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Annie Leibovitz’s Pilgrimage at the Smithsonian American Art Museu

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 22, 2012

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's studio

GessoHead recently made her first Official Press appearance at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has, fittingly, been my favorite outpost of the Official Arts Industrial Complex for a few years. I find the exhibits to be generally more lively, a bit more risk-taking and dare-we-say-it light-hearted, than the fare on offer at most of the mall institutions. Perhaps being a few blocks north of the mall has created a little rift in the bureaucracy’s gravitational pull.

Having said that, while an Annie Leibovitz show can hardly be considered risk-taking, Pilgrimage is a significant departure for her and a good reason to visit American Art if one is needed. For one thing, this exhibit of the work of one of the world’s most heralded portrait photographers includes no images of people, or at least, no literal images of living people. It is also the first time since Leibovitz hit the big time for her Rolling Stone rock royalty portraits that she has shown work not done on commission – these subjects and images reflect entirely her own choices and affinities.

Soon after the death of her life partner, Susan Sontag, Leibovitz embarked on a trip with the their children to historic sites, the kind that have been photographed to death by traveling families, like Niagara Falls and Graceland. She says that watching her children “stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls” began to teach her to “see again”. The experience launched her on the project that became Pilgrimages. The places she visited over the next two years, mostly in the US, but also several in England, paint a broad brush of human accomplishment. They include the homes of Walden, Emerson and the Alcotts, Elvis Presley, Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keefe, Virginia Woolf and the workplaces of Pete Seeger, Sigmund Freud and Ansel Adams. Abraham Lincoln, Annie Oakley and Marian Anderson are included as well as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Perhaps my personal favorites are the television set that Elvis Presley shot and the studio cum sitting room of the painters Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) and Duncan Grant. In both cases, the life force of the human subjects is still palpable.

Curator Andy Grundberg

The sheer scope of the subject matter raised some eyebrows among those at the preview; even the Guest Curator, Andy Grundberg, appeared a teench defensive about heading off possible suggestions that the exhibit might lack coherence. I initially felt a bit puzzled myself; it is not immediately apparent what the battlefield at Gettysburg may have to do with Sigmund Freud’s couch. And while some of the connections are still elusive, the unifying idea is clear. The subjects of the photos are the spirits of the people (all gone except for Seeger) contained in the places they lived and worked and the things they made and used. This is the stuff that the artists, creators and ground-breaking thinkers leave behind in the world when they go. What more fitting subject could there be for Leibovitz as she experiences the loss of Sontag?

image copyright Annie Leibovitz. From "Pilgrimage" (Random House, 2011).

Keep your Eyes Peeled, or Do You Want to Be a Stupid Old Fart?

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Ira Tatelman

Tom Drymon and Peter Harper, artists themselves, have carved out a small space up a rickety staircase on 14^th Street called Harmon ArtLab (HAL) that is dedicated to showing site-specific installations as well as wall-hung work. Their goal is to encourage artistic risk-taking “unencumbered by …the marketplace”. They provide the space and freedom for artists to try something completely new as well as an on-line forum (www.harmonartlab.com) where the artists discuss their intentions and dialogue is encouraged. The nature of a risk, of course, is that it will sometimes fail. Here’s hoping that when a work of art fails, it fails big, because the beauty of this project is the freedom to go for it.

This month, the site-specific installation is “Draft”, by Ira Tatelman. An architect, Tatelman has created an eerily evocative space, a tiny, dark bedroom that could exist in a basement, an abandoned building or perhaps under a bridge. The bed is tied in chains but recent habitation is indicated by the dirty dishes tucked discreetly underneath and the few totemic objects placed thoughtfully around. Tatelman says he has attempted to create a “space in transition”; he has succeeded in using the small, narrow space to evoke the chilling impermanence of comfort.

In the other room, photographer Alexandra Silverthorne has hung MidNights, a series of small-format photographs taken during late-night trips around her neighborhood. The shutter was left open for varying periods of time and the results were not apparent until she got home to look at them. The images are dark, with objects and places partially limned by light and often unfocussed as they register the passage of time. The one consistent subject of the pictures is the movement of the photographer through a fairly menacing environment.

Sondra Arkin and Alecandra Silverthorne

These two exhibits, uncoordinated by the artists, who had virtually no interaction with each other prior to installation, make a surprisingly coherent statement. To my eye, they are both dealing with the same physical and mental space of transition and uncertainty, Tatelman on the inside and Silverthorne on the outside.

So, the show at HAL now issatisfying even judged by conventional standards, but why should a civilian want to patronize HAL, or any other “risk-taking” art venture when there are so many venues in town that can be counted on to provide beautiful, enriching art? Let me make the case for pushing oneself to see new and challenging art.

I was not a big Jackson Pollock fan. I had seen a few of his paintings scattered around museums and a lot of reproductions in books; they didn’t move me. Then came the 1998 Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The huge show began with his very early representational paintings and then the muddy beginnings of abstraction. Then the drips and pours started tentatively to appear and finally, we reached a large room, open at both ends – the hallway to the work that changed the art world. High on each of the two walls hung a mural-sized Pollock drip painting. As I stood between them, the air began to vibrate and my body with it. The hair on my neck stood on end.

It was a pure, utterly unexpected, physical reaction, the kind that demonstrates in the most palpable way that art is always a collaboration between viewer and producer(s). As Marcel Duchamp said: “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone” - and he was an artist who demanded the viewer’s response. In some cases, the result for the viewer is a visceral experience, as it was for me with the Pollocks. Rothko knocks me out in the same way. Sit in the Rothko room at the Phillips for a while and you will start to hear the universal om.

In other cases, the response is more analytical; the work will provoke thought, hopefully in addition to rather than instead of the visceral reaction. Picasso’s Guernica perfectly combines the two, for one example.

But, you may protest, those are works by famous artists that hang on a wall and are beautiful. Everything new out there today moves and screams or it’s mostly ugly or it makes no sense. Allow me to make the case for the value of looking for the gold amidst the dreck.

First, a personal example: About 10 years ago, I was in Cambridge, MA, and wandered into a large show of international conceptual art at MIT. I tend to regard most conceptual art as too damn much work for too little reward, but I had a couple of hours to kill so I went in. The happy result is this example of what there is to be gained by allowing yourself to experience new work. One large wall was covered edge to edge by snapshots, each composed of two people, a young Korean woman and an American man in military uniform, posed formally in front of one of a few painted scenes of natural beauty. The inventory of a retired Korean commercial photographer, those snapshots of couples brought together temporarily by the political choices of their countries’ leaders, evoked wave after conflicting wave of emotion: anger at the idiocy of war; tenderness for the obvious feelings of these people for each other; sadness in the knowledge that almost all of these relationships lasted only as long as the tour of duty and again, anger at how insignificant each of us really is and how little we actually control our lives, notwithstanding all of the effort we make to convince ourselves otherwise. I have thought of this piece many times since then and it has genuinely enriched my life.

Now the scientific case: experiencing new things makes you smarter and extends your life span. There is a substantial body of research establishing that providing stimulation for your brain will help to keep it from turning to mush as you age. This just stands to reason – use it or lose it. Newer research further indicates that new experiences actually extend effective time. David Eagleman, a prominent young neuroscientist, has pioneered the idea of “brain time”, demonstrating experimentally that time stretches out when you exercise your brain and shrinks up when everything is proceeding just as expected. Josh Foer, who wrote Walking with Einstein, sums it up like this: “Monotony collapses time, novelty unfolds it.”

Finally, the social case: People who are open to new experiences are more interesting. They have something amusing to add to the conversation, they are more engaged in the world around them. I’m pretty sure they’re more sexy and get invited to better parties.

In conclusion, if you don’t want to grow up to be a stupid, boring old person, come to see art that is new and different to you. That is the manifesto of Harmon Art Lab and providing those opportunities are its mission.

This is All About Me!

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

May 1, 2011

co-conspirators Finsen and Arkin

I think you will agree that GessoHead does not often try your patience by writing about her own doings. But this time she has made an exception because some of you just must have been curious about why she has gone silent for a month and honestly, why have a blog if one can’t toot one’s own trombone every once in a rare while? So, Gessohead will now switch from this annoying third person mode and fill you in on Ellyn Weiss's current project.

a bit of flotsam or maybe jetsam

I have been working for about 8 months on a collaborative project with Sondra Arkin and Susan Finsen for the Brentwood Arts Exchange @ Gateway Arts Center called Big Ideas. The Gateway Arts Center, which includes two galleries, over a dozen artists’ studios and teaching facilities, is the jewel of the Gateway Arts District, encompassing Mt. Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood and Hyattsville, MD, the corridor along Rhode Island Avenue just north of the DC line. (There is a separate town about every 400 yards up here. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s like Europe where every country felt that it had to have a seaport. Maybe it’s some unique artifact of PG County historical geopolitics. Maybe someone could tell me?)

more shards

its in there - let it out!

About 18 months ago, while the space was still under construction, we saw the large gallery with its expanse of high-ceilinged interior volume and walls quite a bit longer than the typical commercial gallery. I was feeling unpleasantly unmoored by the closing a few months earlier of Sondra’s and my long-time gallery, Nevin Kelly and was looking for ways to assert some control over my career and take some risks. As it happens, both Sondra and Susan were, for their own reasons, also in the market for challenge. Our proposal for Big Ideas envisioned a large collaborative central installation from the floor to the ceiling with an interactive element. It would be surrounded by wall-hung work by each of us that was both a reflection and a source of generation for the imagery of the installation, called Community Spirit. Since none of us had made significant three-dimensional work previously, this exhibit would require us to expand our visual and conceptual vocabularies in scale and to move them off of the wall.

that's one high ceiling

We began meeting weekly to try to approach some common vision of the installation. There was lots of coffee and talk, some conceptual drawings, the sharing of references to the work of some favorite artists, but still the lingering doubt that we were each actually “seeing” the same thing in our mind’s eyes, or if we were seeing anything concrete enough to execute at all. After some 6 weeks or so of this, we reached a fateful decision; we would stop trying to plan it all in advance and begin to play together with various materials, hoping that a more concrete shared vision would emerge in this way.

We learned that we share an affinity for materials with a sort of arcane industrial look that seem well used and aged. We were inspired by Community Forklift in Hyattsville, where renovators donate salvaged building materials from nails to sinks and they are sold at bargain prices to be recycled. Community Forklift not only provided us with our initial art materials, it embodies the spirit of renewal, re-use and rebirth of the Gateway District that we try to reflect in Community Spirit.

Fast forward through months of work together and in our separate studios, making elements of the piece. It became clear early on that the final shape and construction of the installation could not be determined until we actually got into the space, adding another level of contingency that alternately caused fear and exhilaration. On April 14, a couple of vanloads of stuff were delivered to the gallery in black plastic bags. At that point, a whole lot of uncertainty remained about the final product.

Over the course of the next 10 days, the three of us (with help from Ron Childers, Steven Strasser and Phil Davis) turned the stuff into art, if I do say so myself. We had one catastrophic failure, started again with a stronger structural element, moved perhaps surprisingly smoothly to consensus decisions and bridged our individual aesthetics. To me, the critical imperative of collaboration proved to be the ability of each collaborator to let go of the outcome, which to a surprising degree emerged from the process of manipulating the materials themselves.

16 feet of art

My contribution to the wall-hung work is a 16-foot-long mural which I made in the gallery from April 14 - May 2. My favorite part was talking to the people who came in while I was making it. It is the biggest piece I have ever made, out-distancing Cognitve Dissonance (in the Time Warner Building in NYC) and Twelve Linear Feet (in the District of Columbia City Hall, the Wilson Building) by 4 linear feet. Sondra has made some gorgeous new large-scale encaustics in a restrained palette that resonate amazingly well with the installation. Susan's exciting acrylic dyptics and tryptic bring energy and a dash of color to the mix.

So, it’s all done and the doors are open at the Gateway Arts Center, 3901 Rhode Island Ave, Brentwood, MD. The opening reception is Saturday, May 7, from 5 – 8. We will also be in the gallery on Saturday May 14, which is Open Studios day in Mt. Rainier and will be giving artists’ talks at 2 and 4 pm. Finally, there will be a panel discussion on Wednesday, June 1, 7 – 9 pm, featuring Jack Rasmussen, Director of the AU Art Museum at the Katzen Center; Claudia Rousseau, Professor of Art History at Montgomery Collage and art critic for the Gazette; and Welmoed Llanstra, curator of Public Art for Arlington County. The topic is “Walking Off the Cliff: The value of artistic risk-taking.” GessoHead will be moderating and no doubt doing some talking of her own. So be there!!

I can't forget to give a big whooping thanks to Alec Simpson and Phil Davis at the Gateway Arts Center/Brentwood Arts Exchange who gave us the chance to try out our ideas, were exceedingly generous with their time and help and never let us see it if they were worried about the outcome.

Grand and Sirvet @ Artery Plaza

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

April 28, 2011

Rousseau and Sirvet

Freya Grand and Michael Sirvet have been combined by curator Claudia Rousseau in a visually stunning show at the Artery Plaza in downtown Bethesda. The space, formerly the home of Osuna Gallery, has been made available by the building’s owners for temporary exhibition space (and their hospitality apparently extends to a lovely opening reception). The high-ceilinged environment is perfect for Sirvet’s increasingly large and ambitious sculptures. An architect by training, he shows the architect’s affinity for repetitive forms and the engineer’s proclivity for perfection and symmetry. I have always been a fan of Michael’s metal constructions, the pieces that look to me to have the shapes of a bird’s closed feathers or a monster seedpod, punctured by a bazillion perfectly-shaped, evenly-spaced holes. The work shown here, many hung from the ceiling, takes them to another level.

Freya Grand's piece

Freya Grand makes large-scale landscape paintings that are at their best when the scene is a particularly dramatic one. There are arresting works of great mountains and threatening skies that place her in the long tradition of romantic landscape painting. She paints with an economy of style yet the ability to pull off a great flourish of gesture.

The wonderful Elyse Harrison and Freya Grand

The curator here, Claudia Rousseau, is an active presence on the DC arts scene, a professor at Montgomery College and a frequent art reviewer for the Gazette newspapers. The combination of Grand and Sirvet would not necessarily be the most obvious choice; it is successful because both artists are infatuated with extravagant, dramatic natural forms and the work of both shows a strength in execution that can hold its own.

The show is up until May 13 - plenty of time to get on the Metro and check it out.

Ruth Trevarrow's Bare Bones

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 6, 2011

Bare Bones

Ruth Trevarrow spends her days working at the Smithsonian as the registrar of the institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service. There, she helps to ensure that the vast array of priceless stuff owned by the Smithsonian is shared with the people who own it – Americans all over this country. Trevarrow is also an artist who has shown regularly throughout our region for nearly 20 years. The qualities that make her successful at her primary paying gig, including her attention to detail, her sharpness of observation and her love of the diversity of artifacts in the Smithsonian’s possession, are on view at the current exhibition of her artwork at the Athenaeum in Alexandria.

Bare Bones represents the culmination of Trevarrow’s year of study of marine mammal bones in the Smithsonian’s Osteo Prep Lab. Her work has long dealt with the poignancy of the stark physical remains of animals threatened by human activity. Admitted to the Smithsonian’s bone closet, she was given the resources and time to study animal bones and absorb their delicate strength from the inside out.

Tim Tate and Pat Goslee looking good

Trevarrow tells the animals’ story in a variety of media, in objects ranging from wooden cutouts of full dog and deer skeletons in the postures of living creatures, painted the deepest matte black to fine, delicate line drawings of life-sized fish vertebrae, deer and coyote skulls. The uncoiling snake cut from stencil board is a marvel of workmanship. The work is stark and unprettified; the animal traces command respect and manifest beauty on their own uncompromised terms. Each piece in this show is cleanly and beautifully presented, as might be expected from the work of a guardian of priceless objects.

The Athenaeum is an increasingly adventurous art venue; the spare elegance of the 200 year-old structure in old-town Alexandria is a welcoming setting for contemporary abstraction and the President and primary curator, Twig Murray, has a good eye. The opening reception was jammed despite a soaking rain that surely discouraged the only moderately motivated. Those that made it through the weather were clearly ready to fall in love – the red dots were thick on the walls. I am not immune to the cynicism that proximity to the commercial art world frequently induces, but this show and the reaction to it struck me as something quite pure; the artist communicating and the viewers experiencing something beautiful and memorable.

Critics Challenge, Chapter 2: Aletha Kuschan and Bonnard's Nu Dans Le Ba

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

February 25, 2011

Here is the second installment in the Critics' Challenge, wherein Aletha Kuschan encounters Bonnard in the deepest possible way:

Revisiting Bonnard in Thought

Do you know this one? Bonnard’s Nu Dans Le Bain au Petit Chien at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh? I made this fast kids’ crayon version of it when my daughter was a crawler. And I was looking at it again as reproduced in the book Bonnard: The Work of Art Suspending Time.” And I was busy remembering when I saw it in real life during its inclusion in a Bonnard exhibit at the Phillips Collection in 2002. And had you been rich and ready, you could have purchased a version of it here. A fun thought. I’d put it where I could always see it.

The colors of the painting when you see it in real life are surprisingly light. It seems like almost every reproduction gets it too dark, as you can see for instance here.

I did a very small color study in a notebook while looking at the actual painting. As always these kinds of drawings are balancing acts of holding the notebook while also holding the crayon box while also jostling with other museum visitors, all as eager as I to see the famous painting.

The color tonality is difficult to photograph, and yet the painting is so lovely, airy, magical. Is worth driving all the way to Pittsburgh to see it. (No matter where you live…)

Prior to Bonnard’s visit to the Phillips, the painting had been a special favorite of mine. Seeing the actual painting, however, was transformative. And it prompted me then to ask a question that I think too few artists ask: what will the future of painting be like?

Nu dans le bain is a jumble of spaces and color. It jolted me into remembering that the primary colors when combined form white light, and I was never prepared for the airy atmospherics of this picture with its nubby, chalky surfaces. The dancing tiles of the painting float and move in response to both color laws and by virtue also of weird optical moiré effects. Marthe’s body (Bonnard’s wife) in the midst of all this has been pulled and stretched as though caught in the gravity of a new physics. It’s in experiencing these dazzling sense perceptions that one recognizes how much more is going on here than just naive drawing.

The big squares and Marthe’s out of perspective body and the random-seeming little floor tiles can appear almost childlike in simplicity, but standing before the painting one experiences the full force of their space-warp. Bonnard’s Bain anticipates in its own quirky way Captain Janeway’s perennial troubles aboard the Starship Enterprise as well as the LSD montage at the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the enigmatic black holes of Stephen Hawkings Brief History of Time. Bonnard’s innocent eye and vivid French sensibility for color finds it all in the neat confines of a charming little white bathroom.

Some of Bonnard’s naive drawing could have come straight out of the workshop of the Rohan Master. It not true that Bonnard is very new. He is also very old. And yet, for me, he prompts the question more than any other of the modern artists: what will the future of painting be like?

My impulse in searching for the answer to my question was to make these drawings. Because that’s the way that artists understand each other. With image.

Lenny Campello challenges the critics

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

February 23, 2011

About the turn of the year, I put up a facebook post noting that I was underwhelmed by most of the art critics' selections of "best of" art and I asked any and all to tell me about a piece of art of any period that you love/hate/are fascinated, repulsed or infuenced by - something that touches you deeply in some way. What is it that you respond to and what has it meant to you? I will post them and link them to www.BourgeonOnline.com. Here's the first, by Lenny Campello, DC's own artist, art dealer, fabulous blogger and maven of art:

Critics Challenge I: Lenny Campello

My favorite?

Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley at the National Gallery of Art. It seeks to depict an event that took place in Havana, Cuba, in 1749.

The naked guy in the water is fourteen-year-old Brook Watson, who was attacked by a shark while swimming alone in Havana harbor. Lucky for Watson, some of his mates were already at sea waiting to escort their captain ashore, and were able to fight the shark and rescue Watson, although the shark bit one of his legs off. On his return to England, he got his fifteen minutes of fame and Copley painted this work.

If you study the painting carefully, you will realize that Copley probably had never seen a shark in his life, and his depiction of the great white in Havana harbour yields one of the most ungainly and ugliest non-sharks fish things ever painted.

I love to sit in front of this painting and watch people as they walk by and get mesmerized by the brutal event taking place and kids making fun of the shark.

Material Girls in Baltimore

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

February 20, 2011

from left:Stout,Scott,Jarvis,Hassenge,Dyson,Booker

“Material Girls” is a truly exceptional show of the work of eight female artists who tease profound emotional resonance from the likes of newspaper, hair combs, rubber tires and plastic bags. The exhibition opened Thursday night at the Reginald Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture in Baltimore; this is a show that any museum in the country would be proud to mount. Let me say this firmly, folks: get yourselves to Baltimore before October 16 to see it because it is not often that an exhibit of contemporary art so remarkable can be seen within driving distance.

Dyson, untitled

The artists include three who are very well known in our area: Renee Stout, the multi-dimensional painter/sculptor/installation artist and speaker to the spirits; Martha Jackson Jarvis, who makes large biomorphic sculptural work from stones, wood and ceramics (and is currently also part of a three-person show at the Gateway Arts Center in Brentwood, MD); and Joyce Scott of Baltimore, who has long made achingly haunting figurative sculptures from beads and fiber and has expanded into glass and ceramic. Also included is one certified international art star, Chakaia Booker, who has here contributed stunning monumental work made from cut and shredded discarded rubber tires. Booker, who is also known for her distinctive clothing, glided through the galleries like a spectre in a headdress of notable proportions.

Martha Jackson Jarvis

Any exhibition of representative contemporary art mounted these days would certainly include work in “non-traditional” materials, Everything from fire to dung is fair game and the visual effects achieved through these materials are sometimes dazzling. What makes this show so strong is that the materials are almost without exception used in the service of the artist’s meaning and intent. You won’t find a gimmick among them. These women work in the traditions of their craftswomen make-do ancestors, who used the unwanted and discarded bits and pieces, and they use the materials to achieve levels of power that would make their ancestors proud.

Sonya Clark's human hair wreath

One could write about any number of individual pieces, so this selection is by necessity too short and too arbitrary, I confess. But, nonetheless…As usual, Renee Stout’s work blows me away. Here she has assembled “The Thinking Room”, filled with archaic objects of sacred power and totems of memory. It could well be the room where Stout’s alter-ego, herbalist and spiritual adviser Fatimah Mayfield, dispenses wisdom and cures. Martha Jackson Jarvis’s giant seed pods attached to twisting roots, seem to come from another universe; they call on us to treat nature with reverence.

Joyce Scott

Chakaia Booker has made a mural-sized construction of twisted and entwined tire bits that truly leaves me astonished. I stand in awe of the strength and planning required to execute this work. Its absolute matte blackness is relieved and given visual density by the changes in texture and the word that best describes its effect is “power”. At the other end of the materials spectrum is Maren Hassenger’s sculpture, assembled from anklet-sized twists of the New York Times. For me, they evoke heads of exuberant dreadlocked hair. Exuberance is also the word that comes to mind to describe Maya Freelon Asante's explosion of colored tissue paper. Sonya Clark weaves combs into a shimmering simalacrum of kente cloth that is a marvel.

Finally, I can’t end without mentioning Joyce Scott’s work. Of the eight artists, her work is probably the most traditional, in the sense that the line can be traced clearly from her figurative sculptures back to the craft work of the generations of women who preceded her, making beautiful objects from materials that had been discarded and forgotten. The clarity of her vision and the elegance of her execution combine to create objects that vibrate with spirit.

Joyce Scott

The Reginald Lewis museum is easy to find – it’s just a few blocks down Pratt Street from the bustle of the inner harbor and there is a public parking lot across the street. The museum itself is a treat and they’ve made this easy for you, so don’t miss it.

DCAC Shows Richard Siegman

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 30, 2011

Richard Siegman, Joanne Kent and the work

Richard Siegman has been making art in DC for 30 years and for much of that time, he has also been operating PASS, the Painting and Sculpture Studio, a little bijou of an art space entered from the alley between 16th and 17th Sts. NW near Dupont Circle. PASS is a local treasure, where Siegman gives the artists he admires an opportunity to exhibit outside of the commercial vortex. Now two of them have returned the favor. Joanne Kent and Stuart Grenwell have curated a show of Siegman’s recent paintings at DCAC, another local treasure.

Stuart Grenwell and the work

Since I have known his work, Siegman has been an expressionistic abstractionist. Whew, that is a mouthful. He paints in primary colors with broad energetic strokes, covering the whole canvas in. At their best, these pieces can vibrate. In an art world that prizes the next new thing, the commitment that Siegman displays to abstraction is a testament to the value of following a direction in depth and with dedication over time.

Joanne K

The work at DCAC represents an evolution in Siegman’s style. Here, he has created slick glossy surfaces in gorgeous aqua, red and orange that seem to push and compress the gestural sections. The effect is of containing energy and I found it quite effective. As always, Siegman’s work is about the physical object of the painting, rejecting representation. However, there is a richness to these pieces created by the tension of the surface that is new and feels like the artist has approached his vision with fresh eyes.

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