In the Mix: DC Area Abstract Artists

Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday
10:00 am – 5:00 pm
For more information, call 202.476.3225
PHOTO ID REQUIRED

Visit the web site for more information and directions: www.childrensnational.org

“The 2012 iteration of Artomatic is the largest to date, with more than 1,100 artists participating.
That number will increase with each day of the monthly installation.
The sixth floor of the building will be an “Art Reactor,” a space where
visitors will be able to create their own art with supplies provided by
the space.”

Read the whole piece on the HuffPost here.

“Walk through Artomatic for two hours and the effect is what you might
expect: It’s dizzying. Draining. Eleven floors, 10 of them busting with
artworks from 1,300 contributors. Some floors are labyrinthine; others
are wide-open displays of sculpture and installation, interrupted by a
stage and bank of chairs. Like the last time Artomatic was in Crystal
City, this year’s show is housed in an old office building. The carpet
looks cheap; the drop ceiling feels cheaper. The lighting is mostly
fluorescent. It is everything a museum or a gallery shouldn’t be. And
that’s the point, because it is neither.

Consider what it is: a six-week event by local artists for local
artists, run almost entirely by volunteers in a vacant building. There
are the stages: poetry on the 11th floor; Heineken (one of the sponsors)
has stages on the 10th and eighth floors; the ninth floor has a dance
stage. If it isn’t the largest volunteer-run arts organization in the
country, it’s probably near the top”

Read the whole article in the WCP here.

Send me your list of your top ten AOM artists and I will publish all of them throughout the duration of this art-battery charging event.

1851 S. Bell Street, Crystal City, Virginia

Doors open 6 p.m. on Friday, May 18!

1,300 artists and performers take over an 11-story building and turn it into
DC’s biggest creative event.

Plan your visit — directions, hours and more.

1851 S. Bell Street, Crystal City, Virginia

Doors open 6 p.m. on Friday, May 18!

Plan your visit — directions, hours and more.

The oldest rock art ever found in Europe reveals an interest in the
female form — and the type of décor that the first Europeans preferred
for their living spaces.

The new discovery, uncovered at a site called Abri Castanet in
France, consists mainly of circular carvings most likely meant to
represent the vulva.

Read more: here.

As you get older, in the art
world as elsewhere, you”re confronted with some choices about how to
conduct yourself. You can, for instance, stay locked in the style you
strutted when you were younger and hipperthat is, continuing to wear a
ponytail and tight cowboy shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons long after
you”ve gone bald on top and acquired a gut. Or you can try to keep up
with today”s younger people by copying their fashions: Shave your head,
wear small, expensive blue Italian sunglasses and a shiny suit over a
black T-shirt and try to blend in with the 30something critics and
curators. Or you can just give up altogether on trying to wax
contemporaryand wear bow ties, tweed jackets with elbow patches, and
take your proud place as a naysayer who thinks that this time the art
world really has gone to hell in a hand basket.

I find myself thinking about this stuff lately because I”m now almost
70 an age I seem to have reached suddenly, and quite unjustly,
overnight.

Read the whole thing here.

We are annoucing our intention to
make significant purchases of artwork by Prince George’s County artists
at this year’s Artomatic. Our County artists have long played an active,
vital role in the regional art community, and have traditionally had a
strong presence in Artomatic- the region’s largest art festival. Through
this art purchase program, it is our intention to highlight, showcase,
and promote Prince George’s artists, so that attention to their work is
equal to their talent and impact on enriching the lives of our
communities. It is also our intention to demonstrate the long-term
benefit of supporting and showcasing Prince George’s artists by using
these purchases to build our collection of County artists’ work and to
display their artworks in our public facilities.  

What can you do to have your artwork considered?  

First, you must be 18 years of age or older and live, work, study, or maintain your art studio in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

Second, you have to let us know who you are and where your space is within Artomatic. Call the Brentwood Arts Exchange, at (301) 277-2863 or email Phil Davis, Acting Director of the Brentwood Arts Exchange, at phil.davis@pgparks.com.
Make sure you let us know why you qualify as a Prince George’s artist
(live here, work here, etc.). Make sure you give is your contact info so
we can get in touch if your artwork is selected.

Third,
we will provide you with a small, yet easily visible, label that
declares you a “Prince George’s Artist.” Put the label up in your space
so it’s easy for us to see throughout the duration of Artomatic as we
make purchases. Identifying yourself as Prince George’s artist during
Artomatic will not only help us find your artwork, but also builds
solidarity among County artists and reaffirms the County’s reputation as
a creative community and source of exceptional artistic talent.

From: michealjohn218@yahoo.com

Date: May 14, 2012 7:07:57 AM EDT

Subject: ArtFile Online: enquiry to buy

**This following message was sent to you by a person who found your artwork on Washington Project for the Arts’s  ArtFile Online website. artfile.wpadc.org Please report any problems or concerns regarding this email to
artfile@wpadc.org

Hello
am micheal and am interested in one of your paintings, i just want to
buy it for one of my daughter because she loves art paintings a lot, and
i will like to pay you through cheque and i hope you dont mind beacause
that,s the most preferable method for me and i hope you will be able to
bear with me. Thanks

Still from “Reforged Each Morning, My Fate My Own” by Tim Tate and Pete Duvall

This video has all the look of a spectacular painting, but instead of a three-dimensional object, Tate takes the viewer into the 4th dimension… sliding the view through the painting over the next minute
or so. Think of it as a painting that is 24″ x 48″ x 60 seconds. 

This
piece, and those that will surely follow, show Tate entering his mature artist phase.
For those of us less than subjective fans who have followed his career for this last decade, it
couldn’t be more fresh and exciting.

Because it was Artomatic a decade ago who gave Tate his artistic wings, Tate is using Artomatic as a test
audience for his newer style, complete with a comment book on the pedestal in front. A “test run” before releasing the new works in the broader contemporary art world.   

Let him know how you feel about it…..I think that this may be his best and most sophisticated work yet.

Artomatic opens  on Friday, May 18 at 6PM with a massive art party.

Below is the almost finished product. This is tentatively titled “Eyes of  Frida Kahlo” and consists of an assembly of two small LCD screens embedded within the mask and each playing two separate Powerpoint presentations; each has 68 embedded images of Kahlo’s self portraits.

The focus of the piece is to envision triumph over pain, as the brave people who have to undergo radiation therapy for head and neck cancer (HNC) have to do.

Eyes of Frida Kahlo (front view)

Eyes of Frida Kahlo, left view

Eyes of Frida Kahlo, right view

Eyes of Frida Kahlo, seen in a dim light

Eyes of Frida Kahlo, seen in the dark

I’ve been fortunate to have played host on my blog to a very interesting discussion on the rise in popularity of ‘cipher’ characters – protagonists who are blank slates. The most topical one at the moment is Anastasia – the female main character in Fifty Shades of Grey. She is, by no means, the only one.  Increasingly, I’m coming across characters, in both erotica and in erotic romance, who have no goals, no aspirations, no talents, no agency. This is especially true when it comes to sexually submissive characters.

It goes against everything I was taught as a writer, and against all the most celebrated literary characters who are held up as exemplars of brilliant characterization.  And yet these novels are wildly popular. Too popular to simply discount as literary flukes. Too well-liked to attribute their popularity to a readership lacking in discernment.

I think it behooves us as writers to examine how it became not only acceptable, but desirable to deliver up protagonists with no personality, no agency.  And then to examine what has happened in our culture to support or encourage this change. Finally, I think we are required to consider the ramifications of this shift.

As interactive media evolved, it allowed for a very different kind of relationship between the story and the consumer.  There were always role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, but the rise of the computer game enabled the creation of story-space that required the immersion and active participation of the player.  The once maligned 2nd Person POV became a necessary narrative device for interactive gaming.  Writing games necessitated the author to, in essence, make a hole in the storyworld where the player could insert themselves, and allow enough flexibility of plot to make the player feel like he or she had invested enough agency to care about the outcome of the story/game.

Post-modernism greatly influenced many aspects of creative content creation.  There was a thorough democratization of the validity and worth of opinion and experience. Expertise, craftsmanship, authority of the subject were rejected in favour of the lived experience of the common man/woman.  Entertainment types like reality TV have become very popular, valorizing the experience of the everyman – and turning it into spectacle. It also is very cheaply produced entertainment. It doesn’t require a lot of the creative expertise of earlier forms – actors, writers, set designers, etc.

From a literary theory perspective, the rise of new ways of understanding the author’s role in the narrative exchange between the text and the reader forced us to examine where meaning-making lies. And in the latter half of the 20th century, it was generally agreed that the reader played a much greater part in the reader-text-writer relationship than previously acknowledged. Readers internalize the written text and then, essentially, re-write it into their own experience.  This allows novels to have the intensely personal impact that they have on us.

This has influenced writing enormously. Writers began to accept their roles as proposers of fictionality rather than transferrers of truths, and attempted to write increasingly more ‘open’ texts, in which the reader was left to formulate conclusions themselves.  It no longer matters what the novel meant to the writer as he or she wrote it. Now all that matters is what it means to the reader through the filter of their interpretation.

So, in a way, it’s not all that surprising that startlingly vapid characters like Anastasia, are as popular as they are.  As one commenter on my blog said: “I like to immerse myself into what I’m reading and imbue characters with my own thoughts and ideas.” And what better way to do this than to provide the reader with an essentially empty vessel? As another commenter wrote: “…she will be easy to step into as an identity character because so little of her is really fleshed out.”

 It occurs to me that this is a reflection of a greater sociological polarization.  Not only does it seem we are, as a factionalized society, unwilling to listen to an opposing argument or consider that any part of it might be valid, but now we can no longer even tolerate the fictional portrayal of characters who cannot be easily made into ourselves.

It would be foolish not to acknowledge that there are deeply feminist implications in the rise in popularity of female characters who have no goals or aims or aspirations other than to be a compliment to the male protagonist in the story, but I don’t really want to get into that discussion.

The desire for empty vessels into which we can insert ourselves literarily has broader implications that go beyond gender.  At its heart, this relates to a society in which individuals have no interest in the experiences of others.  It is not enough to sympathize with or be co-travelers on a character’s fictional journey. We have to have space made for us to be in the starring role.  And I have to wonder whether this is a fundamental product of a consumer culture in which the customer’s voice is, ostensibly, the only one that matters. Have we had our consumer egos pandered to with such intensity, that we cannot tolerate the other, the alien, the different?  If it is not our story, is it unconsumable to us now?

I think Barthes was simply a little premature. The ‘Death of the Author’ did not occur when we relinquished the role of meaning making to readers. But when writers can no longer write rich, complex, evolved main characters and are compelled, if they want to be popular, to write empty vessels instead, then it really is the death of the author.

It is fairly easy to program a computer to spit out a sequence of fictional events. And certainly, most of the scenarios we create in fiction are not all that new.  The thing that afforded writers creative space was to write interesting characters who transgressed through those familiar landscapes in new and interesting ways. Now, it seems, we are not required to do that either.

Are we dead, yet?

And as if that wasn’t enough, also congrats to fellow Washington Glass School co-founder Erwin Timmers, possibly the DMV’s first “green artist” (before we even knew what that was) and who also has a very cool article about working green in the same issue.