Thursday, March 31, 2005
April in Richmond
SHOWS
This Friday April 1st is First Friday -
1708 Gallery - paintings by Sara Clark and drawings by Andy Moon Wilson, 8-10pm
ADA Gallery - three person show featuring the work of Susan Jamison, Michael Ferris, and me, 7-10pm. Don't forget to check out the record bin show in the back. Submit!
Anderson Gallery - juried exhibition of VCU undergrads. I'm especially looking forward to seeing the work of Mike Ellyson, Brett Johnson, and Amanda Long, 5-7pm.
Curated Culture at Cornerstone Gallery - two of the undergrads I recently wrote about are showing together, Jules Jones and D'Metrius Rice, 7-10pm.
Main Art Gallery - work by Martin Brief, 7-9pm. No idea who he is, but they always have good food!!
Rentz Gallery - paintings by Laetitia Bonnici, 6-9pm. Don't know what to expect here either, but it's right down the street from Main Art.
Visual Art Studio - this caught my eye because one of the four artists showing is someone I met a few years ago in Vermont, Deanne Dunbar! She's amazing; talented, smart, etc etc - I'm talking Carson Fox-land. Hope she comes. This place is close to ADA at 208 W. Broad, 6:30-10pm.
and .... later in the month Katharina Grosse will be showing at Solvent Space! Her show opens April 15th and she'll be lecturing on the 13th. That sounds a little weird, giving a lecture two days before the show opens - maybe incorrect. Don't mark your calendar just yet.
Other upcoming LECTURES I am keen on attending (these are just dates, I don't have all the info yet) -
April 4th - Frances Stark
April 5th - Rosemarie Fiore
April 15th - Joan Gaustad
April 25th - Rachel Berwick
April 26th - Vito Acconci
and... Daniel Buren will be coming in May!
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Duane Keiser II
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Trawick Prize
Don't forget about Radius250 either - that deadline is April 30th. Open to anybody within a 250 mile radius of Richmond - this includes Charleston, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Pittsburgh, Charlotte.
This is the coolest website. They even have a page showing how many people have entered so far and where they are entering from. Not enough!!!
Monday, March 28, 2005
Marlene Dumas!
Incidentally, Richard Polsky is shunning me! In this later article he calls David Hockney "one of our ten finest living painters" - but when I contacted him asking who the other nine were he wrote back he was too busy to tell me! I e-mailed him again a couple weeks later and haven't heard back. Bummer. I'm dying to know who the others are!
Do you have a list of "ten finest living painters"? Post it in the comments.
UPDATE 1/30/05 :
Franklin Einspruch has written a post responding to the NYTimes Marlene Dumas article. Lots of interesting comments - most of his readers do not like Dumas.
The exception is a commenter named George who writes: "the NYT illustrations made me think of the Goya frescos at the Florida in Spain. In my opinion these are among the greatest paintings ever made. She tried." I think George is the artist George Rodart, he later adds a link to his website with scans from a book of the aforementioned Goya frescos.
Franklin's frequent commenter Oldpro offers "Olitski is my nominee for the best living artist".
Where are my requests for The Finest Living Painters???
last week on art.blogging.la
Lots of information, excitement, debate, and disagreement on Caryn Coleman's art.blogging.la last week.
The Greater LA Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists sponsored a panel on art journalism in LA - Caryn was one of the panelists and Sean blogged it.
Here's the roughly chronological breakdown -
1. Sean's transcript of the panel - followed by some comments critical of the moderator, a plug by Mark Vallen, and a fuck off by Sean.
2. a little blurb by Caryn - followed by a bunch of comments, mostly some kind of argument between the anonymous commenter Commentator and Caryn. Some very funny comments by an artist named Patrick N. O'Brien, he gets weirder and funnier with each post. The only artist named Patrick O'Brien I can find is this one - that would be perfect.
3. Mark Vallen's blogging of the panel on his blog Art For A Change.
4. Caryn's response to Mark Vallen - followed by a bunch of comments including an aggressive anonymous Someone.
5. unrelated post by Caryn trying to move on - anonymous Commentator of earlier is back on the attack, gets outed by Caryn! This is his work. Caryn is pissed!!
6. Caryn shuts the comments option off.
Caryn does seem to take a disproportionate amount of crap for all her efforts (resentment?) - if it wasn't for her blog I really wouldn't know much about what was happening in LA. That doesn't mean I always agree or even like what she shows - but I'm extremely grateful for the effort. I hope she turns the comments feature back on, it's one of the best things about blogs.
Thanks Caryn!!!
Friday, March 25, 2005
Eva & Adele

A number of other artbloggers have posted about seeing Eva & Adele at some of the NY art fairs last week, so I thought I would share my photo taken with them at the 6th Nippon International Contemporary Art Festival (Tokyo NiCAF) back in 1999.
The fair was boring, meeting Eva & Adele was one of the highlights. I'd heard of them previously but was surprised to find them at this small fair. I asked if I could have my photo taken with them and they were so happy! After the photo was taken I was given a card asking to send a copy to their German address. They were so warm and friendly, gave off such good vibes. I love them.
The other highlight of this fair was seeing some of this work by Siobhan Hapaska. She had a big room of work - some kind of "artist spotlight".
My bag is Masaki Matsushima.
Social Sculpture For Sale
You have to e-mail me.
related: Oliver Kamm has a pledge drive going on. His friend Juan is making fun of him. I like Oliver Kamm.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
undergrads!
Jon Clary & Rob Lee - I'm posting these two together because they are currently showing together at the Cornerstone Gallery. Rob's work generally falls under that style discussed yesterday and I really love Jon Clary's work. He's a very smart, very talented printmaker. Wish I had some notes from the show to look at right now. Suffice to say I already have one small Clary ($10!!) and we have been meaning to arrange a trade of something for a while. Maybe after his show closes I can negotiate for something left-over. The show closes March 29th!
Dennis Matthews, Demetrius (D.J.) Rice, Lewis Taylor - These guys never stop producing. They just keep cranking stuff out and keep getting better and better. The energy is fantastic and it's amazing to see them grow - I think they are all still very much developing but it is unnerving to see how far and fast they are coming along. Dennis and D.J. are especially driven and all three are ambitious about getting their work shown locally: taco restaurants, coffee shops, wherever. Dennis' paintings looked great on a recent visit to World Cup and I couldn't believe he was only asking $100 apiece.
Jules Buck Jones - Jules is really in a class by himself. Inventive, exciting, dynamic, loose large scroll-like works-on-paper of abstracted/stylized streetscapes. He also has a thing for sharks and I hear has recently made a good fish animation. Last year I gave away some large stretchers I didn't want anymore and Jules took one and made a big painting. This thing is big and I think he felt he was finished and wanted to get it out if his sight for fear of overworking it. He gave it back to me! I've had it in storage for months but now I've moved into my new place and I have it in my bedroom and it is really great!! Thank You JULES!!!
Incidentally, Jules' mother is the artist Sheep Jones - she shows at Rentz Gallery and will be featured in the upcoming Mid-Atlantic edition of New American Paintings.
Hali Emminger - This is the only one of these artists that I don't know at all - but she made something really strange, ugly, wonderful, creepy that I think about a lot. It might even make my eventual Best of 2005 list. She was included in a three-person show in the VCU Student Commons Art Gallery a couple months ago with a piece called Goat Boy. It was a larger-than-life-sized (maybe three feet around?) front-half-of-the-head of a goat boy hanging on the wall. It didn't look like something poking it's head through a hole in the wall but rather like a hunting trophy. The face was ceramic and the rest of the head was some kind of brown furry stuff. The thing looked sort of demonic, sort of impish, sort of Alfred E. Neumann. This thing was really weird!! It just looked so out of place, but where would it look in place? That's no mean feat, making something that looks out of place even when it's hanging on the wall of an art gallery. It just didn't look like "art", but didn't look like anything else either. I think this thing would look "good" and have the same uncanny powerful weird presence anywhere.
She also had a very nice wallpiece called East Coast. Clumps and clods of things vaguely shaped like or referencing different East Coast states. Near the top was a plastic lobster - obviously Maine - but I have no idea what state the lamb-shaped baking pan with the red lightbulb nose at the bottom was representing. A piece of sod or something shaped like Florida was more in the middle. It kind of made me think of Robert Rauschenberg.
Well done Hali Emminger!
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Jason Coates, Steven Little, Bruce Wilhelm
The show looks really good - all three do similar work and gallery-owner John Pollard has mixed it up so you aren't quite sure if you are looking at a Steven Little or a Bruce Wilhelm unless you look it up on the pricelist. Truth be told, the ones I like the best all turn out to be Wilhelms*.
Bruce's work has a wonderful lightness of humor and touch. He strikes just the right off-hand balance between the not-quite-there Little's and a little-too-much Coates. He's also got a terrific sense of color.
Coates works in the same quirky figurative manner as Little and Wilhelm but his work is easier to identify because it is bigger, more like "painting" than drawing, and generally seems more labored. One of his pieces is called Dinosaur Mountain Bridge - a green triangular canvas of a brontosaurus encircled by an upward spiraling elevated highway. This is hung next to one of Bruce's smallish pieces called I Would Like To See Godzilla Turned Into A Building For People To Live In. Jason's work will be featured in the upcoming Mid-Atlantic edition of New American Paintings so check it out!! Raft is nice - very simple and clean.
This style is enormously popular with young artists and buyers right now. You can see stuff like this at Spector Gallery in Philadelphia, Richard Heller in Santa Monica, or Zach Feuer's gallery in NYC. Does it come from Chris Johanson? I think it really took off after Jerry Saltz's rave review of Jules De Balincourt's first show at LFL. This work is charming and likeable, easy to make and easy to sell. Glib Art. It's easier to name the galleries than name all the artists. It's all over.
I'm starting to sound a little harsh - sorry! I should share that some of my own stuff isn't too far removed from this manner of working either - I'm critiqueing myself a bit as well. I'm glad to see that the newest De Ballincourts seem to be better than the big debut.
*Full Disclosure: I own a Bruce Wilhelm!!
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
great blog, great comments thread
So last night I read this post with the great comments exchange between Miguel Sanchez and Bunny Smedley.
Today I googled Bunny Smedley and have found a bunch more stuff to print-out and read tonight.
Thank You!!!
Monday, March 21, 2005
Packets of Rejection
Saturday I told you about my latest Provincetown rejection - but I probably wasn't clear enough that I am really into rejection letters now. Carolyn Zick found a quote from Style Weekly a while back, but that isn't the half of it!
Almost two years ago I made a BIG wall installation of about 150 of my art-related rejection letters dating back to 1991. They were hung in a large grid pretty much randomly, except for some interesting juxtapositions like a Whitney rejection from Lisa Phillips next to a later rejection from Phillips after she had moved to the New Museum. A number of them are from people better known now and at different institutions.
Some of them are quite funny, like the one from Adrian Joffe, husband/partner of Commes des Garcon's Rei Kawakubo informing "we are not an art gallery" - I wrote them after visiting the Tokyo shop and seeing some nice art on the walls. That one was hung next to a rejection from the Seafood Leader catalogue which had put out a request for fish imagery. I think I must have submitted to the New Museum too many times because one of their letters starts off "I am writing, again, to thank you for the chance ..".
A few are now sad, like the one from the wonderful Ella King Torrey - someone who was very good to Philadelphia artists for many years - and who took her own life a decade after moving to San Francisco to become president of the San Francisco Art Institute.
All of these letters were installed in the gallery as a huge Wall of Rejection which I then solicited visitors to pose in front of making the "thumbs-up" sign. I charged them each two dollars and gave them the signed photo in return. People were paying me to take their photos in front of my rejection letters*!
I also photocopied 25 complete sets of all the rejection letters and mailed them out as signed and limited-edition Packets of Rejection. I mailed these Packets to some of the people who had sent the original rejection letters, along with the following note -
Dear Administrator,
Thank you for your previous consideration of my work, but I have decided not to accept your rejection. Enclosed please find a photocopy of your rejection letter, sent along with photocopies of some other unsuitable rejections. Your letter is on top.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have reviewed your rejection, but as you may know, I receive many many valid rejections and cannot accept all. Please do not feel that this rejection in any way reflects badly on the quality of your judgement, and I wish you the greatest success in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Martin Bromirski
Some of the people these Packets of Rejection were sent to are -
Jessica Hough
Madeline Grynsztejn
Elizabeth Armstrong
Clementine Gallery
Jodi Hanel
Ian Berry
Ingrid Schaffner
Richard Torchia
Laura Hoptman
Antoine Guerrero
Charles Bergman
Lisa Phillips
Elizabeth Sussman
Olga Viso
Aaah, that felt good. Try it!
* i have the negatives and these photos have since become a whole new piece!
UPDATE: I was contacted by one of the curators listed above, Jessica Hough, and invited to include that wall of rejection piece in a 2006 show she curated in Dumbo.
We got a review in Time Out and a New Yorker blurb!
Thick and Thin
Thick & Thin - a show of abstract painting featuring the work of six artists from Virginia, DC, and Maryland at The Cultural Center at Glen Allen. An aim of the show is to "illustrate a variety of approaches to abstract painting".
The six included artists are -
Bernhard Hildebrandt
Joanne Kent
Sandi Ritchie Miller
June Shadoan
Mary Shand
Diane Szczepaniak
The show runs until May 14 and is co-curated by N. Elizabeth Schlatter and Gwen Van Ostern.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Provincetown Rejection Recap
Following are the dates of my Provincetown rejections and the number of total applicants for each year -
March 3, 1997 - 430 total applicants
February 26, 1998 - 486 total applicants
February 25, 2000 - 381 total applicants
March 11, 2002 - 478 total applicants
March 11, 2005 - 375 total applicants
The number of applicants was really low this year!
Provincetown has a $35.00 application fee; I've spent at least $175.00 on Provincetown application fees!!! I wonder what my Lifetime Application Fee Total (for everything; Skowhegan, Rome, Roswell, Yaddo, etc etc) comes to? Plus the postage for each one, including each application's SASE of course (all of my apps sent between 1995 - 2003 were mailed from abroad!). And all the slide dupes??? Thousands!!!
Would I have made all those applications if I had been aware of statistics like this and this? Probably. I'll probably keep on applying to Provincetown too. Sucker!
What's my problem!?!
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Damien Hirst
"I've been thinking about painting a lot," he said. Over the years, he said, he has collected about 1,000 photographic images that have captured his imagination, many from newspapers and magazines.
"I started out airbrushing," he said. "But the images looked flat, dead. For two years I didn't think it was going to work." Finally, he said, he disciplined himself to represent each image faithfully by hand.
Still, he doesn't consider himself a serious painter. "I would feel uncomfortable putting myself in a category with other painters like Goya or Bacon," he said. "I'm more interested in the images than the painting."
I still don't understand some of their selections (Ron Johnson?*) for that show, although I'm grateful for the effort. It's over. Please do another one!
Zeke's Gallery has the series of photographs that one of the paintings in Hirst's current Gagosian show is based on. Fascinating and sad, who needs the paintings?
Here's a Guardian take on Hirst from earlier this year.
* if you are new to this blog, I'm not dissing Ron, only saying that his work had absolutely nothing to do with the curatorial concept.
strange detective
This guy was sitting alone at a table and working on a laptop. His clothes were cheap detectivey with short sleeves and a loud paisley tie. He had a bit of a paunch, but it may have been padding. He seemed a little tired and wasn't acting at all hammy or self-conscious.
This guy looked like someone in his 20's disguised as a thirty-something version of NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz. So weird! It was like a non-performing performance – I’m not sure that anybody else even noticed him, although the coffee counter guy must have. Are there more people like this walking around in bad disguises?
What an interesting artist!
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Steve Jones II
I'm in the middle of moving apartments, sorry about the light posting this week.
Mountain Man - your comments under the previous Steve Jones post were good questions, you're not a dummy! I'm just too busy to address them now.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Heide Trepanier reviewed on Artcritical
Congratulations to Ron and Heide!
artist's talk
Monday, March 14, 2005
The Face of the Lady who is Shunning me!
Please read this post about The Whitney Shunning Me and forward it to Jan Rothschild at the Whitney. I know people at the Whitney sometimes read this blog because I see their ISP on my statcounter thing - but I can't get any answers to those questions!!
Don't forget to enter!!!