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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.

John Adams Finding Zero at the Athenaeum

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 26, 2011

John Adams on opening day

Twig Murray, Director of the Athenauem

John Adams’ show Finding Zero is up through the end of February at the Athenaeum in Alexandria and it’s an unusually synergistic fit between artwork and venue. The Athenaeum, located just a block from the main drag of historic Old Town, is over 150 years old, began life as a bank and has been through a whole lot of incarnations since, including a church and the headquarters of the U.S. Quartermaster during the time that Alexandria was occupied by Union forces in the Civil War. For almost the past 50 years , it has been the property of the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association.

The light-filled, high-ceilinged austerity of the Athenaeum’s interior reminds me of a New England Congregational Church. John Adam’s serene and otherworldly paintings are perfectly at home on these walls. Using a limited palette of mostly black and grays, Adams uses a grid to anchor his repeated marks, providing a kind of armature for the build-up of the images. To me, they recall the sky as seen by a child lying on the grass, a lovely memory.

In Unison at the Kreeger

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 25, 2011

Helen Frederick on opening night

The Millennium Arts Salon is a local group of predominantly African American art collectors. While focused primarily on the city’s black artists, they are also one of the few groups that strive to bridge the divide that separates our little art community into racial and ethnic segments. For that, for encouraging broader exposure of artists to those who love and may purchase their work, and for organizing projects such as In Unison currently at the Kreeger Museum, they are to be thanked.

Claudia Gibson-Hunter in the front looking gawgeous

In Unison is an exhibition that grew out of a months-long project undertaken by the Millennium Arts Salon to directly foster the creation of new artwork. Twenty artists were invited by Sam Gilliam, one of DC’s few truly internationally-known artists, to make new monoprints for the project. The participants include a broad range of local artists, some well-known for printmaking, such as Michael Platt and Carol Bean, Renee Stout, Claudia Aziza Gibson-Hunter, Susan Goldman and Helen Frederick, and others better known for painting or other media, such as Sondra Arkin, Martha Jackson-Jarvis and Tom Green.

Carol Bean with hers and Michael Platt's print on the left

Frederick, Director of Printmaking at George Mason University in Fairfax, made the world-class printmaking studio at Mason available to the artists, along with the invaluable assistance of herself and her students. Five portfolios, each of 20 unique prints, were created. For the Kreeger show, a committee composed of Gilliam, Judy Greenberg, Director of the Museum, gallery owner Marsha Mateyka and art critic and historian Claudia Rousseau, chose one print from each of the artists.

Gibson-Hunter's print

There are some pretty terrific prints here and a wide variety of techniques, feeling and subject matter. For the print lover and maker, the show offers endless invitations for those nose-to-the-glass inspections where we try to figure out how the effects were achieved. Some of the pieces that stand out for me are Claudia Gibson-Hunter’s color-saturated heat-infused tower, Renee Stout’s “Lover’s Hearts”, Sondra Arkin’s ethereal circles and Yuriko Yamaguchi’s delicate web.

Stout's print

Certain constraints imposed from the start, such as that each print would be the same size, impose a certain feeling of uniformity that, to my mind, can suppress a bit of the exuberance and spontaneity that the monoprint medium can have. Contrary to some comment, the ground rules for this project did not include use of Mason’s digital lab; monoprint (each one a unique, one -of-a-kind piece of art) and press were the essence of the project and the medium does allow for an astonishing array of effects.

Ravenstahl and Pinder at Salon Contra

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 20, 2011

Ravenstahl and Pinder

After allowing its founding spirit, Philippa Hughes, a brief and much-earned hiatus for recharging, Salon Contra returned for 2011 with an exceptional evening that featured video/performance/conceptual artists Matt Ravenstahl and Jefferson Pinder. The two go back together a while; they met in the University of Maryland’s MFA program and have been collaborating in art and friendship since then. Pinder, a black man who describes himself as an identity artist, and Ravenstahl, a burly white guy who would look completely at home at a Redskins tailgate party, found that they shared an honesty and openness that allows them to go deep inside each other’s heads. Both do their own individual work and each has an academic day job besides, Pinder’s at the University of Maryland and Ravenstahl’s at a Northern Virginia school, but the most engaging discussion of this genuinely thought-provoking evening was of their collaborative work.

Ms. Hughes Presents!

Ravenstahl and Pinder travel together to sites freighted with particular significance in the racial history of this country. They’ve been to civil war battlefields, to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia (where John Brown is apparently still widely viewed as a terrorist) and to a restaurant in Fredericksburg, where they were unprepared for the discovery of a tunnel under a town restaurant that was used to bring newly-arrived slaves from their ships to the sale grounds, in order to spare tender white eyes the sight of the bound human beings.

Alberto Gaitan sat in front of me

The two then spend a great deal of time together processing what they have experienced, creating performances in front of a video camera, which are ultimately edited into the final piece. Their most well-known video is “Passive Resistance,” shown in 2008 at the Greater Reston Art center (GRACE) and in other venues. It shows Ravenstahl slapping Pinder and over and over again. Neither man speaks as the hits come more quickly and more violently. In the last few minutes, the screen splits and both men look at the camera as the slapping continues, confronting the viewers with their own inability and perhaps disinclination to do anything to stop it. The piece has visceral impact; we feel the utter subordination of the black man but also his stubborn insistence on survival with some measure of dignity and there is also the white man’s assumption of unchallengeable superiority and impunity.

Ms. Kristina Bilonick and friend

For Ravenstahl, the over-riding question and the issue that compels him to do this work is a desire to come to grips with the guilt that white people bear for the treatment of blacks, to confront it and cause the viewer to confront it. This is not a subject that not many white people find comfortable, and Ravenstahl has encountered outright hostility. Pinder didn’t discuss his own motivation but has said before that his intention is “to find black identity through the most dynamic circumstances.”
For me, conceptual work has to prove itself; I have confessed before that I come to it as a natural skeptic. The work of this pair, the depth of their inquiry, their honesty and the insights which they offered to us – I am very grateful for it and I congratulate them.

Zip Through the Galleries: Fridge, Studio and Hillyer

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

GessoHead has just returned from an extended visit to the Isle of Sloth and is attempting to fling herself back into the current of DMV art. So far, efforts have been half-assed; I've poked a toe in and here comes the rest! There are a few shows that I want to write about ASAP before they disappear.

Laura Elkins and Mr. Fridge

First, there’s Laura Elkins’s solo at The Fridge, that funky little gallery in the alley on Barracks Row. Laura is continuing to mine the rich vein of her decade-long pre-occupation with painting self-portraits in the guise of our county’s first ladies. This time she’s gone big and even more scary – and I mean that in the best possible way.

The show is called “White House Negligee” and features the first ladies in their dressing rooms in various stages of deshabillee, sporting alarmingly aggressive expressions and sometimes brandishing weapons. I find the Hilary Clintons most effective, probably because the pictures so vividly capture what I believe to be the woman’s true feelings.

Favianna Rodrigeuz

Then there’s the group show at Studio Gallery called “The Magic of the Melting Pot: Immigration in America.” Let me start with a little nit-pick: as is often the case, I am a bit put off by the distance between the title of the show and what I see on the walls. What I see are some very interesting, sometimes superior pieces of art by artists who have come, or whose parents have come, to this country from various places around the globe. I don’t see all that much that speaks to me of the “immigrant experience.” I wish curators didn’t feel they had to assemble topical consistency, or suggest it. Is that too crabby?

Graham Boyle

OK, on to the art - and there is a lot of that to like. I love Favianna Rodriguez’s high-key prints. Rodriguez, from Oakland, California, uses the bold colors and hortatory text of 20th century political posters. The work is attention-grabbing and intelligent. Graham Boyle, whose studio is Mt. Rainier is across the driveway from mine, has contributed some evocative hand-altered photographs that create a feeling of time passing and memory dimming. Susan Cho’s parents emigrated from North Korea to Northern Virginia before her birth and her images on layers of sheer cloth speak of ancestors left behind.

Joan Belmar

Finally, Joan Belmar, who was born in Chile and landed in DC 12 years ago after living in Spain, has long dealt in the emotional currency of memory. His meticulous, dimensional pieces create both the physical reality and the emotional content of distance, separation and nostalgia. As always, I find Joan’s work compelling.

I finished First Friday in Dupont Circe with a visit to Hillyer Art Space, the gallery run by International Arts and Artists that fronts on the alley space it shares with such tony company as the Cosmos Club and the Phillips Gallery. The place was completely jammed with well-dressed young bodies. Gotta confess, it’s a mystery to me, but Hillyer openings have somehow acquired a reputation with the cool kids. I’m not complaining. I wish I could bottle it. Anyway, truth be told, the work was pretty much obscured by the bodies and GessoHead suffered waves of clautrophobia, but she gave it her best..

A glimpse of Kyan Bishop's salt mountains

    The largest exhibition space has been given to Kyan Bishop, a young local sculptor whose work is characterized by the accumulation of multiple pieces or fragments of material. The idea is one that is very much “in the air” now, but Kyan manages to achieve a kind of counter-intuitive delicacy in her constructions that I find beguiling. This time she has reduced the idea to its essence; we have large snow-white piles of salt chunks filling the main exhibition space. (The rumor is that she wanted to make them even bigger but that the Hillyer folks were concerned about possible collapse.) Visitors on opening night were given a 7-ounce packet of the salt in a plastic bag printed with the information that this is the approximate salt content in the average human body. The packets encouraged reflection about the meaning of “elemental” and the interdependence between the human body and the most basic aspects of the earth around us.
    Leah Appel’s photography show, “Southern Exposures”, occupies the front exhibition space. Her pictures of the park-like squares that define Savannah Georgia, each dedicated to a historical figure, are lyrical and lush, toned using an old technique called “Berg printing” that gives them a golden brown patina.

Craig Kraft's neon

There are some Ellyn Weiss encaustics back there

Finally, the terrific new Members’ Gallery, stripped, painted and spiffed, makes its debut this month with a three-person show curated by local sculptor, Barbara Liotta. I was lucky enough to be chosen for the show, where Barbara has hung a small grid of my “seascape’ encaustics, along with the amazing explosions of neon artist Craig Kraft and Lauren Kotkin’s, precise and delicate paper cut-outs. The show is called “Dispersed” and, according to the curator, “the pieces in this exhibition explode, flinging their elements outward and only retrieving them in the final arrangement.” Wow. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Ellyn's Blog

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

I am Ellyn Weiss, aka Gessohead. I live and work in Washington, DC and in Truro, MA during the summer. I use this blog for my news and to comment on the art I see in and around both towns. That includes the galleries, studios and alternative spaces that sometimes get lost amidst the art-industrial complex of institutional Washington and official Provincetown.

If you'd like to be notified by email when I've added an article to the blog, click on the RSS icon above.

WPA's Catalyst

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

November 25, 2010

Richard Dana and Judy Jashinsky

Ms. Sondra and Jim and Minna Nathanson

WPA’s 35th anniversary show, “Catalyst”, is at the Katzen Art Center at American University through December 14 and you need to haul it out there and see this show if you haven’t yet been. JW Mahoney has curated a terrific exhibition of the (mostly) recent work of artists who have shown with the WPA over its history – everyone from DC institution William Christenberry to cartoon-inspired lowbrow artist Kelly Towles and many many points in-between.

Judy Southerland and her painting

I was expecting a pretty great party and a nostalgic trip down the DMV cultural memory lane, and I did get that, but I got much much more. The quality of the art is very high and the span of its intentions wide. The show is very much worth seeing even if you don’t know the players without a scorecard.

Kim Ward and her daughter

GessoHead and Michael Platt's piece

There is not much in-your-face work, although Jason Horowitz’s way bigger than human scale French kiss aborning will stop you in your tracks. But there is an abundance of well-conceived and well-executed artwork. Just a few of the pieces I was particularly drawn to: Michael Platt’s overscale pigment print, subtle, ethereal and inexpressibly sad; Sylvia Snowden’s thick, mostly black and assertive expressionist manifesto; Yuriko Yamaguchi’s coils of wax that repel and attract simultaneously; Judy Jashinsky’s The Guardian, with her late husband, Larry’s figure guarding a Native American fire in a dark but oddly artificial forest.

Yuiko Yamaguchi, Metamorphosis

Jason Horowitz, Tony and Liz

Of course, tout le monde showed up, most cleaned up extraordinarily well, the food was distinctly above the norm and it was the best social collection of DC artists in forever. My mouth was puckered for days afterward.

Helen Frederick's piece

Judy Jashinsky, The Guardian

Catalyst makes you feel good about working in this city and the people you’ve been working with. All us oldsters moaned to remember the Ritz hotel art colonization in 1983, a more louche and less legal predecessor of Artomatic which is commemorated in an installation here. The Washington Post art critic at the time called the show “sleazy and chaotic”, but in the best way. Yeah, and wouldn’t we like some more of that about now? I do find myself yearning for confrontation.

Sylvia Snowden, Sylvia

Inga Frick and Betsy Stewart

There are many people who deserve shout-outs for this show. Just a few: from the WPA, former Director Kim Ward, who got the ball rolling and current Director Lisa Gold, who brought it all the way down the field; JW Mahoney, who selected the artwork with a discerning and sensitive eye; and Jack Rasmussen, who brought Catalyst to the Katzen and was generous enough to allow it to occupy almost all of the space in his amazing galleries.

Vinnie Wohlfarth's 20th Anniversary

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

November 24, 2010

Ms. Wohlfarth herself

Lisa Farrell on the right

Lavinia Wohfarth (Vinnie to her legion of friends) is a fifth-generation Washingtonian who has operated a pioneering fine art gallery in Brookland for 20 years. Brookland is home to some venerable institutions like Catholic University and Dance Place, but Vinnie's eponymous gallery is the only commercial outpost of the visual fine arts.

Vinnie clearly deserves a party for providing a venue for artists for 20 years, not to mention for being a member of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and our local delegate to the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and, to top it off, operating a fab summer gallery in Provincetown Massachusetts. So she threw herself a 20th-anniversary shindig and invited all her artists, friends and neighbors.

good old tar

The gallery is made up of two row homes that have been connected and are spanned across the back by a deck that gives onto some nice urban greenery. There is lots of art hung throughout the two floors of the houses, ranging from a few of my own tar pieces to a Cape Cod school landscape or two, a terrific Stevens Carter piece, some Cheryl Edwards’ tiny paintings, Lisa Williams’ Farrell’s lush large charcoal drawings.

Open Studios in Mt. Ranier and Mid City

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

November 17, 2010

my studio clean - new encaustcs and monoprints

Whooey, GessoHead’s got a lot of catching up to do! Who knew a blog could make me feel so guilty and slothful? I have scheduled today to wipe out the backlog in one sweel foop. We start here.

clean studio take 2

clean studio - "time of war" series

First, our twice-yearly open studios last weekend in Mt. Ranier. We had a nice crowd all day, it was a spectacular sunny day, and I managed to get a couple of pictures of my spit-shined studio for the historical record. This appalling level of cleanliness is a once-in-a-hundred-years event, like a volcanic eruption, so it bears documentation. Then the people started coming and I forgot about the camera. So here you go.

ambience

My coverage of the MidCity Artists open studios the previous weekend is much more comprehensive. As I’ve written before, MidCity Artists is an ever-expanding cohort of artists who live and/or work in an ever-mutating area of the city that covers DuPont Circle, 14th Street, Logan Circle and Shaw. They open their studios twice a year, as well as put on shows in venues around the mid-city area. It’s a great example of smart art marketing, for which my good bud Sondra Arkin deserves a major measure of credit.

George Smith-Shomari's studio

more ambience

This time I wanted to make sure that, in addition to the old stalwarts, I popped in on a couple of artists whose studios I had not previously visited. The first was George Smith-Shomari, whose Westminster Ave. studio is right next door to my friend Chuck Baxter’s. George is a print-maker and painter. He was trained by some of the most prominent African American printmakers, including Lois Jones and James Wells and his technique is clean and impeccable. Whether in arresting black and white or rich, clear colors, the work has an Afro-centric sensibility and a wonderful sense of life. I’m delighted that I wandered in.

Chez Baxter

Photographer Colin Winterbottom

Of course, I popped next door to Chuck’s, which is chock jam full of crazy new work. One day I’m going to give in to my desires and take home the crying baby doll surrounded by stuffed gloves and puffs of tulle – as soon as I can figure out a way to get it by Mr. Weiss. I have lusted after that thing since I first saw it a couple of years ago. I did take home a lumpy lamp/vessel woven out of Christmas lights. I plugged it in for my own open studio, where it leant the appropriate festive air.

Regina Miele's studio

former Va. Governor spotted on 14th Street.

Also new to me was the studio of Regina Miele, up a scary staircase on 14th Street. Her oils on canvas and charcoal drawings use old master techniques to achieve effects of heightened reality. I was particularly drawn to the large bird’s eye-view cityscapes empty of people. They are a bit reminiscent of Hopper and, at their best, achieve that kind of mystery.

Dave Peterson and fans

Joren Lindholm and painting

After Miele, I hit the 14th Street studios of Tom Drymon, Dave Peterson, Joren Lindholm and Naomi Kim. On the sidewalk in front of their place, engaged in apparently deep conversation, I spotted the former governor of Virginia, Mark Warner, there to see some art. Gotta say, he looked like he belonged there. Can you even remotely imagine being Governor of Virginia? Anyway, Tom is starting on a new project that involved painting on enlarged photographs and it looks really intriguing. More to come, I hope. I also like Joren's new paintings. There's a narrative hovering there just beyond visibility.Many of Dave's whimsical prints feature an eccentric collection of animals who exhibit very human pretensions and insecurities. They never fail to make me laugh.

Joan Belmar at Arkin Studio

The day ended, at least for me, near Dupont Circle, with Sondra Arkin and Groover Cleveland. At Sondra’s, I hooked up with my old friend, the artist Kathy Keler and her main squeeze, Jose. Kathy had a studio on 14th Street way before it reached respectability, much less trendiness. She moved to Tucson a couple of years ago and was back for Mom’s 90th birthday. We love love love the big new encaustics Sondra has made for her show at Black Rock in December. Scale is important (this coming from someone whose recent work is 8” square) and the 4-foot squares barely contain the blasts of color and texture. The work has presence.

Groover Cleveland, Kathy Keler and Jose

Just before they rolled up the sidewalk, we made it to Groover’s. He continues to create graphically punchy variations on the theme of fear of the other. Groover had a first career as an illustrator of magazine stories. He has a highly-developed instinct for how to portray a story in one memorable image. It’s a very special talent.

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