June and July, 2008, she was selected to be part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for a series of performances in and around Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses sculptures at DIA: Beacon. Fellow sound artist and writer Tara Rodgers will include an interview with Chavez in Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, to be published by Duke University Press in 2009/10. http://www.myspace.com/mariachavez

Friday, November 6, 2009 8:30pm (doors open at 8pm)
The LOF/T
120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21201

11.7.09

Torkwase Dyson and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum @ The Creative Alliance

Artists Torkwase Dyson and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum live fearlessly in the world as it is, in a state of becoming, where visual culture elides with visual metaphor, and dragons appear as domineering specters of globalized adaptation and alter egos journey bravely through landscapes that are a fusion of myth and autobiographical make-believe.
Dyson, Media Artist in Residence at American University, exhibits nationally and internationally, presents Here Be Dragons, a collection of wall installations, animations and sound design that are dizzying, visionary and political, as if Sun Ra and Chuck D got together with Fela Kuti to make art. Dubbing her practice “The Black Eco Imagination,” Dyson up-cycles bulk goods such as cotton t-shirts, solar panels, belt buckles, earring cards and plastic to address environmental reform alongside economic justice, underground economies, and black visual culture.

Rooted in drawing, but ranging to installation and animation, Pamela Sunstrum charts the hero-quest of her alter-ego Asme (pronounced “AZ-mee”) who embodies selves that are trans-cultural, trans-historical, trans-geographical. In my skin of mirrors and clouds, Asme ventures into the underworld, where the outlines of her being are porous and unfamiliar. Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana and grew up living in Africa and Southeast Asia. Currently, she is a Resident Artist at The Patterson, exhibiting both nationally and internationally and teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art. On Thu Dec 3, Dyson and Sunstrum share an evening in the theater, presenting solo works that combine performance, installation, puppetry, video and animation. Click here for more info!

Main Gallery
On view: Nov 7-Dec 19, 2009.
Opening Reception: Sat. Nov 7, 2009 5-7pm.
Performances: Thursday Dec 3, 2009 7:30pm.

The Pendulum, The Pit, and Hope @ Metro Gallery
Metro Gallery presents photographs by artist Natasha Tylea.
This work strives to find the most overlooked or ordinarily mundane subjects and locate the corner where it all gets weird. To witness the irk in life. Little explorations in the moment between a grim reality and a possibly great reality, the space between despair and enlightenment. There is a comfort there, as these sensations are the sustenance of life, but there is also the spook of fate in our bones. The photographs conjure this sensation while giving new light to the spook. There is always a sense of hope in all these mixed emotions, if one resists the whitewashing methods of this America and the dumbing, numbing, narrowing down of letting fear live here. The photographs are carefully conceived in seconds. The work is often composed entirely of painterly moods from hues, stark instances, quaint folks or insect perspectives. The camera for Natasha, lives in this hope and that spook, and channels it by hand.

On View: Nov. 7-Nov. 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009 8pm

11.11.09

New Art Dialogue Series @ MICA
The second season of the Contemporary Museum’s New Art Dialogue Series, a forum for discussion of contemporary art in Baltimore, will begin Wednesday, November 11 at 7 p.m. with Carlos Basualdo, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A renowned curator of international exhibitions, Carlos Basualdo will share his experiences curating at prestigious international art venues and museums. His most recent work includes the celebrated Bruce Nauman exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Other projects of note include the exhibitions Structure of Survival, also for the Venice Biennale, and Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany.
The lecture is held in collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of Art, and will be held in MICA’s Falvey Hall, located in the Brown Center at 1300 Mt. Royal Avenue in Bolton Hill.
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 7pm
www.contemporary.org

Interview with Andy Holtin

2009-10-30T09:40:00.001-07:00

Andy Holtin is a kinetic sculptor based in Washington, DC. He teaches at American University and is currently featured in the Washington Project for the Arts' Options Biennial. interviewed by Rachel Sitkin

RS: Can you start by telling me where you’re from and how you got to this moment?

AH: I’m from mostly southern states and I ended up at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) for Graduate School. That was the first time that I had really come to this part of the country and I felt like it was a place I could be from.

RS: Richmond?

AH: This whole subdivision of Mid-Atlantic States- the whole region of the country you don’t know exists when you’re from the south. When you’re deeply from a given area, you don’t really know what the boundaries are of other areas. Like people in Texas think that Virginia is in New England or they think of Colorado as the Midwest. Once here, I got to know the culture that defined this region- southern enough not to be too fast moving but northern enough not to have this addiction to it’s own prejudicial past that makes up the south in way that I was never really comfortable with. I really liked it here.

I graduated from VCU and adjuncted for two years at VCU, University of Richmond and George Mason and then I taught in Texas for four years and decided that wasn’t really a long-term scenario for me. I feel like I jumped and the earth rotated a random amount and I came down and it happened to be in Texas. It was a good school but it wasn’t a place that I wanted to be and I decided that I really wanted to be back in this region. I enjoy the art community, and just the geography, I mean it being fall right now which is something that an awful lot of the country doesn’t get to appreciate the way that we do. So getting the job at American University turned out to be a really good opportunity.

RS: You mentioned at some point that you were a drawing major in undergrad. Can you talk about how your worked changed from strictly works on paper to 3D and performance?

AH: In some ways it was my allowance of what I was “allowed” to do that really changed. A lot of us that end up in art, it’s because at some point we were the kids that could draw well. That was the only thing I had in common with art making. I had very little understanding of the cultural complexities or the ways that art overlaps so many other disciplines and fields- I didn’t know any of that. Most of us, in my experience think we’re either going to be illustrators or graphic designers.

I went through a very small undergraduate program. Small programs really focus on 2D because, superficially, image making is the history of art making. I say superficially because there are a whole lot of other things out there, but 2D is the predominance of product. It doesn’t require as many facilities, and there are more people out there teaching it so when you have a small program, it usually ends up being drawing/painting based. So that’s what I went into and I really struggled with thinking in terms of images- I just never really did it. Even though I produced some good work and had some nice drawings, I found that I got more enjoyment out of building the stretchers or priming the surface, dealing the with the real materials than actually making a painting.

I started doing drawings on those objects and materials, like plexiglas or aluminum sheeting. Initially, I was just treating them as surface. But it’s a pretty short skip from that to turning those materials into object. You just bend them, fold them or break them and suddenly they stop being a surface. That really opened things up for me. I started bringing in other materials and realizing that I thought much more in terms of the real-time relationships of objects rather than a completely illusionistic image world. I was really pushing these weird fractured paintings and putting chunks of objects into them, making stretchers with holes in them, or putting a piece on the wall and then drawing around it- things that Vernon Fisher figured out a long time ago, but you have to go through it for yourself.

There wasn’t a lot of discourse around it at my school. People still wanted to see the work as image and kept looking for the skill justification in it. At one point I was so down on it that “I thought” I had a realization that I was really a painter. Because painting has this kind of umbrella history, I thought if I could define myself as a painter I could eliminate all of this answerless groping-in-the-dark for this other kind of art form that I didn’t have a name for at the time. If I could just default into this existing craft it’d be so much easier. So I started on another set of paintings but quickly realized again that I couldn’t stand working that way and started making those into objects… again. It was a strange realization after I had spent my whole life being a “facile drawer”.

It wasn’t until I went to grad school that I realized I could give up on images completely and work with objects and materials.

The Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

RS: Would you say that right now your work is shifting? Does the work that’s in the Options Biennial relate to the cardboard surveillance cameras?

AH: The shift that I see in my work happened about two years ago- as always I didn’t notice at the time. My previous work was an early exploration of using mechanism to create phenomena. Most of those phenomena are based on perceptual analysis- using an event visually and it’s sound as separate layers of reality that we experience by separate senses, that we then cognitively stitch together. I have several pieces that are about amplifying the sound of a tiny event but exporting that sound to another location so it breaks up the event. They all use some sort of mechanical system so that it happens in real time, something that you’re actually watching happen. That way of working is something that I am physically interested in enough to stay with it, but what began to happen was a shifting away from a choreography of cognitive or perceptual phenomena and towards a theater of the objects themselves.

I think of it as puppetry but with a material instead of a figure. I bring a material in and I make that material do what I want it to do or perform in its way, and I do it with a visible mechanism. I really like Japanese Bunraku puppetry where the puppeteers are all in black and they are actually holding the puppet. Yet within about the first 8 minutes of a 3 hour performance, you forget completely about the puppeteer and you spend the rest of the time focusing entirely on the sophisticated graceful gestures of the figure they’re moving. But some part of your brain knows your ignoring the mechanism.

RS: You’re not fixated on “how is this working?” You know how it’s working and you’re just enjoying that it is working.

AH: Yes, but I think that some part of us is enjoying the act of ignoring. It’s like the difference between a Titian painting and a Constable painting. I’d much rather look at a Constable painting, being given the experience without having to define every object in the way that a faithful realist painter would.

The thing that the most recent pieces have in common, including the cardboard cameras and the population of flashlights piece and these landscape pieces I’ve been doing recently, is that they all play with asking, “How much does it take to make us believe that something is what it is in the representation”.

They’re more about analyzing the degree to which the behavior of the piece is real or compelling or correct for our categories of assumption, and the degree to which is it completely incorrect. These little landscapes looking just like landscapes but we know that they’re not. And in a way they don’t really look the way mountains look, they just stand in close enough or the fact that they do look like it given what they’re made of or they’re scale- it’s that we want it to look that way. So the mechanism that produces these things is like the marionette strings that you want to ignore but you know that you’re ignoring them and that’s more fun than having them go away completely.

RS: Can you talk a little about where you find inspiration for new pieces? Is it generated while you’re working on a piece- if you come across a material that you think “wouldn’t it be interesting if this material were working in this way”? Or are ideas generated more outside of the studio?

AH: It changes. There are times when being in the studio working, surrounding myself with materials and things to a play with is the only way things happen. But sometimes it’s just stumbling across something in real life.

There was this optics piece (Very Close) I did not too long ago and that was prompted by a trip I made to an elderly relatives house where I found their magnifying glass with a light in it, for reading. For that piece, I began by bringing in all sorts of lenses and playing- seeing what events looked like. I ended up making a machine with a thin wire stylus that pricked the edge of a quarter while it rotated and it made a sound. I had a magnifying glass looking at the event, but if you looked at it without the magnifying glass you couldn’t even tell that the little needle was moving.

Under the glass it was really bouncing around and suddenly it accounted for the amount of noise that came out of the thing too. So, a piece like that comes about entirely by bringing those bits and pieces of material into the studio, the lab, where I start dissecting them, pulling them apart to see what happens. There was no endgame in mind, no idea whether it would be mechanical or involve sound or anything.

The most recent ones with the sifter- I had worked with the chalk before but was kind of dissatisfied and wanted to play with it some more. So I contacted a friend of mine, Galo Moncayo, that I collaborate with on large-scale projects (causality labs) and was talking about ways of getting this chalk to behave differently and how I wanted it to look like a landscape, how I wanted to build it up or erode it with water. After talking about the idea for a while, we both ended up miming the motions of a flour sifter, and there was the solution. And that was brilliant! So within a few hours I had one of those hand crank ones hooked up and it built beautiful little mountain ranges, unbelievable little landscapes falling out of this kitchen device.

RS: I never noticed the landscape in your work before. What inspired that?

AH: Well, what I’m not interested in is landscape in the historical sense of painting landscape, although maybe it’s just been kind of maligned and is more interesting than we give it credit for. I saw a show in Ghent, Belgium this summer at the Contemporary Museum, called The Picturesque, that really had its finger on it. It was a show about the way in which we envision the world and how that may not be anything like the world itself. The history of our notions about [landscape] become as much of a thing that we are referencing when we imagine the world as our real experience of it. Like, I was recently on the Oregon beach, and I hate it but I can’t stop thinking “this looks like a really great painting”. We now equate the frame of our vision with the frame of the image. It’s a change in our DNA from a hundred years ago and I think it’s permanent.

This show really got me thinking about representing the way that we make images or objects in relation to the landscape being like our pursuit of artificial intelligence. How do I represent the real or the other, and how am I going to acknowledge that I am dealing with a thing that is not just my perception of it but is in fact a real thing? It’s dealing with it ontologically and not just epistemologically, which is kind of impossible. So producing these landscapes that look nothing like any real mountain range that you’ve ever seen, in color or in shape or in anything, but there is something about the basic logic that is compelling in spite of the things that don’t make sense. So in a way these landscapes look like our notion of the world more through the images of the world, not the real world. They look like paintings of landscapes, not landscapes.

We all need a creation myth (2.1) from Andy Holtin on Vimeo.

RS: If all you had was a picture of a landscape and you were to think about how these things came into being, you wouldn’t necessarily think that they were formed by tectonic plates bashing into each other, you might think they were created by something that fell from the sky.

AH: Yeah. So that’s how it’s more about our “view” of the landscape, than representing the real thing.

RS: Ok. I have just a few more ending questions. If you could visit the studio of any living artist, who would it be?

AH: [long pause]… One of them would have to be Jenna Cardiff and George Bures Miller, a partner couple. I hesitate so long because I really wonder what their studio is like, their pieces are so different from each other but one of the things I like about them is that the pieces are experiences that you walk through, and they use sound and projection but integrated into the physical environments so that you’re not just aware of the video editing or sound quality exclusively. So their studio must be some beautiful combination of installation space, fabrication space and technical production space. I would like to see how they interact, how they layer the different tasks that have to be done in their process.

Some of the artists that I like the most, their work is sort of less physical than my own. Erwin Wurm is a good example. Vic Muniz I bet would be a really interesting person to hang around with for a little while. I like the fact that there are some physical solutions to his work, but it is always about the variety of ideas and the layers of interest. His work reflects how complicated contemporary culture is more than any other artist I can think of. Maybe I’d move him to the top of the list.

RS: If you were me, and you could interview any regional artist, who would it be?

AH: It sounds like an industry plug, but Alberto Gaitan. One of things I’ve really enjoyed about coming to D.C. is how strong a community there is for people that are interested in the same sort of technical things that I do. Especially the micro-controllers, the computers I use to choreograph the pieces. Within just a few weeks of coming out here I was able to get in touch with a number of artists that work with similar systems and are far more advanced at it than I am. Alberto is guy that’s been working with electronics and interactive artwork for a really long time and has some really interesting work.

RS: Thanks!

To See More:

www.andyholtin.com

options biennial

this weekend

2009-10-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

10.31.09

Desire, Destruction, Transcendence @ The Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art Museum is proud to present selected works from the John and Berthe Ford collection of traditional Indian and Himalayan art in visual dialogue with contemporary paintings by India born artist, Amita Bhatt. Bhatt derives her imagery from Hindu and Buddhist tantric sources infused with her understanding of Western philosophy. She explores classic themes of desire, conflict, struggle and transcendence as they manifest themselves in the present day. This thought provoking installation recognizes the power of visual expressions to articulate, to mobilize, to activate, and to provoke. Informed by tradition but speaking in the present, Bhatt’s works explore fundamental struggles and eternal tensions common to all cultures.
This installation will be in the Ford Gallery of South Asian and Himalayan Art. The Ford Gallery is located in the Hackerman House.
Exhibition Dates: October 31 - December 13, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009 3-5 pm

The Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MS 21201

11.1.09

Sejayno, Melissa Moore & Layne Garrett @ 2640 Space
Baltimore's stalwart innovators Sejayno and Melissa Moore join DC improviser Layne Garrett for an evening of sonic merriment and wonderment. Working with a menagerie of homemade electronic instruments, field recordings, and perhaps a strange assembly of strings and electronics known colloquially as a "guitar", they promise an evening of time travel facilitated by light-sensitive oscillators, touch-sensitive circuits, aura-sensitive biospheres... possibly even some finger-sensitive strings! Sunday, Nov. 1, 2009 7pm $5 - $10 sliding scale suggested donation.

2640 St. Paul St.
Baltimore, MD 21218

this weekend

2009-10-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

10.22.09

Rush Hour: Art beats Traffic @ Maryland Art Place

As part of MAP's seventh annual Curator's Incubator program, curator Rachel Sitkin will discuss the social relevance of her exhibition, In Our Nature: Artists Reflect on the Manmade Landscape. Artists Michelle Hagewood and Alex Lukas will talk about their work and landscape interests.
Closing Reception: 5-6pm
Gallery Talk: 6-7pm
free and open to the public

www.mdartplace.org

Unlimited Impressions @ University of Maryland
The Art Gallery presents Unlimited Impressions, an exhibition with Judy Pfaff, Karen Kunc, and Brian Shure. In tandem with Limited Edition, Judy Pfaff the Department of Arts and Humanities 2009 Artist-in-Residence, will be presenting a public lecture on Thursday October 22nd, and an exhibition with Karen Kunc and Brian Shure at the University of Maryland Art Gallery opening on Friday October 23rd.
Exhibition Dates: Oct. 22- Dec. 19, 2009
Public Lecture with Judy Pfaff: Thursday, October 22nd 5.00 PM
Room 2309 in the Art-Sociology Building

www.freetransformstudio.com
www.air.umd.edu/pfaff.html

10.23.09

Knitwit@NUDASHANK

An exhibition of contemporary knit and sewn work featuring Sarah Applebaum, Anthony Record, Nathan Vincent, Jennifer Strunge, Chiara Keeling, Todd Knopke
Exhibition Dates: October 23 - November 18, 2009
Opening Reception: October 23, 2009 from 7 - 10 pm

Nudashank

H&H Arts Building

405 W. Franklin Street

3rd Floor

Baltimore, MD 21201

Toppled @ The Stamp Gallery
In her current exhibition Toppled, Jessica Vaughn explores historical and cultural issues through the athletic performance of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. In appropriating the iconic image of Jesse Owens from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film “Olympia” as well as archival still images from the Games, Vaughn critiques the sporting event as a heightened connection between euphoria and spectacle, between the body and a public space.
Exhibition Dates: October 14th - December 18th, 2009
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, October 23rd 2009, 5:00-7:00pm

Stamp Gallery
1220 Stamp Student Union
Adele H. Stamp Student Union - Center for Campus Life
The University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Do Me a Favor @ John Fonda Gallery

Do Me A Favor: A Solo Exhibit by Christian Herr- A bunch of new paintings dealing with lovers slashing tires, russian knife fights, smokey burnouts, sign switch a roos, hot rod faces, and heros.
Opening Reception: Friday, October 23, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

John Fonda Gallery at Theater Project
45 West Preston St.
Baltimore, MD

10.25.09

Our Common Bond @ Galerie Myrtis
In collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of art, Center for Race and Culture, Gallery Myrtis presents Our Common Bond: Mother, Daughter, Sister, Self. This exhibition is a compelling testament to the societal roles of Black Women, derived from imagery of African-American women artists who are bound by their personal experiences as mothers, daughters and sisters; and the effort to maintain their self-identity. Artists: Maya Freelon Asante, Eliabeth Catlett, Linda Day Clark, Oletha DeVane, Kenyatta Hinkle, Margo Humphrey, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Valerie Maynard, E.J. Montgomery, Annie Phillips, Delilah Pierce, Joyce Scott, Renee Stout, Evita Tezeno and Joyce Wellman.
Exhibition Dates: Oct. 17- Nov. 15, 2009
Opening Reception: Sunday, Oct. 25, 2009 1-6pm

Galerie Myrtis
2224 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218

This Weekend

2009-09-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

10.2.09

Grundlehammer @ 2640 Space
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society proudly presents their debut production Gründlehämmer. Gründlehämmer is an entirely original, medieval, fantasy rock opera that combines completely ridiculous stage theatrics with great live music. It will be staged October 2 through 4th at the 2640 space in Baltimore, MD, and will feature 15 original rock songs performed live by a 7-piece metal orchestra, in addition to a full cast and crew of talented people. Our goal is to produce an entirely new and original Rock Opera that is as epic and face-melting as possible, while remaining true to the DIY ethic that inspired the BROS to band together.
Show times: Friday & Saturday, October 2 & 3, 2009 7pm
Sunday, October 4, 2009 5:30pm
Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com
2640 Space
2640 St. Paul
Baltimore, MD 21218

Los Solos Series @ The LOF/T
This weeks perfomances will feature Baltimore's own Lauren Bender and New York based Trisha Baga. It will be an evening of live video performance from two exceptional solo artists.
Friday, October 2, 2009 8-11pm $6
The LOF/T
120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21201
Los Solos Series

Northernmost Southern Exposure @ Metro Gallery
Metro Gallery presents Northernmost Southern Exposure: an evening of interesting actions & modern day signs & wonders. Featured artists are Spoon Popkin, Kelley Bell, Sarada Conaway, Jackie Milad, Ric Royer.
October 2 - November 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 2009 7pm
Metro Gallery
1700 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21217

10.3.09

Crafty Bastards in Adams Morgan
Crafty Bastards Arts & Crafts Fair is now in its 6th year. Crafty Bastards is an exhibition and sale of handmade alternative arts and crafts from independent artists presented by the Washington City Paper and powered by Hello Craft!
Saturday, October 3, 2009, from 10am to 5 pm in Adams Morgan, Washington, D.C.,
Marie Reed Learning Center at 18th & Wyoming
Vendor List

This Weekend

2009-09-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

8.24.09

Curator's Incubator '09 @ Maryland Art Place
Three curators were selected this year to take part in Curator's Incubator '09 at Maryland Art Place. Margaret Winslow's Soft Space: Architecture in Contemporary Art, combines a set of drawings and installations that explore physical and psychological nuances in the built environment. Rachel Sitkin's In Our Nature: Artists Reflect on the Altered Landscape features artists who mine the outfall of urban development. The Art of the Set Up: Sound Objects as Artifacts was curated by Shelly Blake-Plock.

artwork by Alex Lukas

Artists include Peter Blasser. Alessandro Bosetti. Andy Hayleck. Bonnie Jones. Melissa Moore. Mike Muniak. Kim Beck. Laura Cooperman. Michelle Hagewood. Alex Lukas. Igor Pasternak. Ronald Longsdorf. Janell Olah. Stephen Ruszkowki.
September 15- October 24, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 24, 2009 6-8pm

Maryland Art Place
Power Plant Live! 8 Market Place, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21202

8.26.09

Relative Terrain @ The Whole Gallery
The Whole Gallery presents: Relative Terrain, new work by Andrew Geddes, Phuong Pham, and Marty Weishaar. In this exhibition, Geddes installs pedestrian commodities through structures that have been simplified into wood and vinyl; Pham presents drawings in horsehair, silk, and wax that communicate displacement and meditation; and Weishaar explores different modes of location, destruction, and play in his dollhouse installations. Geddes and Weishaar both teach art in the Baltimore City school system, and Pham works as a book conservator. All three artists reside in Baltimore.
September 26 - October 24, 2009
Opening Reception: September 26, 2009 8-10pm, with light refreshments and live music by Ten Elevenths and Sweatpants

Coming in October...
Studio Visits with Baltimore artist Kim Manfredi and DC based Andy Holtin!

This Weekend

2009-09-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

9.17.09

Options Biennial @ Conner Contemporary, 2nd Floor
Washington Project for the Arts presents the thirteenth installment of the biennial exhibition, OPTIONS, curated by Anne Collins Goodyear. The exhibition will include works by Leah Beeferman (VA), Jessica Braiterman (MD), Graham Coreil-Allen (MD), Younseal Eum (VA), Andy Holtin (DC), Sue Johnson (MD), Patrick McDonough (DC), Kim Manfredi (MD), Jenny Mullins (DC), Ding Ren (DC), Matthew Smith (DC), Polly Townsend (DC), and Matthew Wead (MD).

As a tradition, OPTIONS is a survey of the brightest and most talented emerging artists in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia regions and offers visibility for artists who do not have gallery representation.

September 17 - October 31, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 17, 2009 6-8pm
Conner Contemporary
1358 Florida Avenue NE, second floor
Washington, DC 20002

9.18.09

Smoke Rings @ Gallery Imperato
Gallery Imperato is pleased to announce Smoke Rings, a solo exhibition of new work by Rob Tarbell from his series, Smokes. Comprised of smoke-marked works on paper that depict performing animals, the work intends to balance accident with control and give permanence to the ephemeral. The parallel between the artist's subjects and unconventional process makes for a thought-provoking exhibition. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to animal rescue organizations.
September 18, 2009 - October 31, 2009
Opening Reception: September 18, 7-10pm
Gallery Imperato
921 E. Fort Ave. Suite 120
Baltimore, MD 21230

9.19.09

Isabel Manalo: Once, Upon @Addison/Ripley
Isabel Manalo’s exhibition, Once, Upon, is a collection of new paintings where innocence and danger reside in a verdant and timeless place. It is a space where her two daughters exist and even seem to belong to -- as in a garden or sanctuary. At the same moment, it is a place where they can be vulnerable in the lushness of their surroundings.

September 19 - October 17, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 19, 2009 5-7pm
Addison/Ripley Fine Art

John Singer Sargent @ The Corcoran

2009-09-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

Sargent and the Sea at The Corcoran Gallery of Art

September 12, 2009 – January 3, 2010

In Sargent and the Sea, the Corcoran Gallery of Art brings together for the first time more than 80 paintings, watercolors, and drawings depicting seascapes and coastal scenes from the early career of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the pre-eminent American expatriate painter of the late 19th century. The Corcoran’s masterwork En route pour la pêche (Setting out to Fish) (1878), will serve as the centerpiece of the exhibition, and will be joined by other works produced during, and inspired by, the artist’s summer journeys from his home in Paris to Brittany, Normandy, and Capri, as well as two transatlantic voyages.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 Seventeenth St. NW
Washington, DC 20006

This Weekend

2009-09-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

9.10.09

Robert Guevara: Three voices @ The Creative Alliance

At first glance, Robert Guevara’s sculptural installations resemble abandoned sites of construction. Then you notice the 2x4’s are planed by hand, the fasteners individually stamped, and the materials possess an internal logic, even vitality. Playing off of The Patterson’s girders, conduits, and gallery walls, Guevara suggests architecture’s nature as a living system.
In the Amelie Rothschild Gallery September 10-26, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 2009 5:30-7:30pm
Creative Alliance at The Patterson
3134 Eastern Avenue
Baltimore Maryland 21224

High Zero @ Theater Project
High Zero is the premier festival of Improvised, Experimental music on the East Coast, being fully devoted to new collaborations between the most inspired improvisors from around the world.
Lasting two weeks in total, the festival brings together 28 core musicians each year, but also involves a much larger subculture of musicians in Baltimore and on the East Coast. Unlike many related festivals, High Zero is not narrow in terms of sensibility or subculture, but rather widely inclusive of all the different types of experimental music-making in the moment. The fact that half of the festival's core participants are from Baltimore speaks to the depth of Baltimore's experimental music subculture, which in recent years has grown to be one of the richest cities in the country for experimental art.
Concerts every night September 10-13, 2009 at Theater Project
For details: http://www.highzero.org

9.11.09

Love Letters & Debriscapes @ Civilian Arts Project
Civilian Art Projects is pleased to present two solo exhibitions: Love Letters by Cara Ober and Debriscapes by Nikki Painter.
Love Letters is Baltimore-based artist Cara Ober’s first solo exhibition with Civilian Art Projects.

Ober layers drawing, painting, and printmaking into mixed media works that examine and reinterpret sentimental imagery. Intricate and funny, Love Letters explores the relationship of the artist to image, word, and personal meaning found in the exploration of secret fantasy and expressive interlude.

With Debriscapes, her first solo exhibition in Washington DC, Richmond VA-based Nikki Painter exhibits new drawings and a site-specific installation that explore -- in bright neon colors, pencil lines, and various materials -- the relationship and continuum between the built and natural worlds.

September 11- October 17, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, September 11, 2009 7-9pm
www.civilianartprojects.com
Civilian Arts Project
406 7th Street NW, Second Floor
Washington DC 20004
(202) 347-0022

Visions From the End of the World @ Flashpoint
Bradley Chriss’ small, apocalyptic watercolors are situated at the unlikely interstice between the sentimental and the nightmarish. The intimate scale and seductive colors cajole and beguile the viewer into confronting the sinister reality that humanity is ultimately powerless within its own environment. Visions from the End of the World will open with a performance by Chriss’ performance art group, The Post-NeoAbsurdist Anti-Collective.
September 3- October 3, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, September 11, 2009 6-8 pm
Flashpoint
916 G St. NW
Washington, DC 20001

9.12.09

REbirth/Decay @ The Hexagon
The Hexagon presents: REbirth/DEcay, an exhibition of local artists who interpret concepts of rebirth and decay, curated by Anna Louise Jiongco. Featured artists include: Sarah El-Jellad, Jared T. Fischer, Brian Casey, Scotbot, and Anna Louise Jiongco.
September 12- October 2, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 2009 6pm
The Hexagon
1825 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21206

FAX @ The Contemporary Museum
FAX invites a multi-generational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. FAX will include drawings by over 100 artists that have each been submitted via fax machine. Over the course of the exhibition, as new works arrive via the museum's working fax machine, the exhibition will evolve as new works are added to the walls of the museum.
September 12- December 20, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 2009 6-8pm
The Contemporary Museum
100 W. Centre Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

Barry Nemett: Paintings, Poems & Passages @ The Creative Alliance

Barry Nemett’s paintings reflect a busy mind, constantly feeling around for ideas, images, words and other voices, then piecing them back together like grand puzzles, bursting with information. The longtime professor and Chair of MICA’s Painting Department, Nemett is also a published writer and poet, and collaborated for years with Richard Kalter, MICA’s dearly missed philosopher/ poet/ theologian in residence. The spirit of that collaboration hovers over this exhibition, which celebrates the release of Nemett’s full-length retrospective catalog, and draws together work exploring the dynamic interplay between painting and poetry.
In the Main Gallery September 12- October 24, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 2009 5-7 pm
www.creativealliance.org

Jo Smail: Conjurations @ Goya Contemporary
September 1- October 14, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 2009 5-8pm

Goya Contemporary
Mill Center, Studio 214
3000 Chestnut Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21211

This Weekend (Load of Fun is where it's at!)

2009-09-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

9.3.09

The 50 Greatest Ladies & Gentleman @ The LOF/t
The Missoula Oblongata presents their fourth full-scale touring production, The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen. As always, the company has created their own homemade lighting system—run from the stage by the performers, as well as an interactive set made of junk, and an original score played live by the composers-turned-actors.
The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen takes place just after the Treaty of Versailles. A veteran who is genetically predisposed to cowardice searches for his brother from whom he’s received a mysterious letter. When the veteran comes upon the town from whence the letter came, he finds that his brother (and the rest of the town) have been caught in a dance mania—a hysterical mass tarantism. With no one else around, the veteran befriends a spider—likely the one who is responsible for the tarantism, and together, they go up against the town doctor who believes that breakfast (and everything ordinary, for that matter) is beneath love.

Thursday, September 3, 2009
8pm sharp in the theater, $5

www.loadoffun.net

9.4.09

In The Jungle & more @ The LOF/t
Los Solos will be presenting the Baltimore premiere of Stephanie Barber’s new performance piece in the jungle which premiered in May 2009 at The Stone in NYC.
57 minutes, digital video, live performance, lecture and music

Part musical, part poetic lecture, part video transpiration soaked performance, in the jungle, playfully and sorrowfully tells the tale of an unreliable narrator in a self imposed exile. Given a grant to study the equivalent of animal cries and whines in jungle flora our heroine has lived for 1, 612 days deep in an unnamed jungle.

Friday, September 4, 2009
Doors open at 8pm, Show starts at 8:30, $6

http://baltimoreperformance.com/lossolos/

9.5.09

Lab Door/ Ozone Shelf @ Open Space
Featuring work by Eamon Espey, Andrew Liang, and Matthew Thurber

Opening: September 5th, 7 - 10 pm
with performances by Ambergris and ghost life

Open Space
2720 Sisson St.
Baltimore, MD 21211
www.openspacebaltimore.com

Sublime Structure @ Grimaldis Gallery
A multi-media thematic exhibition featuring artists possessing distinct approaches to the body as their subject. With references to science, sexuality, gender, spirituality, performance and technology, each artist brings a unique and heightened sense of physical being into their work.
Featured artists are Effie Halivopoulou, Kim Manfredi, Christopher Myers, Rachel Schmidt and Lu Zhang.
Catalog and an essay written by Virginia K. Adams, Ph.D. will accompany the exhibition.

September 2 - October 3, 2009

www.cgrimaldisgallery.com

CONECTA @ The Stamp Gallery
CONECTA, is an exhibition and artist collaborative project featuring emerging U.S and Mexican Artists. The exhibition, curated and organized by Jackie Milad

August 21 – October 3, 2008.

The Stamp Gallery

9.8.09

Inequalities @ Load of Fun
Since 2001, High Zero Festival has included a gallery show of installations, primarily to do with sound and other elements related to the broad experimental music and thought culture of which High Zero is a part. This year, High Zero Foundation presents INEQUALITIES, a gallery show at the Load of Fun curated with works of four very interesting local artists. The following artists will present work in the show: Walter Carpenter, Owen Gardner, Jesse Haas, Ayako Katoaka, Jimmy Joe Roche
Opening Party- Tuesday, September 8, 2009 7:30pm, $6

High Zero

This Weekend

2009-08-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

8.14.09

Gerald Habrath & Preston Poe @ The Creative Alliance
Recalling the cave walls of Lascaux, the wailing wall, or just community bulletin boards, artists Gerald Habarth (Morgantown, WV) and Preston Poe (Salisbury, MD) make a literal and metaphorical pilgrimage to the gallery walls of The Patterson. There, they produce, display and combine quirky drawings and paper maché sculptures, along with other material gathered on their journeys, to make an animated video about the ways people convene within and around walls to share information.
Reception: August 14, 2009 5:30-7:30 pm

The Creative Alliance
3134 Eastern Ave.
Baltimore, MD

www.creativealliance.org

In a Material World: Costumes by Melissa Webb @ Gallery Imperato
Elaborate costumes by fiber artist Melissa Webb will be on display from August 14 through September 12, 2009. A selection of related photographs by Uli Loskot, Lisa Dietrich, and aminibigcircus will accompany the wears. Guests can expect to be served by garden gnomes and mingle among hi-society stilt walkers at an opening reception to be held on August 14 from 7-10pm.

Gallery Imperato
921 East Fort St., Suite 120
Baltimore, MD

www.galleryimperato.com

This Weekend

2009-08-05T13:55:00.000-07:00

8.7.09

Shunpiker & Milan Braslavsky @ School 33
In Gallery 1: Shunpiker curated by R.L. Croft.
Featured Artists include: Bill Gusky, Christine Hahn, Ken Huston, and Janet Van Fleet.

In the Member Gallery: Milana Braslavsky

Opening Receptions: Friday August 7, 6-9 pm
1427 Light Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230

www.school33.org

Where The Sun Don't Shine @ Nudashank

Closing Reception: Friday August 7, 7-9pm
H& H Building, 3rd Floor
405 W. Franklin St.
Baltimore, MD

www.nudashank.com

8.8.09

Abandon Ship @ Current Gallery
The final show!!!

Closing Reception: Saturday August 8, 7-10 pm
30 South Calvert St.
Baltimore, MD

www.currentspace.com

Art I saw in Portugal

2009-08-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

graffiti from Lisbon and Porto

Highlights from the Serralves Foundation 30th Anniversary Exhibition in Porto

Bernd & Hilla Becher, Aufbereitungsanlagen, 1974-75, 9 b/w photographs of mining plants in the U.S.

Gilberto Zorio, Piombi, 1968, Lead plate, coppersulphate, chloric acid

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (Venetian), 1983, cardboard, tar paper, tape & rope

Christina Iglesias, Untitled (Passage I), 2002, raffia

Tobias Rehberger, Mother 81%, 2002, metal, plastified paper, fabric, plexiglass, wood, tape

interior of Mother 81%

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rag Wall, 1967, bricks, fabric

Emilia Nadal, Slogan's, 1979, painted wood

Eduardo Batarda, Eat That Chicken, 1973, india-ink and watercolor on paper

detail

Katharina Grosse, Atoms Outside Eggs, 2007, acrylic on polyurethane on styrofoam (& me)

This Weekend

2009-06-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

6.25.09
Pause 2009@ The Stamp Gallery
Through a range of media, Elizabeth Crisman, Laura Hughes and Lu Zhang invite viewers to examine individual elements of larger narratives or events. Charged with meaning, the work serves as a meeting point of the unknown and the familiar, the concrete and the abstract
Works by Elizabeth Crisman, Laura Hughes and Lu Zhang
Curated by Alexandra Douglas-Barrera, Fernando Ramirez and Alison Reilly

Exhibition Dates: June 25-July 24, 2009

The Stamp Gallery

6.28.09
Sondheim Artscape Prize: 2009 Finalists @ The BMA
In conjunction with Artscape, Baltimore’s premier arts festival organized by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, the BMA presents a special exhibition of the six finalists for The Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize: Baltimore Development Cooperative, Leslie Furlong, Ryan Hackett,Jessie Lehson, Molly Springfield, and Karen Yasinsky.

Exhibition Dates: June 20–August 16, 2009
Free exhibition

The winner is chosen by an independent panel of jurors and announced at a special ceremony on Saturday, July 11, 2009

6.29.09
2009 In Studio MFA Thesis Exhibition @ MICA
Full-screen an exhibition of thesis work of 11 graduating artists in the MFA in Studio Art, a low-residency program that allows experienced artists to develop a professional body of work, a unique personal voice, and an expanded understanding of contemporary art through intensive studio practice. Artwork will be on view Monday, June 29-Saturday, July 11 in Decker, Meyerhoff, and Fox 3 galleries of Fox Building, 1303 W. Mount Royal Ave., and Pinkard Gallery of Bunting Center, 1401 W. Mount Royal Ave.
Artists include: Kerry Adams, Julie Benoit, Leah Cooper, Salinda Deery, Bruce Feldman, Nicole Herbert, Michael Iacovone, Jennifer Miller, Sondra Peron, Kelly Valdez, and Katie Walberg

Opening Reception: Friday July 10, 2009 6-8 pm

7.01.09
Summer '09 @ Grimaldis Gallery
A selection of the gallery's artists including Chul-Hyun Ahn, Henry Coe, Don Cook, Grace Hartigan, Hidenori Ishii, Isaac Julien, Elizabeth Laudenslager, Dimitra Lazaridou, Eugene Leake, Neil Meyerhoff, Raoul Middleman, Christopher Myers, Christopher Saah, Rex Stevens, Rene Trevino, Costas Varotsos, Andy Warhol, John Waters and Lu Zhang.

Exhibition Dates: July 1 - August 22, 2009
Opening reception: Wednesday, July 1st, 6-8pm

For more information, go to www.cgrimaldisgallery.com.

This Weekend

2009-06-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

6.4.09
Marching for Digits @ Theater Project
John Fonda Gallery is please to present Nicole Shiflet’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Titled Marching for Digits, the show consists of new paintings that explore Nicole’s fascination with interstitial moments that she documents into the fictional narratives of her paintings
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 4, 6:30-8:00pm.
Exhibition runs through July 12.

Theater Project
45 West Preston St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

Open Studios @ Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower
During this event, guests can visit artists' studios, view and purchase artwork, and enjoy refreshments and light fare.

Bromo Seltxer Arts Tower
21 South Eutaw Street.
Baltimore, MD 21201

6.7.09
Lawrence Schneider @ The Evergreen Museum
Six abstract sculptures created by Hunt Valley-based artist Lawrence Schneider comprise this focus exhibition in Evergreen Museum & Library’s Reading Room. A former aeronautical engineer and computer systems professional, Schneider developed his direct carving skills as a hobby until 2004 when, at the age of 70, he made art a full-time career. Reading the Grain showcases his imaginative designs, in which delicate unbroken ribbons of polished wood or bronze from basic structures.

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 7, 1-4 p.m. FREE
reservations requested: (410) 516-0341 or evergreenmuseum@jhu.edu

This Weekend

2009-05-27T16:36:00.001-07:00

5.27.09
ONE @ Tilt Studios
featuring local artists Jessica Van Brakle, Kris Vandevander and TwoCan Collective (Emily C-D and Jessica Unterhalter). This collective of artists have one thing in common: connection. Whether it is community relationships, human presence or just connections to nature, these three artists have displayed their work in a way that brings everyone closer together; to become one.
Exhibition Dates: May 27- July 2, 2009
Opening Reception: May 27, 6-8 pm

5.29.09
The Unbroken Circle of Things @ The LOF/t
truetheatertheater presents The Unbroken Circle of Things, a tale about the unbreakable spirit energy of love. The company of fourn intermixes costumes, puppets, shadows, jokes, saong and dance with live and prerecorded sound to create a captivationg 40 minute psychedelic narative.

For tickets call the LOF/t at 443-759-8314

Diagnosis: Dyke @ The Creative Alliance
The Charm City Kitty Club present Diagnosis: Dyke- music by Jana Hunter and Mzery Loves Company, Eliza Blaze on hot trapeze, the contortions of Rebecca Nagle, and Ariel Schrag with scenes from her acclaimed graphic novels and more!
Friday May 29- Saturday May 30, 2009
Cocktails: 7pm, Showtime: 8pm

The Creative Alliance

5.31.09
From Sketchbook to Suspension: Trajectories in the Age of Synthesis @ St. John's College

Helen Frederick, Curator
Exhibiting Artists: Maria Barbosa, MD / Roberto Bocci, DC / Mark Cooley, VA / Eve Ingalls, NY / Helen Frederick, MD / Janis Goodman, DC / Beth Grabowski, NC / Lawrence Hamlin, Ill / Lisa Hill, MD / Cara Ober, MD / Michael Pestel, Conn / Michael Platt, DC / Andrew Raftery, RI / Paul Ryan, VA / Barbara Tisserat, VA / Yuriko Yamaguchi, VA
Exhibition Dates: May 21 - June 11, 2009
Panel Discussion: May 31, 3 p.m.
Opening Reception: May 31, 4-6 p.m.

For more information or directions to the gallery, go to:
http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa207.htm or
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/about/AN/map.shtml

Studio Visit with Amy Boone-McCreesh

2009-05-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

Amy Boone-McCreesh was interviewed by Joseph Keli Anaya

Where are you from and can you tell me a little about yourself?
I'm from Pennsylvania, but my mom is from England. I'm recently married and moved to Baltimore about a year ago. My parents divorced when I was four years old and that plays a large role in forming my personal relationships.

Why Baltimore?
I wanted to go to grad school that was relatively close to where I'm from. It really just made sense for this point in my life.

What medium did you first start working in seriously?
I started in large oil paintings because liked expressing through gestures and the texture.

How did you make the shift from oils to your work now?
I had the desire to achieve different line quality and oil paint only allows for a certain kind of line quality. I also liked thick paint which helped me move into 3-D work.

Will you talk about your process a little bit?
I have a pretty short attention span, so I work on sculptures, drawing, and anything in between even if it's just ideas. Working on several things at once helps the cohesiveness of everything. When I create a drawing it makes me excited to create something in 3-d and then merge the two. I'm never satisfied with what I'm working so it spawns the next piece. My work mainly from intuition and usually use very little planning.

What draws you to the materials that you use?
I use a limited color palette because it avoids the danger of being too busy. Cohesive colors also unify my 2-d and 3-d work in same space.

What materials do you use and why?
When I work in 3d, I use second hand fabrics. Those handled, worn or used fabrics have a history and I use them because I like to reference home and items in the home. For example, a certain fabric might have been a cushion or some other thing that was comfortable for someone else. I have a skewed sense of home because I was shuffled around a lot, so I try to recapture that comfort.

How do you feel about craftsmanship?
Craftsmanship is important, but I struggle with it. I work so quickly and fast paced that those issues are difficult to face, but if I don't take the time to face them I regret it.

How do you take the time for craftsmanship?
I desire to have a successful finished product, which overrides the need to produce for the sake of producing. The process of making during the piece is as important as a successful finished product. As much as I love the process it's detrimental to my work, but if that was not an issue the work would be totally different.

How do you feel about concept in relation to your work?
I'm never not thinking about concept. I make aesthetic decisions, but always with a concept in mind. Visual decisions influence the concept by either reinforcing the concept or working against it.

What are some specific issues that interest you and what are your goals with those issues?
I'm working with human relationship issues because of the way I grew up and because of my life currently. I'm influenced by family dynamics like mother/daughter, husband/wife, and brother/sister and the different issues that can arise within those relationships. I'm interested in how one changes whether you are with your mom or with your husband. For example, I bring the history I have with my mom to the table when I form a relationship with my husband.
My goals are to examine specific situations that can some up in a single relationship or in a group dynamic and bring those emotions to the surface. Ideally I'd like to illicit an emotional reaction with my work.

What are you working on now?
I'm working on fusing 2-D and 3-D.

What is most important for people to get from your work?
Ideally, I would like people to make a connection from abstract visuals to human interactions and for people to get a sense of me because my work is a visual extension of who I am. It means a lot to me when people come in to my studio and understand that my work is a direct visual representation of myself. My work provides me with a forum to express things that I can't express daily. It's like having a translator. I feel way more comfortable with the visual vocab than I do with real communication.

What are you most proud of?
I am very fortunate for all the things in my life right now.I most proud of getting to where I am right now because when I was born my mom wasn't even an American citizen. That's where I started and the awareness of my path here makes being in grad school really exciting.

What artists are you looking at right now?
Petah Coyne: I like her monochromatic arrangement and the assemblage quality of it.
Lauren Owens: I like her sparse compositions, particularly the grand scale.
Egon Shiele: I like his line quality
Louise Bourgeois: I'm fascinated with her because she's still making work about her childhood.

Young & So Fresh

2009-05-13T20:58:00.000-07:00

Visit with Alex Ebstein at Nudashank Gallery
interviewed by Rachel Sitkin

Alex is a curator, arts writer, and artist in Baltimore. She writes for the City Paper and contributes to Gutter Magazine, as well as writing her own blog, There Were Ten Tigers. She and Seth Adelsberger recently began Nudashank Gallery, a new curatorial project on the 3rd floor of the H & H building.

Their second exhibition, Picture Plane, will open at Nudashank on Friday, May 15th 7-9pm

RS: Where did you go to school?

AE: Goucher. I started as a photographer but by the end I was focusing on sculpture and drawing, and so my senior show only had two photographs in it, and they were shots from installation work and a collaborative work I’d done with my friend Andrew Williams.

RS: So I know you do a lot of writing. Is it just for the City Paper?

AE: I’m also doing some writing for Gutter Magazine. I’ve been the fashion editor and I’m taking over as arts editor for a little while.

RS: How did you begin writing for the City Paper?

AE: It started because I helped with their 2008 year end issue and then I ran into Brett (McCabe) at Paperwork Gallery and he asked me if I was interested in writing longer reviews.

RS: How does that work? Do you write about what you want or do they give you assignments?

AE: So I suggested the first couple of articles. And now I kind of work it out with Brett. It’s a mix of what I’m interested in, what I know about and what needs to be covered.

RS: You are kind of filling three roles right now, critic, curator and artist. In terms of aspirations, do you feel like there are one or two that you want to pursue more actively?

AE: I’m feeling invigorated by this project (Nudashank), the curating aspect, continuing to look at what’s new. Which sort of ties into writing because I’m looking at as much art as I can, thinking about work for my own shows. So I form opinions about the way things are presented, the way things are curated. Those two things sort of go hand in hand, but ideally all three will even out.

A lot of my roles I’ve sort of fallen into. With curating, I did the Current show exactly a year after I’d started my blog and so I’d been looking at stuff all over locally and I knew what I wanted to see more of. I pulled together a show that represented what I didn’t see a lot of in Baltimore. After that, I felt it was something I really wanted to keep pursuing; it was a really good fit for me. And out of that experience came Nudashank. I wanted to see a fresher gallery space in Baltimore, with a hipper sensibility, a focus on young artists, a venue that is easier for artists just out of school to approach.

It’s a good thing to have a space that focuses on young artists that are really in tune with what’s going on in other cities and sort of breaks with the Baltimore old regime.

RS: It seemed like there was a really great turnout for the first show. Did you get any specific feedback that you think will influence future plans for the gallery?

AE: The turnout was amazing! And I think people were really looking for a new and young space. We got a mention in the Washington Post and on Fecal Face, and we didn’t really even have to try, they found us. I think because we are connecting the Baltimore scene with bigger city contemporary trends in art and trying to keep it as current and relevant as possible (while still true to a Baltimore aesthetic). People really really responded to the work and the space.

RS: Since you have been all over this past year what are some of the better shows that you’ve seen. And what are the criteria for you right now for what you think is “standout” work?

AE: Can I answer that in a round about way? After going to the art fairs in Miami and being exposed to everything all at once, it was sort of obvious what stood out to me as being interesting and new. The west coast illustration aesthetic is something that I personally gravitate towards. And for the business aspect of running a gallery, it was interesting to see what was commercially viable.

RS: Are there specific artists that you just Love, Love Love?

AE: Well, having been exposed to a lot more painting, people like Kim Dorland and Allison Schulnik really stand out. They are these really thick goopy painters, impasto painters that are both illustrative but really expressive at the same time. I really like people who really have developed a style and aesthetic all their own- work that is really fresh and interesting. Paintings, sculpture, illustration that has a voice of its own. Like Xavier Schiapani’s creates these intense isolated vignettes, this kind of creepy really tense world. It’s complete and speaks for itself.

A lot of work in the first show was very illustrative and narrative and that’s my own aesthetic preference, similar to the show, Stories From the Woods, which I curated at Current gallery. That’s the way I lean, work that is a look into a fully imagined and realized space. In our new show, Picture Plane, I am really drawn to Morgan Blaire’s piece. She has this entire world and story going on without any figures, without any specifics.

RS: And from a curatorial perspective, are there certain exhibitions or group shows that you thought were really well put together?

AE: I was really into Agenda, Jamillah James's show. Her show looked at new media and queer media- the way people interact and react to it, make art through it and about it. It was a show that came back around full circle in every way. The artists that she chose work in a variety of media, but the majority of the included work was video. So seeing someone who has such a strong vision and stays true to their own interests while still making it accessible for everyone was really great. There was sculpture, drawings, interactive work, she had additional screenings- the exhibition filled every inch of the gallery, but wasn't overcrowded. The whole show was very tongue-in-cheek; there was a humor throughout the whole thing that was coupled with this overall seriousness that rang really true for the subject matter. It was in your face. That was definitely one of the most memorable group shows from the past year.

I think curation has become a little loose in Baltimore. It’s sort of like “Here’s this one idea, and I had this one artist in mind, who’s my friend, and I’ve just thrown a bunch of other stuff at it that vaguely fits,” as opposed to going through and deciding on a good theme and bringing together something that has a full message.

RS: Ok. I know that a lot of young artists, they end-up staying in Baltimore after school, not necessarily at first because its what they want but because it’s so affordable and so easy to pursue the things they want to pursue. But now that you’ve been out of school for a couple years and you’re setting up projects here, do you feel like you are forming some sort of commitment to Baltimore? Do you have a goal for what you want to cultivate in Baltimore or is it more of a personal goal and you may end up moving to New York or San Francisco or LA to pursue those things?

AE: They are goals for myself but they’re rooted in Baltimore. I have friends in the art scene here and I think there are a lot of amazing things going on here. We have awesome opportunities, and a really sympathetic press. But I think if Baltimore artists had some exposure in other cities the scene could really take off. I’d like to see Baltimore scene receive some national attention for art instead of just Dan Deacon.

RS: If you were me, whom would you interview next?

AE: Mark Brown! He collaborates a lot with musicians making video pieces that he projects with live sets. He bridges the gap between the music and arts scenes in a lot of interesting ways. He and Kari Altmann also co-coordinated an online curitorial project, “Netmares/Netdreams”.

You know, Jamillah and Mark have given me my first real exposure to new media and there is so much going on. I think it’s an expanding section of the art world, I’m curious to see where it goes.

RS: Do you have any plans to do a new media show at Nudashank?

AE: Yeah!!! It’s gonna be all video and digital work. We don’t have a date yet but it’ll be sometime in the next year. I’m not gonna give out the title cause it’s so cool somebody might steal it!

To See More:

www.nudashank.blogspot.com
www.thereweretentigers.blogspot.com
guttermagazine.com
www.sethsdelsberger.blogspot.com

This Weekend

2009-05-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

5.15.09
Picture Plane @ Nudashank

Nudashank is pleased to present our second exhibition- “Picture Plane.” This show brings together paintings that combine hard-edged abstraction with a post-digital return to pictorial space and linear perspective. Equal parts modernism and classicism, the exhibiting painters are from a generation that has been influenced by screensavers, vector graphics, MS Paint, Google maps, and Photoshop. The paintings evince the pervading luminescence of the computer screen, the digital color spectrum, and the expanding universe of virtual spaces. Flat, planar shapes are used as devices to depict scenes void of inhabitants. These paintings reflect a new, synthesized (perhaps alienated) perception of the world and how visual information is coded, condensed, flattened, and transmitted.
Featuring the work of Dan Bina (NYC), Morgan Blair (NYC), Michael Dotson (DC), Allison Reimus (DC), Dale Ihnken (BMO), & Tim Horjus (BMO)
May 15th- June 19th, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday May 15th, 7 - 9 pm

Nudashank

H & H Building

405 W. Franklin St. 3rd Floor

Baltimore, MD 21201

Urban Blight @ Gallery Imperato
Gallery Imperato is pleased to announce Urban Blight, a solo exhibition of new works by Alyssa Dennis. Through a series of mixed media drawings, Dennis attempts to "track the development of urban living systems." Her work is a collection of ideas, information and experiments that study the human relationship to the built environment.
May 15, 2009 - June 27, 2009
Opening Reception: May 15, 2009 7-10pm

Gallery Imperato
921 E. Fort Ave., Suite 120
Baltimore, MD 21230

5.16.09
Bruce McClure @ The Loft

"Cycloptically Through The Window Disks - There's Rings For All!"
A Projector Performance by Bruce McClure
Magic Eye is proud to host expanded-cinema artist Bruce McClure in his Baltimore debut. McClure, who recently played with Throbbing Gristle, will perform two half-hour live projector performances. Working with four modified 16mm projectors, film loops, guitar pedals and a handmade soundboard, McClure “plays” the mechanical supports of film like musical instruments. Harnessing the strobing light and percussive sounds from his stockpile of projectors, McClure’s performances are an improvisational audio-visual experience not to be missed.

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 8pm tickets- $6

The Loft @ Load of Fun
120 W. North Ave
Baltimore, MD 21217

The Protectors @ GSpot Audio Visual Playground

New Works by Melissa Dickenson

Opening Reception: Saturday May 16, 2009 7-10pm

The GSpot

2980 Lower Falls Rd.

Baltimore, MD 21211

This Weekend

2009-05-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

5.8.09
Maryland Film Festival @ The Charles Theater, MICA & UB Student Center
The film festival will be going on all weekend, featuring a number of shorts programs and a few promising feature length films
*John Waters' 2009 pick! Love Songs (dir. Christophe Honoré)A Maryland Film Festival tradition! For the 11th straight MFF, Baltimore's own John Waters has chosen a film he'd like to share with unsuspecting audiences -- this year selecting Christophe Honoré's (bi-)sexually charged French musical Love Songs.
www.mdfilmfest.com

5.9.09
During the day...
Squidfire's 2009 Spring ArtMart in Mt. Vernon Square Park
Join over 50 of the best local and regional crafters and artists as they display their handmade wares in the most beautiful park in the city. The event goes on rain or shine. See you there!
Saturday May 9, 11-6pm

Mt. Vernon Square (Between Charles and Cathedral Streets)
Baltimore, MD 21201

23rd Annual Critic's Residency Program at Maryland Art Place
Artists participating in the 23rd Annual Critics’ Residency program include: Ken D. Ashton, Jessie Boyko, Dottie Campbell, Bernhard Hildebrandt, Gil Jawetz, Bonnie Crawford Kotula, Kim Manfredi, and Lynn Rybicki.
A public forum intended to address important issues relating to contemporary art on both a regional and national level is scheduled for Saturday, May 9, 2009 at 2 pm. This free event, which will include program participants, will be moderated by WYPR’s Aaron Henkin and will be followed by a reception at 3:30 pm.

Maryland Art Place
Power Plant Live!
8 Market Place, Suite 100,
Baltimore, Maryland 21202

and all night...
Rectified at Gallery Four
Gallery Four, an independent exhibition space in Downtown Baltimore, features work from four artists from New York, Wilmington, and Baltimore. This newly renovated 4,000 sq. ft. gallery features Xerox enlarged drawings by Gary Kachadourian, new sculpture and installations by Julianna Dail and Ron Longsdorf, and works on paper by Jackie Milad.
Exhibition Dates: May 9- June 13, 2009
Openng Reception: May 9, 2009 5-10pm

Gallery Four
H & H Building
405 West Franklin St. 4th Fl.
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.galleryfour.net

Rebound: Rudy Shepard and Valesk Populoh at Paperwork Gallery
Exhibition Dates: May 9- June 20, 2009
Opening Reception: May 9, 2009 7-9 pm

Paperwork Gallery
107 E. Preston St.
Baltimore, MD 21217
www.paperworkgallery.com

MASKED at School 33
Masked is an exploration of work about concealment, secrets, self-conscious and social constructions of identity which ultimately reveal a new face –a brilliant corona of strength, integrity and courage. Each work is a performance piece of sorts; the artists have used their own bodies or their own biographies to very directly create a presence that suggests a story or a secret. However, rather than being a study in psychology or narrative, where one might work to discover that secret, this assembly is exciting in that even while experiencing the powerfully posited content on the surface, we know that there is an equally powerfully complex internal life.
Participating artists include: Dawn Black, Iona Rozeal Brown, Lynden Cline, Bailey Doogan, Susan Fenton, Inga Frick, J.J. McCracken, Ledelle Moe, Elsa Mora, Elena Patino, Phyllis Plattner, and Athena Tacha.
Curated by Joan Weber
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9 6-9pm

School 33
1427 Light Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
www.school33.org

This Weekend (sorry I skipped last weekend)

2009-04-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

5.1.09
Meet The Members Benefit Show at The Hexagon
The Hexagon, a community-run gallery and performance space, presents 'Meet the Members,' a group exhibition featuring new artwork by Hexagon Members. This exhibition is an open house to showcase visual art in the spirit of Baltimore's dynamic DIY community.

Featured member artists are: Josh Atkins, Krista Faist, Andrew Geddes, Alex Ghinger, Carlos Guillen, Anna Jiongco, Torin Nash, Phuong Pham, Miguel Sabogal, Rick Weaver, and Marty Weishaar.

May 1 - May 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday May 1, 2009 pm

The Hexagon
1825 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201
www.hexagonspace.com

5.2.09
DECOY at The Creative Alliance
Featuring the work of Paul Jeans, Michael Mansfield, Kendra Hebel, Robert Horvath, Jenny Mullins & Kimberly Rupert
Curated by Erin Cluley

May 2, 2009- May 30, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2, 2009 6-8 pm

Creative Alliance @ The Patterson
3134 Eastern Ave.
Baltimore MD 21224
www.creativealliance.org

5.3.09
Je Ne Sais Quoi at Sub-Basement Studios
Featuring work by these ten women artists:
Melissa Dickenson, Cara Ober, Gloria Askin, Nancy Valk, Marcia Ray Wolfson, Michelle Woodward, Edna Emmet, Rachel Rotenburg, Peggy Fox & Andrea Guay

Curated by Mimi Kapiloff

May 3, 2009- June 7, 2009
Opening Reception: Sunday May 3, 2009 2-4 pm

Sub-Basement Artist Studios
118 North Howard St.
Baltimore MD 21201
www.subbasementartiststudios.com

This Weekend

2009-04-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

4.16.09

Christopher Saah: New Work
&
Landscapes into Art featuring: David Brewster, Sukey Bryan, Henry Coe, Robert Dash, Paul Hotvedt, Eugene Leake, Raoul Middleman, Fairfield Porter, Giorgos Rigas, and Thom Sawyer
simultaneous exhibitions at C. Grimaldis Gallery
April 16- May 16, 2009
Opening Recption: Thursday April 16, 2009 6-8 pm

C. Grimaldis Gallery
523 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.cgrimaldisgallery.com

Painted Space at The Light
Group Painting Exhibition- work by MICA students Jon Marshalik, Kate Dervishi, Leah Caplan, Travis Hinkle. Curated by MICA professor Sangram Majumdar.
April 16th-May 17th, 2009
Opening reception: April 16th, 2009 7-9pm

The Light
1015 North Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.atthelight.org

4.17.09

HAIR
MICA students, faculty, and staff will perform HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a play that celebrates the heyday of the 1960s hippie movement, Tuesday, April 14-Sunday, April 19
Performances takes place Tuesday-Thursday, April 14-16 at 8 p.m.; Friday, April 17 at 7 p.m.; Saturday, April 18, special midnight show; and Sunday, April 19, 2 p.m.

Tickets: Opening night special, $5 for everyone; all other shows, $10, students with ID; $15, everyone else. Tickets are on sale at the MICA store, 1200 W. Mount Royal Ave. For more information, call Judy Lidie at 410-225-2350 or e-mail jlidie@mica.edu.
BBOX, the performance space of MICA's new Gateway building
1601 W. Mount Royal Ave.

4.18.09

CityLit Festival VI @ the Pratt

On Saturday, April 18, visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library to celebrate the written word at the Sixth Annual CityLit Festival. Enjoy a full day of readings by contemporay writers, author panels, writing workshops, and a lively book market filled with exhibitors. Guest speakers include Junot Diaz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Click here to see a full schedule of CityLit Festivities.

For information on other upcoming events at the Pratt, visit www.PrattLibrary.org.

Marquee Ball 2009 GOLDFINGER!
at The Creative Alliance
Sat April 18 9pm.
$35, $25 mbrs in adv, $40 at door. Incl. performances, silent auction, beer, wine, hors d’oeuvres. Cash bar f/ liquor. Suave mod or Bond Formal Glam attire.

w/ Junkyard Saints, Spytastic Vaudeville & Burlesque, Peter Pan Award to Todd Lesser, Live & Let Buy Silent Auction, & other Solid Gold Silliness

for more info visit www.creativealliance.org

The 2009 Sondheim Prize Finalists are...

2009-04-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

drum roll....

2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalists:

BDC (Baltimore Development Cooperative), Baltimore, MD
Leslie Furlong, Baltimore, MD
Ryan Hackett, Kensington, MD
Jessie Lehson, Baltimore, MD
Molly Springfield, Washington, DC
Karen Yasinsky, Baltimore, MD

The winner of the $25,000 prize will be announced during an award ceremony on Saturday, July, 11 at 7pm at The Baltimore Museum of Art, located at 10 Art Museum Drive.

Check below for last week's interview with Molly Springfield.

Hopefully I can post interviews with the rest of the finalists soon...

Studio Visit with Molly Springfield

2009-04-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

Molly Springfield is a Washington, DC based artist. She received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, and was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art Papers, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. She is currently a semi-finalist for the Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize for 2009.
interviewed by Mindy Hirt

MH: Could you tell me a bit about where you have been and how you got to the point you're at now in your career?

MS: Well, I went to graduate school at UC Berkley and I graduated in 2004. I lived in DC before going to grad school. My partner and I came back to DC and I have been here ever since. I taught at George Washington University and MICA the first three years after grad school. Now, I'm just working full time in the studio. During that period from grad school I just worked hard in the studio as well as teaching, tried to get my work out as much as I could. I built up enough momentum that I felt like I could do it full time. So that's what I've been doing the past couple years.

MH: Can you talk a little about your drawing process?

MS: Well, in very general terms I start by doing a lot of research identifying text or subject that I want to work from. Then I pull all of that stuff together either make photocopies that I'm going to draw directly from or make copies or clippings that I'll use as less direct subject matter. Then I make drawings from there. It's pretty straight forward- what you see is basically what I'm drawing from.

A comparison of one of Molly's drawings (left) to the photocopy it was drawn from (right).

MH: So you plan the drawing out ahead of time?

MS: I don't want to say it's regimented because that's not how I feel about it. It might appear that way but there is something about doing a 1:1 equivalent of whatever it is that I'm drawing that's important to me. That process of doing that 1:1 correspondence is something that drives me to make work. Any kind of work. So, it might appear to be really contained or constrained but that's not the way it works for me.

These are two drawings of an empty photo copy. It was a reaction to one of her previous projects.

MH: How do you go about deciding the text you're going to draw?

MS: When I first started drawing photocopies the texts were usually about language in some way. Whether it was language and visual art or language and philosophy. So that's kinda where I started from; an interest in language. How language has a visual presence as well as a semantic presence. Its kinda evolved from there. I have a pretty broad intellectual interest. So, I like to pull from all kinds of different things, whether its conceptual art from the 60's or 70's or the history of photography. Right now I'm researching the proto-history of the internet and how early 20th century models prefigured the internet as we know it today. So, I have a wide range of interests in terms of subject matter and why I chose things.

MH: Do you think that you might start drawing from the internet or is there something specific about the book?

MS: I won't say never because you never know what you're going to end up doing down the road. Right now I don't think that I would draw from the internet. I still think that there has to be some kind of tangible thing, maybe if I did I would be printing out from the browser and then drawing the print out. Or something like that. There has to be some kind of physical correspondence and the internet is a completely unphysical thing.

MH: Is that what the book gives you, that physical correspondence?

MS: Yes, the book is an object that has a lot of weight to it, whether it's emotional or historical. It's a nostalgic object for a lot of people in a lot of different ways. That's defiantly one of the things that attracts me to actual books. I'm not one of those people who thinks that books are gonna disappear.

MH: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of your hand in your drawings?

MS: Yeah, a lot of people don't see the hand in the drawings and it is there and that's important to me. If it wasn't important to me then I wouldn't be drawing them I would be re photographing them or just putting up the photocopy itself. So, the imperfections that I introduce by drawing them by hand are very important.
And they are there. If we had a drawing and the original photocopy it would be pretty obvious that it's not a perfect copy I don't try to hide the little flaws that happen in that process I want them to occur.

MH: What's your next project?

MS: Well, like I mentioned before I'm researching these kinds of pre-internet organizational systems. I think I'm going to be doing something along those lines. It's pretty early in the process. I've been wanting to try some sculptural ideas out and I think this might be a vehicle for me to do that. I took a sculpture class in undergrad because I had to for my major and I've done a little here and there but never in a really serious way. So it's kind of a new thing for me that's going to require a lot of education and research. Probably some collaborating with people who know about these kinds of things. But it will defiantly also include drawing. Right now I'm thinking that the drawing and sculpture will be combined in some way. I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around the actual history and the technology and all the sources that I have been collecting. I'm ready to try something new.

MH: Are there any specific goals in your career that you haven't reached yet but would like to?

MS: It would be really nice to have some kind of museum show within the next few years of some of the projects that I have recently finished. It doesn't have to be MOMA. You don't not get things by not trying. I would also like to do some more residencies, kind of longer term that would allow me to really make a dent is some of this new stuff that I'm getting into. My last major project of my Proust translation there are plans to publish it in book form and I'm going to have a book design ready to go it's just a matter of finding a publisher and/or funding to publish the book. I would really like to see that happen in the next couple years.

MH: Can you talk a little bit more about the book?

MS: It's basically, not a catalog so much as a book version of my drawn Proust translation and it would have a reproduction of every drawing. You would be able to read it like a book rather than view it as the drawings in the gallery. A poet named Bill Berkson has written an essay that would be in the book. I wrote an introduction for the drawings which became another drawing for the show version of the project. Because the drawing is one piece, and whoever buys it has to buy the entire set of 28 drawings, I wanted there to be a more democratic version that could distribute the project to people. And would also give people an opportunity to read it like a book, like a real new translation. Which is the concept of the project that I've made this new translation.

MH: If you could interview any local artist, who would it be?

MS: Noelle Tan. She has a show up at civilian right now. I really love her work. In fact she had a show at DCAC a couple years ago maybe more than that and I saw it. Her photographs were amazing, they look almost like drawings and I think that's why I was attracted to them in the first place. They have a kind of drawn quality to them in the way they are exposed. I would love to meet her and talk to her about her work.

To See More:

www.mollyspringfield.com

Mindy Hirt's work will be on view at The Katzen Art Museum
as part of the first year MFA exhibition April 11- 19, 2009

This Weekend

2009-04-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

4.2.09
6th Annual Transmodern Festival
Four Days of Avant Performance, Installation,
Sound, Film, Mayhem, Ecstasy, and Radical Culture!
April 2nd thru April 5th, 2009

THURSDAY April 2nd, 8:00pm The festival kicks off at the Whole Gallery with an opening ceremony performance by artist Jenny Graf

H&H Building
405 W. Franklin Street
Baltimore MD
www.transmodernfestival.org/2009/

4.3.09
Out of Order at Maryland Art Place
Annual art auction & gala featuring the work of hundreds of area artists (including yours truly)
Friday April 3, 2009 8pm

Maryland Art Place
Power Plant Live!
8 Market Place, Suite 100
Baltimore, MD 21202

Conventionalized Calculations for Primary Structures at the Hexagon Gallery
The work of Andrew Geddes, April 3 to April 24, 2009
Opening reception: April 3, 7 PM to 8 PM
Closing reception: April 24 from 6:30 PM to 8 PM

The Hexagon
Community-run Gallery and Performance Space
1825 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.hexagonspace.com

"Hunger"- A New Film by Steve McQueen
at Landmark's E Street Cinema (555 11th Street NW) Washington DC
Premier: Friday April 3, 2009 1:45, 4:15, 7:00, 9:30, 11:40 pm
www.landmarktheatres.com

This Weekend

2009-03-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

(TONS of great things happening!!!)

3.26.09
Blindheaded: Ellen Durkin
Towson Unversity - Center for the Arts MFA Holtzman Gallery
Opening reception: Thursday, March 26, 2009 7:30 - 9 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Tues - Saturday, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Information: www.towson.edu/artscalendar

Futurefarmers: The Reverse Ark--In the Wake
&
Soledad Salamé: Where Do You Live?
The Contemporary Museum announces two exhibitions
Opening reception: Thursday, March 26, 2009 6:00 - 8:00 pm

The Contemporary Museum
100 W. Centre Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

3.27.09
Wise Guise: Grand Opening Group Exhibition
Nudashank- H & H Building 3rd Floor
Friday March 27- Saturday April 25, 2009
Opening reception: Friday March 27, 2009 7 - 9 pm
After-party in the adjacent Whole Gallery
with performances by Talk Normal , U.S. Girls, and Jana Hunter

Nudashank
405 West Franklin Street 3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201

MICA MFA Thesis Exhibitions-
Graphic Design, Hoffberger School of Painting, Mount Royal School of Art, Photographic and Electronic Media, and Rinehart School of Sculpture programs
Friday March 27- Sunday April 5, 2009
Opening reception: Friday March 27, 2009 5-7 pm

MICA Fox Building
Decker, Meyerhoff and Fox 3 galleries
1303 W. Mount Royal Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21217

3.28.09
Everyone An Artist? An Everything Exhibition
Opening: Saturday, March 28, 2009 3-6 p.m.
first floor of Studio Center, 113-131 West North Ave.

The exhibition, which also is on view Wednesday, April 15 from 5-7 p.m. and Saturday, April 25 from 3-6 p.m.
is described as a "project room" where all is considered, and nothing rejected out of hand.
Information: http://www.mica.edu

Studio Visit with Marty Weishaar

2009-03-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

interviewed by Phuong Pham. Phuong is a contributor to Locus Art Magazine.

I recently visited local painter and educator, Marty Weishaar, in his home studio in Hampden. Weishaar and his wife have turned their house into a mutual creative space, where he works on paintings not only within his studio room, but also in their dining room, around her musical equipment, and in their upstairs hallway.

So tell me a little about yourself and where you come from:

I grew up in upstate New York and graduated from Alfred University in with a BFA in Ceramics and sculpture, and then later went on to American University to get my MFA in painting. We have been living in Baltimore for 2 years.

How did you make the shift from ceramics to painting?

It was a gradual shift, like when you're in art school you try as many things as you can until something sticks. And actually, a lot of ceramicists who are fascinated with color do turn into painters.

Who are you looking at these days?

When I was doing more painting, I was, of course, thinking about Pollock and de Kooning and their use of texture and gesture, but was eventually turned off by all of that manliness, like it was just too macho for what I wanted to do. I'm really interested in Mary Heilman, another ceramicist-turned-painter who works with contemporary abstraction, and there's a whimsicalness to her work. I also like the work of Amy Sillman, who works with vignettes of abstract sailboats, and Laura Owens.

Could you talk about your process?

I start with these simple, almost graphic mountain ranges... I'm interested in creating fun and whimsical pieces, but it's more adult or serious fun.

I'm not trying to be ironic or cute with my work. I like to compartmentalize my different compositions; building up the surface allows me to not get stuck. The colors become something that you can feel and touch, even though they are flat.

I notice that you use a lot of nostalgic imagery and landscape-like placeholders in your work.

Yeah, I like to use things like electrical towers, houses, and silos in my mountain ranges. They refer to a certain playfulness that I was trying to resist for a long time because I didn't want it to be mistaken for being silly. I kept coming back to them, though, and using them as nostalgic abstraction. I think mark-making is both subconscious and conscious, and the more I build up a composition, the more I can take something that appears to be playful... but it's also a strange way of representing a personal story for me.

How did the rainbows start entering your paintings?

I think they're kind of funny as a symbol. like my interest in nostalgic objects, I was thinking about how the world changes when you're married. there are all of these "social cues" that you don't think about as being so pervasive until you have to start making adult decisions. They started as simply an interesting object for me to use as a straight white male out of grad school, but now I see them more in compositional terms; they harmonize a picture through line and color.

Why did you decide to come to Baltimore, rather than stay in DC or go elsewhere?

My wife had a job opportunity here, and my work was also going back to my influences of mountain ranges and rural life, so we came to Baltimore. I was really resistant to moving to New York, because there are fewer opportunities and more people competing for them... I wasn't interested in fighting tooth and nail just to make my work.

Do you think your interest in nostalgia has anything to do with the displacement that comes with moving from farm to city or city to city?

Sure, in a way. It's also connected to noticing change around you. When I lived in DC, I always thought it was so... politicized about nature, like it was too sculpted or simulated. Where I was in northwest DC, the gardens were uprooted and replaced every 4 months, which was never something I experienced in rural New York. It was so artificial, even when I lived in Rockville for a while, and I was pissed about that. I found myself remembering silos and thinking a lot about what they looked like. I missed that aspect in my daily life, and began recalling them in my work. Then I moved to Baltimore, where you don't really feel like there is a central, urban strip. Some parts of the city are really ugly, but it's still a landscape. We're all putting in our images and breaking things down to abstraction for different reasons.

Marty Weishaar works as public school art teacher and currently has paintings and drawings on exhibit at The Hexagon.

This Weekend

2009-03-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

3.19.09
Kate McGraw & Ann Tarantino: Workbook
March 19 – April 17, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, March 19, 6 – 8 p.m.

Kate McGraw and Ann Tarantino collaborate on planned and improvised drawings created directly on the walls of the gallery. The artists draw using their own signature styles while also responding and referring to one another’s mark-making. The artists film the process and the resulting video will become a part of the art, rather than just documentation of the process.

Workbook is a video that documents the ten days artists Kate McGraw and Ann Tarantino will spend creating a mammoth work stretching across the walls of the Gallery at Flashpoint. The installation will be on view beginning March 19, 2009 and the film will be projected at the exhibition entrance beginning March 28, 2009.

Flashpoint DC
916 G St NW, Washington DC 20001

3.20.09
Patterns of Obsession
March 20, 2009 - May 2, 2009
Opening Reception: March 20, 7-10pm

Gallery Imperato is pleased to announce Patterns of Obsession, a three-person show that brings into light the visual and behavioral patterns of each individual artist. On display will be Dana Reifler Amato's luminous, three-dimensional drawings, Chris Bathgate's precision made, metal sculptures, and Matthew Kern's mixed media Polaroid collages.

Gallery Imperato
921 East Fort. Ave. Suite 120 Baltimore, MD 21230

The Garden
Screening at The Contemporary Museum
Friday March 20, 7pm

Scott Hamilton Kennedy's 2008 documentary tells the story of a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles started after the 1992 riots. Presented in conjunction with the March 27-29 "The City From Below" conference.

A Talk with Jason Hughes at The Library

2009-03-12T23:04:00.000-07:00

Jason Hughes has been an artist and curator in Baltimore for over 13 years. He is the head exhibitions coordinator at School 33 and co-founder of The Library. He is represented by Curator's Office in Washington, DC.
interviewed by Rachel Sitkin

RS: Do you want to start by telling me a little about yourself? Where did you grow up, go to school, that stuff?

JH: I grew up in Jacksonville, FL and went to a magnet school down there. When I was 18 years old, just a couple of months after graduating I ran into a friend of mine, and he and some other members of my graduating class were moving to Baltimore to go to MICA. He told me he was moving up the next week and asked me if I wanted to go with him. So with three hundred bucks in my pocket I was like, “yes, yes! Yeah, sure let’s go!” I had been accepted but didn’t have enough scholarship money to afford to go so I ended up deferring my acceptance. I got a job the day I got here.

RS: Where were you working?

JH: Stocking shoes in a shoe store in the inner harbor (laughing) About two weeks after moving to Baltimore a space in the H&H warehouse opened up. I had a few friends that were living there and they asked me to fill in that vacancy- I moved into that space in September of 1996 and I was there until February 2008.

For the first five years we were converting the warehouse space into a gallery (Gallery Four) and some nice live/work spaces. One of our friends was working for the Smithsonian and they were closing one of their galleries for renovations. They were tossing all of their track lighting, so we were able to get that as a donation. And that really helped to elevate the quality and presentation of our exhibits.

As well those first five years I was working in museums or for a few different fabricators- Fandango and Center Stage. I was learning how to build, all the crafts and skills that I could apply to my artwork, all before I went to MICA. Then a friend of mine put me in touch with an art installer and I started doing work for the Contemporary Museum and the Historical Society, then got a job at the Walters as a cabinet-maker for their renovations.

And through all this we started realizing what a great potential we had with the warehouse space. We started applying everything we had learned to our approach for organizing exhibitions. We had a lot of respect for the artists that were in Baltimore, but we thought there wasn’t a lot of support for artists beyond MICA. There were a lot of artist run spaces but we wanted to take the professionalism up a notch- create a situation where people would seek us out. We had a 4500 sq. ft gallery to begin with, and we would concentrate our shows to only having 4-7 people and show enormous bodies of work instead of only a few pieces. We would completely alter the space for each show so it gave us a lot of versatility. So yeah, that was my first five years here and then in 2001 I finally started at MICA. I was a sculpture major and did an unofficial concentration in drawing and curatorial studies. In the fall of 2003 I did a semester at the New York studio center.

For my thesis show, in addition to showing my own work, I also curated a huge exhibit at the H & H, 2 floors, 9000 sq ft. of gallery space. Immediately following that show, January 2005, I had a studio visit with Andrea Polan at from Curator’s Office and she liked my work and put me in a show. A curator from the Yucatan saw the drawings I had in that show, kind of dreamscape architectural drawings that were drawn from memory. He asked me to go down there, so like 6 months out of undergrad I had an exhibition in the Yucatan. It was really amazing.

Then last year, after having been in Baltimore for 13 years, I was really trying to figure out what to do next. I was planning on moving to New York and then the opportunity to take over The Library came up. Fran (Franciska Farkas) and I learned about this space, and I was wanting to set up an artists’ residency for a while- so we saw the building and as soon as we saw it we really felt it had a lot of potential, but we couldn’t really afford it. We sent out an e-mail to about 40 people to see if they could help us get the money together to do the renovations and within 30 hours we had all the money raised.

RS: Wow! That’s fantastic!

JH: Yeah it was totally unexpected but that really got the ball rolling for us and within a couple of months we had our first exhibition.

Fran brought her yoga teaching practice here and she and her partner have a video production studio here and it gave me a space to put together some dynamic exhibitions. But just as we were getting it started I got the job as exhibitions coordinator at School 33. So it’s been a real balancing act this past year. We haven’t yet been able to do the residency thing yet.

And that brings us to today…

RS: Ok. Now that you’ve answered my first "five" questions… It seems that both your studio and curatorial practices tend to be socially critical. Can you speak about the specific issues that interest you and about what your goals are?

JH: Well, I think it’s always going to be evolving no matter what. I grew up questioning authority and wanting to do things my own way. My parents taught me that your thoughts shape your reality and that’s had a major impact on me. My practice is always rooted in perception, that’s always the underlying thing- your perception shapes how you experience things. And it results in a very formal sensibility.

You say it’s socially critical, I guess so. I began allowing my work to become more political after organizing Material Matters for Maryland Art Place’s 25th anniversary. I realized I was addressing all the things in that show that I try to address in my work but it had a much louder voice. The other artists were able to articulate similar ideas in ways that I never would have thought of or been brave enough to tackle. I realized that curating could be an extension of my own practice. I never want to force my opinions on others but I do want to open people’s eyes to other ways of seeing things.
Similarly, in recent years, I’ve really been inspired by the music of Fela Kuti, his ability to motivate and inspire people around him through his music, create change that way.

RS: So, are you’re talking about bringing to people’s awareness how we affect the world and how the world affects us in return, from a very personal intimate level to a more outward level? Maybe the mandalas are more on that personal introspective level and the currency specifically is more socially critical?

JH: Well the mandalas, the army men mandala and the camouflage mandalas were more about the idea of demons. The way that war manifests because we are at war with ourselves. The way we deal with our internal struggle on a personal level ripples out to the bigger picture. It is about a meditative transformative process, but how that affects everything around us.

With the currency work though it’s a little bit more conceptual and immediate. With money some people believe it’s the root of all evil, and some have said that it’s just a form of energy, an exchange you have with someone else. It something that moves through you- I’m leaning toward that idea a bit more. With the Police and Thieves piece, I shredded American currency and axis-of-evil currency and wove it together to create Chinese finger traps; they’re all intertwined. That’s the direction I’m moving in right now, the more political side of things. I’ve been really into the idea of disaster capitalism lately- it’s twisted.

RS: What are you working on right now?

JH: I bought all this really finely shredded currency from the Treasury; it’s like a novelty gift. I used to get in elementary school and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, but I didn’t really realize what I was looking at. It’s a really loaded medium though. I bought $10,000 in shredded money and I’m working on weaving 10,000 $1 bills back together.

RS: You’re making 10,000 individual bills?

JH: Well ultimately however many bills I can make out of it. So it’s a really heavy process oriented piece.

RS: It’s seems that over the range of work that you do, whether its drawing or sculpture or collage that craft is always meticulous. How do you personally feel about craft in your own work and how do look at it when you are curating other people’s work?

JH: For my own process it’s always about becoming a better craftsman. I think the craft always needs to match up with concept. Perception always comes before conception, and the look of it is the gateway to the audience. Curatorially, I have a lot of museum experience and I really appreciate that professional look. But some of my favorite artists are very crude in their art making- John Bock and Adrian Lohmuller. I really liked the immediacy of the Dadaists. There just has to be a balance between what you are trying to say and they way people perceive it.

RS: If you could visit the studio of any living artist who would it be?

JH: Oooh, that’s a tough one, maybe Bruce Nauman. He really had an impact on me.

RS: If you were me, which local artist would you interview next for this blog?

JH: Oh, Laure Drogul. I just saw her show at MICA and it was great.

RS: You’re the second person to say that so I guess I better look her up.

To see more:
www.jason-hughes.net
www.thelibraryproject.net/

This Weekend

2009-03-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

3.13.09
The 14Karat Cabaret at the
Bakst Theatre

March 13, 2009
8:00-10:00pm

Join Laure Drogoul and her colleagues at the elegant Bakst Theater located at the Evergreen Museum and Library. The night includes the world premiere of a new film by Nancy Andrews and musical performance by Dick Turner, with La Hostess as MC.

Tickets are $10 general public, $5 for Evergreen members. Limited free seating is available for students with advance reservations by calling 410-516-0341. Valid student ID required at the door.

Evergreen Museum and Library
4545 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21217

3.14.09
Bridget Sullivan: Watershed
at School 33 Members Gallery
March 12- April 11, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday March 14, 2009 2-4pm

Interview with the Curators of Involving Violence

2009-03-06T20:41:00.000-08:00

Involving Violence is group show featuring artists from Chicago and Baltimore. It is on view at School 33 through April 11, 2009. Lasso (Carrie Ruckel and Karin Patzke) was interviewed by Rachel Sitkin

RS: Can you tell me a little bit about the two of you?

L: We are both engaged in the art community in Chicago. We are both from Texas, but met in Chicago.

Carrie Ruckel is an artist, curator, works for local tv and is currently also a grad student. She works at Chicago's public access tv station, CAN TV, as a videographer and editor. She is pursuing her MFA degree in Visual Art at Vermont College of Fine Art, a two year, intensive, low residency program.

Karin works at the Art Institute of Chicago, coordinating a project to photograph the complete collection of works on paper and small objects for the museums website and collections database. She's also working on her MA in art history, criticism and theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on depictions of culture in natural history illustrations.

RS: How and when did Lasso begin?

L: Lasso began after we'd been collaborating for a couple years and we had the opportunity to inhabit a gallery space, The Butcher Shop, in Chicago. It's an artist-run studio and gallery space that's been around in different formations for about 12 years. We took over the summer of 2007 and had three wonderful shows there, after which we were kindly asked to leave by the building owner. He was and still is having zoning and licensing issues with the City of Chicago. We / he did not have a license to run an exhibition space in the building. Unfortunately, after years of being under the radar of the city, it was "found out" or discovered when the building needed some major work done to the roof and had some contractors or city officials come in to inspect it. That, in addition to some press reviews of the gallery led to it's current demise. The Butcher Shop, located in Chicago Meat Market District currently houses artist and musician studio spaces. We don't know for sure, but we think it may never be a gallery again, unfortunately.

RS: How did the idea for “Involving Violence” come about?

L: Shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings we decided we wanted to do something in response. While that event, along with the subsequent censoring of images in the media was our instigator, we quickly realized that the show would have to address larger issues of violence, such as the war in Iraq and gun violence in general. We are constantly bombarded by reports on assaults and gun violence in the media, not to mention the depiction of violence as entertainment, from television to music to movies and video games. We knew that we discussed these issues in detail, but wanted to bring this dialog to our gallery space by inviting artists whose work addressed these social and cultural problems as well. We asked the basic question: How are artists dealing with violent imagery in their studio practice.

RS: When curating this exhibition, did you have specific artists in mind or was the worked selected after a call for submissions?

L: We put out a call for entries and solicited work from a few local Chicago artists who we knew were working with similar subject matter. We had a lot of submissions and had to narrow it down a great deal. Luckily we had a lot of space to work with for the first show in Chicago at the Butcher Shop.

RS: If it was an open call for submissions, did the submission pool change your initial ideas about the show? In what way?

L: For the first show, we specifically wanted to focus on artists incorporating media images into their own work.But as submissions came in, we realized that we would have to cover a variety of issues about violence, from the war to domestic violence to lynching to self-inflicted violence. We really wanted to question the impact of violence on our society at large by looking at art that engaged different types of violence.

RS: This is the second incarnation for “Involving Violence”. When selecting work from the Baltimore based artists, how were you hoping to broaden or change the exhibition from its original version in Chicago?

L: For the second show, we started out just looking for Baltimore/DC area artists who were dealing with the issue of violence in their work. After reviewing the many submissions we received and speaking more with Jason Hughes, the director of School 33, we realized the issue of urban and gun violence would be a main focus, specifically because of the work submitted but also because of the reputation that Baltimore has. We still wanted to include a variety of issues in the discussion, but we knew that urban influence was prevalent and needed to be addressed for both Baltimore and Chicago. We were very interested in creating a dialog between the artwork and the two cities.

It was difficult to bring the show to Baltimore for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the reputation that Baltimore has of being a violent and dangerous urban area. We consciously chose work that helped to engage this stereotype in a more productive manner. We wanted to bring artwork into a gallery space that would help create a thoughtful discussion, and not work that limited conversation to stereotypes.

RS: Do you have any plans to exhibit this show anywhere else in the future?

L: We would very much like to continue to explore the issue of violence and bring the exhibition to other cities, especially, urban areas that are well known for their struggles with violence, like Detroit and New Orleans.

RS: Any other projects coming up for either or the two of you?

L: Lasso submitted a curatorial proposal called Imposing Landscapes, to a local Chicago community art space called Hyde Park Art Center. We are waiting to hear back.

Karin is preparing to present her archival work of the Art Institute of Chicago's collection to several larger organizations (the American Library Association and the Museum Computer Network) to promote digital imaging for cultural heritage institutions in an effort to advocate for the sharing and distribution of isolated materials. She's also a printmaker and will have art work in an upcoming show, curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore, at the Green Lantern Gallery in Chicago.

RS: What was the best exhibit you’ve(both of you) seen in last year or two?

L: While in Baltimore, we saw the "retrospective" of Laura Drogule at MICA, that we really enjoyed. We were very excited to learn more about the Baltimore art scene.

New Blog from Local Andy Cook

2009-02-28T08:18:00.000-08:00

Local photographer and man about town, Andy Cook is driving around the United States, meeting people who have lost their jobs or have otherwise been impacted by the recession. His new blog is intended to be a compilation of their stories.

Take a look: Faces of The Recession

This Weekend

2009-02-26T06:45:00.000-08:00

2.27.09
FANTASTICAL IMAGININGS at Loyal College and Maryland Art Place

A traveling exhibition featuring fourteen artists whose work is oriented toward fantasy, creating imagined worlds full of intrigue, excitement and discovery. Fantastical Imaginings originated at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and is curated by J. Susan Isaacs. The exhibition is featured at MAP and the Julio Fine Arts Gallery at Loyola College from February 19 through March 28, 2009.
Participating Artists: Laylah Ali, Roberley Bell, Paul Chidester, Amy Cutler, Marilyn Holsing*, Mark Hosford, John Karpinski, A.D. Loveday*, Claire Owen, Serena Perrone*, Hiro Sakaguchi*, John Shipman, Anne Siems, and Lee Wilkinson

Julio Fine Arts Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, February 27, 2009 6pm
Gallery Talk: 5pm

www .mdartplace.org
Opening Reception: Friday February 27, 2009 8pm
Gallery Talk: 7pm

2.27.09
Black to Our Roots (Subira, 2008) at The Creative Alliance
Presented by CA, BlackOut Studios & HABESHA
Friday, February 27, 2009 Doors @ 7pm, Film @ 8:30pm

The Creative Alliance

2009-02-24T06:48:00.000-08:00

"Art's unique role is that of guiding the individual to a personal vision of the world, and his place in it... Art is always a vision, an attempt to express visibly- I am tempted to add: and tangibly- what a particular age, a particular society, a particular person has viewed as the true nature and essence of reality, the essence of both man and his relations to significant aspects of the world."- Bruno Bettelheim

Studio Visit with Melissa Webb

2009-02-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

A studio visit with Baltimore fiber artist Melissa Webb at her Load of Fun work space.
Interviewed by Jaclyn Paul

JP: Would you mind telling me a little bit about where you come from? Are you originally from Baltimore?

MW: I'm from Westminster, which is 40 minutes north of here. I lived there until I was 17 and moved here to go to MICA, and I've been here ever since!

JP: So what made you stay in Baltimore? I feel like graduating from art school there's pressure to go to these “art centers” -- NYC, etc.

MW: Well, there are a lot of reasons. Family is one. I felt like I had a good network here, and it's inexpensive. I was able to move pretty quickly into the [H&H] warehouse space. I couldn't have gotten that kind of space [in New York] and lived off the very little money I was able to make when I got out of college. I also felt like New York would be too fast-paced for me. Philosophically I've always believed – and I was a lot more hardcore about this when I was younger – but I was like “who the hell does New York think it is?” You know, art is for everyone, and I want to spread it around here. I don't want to be like everybody else and run up there and try to stand out in this crowd of thousands and thousands of people.

JP: As someone relatively new to Baltimore, it seems to me like there's a great art community here.

MW: It definitely paid off to stay here because there's so much going on, so much good stuff. I think it rivals many places right now, the vast, rich amount of different mediums people are working in and how they're making hybrids of all of them. Everyone's collaborating, it's neat.

JP: So were you able to do your work full-time right after graduating?

MW: I've only had the opportunity to do that here and there over the years. But I got right into learning a craft. I worked for A.T. Jones & Sons, which is a masquerade and opera costume place on Howard Street, so I was able to learn how to sew really well there. That's what I wanted, and it was feeding my art. Then I got into theater. For about 10 years I was doing theater in either permanent positions or working commissions.

JP: So where are you now?

MW: Right around 2003, I was working at Everyman Theater. I met my current boss there, who is a company member and he also has a drapery company. They needed somebody in management. It was great because it was much better money than I'd made in a while and I didn't have to worry about it after I left. I could just go ahead and work in my studio or do projects, and since my boss in an actor, all of the hours are set up so he [can] go run tech. We have off Friday-Saturday-Sunday..and we get off at 4:00 so he can go to the theater. I've been there for almost 7 years. They're wonderful people and I get all kinds of [free] fabric and trims from them, so that's really good.

JP: How do you feel about living and making art in the same space (vs. having a separate studio)?

MW: I've done it a lot, in fact this is the only time I've had a separate studio from where I live since I was in school and I like it both ways for different reasons. I like getting away from home, and I like the fact that when you're in your studio, you're going to work because you're making time for it. But then again, it's out of sight out of mind sometimes. Before, my art was all over – it was, like, my décor in my house, so I was inspired. Then I lived at H&H, and that was cool. We had shows, and I had a full studio with my room there, and I was definitely very productive. I think if I could go back to that in a more adult form – as in, buy a building and rent out parts of it – and have a nice loft space with work area, living area, that would be the “winning the lottery” kind of dream.

JP: So tell me about this space at Load of Fun.

MW: This is a great space because there are a lot of other artists in here. It's a bit of a support network and you can kind of bounce ideas off of each other. It's just a lot of energy, you know? There is so much going on in this building.

JP: What's the strangest experience you've ever had here? Any late-night studio oddities?

MW: Well, there was one time we had a dance party in here, and I had made these gnome costumes a while back for a piece. We ended up putting on the gnome hats and dancing for hours, and I have these great pictures of it. And there have been so many..several-floor shows. We had the Transmodern Festival in here, and that's weird, lots of cool stuff going on there. There hasn't been anything bad-weird. Just fun, good weird.

JP: Speaking of pictures, I was looking at your Baker Artist Awards portfolio. I was interested especially in the Enchanted Forest photos and your decision to photograph your work there.

MW: That was a really neat experience. That place is so mysterious and beautiful in a way, and I've always been into the idea of nature taking back things that humans make. That was so poetic because that place is supposed to represent nature in a lot of ways. There's a lot of natural forms in there and it was integrated into this forest landscape and it's actually being eaten by the forest now. It's been abandoned and nature's crawling all over it, consuming, and it's just a fascinating place because of that. The people who were in my costumes, that's aminibigcircus, this group I've worked with for many years and we've done a lot of live performance and film. We just went there, put the costumes on, and sort of improv-ed and took pictures. It was an organic process. Then we wrote a story to go with it and made a video, so it wasn't like we said “let's go do this, and we'll do these actions, and then we'll show it.” It was the opposite way.

JP: So where do you feel like the real essence of your work is? Is it in the process, or that documentation, or the actual performance?

MW: I'm very process-oriented and I'm a fiber artist, so the exploration of materials is the most important part of it for me. But then, they're all great! Usually the kind of work I do with collaborators turns out to be situational, sort of a setting up of an environment, a set of motions or actions we're doing but everyone's sort of improv-ing. So all the performers are creating...and defining what's happening in the moment. That's a beautiful part of the creation and it continues the process into the performance for me. Then, the documentation is awesome because...I love the still image, I love the fact that you can say “this is what I want the world to see, this moment, right here.”

JP: So, if someone is just seeing photographs of your work, what do you think is the most important thing for them to know?

MW: What they're seeing is just a window in on a moment, and they did miss the the action. It's really hard with a photograph because you have to create context with this kind of work, just so they have an idea of what it is that they missed. That's why I can never just have one photo of any piece because that will not do it, it has to be a series. That way you get an idea, and at least there is the beauty of the photograph.

JP: So what's the toughest time you've ever gone through with your work?

MW: You know, there have been different ones, but they're all kind of hard! It's wacky because I do this big stuff and I work with lots of other people, and that's not easy. Collaboration is a big part of my work: working with my friends to create something bigger than we could have done on our own. It can be a little terrifying, and sometimes it can be exhilarating. At times it can be just like the heart of creation is right there with you and everyone, and sometimes it can be like “no, this isn't working!” That's good as long as there's something happening, but there have been times when there's nothing happening for long periods of time.

JP: So what have you been most proud of, in terms of your collaborative work?

MW: I'm proud of so many things. The thing I'm most known for, and I think it was the most successful, is this piece called Uppity Ladies which you can see on the Baker Artist Awards site. That was me and M. Jane Taylor, and a company of performers that we got together.

That was a beautiful piece and people loved it. They wanted to see it again and again, I mean, it's too big and crazy to put on again but we did things where we took the gnomes out to different places and did continuations of it. And that collaboration was a really nice one, so I feel like it's the most successful thing I've done in a long time.

JP: If you visited one artist to interview, who would it be and why?

MW: One? Oh my gosh...

JP: Well, how about two?

MW: Well, I'm a really big fan of Kristen Grey's work. She knows how much I love her work, it's just gorgeous and she's such a professional artist. She's got this great self-exploration in her work. I think it'd be neat to pick her brain about where she gets her ideas.

Also, Laure Drogoul. She has such a vast variety of things she's done over the years and it'd be neat to hear her stories of all the different projects.

I know I'm forgetting some important people, too. I'm friends with a lot of the people whose work I really respect, which is neat, I think my friends are talented.

See Melissa's work at the Transmodern Festival, April 2-5, 2009 at the H&H Building in Baltimore.

To See More:
Melissa: http://www.bakerartistawards.org/nomination/view/Missy/901
Jaclyn: http://www.jaclynpaul.com/

This Week

2009-02-17T06:34:00.000-08:00

2.20.09
Involving Violence
at School 33
Friday, February 20 – Saturday, April 11, 2009
Opening Reception- Friday, February 20, 2009 6 – 9 pm
7pm gallery talk

The artists included in this exhibition attempt to negotiate contemporary, historical, and personal events, hoping to resolve and come to terms with the actions of modern society.
Visit School 33 for more information

2.21.09
Propositions
at Area 405
Monday, February 15 – Sunday, March 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21 7–10 pm
Curator's talk: 7 – 7:30 pm

Curated by Stephen G. Dewyer
An exhibition featuring works of
Neal Reinalda, Ding Ren, Glenn Shrum and Elena Volkova.

Additional information can be found
at www.propositionsatarea405.com.

Studio Visit with Christine Buckton Tillman

2009-02-14T13:48:00.000-08:00

Interviewed by Rachel Sitkin

Christine Buckton Tillman is a local artist. She teaches at The Park School in Baltimore. She exhibits her work frequently in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, including exhibitions at Transformer in Washington DC, Current Gallery in Baltimore, Redux in Charleston SC. She has work currently at Goucher College as part of RESPOND and is preparing for an upcoming solo show, General Merriment, at Material in Memphis, TN.

RS: So where are you from?
CBT: The Northern Chicago Suburbs, that’s pretty much where I grew up.

RS: And where did you go to school?
CBT: I went to the University of Iowa for graduate school.

RS: And for Undergrad?
CBT: Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

RS: What are you working on right now?
CBT: I have a solo show coming up at Material Art Space in Memphis and an artist's talk at Rhodes College in Memphis too. So for the show I’ve been making this mylar weaving that will lie on a wood grained table. I’ve been making these individual weavings and I’ll attach them so there will be a gradient from mostly red to mostly silver.

RS: Like a quilt?
CBT: Well they’re held together with tape, not really quilted but patchwork so yeah “like a quilt” but it will be more like a tablecloth.

And then I’ll be showing this group of drawings arranged in a grid on the wall. It will become more sculptural. I like how the drawings become bigger than they are individually when they are shown together. Illustrative of the bigger idea.

I’ve also made this banner out of model airplane wood that says “high five” in the style of those happy birthday banners people hang.

I’ve been working with these banners a lot lately. The real banners have these pieces that make up the spaces in between each letter, and I was thinking, “what if the whole thing was made out of those spaces?” I’m working on one piece that is comprised of a chain of bows, each cut out from “failed” drawings. But if there are nice drawing moments that I want to save I can cut them out and incorporate them into this decorative banner. I’m not really sure where it’s going but it will probably get a lot bigger (currently about a 5ft. long chain of 4 inch silhouette bows).
Artificial nature is one part of the work and the other part is the party stuff-the banners and streamers and bunting that people bring out to celebrate.

RS: So are you interested in describing objects with contrasting materials?

CBT: Yeah, totally. This woven mylar that I’ve been working on- the mylar used to be flowy and active and by weaving it, it becomes static. For a previous project I made these slip-cast porcelain party banners. Because, you know, those things would probably survive a hurricane, the plastic is so durable but people think of porcelain as being super fragile and delicate.

RS: You seem to be a very busy person. What is your studio practice like?
CBT: 90% of my work can be done in 15 minutes chunks while I’m on the phone. That’s the nice thing about having a studio at home, you know. I don’t have to commit my whole Saturday. I can work for an hour before dinner or draw while Robert (my husband) and I watch TV. But I do draw a lot, considering that I work like a 50 hour a week job, I also make 10-15 drawings a week. I am a maker of things, and sometimes those things are stupid, but mostly they keep me active, keep me working. They are never pre-planned and I always have a bunch of drawings that I work on at once.

RS: Do you draw to get the ideas out, see how things are relating?
CBT: Yeah. The constellation shape that I work with originated in a drawing, then it became (embroidery on felt) sculpture then reappeared in the drawings. And the plaid patterns came out of knitting.

I used to knit but had to stop because I’d gotten tendonitis. The grid was an attempt to replicate that pattern via drawing. Things like the speech bubble came out of a formal need for a black shape, not really out of some content driven thing.

RS: I saw on your Flickr site that you had a “draw everyday” project going on last year. What sparked that project and what did you learn/ how does it affect your work?
CBT: The sketchbooks were a way to keep myself working while I work on some of the other labor-intensive long-term projects. The books made drawing a long-term project too. It’s given me the freedom to make a lot more mistakes.

When I hear professors talk about how their students influence their projects, I generally think it’s pretty lame- something they say because they think that's what they’re supposed to say. But this project was really that for me. I make all my students keep sketchbooks to kind of solidify a relationship with their practice.

But I’ve been not only keeping these sketchbooks, which is documentation of life, but also documenting the books too since 2006, going on 4 years now, which is kind of insane.
The internet has made visible this part of art making that's really good and really democratic. Exposing the process and the product. I really like Art 21 for that reason. Anyone can relate to the act of human making. Like I am obsessed with Martha Stewart magazine because it’s about making and doing instead of buying. I know some of it can be unrealistic but if I want to make venison risotto, I can.
You know… I’ve been wrestling with my artist statement right now, because it’s a lot headier than my experience. My experience is really just FUN. My relationship to my work is more enthusiastic than those things are supposed to be. It’s really nice to just make stuff without having to prop it up.

RS: Tell me about the last great/inspiring exhibition you've seen?
CBT: This is hard for me because its more like individual pieces that I find amazing- rather than shows. Right now I can't get Christine Gray's paintings out of my head from when I saw them at Towson this fall they're really whimsical and focused at the same time. I just love that the Felix Gonzelez Torres water piece is finally up again at the BMA and The Cia Guo-Qiang show this spring at the Guggenheim was a show-stopper.

RS: If you could visit the studio of any living artist, who would it be?
CBT: Can I have three? Oh, I kind of have a lot. I’m a very very big fan of Thomas Demand. He’s a photographer. He recreates these photographs, mostly news photos. I saw him give a talk at the BMA a few years ago and it was probably the best artist’s talk I’ve been too. I’d also like to go to the studio of Polly Apfelbaum. Her work is very fun and delightful. Seeing her work has given me the permission in my mind to be as light hearted as I want to be. I think she’d be awesome to hangout with. And her work seems much younger than she is. I don’t know exactly how old she is but I think she’d be surrogate mom style. I think I’ll actually leave it at those two so the list doesn’t get to long.
But I want to visit Morandi’s studio too.

RS: I went to the Morandi Museum in Bologna, Italy during college and they have a room set up like his room. You can’t walk around but you can look in and see all of his stuff, all of those jars and vases that he painted.
CBT: Yeah, I guess I just need to go there. And I want to go back to Disneyland really soon. Does that count? I forgot how influential “It’s a Small World After All” was for me as a child. It’s amazing! I think I want to go there!

RS: Final question. If you were me, which local artist would you interview next for this blog?
CBT: Oh good one. Hmm… I’d interview Matthew McConville. He teaches at Goucher College. I think he’s the funniest figurative painter I know, and artistically he’s very opposite from me. Robert and I went to his house last year for dinner and he showed me his new paintings on his computer and they were like the best thing I’d seen all year.

To See More:
http://christinebucktontillman.com/

Upcoming Events

2009-02-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

2.12.09
Respond an exhibit of site-inspired artwork at Goucher College

featuring Heidi Neff, John Shipman, Stuart Stein and
Christine Buckton Tillman
Monday, February 2, through Sunday, March 8
Artist's Reception- Thursday, February 12, at 6 p.m. in Rosenberg Gallery.

Check back soon for an interview with participating artist Christine Buckton Tillman

2.12.09
Megan Hilde at Megan Lavelle's

Thursday, February 12th at 7pm
How We Dwell

2.20.09
Involving Violence
at School 33
Friday, February 20 – Saturday, April 11, 2009
Opening Reception- Friday, February 20, 2009 6 – 9 pm
7pm gallery talk

The artists included in this exhibition attempt to negotiate contemporary, historical, and personal events, hoping to resolve and come to terms with the actions of modern society.
Visit School 33 for more information

In the studio with Magnolia Laurie

2009-02-01T20:53:00.000-08:00

interviewed by Rachel Sitkin

Magnolia Laurie is currently a resident at the Creative Alliance at The Patterson. She teaches drawing at Goucher College. Her work will be included in To The Teeth at The Creative Alliance Amalie Rothschilde Gallery from Feb 5-21, 2009. Opening Reception- Friday Feb. 6, 2009 6-9pm

RS: Do you want to give me a little background about where you are from, your education and what you’re doing right now?

ML: I grew up in Puerto Rico. I moved there when I was eight and lived there until I was fifteen and I think that was one of the most influential elements of my life because it was such a huge transition. It meant me growing up as an American but looking from the outside at the lovely concept of America that Hollywood projects. I had been in several different public schools in Puerto Rico and eventually my mother took me out and I was home schooled for a while. At 15 I wound up moving here with my Grandmother and I went to a boarding school in Massachusetts, the Berkshires. I ended up going to college in Massachusetts as well, at Mt. Holyoke College.

After graduation I was invited back by the boarding school to teach art. I taught for three years there. But I started feeling like all my ideas were turning into ones I proposed to my kids. I wanted to push art for myself. So I went to the San Francisco Art Institute for my Post Bach and had a really hard hard year there. I had never been to the west coast and I moved out there without knowing a single soul. The school didn’t really have a community. It had a different vibe than I was looking for. I was longing for a nurturing community. So I decided not to stay and do my MFA there and I came to Baltimore to go to MICA (Mt. Royal). I came out for the interview and I felt like I was in the twilight zone, they were so welcoming. I’ve stuck around. I kept thinking I’d move back to New York but every year I consider it, it seems really daunting. And in Baltimore there’s a great community of people. There’s a communal element here, maybe it’s because there isn’t a great market so we’re not fighting each other over anything, but I really enjoy it. I moved in here (the Creative Alliance live/work space) right after graduation in 2007.

RS: To somebody whose only seeing photographs, how would you describe your work?

ML: People often assume it’s much larger than it is, it’s very intimate. I’ve been wanting to work larger but there’s another part of me that really believes in the modesty of the scale, that it’s a proposal of a much larger idea. In my head it has a connection to literature or a book or a poem where you'll have this little moment of exchange- but it can open up like it’s an invitation. It doesn’t need to consume you and I’m attached to that idea. It doesn’t have to be large, it can fit in anybody’s home.

And something people are always struck by, and something I enjoy about them is how thin the paint quality is. When they work, it happens in one or two goes. I’ll work on them and work on them and if their not working I’ll keep wiping them down and starting them up again. And so they have to work at a certain moment. I don’t keep going into them after a few subtle adjustments. And I think that translates in person, that it’s a caught moment. They’re painterly. And the color is always off, the color is always better in their real state than in reproduction.

Overall, the idea of the work is the idea of building as an innate human instinct. The beauty of that and the danger of overbuilding, that it’s sort of futile and self-destructive. In person you can see the marks, the marks stand for a stick or a log or a concrete brick. What I’m hoping for is a simultaneous gesture or action of building- building the structures within the painting while literally building the painting. This is more visually clear in person, when you can see how light or heavy each paint gesture is.

RS: What are you working on right now?

ML: I’ve started working with this idea of signal flags. Reading and writing is a large part of my process and titles are really important to me. So a lot of times my titles are bits of writing that I salvage. At some point I came across this chart of signal flags. I just loved that there would be these visual cues that would actually be a phrase if I put them together, so Alpha and Charlie if I put them together means “I am abandoning my vessel.” I’ve been making paintings that incorporate these flags for the statements that they make. I love how specific, how direct the symbols can be. I had been looking at knots, at nomadic building techniques, and that lead to temporary boat structures, which is how I stumbled upon these flags.

RS: Did your work change a lot while you were at MICA and if so what did it look like before?

ML: I had been moving so much since graduation- I spent 6 months in Switzerland then 9 months in Boston. Then I packed everything and moved to San Francisco, then I moved back. But the whole time I was making these tiny tiny paintings on cardboard with gouache and they were all interiors that I could install on the wall in segments so they could expand. These small moments of shared spaces, reflecting on time.

When I got to MICA I just wasn’t there anymore. I was disenchanted with making more stuff in the world. I started making these installations that would fall apart- with water and balloons and found debris from Baltimore. I did a lot of that my whole first year. After my year in San Francisco, the whole idea of painting was out and I was exposed to other processes.

What’s funny is that I went to Turkey to TA for the summer. I saw all these temporary structures, these instinctual gestures at the markets or getting off the boat. Being there got me thinking about nomadic structures and growing up in Puerto Rico. And I came back at the end of the summer- a Baltimore summer and my entire studio had melted. Everything was stuck to the floor and it got me thinking, “What am I doing?” So that’s when I started going back to painting.

RS: Did you have any hesitations in starting new projects? Were you concerned at all about there being a continuous line from what you had done to what you were doing?

ML: I didn’t really know what was going on with the small cardboard paintings anyway. I was just making things compulsively and figuring out later what they were about. And I felt very insecure about that. That first year of grad school you kind of lose yourself, because suddenly it’s safe to experiment and it throws you off in a good way. I was in a new point in my life and my work was going to change and I think for the better. I feel much more confident now. I was making work that I just needed to make but didn’t really want to put out there in the world and now I can put them out in the world now and not feel too exposed.

RS: That's all for the heavy stuff. What do you listen to while you’re working?

ML: I listen to a lot. I listen to This American Life because I have a little crush on Ira Glass. I love people telling stories. And I sit down and read little bits in between paintings, all that triggers emotions for me. And lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Baltimore Music, like Wye Oak and Noble Lake and Small Sur.

RS: If you could visit the studio of any living artist who would it be?

ML: That is so hard. I think it’s a toss up, either Luc Tuymans or Mamma Andersson because I love their work so much. But it might be like pulling back the curtain in Wizard of Oz. Do I really love you or do I just love what you produce? On the other hand, someone like Richard Tuttle, I’d just be in a wonderland.
At MICA when I’d be working in my studio, even if she wasn’t there I’d go sit in Mary Beth’s studio and she just had such a different aesthetic, a sensibility that’s so off kilter from mine. I’d just look at where her coffee cup was placed or random bits of paper. I’d just take in these little contrasts. I just needed something else in my brain to help me see what was needed in my work. Sometimes I wish I still had that.

RS: If you were going to interview a local artist who would it be?

ML: Megan Lavelle of ‘How We Dwell” project.

To see more:
www.magnolialaurie.com
www.creativealliance.com

the genesis

2009-01-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

This is a blog to showcase local artists. The idea is for one artist to go to the studio of another artist and interview them and take pictures and/or video. I am open to non-local artist participation but I'd prefer that either the interviewer or interviewee be local. You could interview anyone, any medium, visual art, music, literature, or multi-discipline. Ideally there would be at least two interview posts/month. If you are interested in conducting an interview let me know so I can assign you a week. Feel free to pass this on to other artists you think would be interested. Thanks!