By F. Lennox Campello

Good news for the DMV art scene! Artomatic will be back next year! In its 25 year history, Artomatic has become a DCMV institution. It has provided an alternative venue for local artists, offering an art festival that’s part art fair, part madness, and part circus, but always the best open art show on planet Earth!

Open means that there are no jurors or judges and that every artist who wants to do it, can do it!

And because it doesn’t use judges, curators or hierarchy, Artomatic is as democratic as an art show can get… which usually drives art critics crazy!

Besides heaps of visual arts of all types, the fair showcases local Dance, Theater, Spoken Word, Music, Film, Story Telling, Workshops, and whatever else DMV creatives can incorporate into the month long event. I am told that there was some talk of adding “culinary arts” to this show- but not set yet.

The 2024 Artomatic will be in the largest building ever at over 400,000 sq ft!

I’ve been a fan of Artomatic since the very first one, and have written and reviewed it over and over as the show (once called Art-O-Matic) evolved and grew into the planet’s largest open art show.

Wikipedia tells us that “the first Art-O-Matic, as it was spelled then, ran from May 21 to June 19, 1999.  It started as a fairly spontaneous event in the Manhattan Laundry buildings on Florida Avenue in Northwest Washington. The location, in an old laundromat, accounts for the name. The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities acquired about $25,000 of artwork from this show for permanent display in the capital’s public buildings through its Art in Public Places program.”

The process is simple: Find a large (read: enormous), empty commercial, get the landlord to give it up for a month or so, and open it to anyone who is or claims to be an artist, performer, or actor.

The process itself is democratic and doesn’t involve any jurying. At Artomatic anyone and everyone can exhibit their work. As a result, the exhibition delivers a huge diversity of skills, subjects, media, presentations, goals, and ideas. Curiously enough, even the most amateur of artists, with the muddiest of watercolors and kitschiest of subjects is a refreshing change in an art world dominated by reproductions and mass-produced art.

And I love Artomatic not just because of the miles of artwork on display. The main reason that I like Artomatic is the palpable amount of artistic energy that it delivers to the DMV whenever it is held. It is as if some invisible visual art battery in this ignored art scene comes to the forefront and gets recharged with brilliant white light (made as we all know, of all colors in the spectrum), and 50,000 people who generally would not set foot in a gallery or museum come and see art and artists, and absorb the positive energy that only creative minds can generously give away.

In the past I’ve noted that critics generally hate Artomatic because they are not equipped in any intellectual way to write about a show with 1,000+ artists. That would require them to visit the show six to seven times, while still getting paid for just one review, when they are used to visiting a gallery or a museum with brains tuned to evaluating a single artist or group show rather than 1,000+ artists ranging from disturbingly awful to spectacularly good.

I think that the real reason that most “regular” critics don’t like AOM is because they lack the formation and depth to see beyond what is hanging on the walls. Because their experience is often limited to reviewing or visiting a gallery or a specific show in a museum, their sensory capacity is quickly overloaded when they pass the 100th or 200th artist with less than noticeable work in a postmodern world where everything and anything is art. Thus, once those senses are overloaded, it all looks in the same puerile category to them and they fail to see what most of us see. After a rookie critic is exposed to 20-25 photographers doing close-ups of flowers, all in one show, it is actually quite hard for those same tired critical eyes not to be poisoned into giving all photographers a failing grade.

Not all critics lack the mental capacity and visionary depth, but most do – including the guy who once gave AOM a horrible review on air in a radio show and later it was discovered that he had actually never seen the show… remember that?

Often, as the locations have hundreds of rooms of all shapes and sizes, the rooms themselves lend themselves to interesting presentations.  For example, 20 years ago, at the 2004 Artomatic, my favorite among many strong installations was the collaboration by Jordan Tierney and Marcia Hart titled “Aqueduct.”

Tierney and Hart offered us a pristine white room where clear, empty glass vessels, shaped like small virginal amphorae, are lined up in severe rows forming a block in front of a large glass bottle filled with water. This is a powerful installation, which made me somewhat uneasy by its severity and Teutonic geometry – like a row of acolytes in front of some cult leader, waiting to be filled with religion, or Nazi storm troopers, waiting to be filled with hate.

Artomatic is a nonprofit organization, and there is no admission fee for the public to attend the show. They note that they “rely on volunteers to serve as staff who promote and advertise events, welcome the public, manage security, and perform a variety of other duties to ensure a successful experience for both artists and audiences.” Go online to www.artomatic.org.

About the Author: F. Lennox Campello’s art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area has been a premier source for the art community for over 20 years. Since 2003, his blog has been the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet with over SIX million visitors.