Some Favorite Art Things 2004

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Following are some of my "Favorite Art Things" from 2004.

Anish Kapoor - Whiteout- at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Great gallery.

About Painting at the Tang Museum, Skimore College, Saratoga Springs, NY - This was a real big hodge-podge show of contemporary painting, featuring more than sixty artists, some represented by more than one piece. The website has a great page of most of them - click on the thumbnails for more info. A favorite was this silvery piece by Rudolf Stingel, stuck in a hall between a door and a window. The window had a shade on it almost the exact texture of the painting. I enjoyed that weird placement.

My show at ADA.

John Ravenal - John Ravenal is the curator of contemporary art at the VMFA and I see him at every art show in town, no matter how small. That's great, thank you John. Supposedly Robert Hobbs lives in Richmond too.

Carly Troncale - Carly Troncale spent her entire final semester as a VCU art student on a project documenting the construction of a big new building across the street. The construction crew let her paint some of the plywood sheets pink before they were attached to the building. She interviewed them wearing pink hardhats and videotaped everything. The video was great, very funny, and it was cool to look up at the building in progress and see the randomly placed sheets of pink plywood slowly being covered over with tarpaper and brick. Shortly after Carly completed her project the unfinished building was consumed in one of the biggest Richmond fires since the Civil War, if not ever. Twenty-nine buildings were damaged, nineteen had to be demolished. Richard Roth's truck melted. I think you can see some of the pink plywood in the rubble here. Wow, what an incredible finish.

An uncanny Dutch peasant dance painting at the VMFA that I don't want to talk about without an image to share. Gave me chills it's so weird.

Rachele Riley - Rachele Riley's piece in the Print Biennial at University of Richmond's Marsh Art Gallery. This was my favorite piece in the show so I was doubly shocked when during the curator's slide talk immediately following the artist's reception she projected it as an example of how hard it is to jury by slides and that if she had known what the piece really looked like she wouldn't have included it! If you were there, yes, that was me who interrupted her.

Reality T.V. - especially The Amazing Race!

Joe Fyfe - It was great meeting and learning from Joe Fyfe, even if he isn't always as right as he thinks he is. I admire his sureness and fearlessness at speaking his mind, same goes for Tyler Green. My recent post on Don Crow I was sort of thinking about how Joe Fyfe might write it. In case it wasn't clear, I loved that work! Here's an interesting piece Joe wrote on stripes.

Artblogs - I love them all, but I think the best is Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's artblog, and I'm not just saying that because they gave my last show in Philly a nice mention, or because I'm in a show in Philly now and I want them to review that one too.

Sesshu - just because.
Jack Kirby - just because.
Donald Judd - just because.
Caspar David Friedrich - just because.
The Genji Monogatari - just because.

I'm sure there will be many other things that come to me later, but this will have to do. Richmonders with Richmond things to add please make a comment or e-mail me and I can post those later. I know you're reading this, I have a stat-counter.