By F. Lennox Campello The Coronavirulization of the art world A few weeks ago, what could possibly be the last art fair of 2019 took place in New York City amidst all the angst and social changes caused by the virus in our society. The fair was essentially a disaster, and we lost a ton of money, and subsequently all planned art fairs for 2020 have either been cancelled or postponed. The silver lining in the coronavirulization of America is that, for artists, it gives all of us – in spite of the scariness being gratuitously disseminated by the main stream media in a futile effort to boost ratings – the perfect excuse, as we are forced to hunker down and batten all hatches, to do some constructive things which in most cases will help your art footprint in years to come. “But Lenster,” you cry in anguish, “how can we exhibit and sell work?…all galleries are closed, all fairs postponed… all this… all that.” Ahhh… money worries – good point. Even in the best of times, artists often have money issues, and thus the Coronavirulization of the art world has an even more profound impact on our families. There are options out there; in fact there are plenty of emergency resources for artists as well efforts to provide financial relief for artists. Let me list a few. The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Emergency Grant (https://www.gottliebfoundation.org/emergency-grant/) is “intended to provide interim financial assistance to qualified painters, printmakers, and sculptors whose needs are the result of an unforeseen, catastrophic incident, and who lack the resources to meet that situation. Each grant is given as one-time assistance for a specific emergency, examples of which are fire, flood, or emergency medical need.” This program has no deadlines. The Artists’ Charitable Fund (http://artistscharitablefund.org/index.html) “assists…
By F. Lennox Campello Thinking Out Loud About Art! A few thoughts on a few things which should be of interest to all artists: Public Art: Selecting artwork for an American public collection is a fine art in itself, as the artwork has to avoid the appearance of remotely insulting anyone or making any sort of social statement that may be offensive to any segment of the public. Thus we usually end up with a lot of abstract, non-representational art in most public venues, and nudity needs not apply – I have called it “airportism” in the past. Over a decade ago, when the then “new” Washington Convention Center unveiled its art collection to the public (selected curiously by a Chicago firm), they introduced the then largest public art collection in Washington, DC, with over 120 works of art, sculpture, paintings, photography, graphics and mixed media. They spent around four million dollars, of which half was allocated to DC area artists. The plan was to keep “adding” works to the collection in the mostly empty and cavernous WCC – not sure that ever happened. The DMV quite possibly has the largest and most diverse set of public art in the nation – between all the WPA era projects, all the private and city-funded murals, all the homage statuary by the federal government, by the city and by the embassies, we have a wide ranging variety of public art – including a form of public art which almost no other American city has: nudes. Granted, all the naked statuary adorning our area is in some cases over a 100 years old, when it was curiously OK to put up a nude statute under the auspices of classic art, where no city in this country would dare to nudify anything being paid…
By F. Lennox Campello Art in the City….and the Metro Area! “Why DC Needs Art Galleries” is the title of a January article in the DMV area glossy Washingtonian magazine. The article is by Ian Bourland, who is assistant professor of contemporary art history at Georgetown University and an art critic for a range of international publications. Bourland does an excellent job of updating the current gallery around the District (not the DMV). He goes back a little too far in history (for my taste) to recount the halcyon days of the DC gallery scene, at least according to him when he notes: “Decades ago, before the economic turnaround transformed Washington, it seemed as though the city might be an emerging art capital. The Corcoran School of Art & Design was thriving, and DC boasted the hard-edged abstraction of the Washington Color School, anchored by now-canonical figures Morris Louis and Sam Gilliam.” Why am I starting my column with this observation? Two reasons: (a) It is rare to see any DC area media write and discuss DMV area art galleries, and (b) It reaffirms my commitment to this column, which for a couple of decades now has been trying to do that! Kudos to the Old Town Crier! Another point: In my opinion, technically the zenith of the DMV gallery art scene (no pun intended with Zenith Gallery, which coincidentally represents my work) was more around the late 1990s to mid-2000s, when the number of art galleries of all flavors: independently owned commercial art galleries (such as Conner, Fraser, eklektikos, Marsha Mateyka, Irvine, Davidson, Anton, Robert Brown, Heineman-Myers, Alex, Baumgartner, Alla Rogers, Veerhoff, Neptune, Aaron, Numark, G Fine Art, Hemphill, Addison-Ripley, Littleton, Parish, and others, as well as the highly survivable artists’ cooperatives (Touchstone, Studio, Multiple Exposures, Factory Photoworks, Gallery…
By F. Lennox Campello The Art Gallery…a Fragile Labor of Love Art galleries (according to the US Chamber of Commerce from the last time that I examined the subject) are the second most likely business in the USA to fail (first is restaurants). John Pancake, a good friend and a former Washington Post Arts editor once told me that “running an art gallery in DC is a heroic endeavor”, and Pancake was not that off the mark with that assessment. When I first opened the first Fraser Gallery in Georgetown in late 1996, we immediately had lots of people giving us advice on how to succeed, as well as someone who, once they heard what the galleries intended to focus upon, noted that he “gave us six months before we closed.” Six years later we opened a second gallery in Bethesda, at the time the largest independently owned commercial fine arts gallery in the DMV, an acronym which I invented around that same time, at least according to an investigation of the origins of “DMV” to refer to the Greater DC region conducted in 2016 by the Washington City Paper. Art galleries, when run by ethical dealers, are fragile labors of love, and while we sigh when we see them close, we should applaud and encourage them when they sprout from the most unlikely of places. Freight Gallery is an artist run micro/pop-up gallery in a 1925 Hollister Whitney freight elevator in Washington, DC. The space is 75 inches wide, 95 inches high, and 85 inches deep–a perfect container for displaying sculpture and small installations. Its mission is to create more opportunities for artists. In a recent review by Eric Hope of Diane Szczepaniak’s installation at Freight Gallery, (titled Floating Light) and published in that media jewel known as East…
By F. Lennox Campello This month this column is just going to re-address some thoughts about our DMV area non-profits – an idea which I’ve been venting on about for years. The Art League in Alexandria is not only one of our area’s largest artists’ organization, with over 1,200 members, but also a jewel in our area’s art presence. The Art League also operates a school with over 2500 students per term and a supply store for the purchase of art supplies by students and members. When I first re-arrived to the Washington area in 1993, the first thing that I did was to join The Art League, and was a member for several years. It was a key part of my growth as a “local” artist. Each month The Art League has a juried competition, where members can bring original works of art to be juried by a guest juror. Selected works are then hung at The Art League’s large gallery on the ground floor of the Torpedo Factory. Over the years I have been honored to have been a juror for this process multiple times. Also multiple times over the last few years I’ve tried to get someone from the many great art non-profits and artists’ leagues which abound in our area interested in doing art fairs in other cities as part of their programming… and I’ve usually picked on the Art League as an example of ow this process would work. But the “process” applies not only to our great Art League and its management, but also to the Greater Reston Arts Center, the Arlington Arts Center, the McLean Project for the Arts, the Rockville Art League, the Fairfax Art League, the Washington Project for the Arts, etc. You get my drift. Thus I am using the…
By F. Lennox Campello Zophie King or the Importance of a Good Art Work Ethic Ever wondered how to maximize the attention that your art work gets from the press, galleries, and museum curators? Or how to present your work in a professional manner and save money in the process? How to tap into grants, awards and residencies? How to approach a gallery? Should you have a contract? How do you establish an online presence for your art foot print? How do you build your professional resume? How do you get your work acquired by museums, universities and other public collections? Those are all great questions that are seldom part of any art school curriculum that I am aware of… they are sort of part of the business side of art, which most artsy folks avoid like the plague, as art generation after art generation gets swallowed by the “victimism” approach favored by most art faculties – at least in my experience. If you are a 2D artist, the subject of framing your artwork is enough to give most wallets a tremor of fear, as framing, unless properly planned and delivered, can be an exceedingly expensive proposition to most artists. And there are multiple approaches to this task, I call them “guerilla tactics” which can reduce the cost of framing up to 90%, especially in the DMV, where custom framing costs are around $100 an hour for labor (plus materials). I’m starting this month’s column by discussing these issues because for the last 20 years or so I’ve been presenting a seminar titled “Boot camp for Artists” which covers all those areas and more. The seminar is free to attendees and is usually presented courtesy of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Division of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission….
By F. Lennox Campello “True Stories from the Gallery World” “True Stories from the Gallery World” should be a book written by me about some of the most interesting, sometimes even weird experiences that I’ve had since I started selling art – initially my own art school assignments at the Pike Place Market in Seattle when I was an art student at the University of Washington. One of the key lessons which I learned there is that the trite saying “Art is in the eyes of the beholder” is very true. And I have empirical evidence to prove it. As I noted, I used to sell, trade and/or give away all of my art school assignments: ALL OF THEM, including the inexplicably senseless ones, such as the ones which one of my professors, maybe Alden Mason, or perhaps Jacob Lawrence assigned, where each student was handed a brown grocery paper bag filled with objects and stapled shut. In the “assignment”, we were supposed to “feel” the objects and use our mind’s eye to image or detect what the object was and then produce a charcoal drawing on newsprint. You can just imagine the vapid things which resulted from this assignment, but just like all my assignments, as soon as it was graded, I had it backed in a sturdy board, shrink-wrapped and on sale for around five bucks at the Pike Place Market. These beauties usually hung around for a few years, with thousands of visitors pawing them as they looked though all my offerings and passing on them. And then one day, someone would pick one up, hold it triumphantly in front of their faces with two extended arms and shout: “I love this!” Behind the metal tables at the Pike Place Market, I would smile warmly at the…
By F. Lennox Campello Artmosphere I’m one of those dwindling number of people who had a significant existence before Al Gore invented the Internet; was right there at the inception of it; bought Amazon at $5 a share (technically my wife did – I bought Commodore); and have developed right along the spectacular “spread” of cyberspace as a way to reach places where the written word had never reached before. And in spite of all that, I am always surprised by things and facts that people pick up on, discover, and reflect back to me when appropriate. Last month I wrote about “Queer Glass” and in that piece had one of the DMV’s best-known artists, and perhaps the leading and earliest artist associated with this “new” term (new to me at least), Tim Tate, guest-write a piece which he had earlier authored for the Washington Glass School. After that piece, I received a few emails, including one from a museum curator, pointing me to other artists who are also doing what is now being called “Queer Glass.” I also got an interesting email from a local writer, who often writes about art for a well-known online publication. He pointed me to an interesting event which had developed a while back in Wikipedia. Apparently, right in the middle of Pride month, some editors at that Internet site decided that the term was not a “real” art term and deleted the article from the online site. I do not know Wikipedia that well, and or how “articles” or facts are vetted, and thus I do not have an informed opinion why “Queer Glass” was deleted as an art term, but it doesn’t leave a good optic… especially during Pride month. Enough said about that. But it got me to think about how…
Gallery Beat By F. Lennox Campello Back to the Future: Queer Glass For the last few years I’ve been hearing this “new” (at least new to me) art term “Queer Glass” all over the glass artmosphere of our art planet – I am told and have learned that the term is used to describe fine art glass about and by LGBTQ artists and issues. The curious part is that the term and what it means, even if it means what it tries to mean, has been the puzzling source of debate outside of the art arena, even to the point where Wikipedia recently deleted it from its articles because its editors apparently do not think that it really “exists” out there in the lingo of the artworld. And thus, I’d like to share this below essay on the early days of “Queer Glass” from our own Washington Glass School source, by the DMV’s own Tim Tate, perhaps the earliest and best-known creator of “Queer Glass.” Queer Glass : A Personal History Tim Tate: Queer Glass I’ve heard the term “Queer Glass” being used lately, which completely excites me! Meegan Coll’s “Transparency.” LGBTQ exhibit at the Liberty Museum last year, Jan Smith’s Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, Reflecting Perspectives: Artists Confront Social Issues of Diversity and Inclusion and Susie Silbert’s (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass) upcoming seminar discussion in October ( thank you Meegan and Susie!). This makes me want to cheer from the roof tops. Thank you to Meegan for curating that first show, and thank you to Susie for being the first institution to use the term Queer Glass. One of the reasons I’m happy about this is that it gave me a reason to compile a history of my own Queer Glass, an excessive I had never undertaken….
By F. Lennox Campello Santiago Is My Pick In 2005, the Bethesda Painting Awards were established by local DMV business owner and art collector Carol Trawick. Ms. Trawick has served as a community activist for more than 25 years in downtown Bethesda and established The Jim and Carol Trawick Foundation in 2007. She is the former Chair of the Maryland State Arts Council, Strathmore, Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, Bethesda Urban Partnership, Inc. and founder of The Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards. She also puts her money where her mouth is and funds not only this regional painting award, but also the equally wonderful Trawick Prize. Eight painters have been selected as finalists for the Bethesda Painting Awards. Nearly 300 artists from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. submitted work to the 15th annual competition created to exclusively honor regional painters. The work of the eight finalists will be on display at Gallery B in Bethesda (the former Fraser Gallery) from June 5-29, 2019. The Best in Show winner will be awarded $10,000, second place will be honored with $2,000 and third place will be awarded $1,000. The artists selected as finalists are: Mary Anne Arntzen, Baltimore, MD Taha Heydari, Baltimore, MD Lillian Bayley Hoover, Baltimore, MD Gina Gwen Palacios, Baltimore, MD Erin Raedeke, Montgomery Village, MD W.C. Richardson, University Park, MD Nicole Santiago, Williamsburg, VA McKinley Wallace III, Baltimore, MD A public opening will be held on Friday, June 14th from 6-8pm. Gallery B is located at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite E in downtown Bethesda. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 12-6pm. The competition’s jurors are Kyle Hackett, Professor of Studio Art, American University, and the 2014 Bethesda Painting Awards Winner; Sue Johnson, Professor of Art, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Susan Zurbrigg, Painting and Drawing Area…
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