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Art Enables @ Biagio Studio B

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

April 8, 2010

One of my very favorite groups is “Art Enables”, a studio, gallery and website where disabled artists create and sell their work. (Full disclosure: I am a member of their Board of Directors). Art Enables is not an art therapy program, first class art is created, shown widely in galleries and other venues and sold. The artists receive most of the money paid for the work; a small commission goes to help run the program

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This week Art Enables hung a show at Studio B at Biagio Fine Chocolate at 1904 18th St. NW in Washington. The work is brilliantly-colored, totally springtime-worthy, eminently affordable and guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Plus, if that isn’t enough, this Saturday, April 10, Biagio is having a sample sale, meaning that much of his incredible confectionary inventory is discounted. So you can get great values in art and chocolate at the same time. That’s what I call multi-tasking.

Tom Drymon Selects - Grand Opening

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

April 7, 2010

an impressive turnout

I was at the grand opening last Friday night of a new episodic artspace in town called “Tom Drymon Selects”. Not content with being an artist and graphic designer, my friend Tom has become a gallerist of a very particular and individual kind; every few months he will be showing a small group of artists whose work is affordable, accessible, and appeals to Tom’s personal sensibility. The aim is to introduce art collecting to a broader (i.e. less old and less rich) audience, the venue is the second floor of Studio Gallery on R Street in Dupont Circle and it is a lovely and intimate way to show art.

Mr. Drymon enjoying himself

Each show will be centered on a central organizing premise of some kind and will feature a new selection of artists. This month’s show is called “Only what you can carry with you” and I love that title with its connotations applying both to the artist and to the collector. Allowing for the generally tenuous and elastic nature of most art themes, the idea common to much of the work that most attracted me is the persistence and centrality of childhood memory and perception to the way each of us experiences life ever after – for good or ill.

Zade Ramsey's "American Girl"

Zade Ramsey, Ruth Trevarrow and S. N. Arkin

The four artists Tom chose for his inaugural show are James Cassell, Peter Harper, Joren Lindholm and Zade Ramsey. For me, the standout works are Zade Ramsey’s Memory Boxes. After graduating with a BFA, Ramsey spent many years as manager of digital printing production for a major company and is now an interior designer who crafts custom fabric and upholstery work. His attention to detail and mastery of craft elevates his boxes of Southern Gothic memories to an exceptional level. Peter Harper’s exuberantly colored large paintings also succeed in conjuring up a kind of memory map of childhood places.
So, thanks for doing this, Tom, and good luck in the new venture. It’s a good thing for all of us to show more art and engage more people.

Contemporary Print Fair at the Baltimore Museum of Art

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 29, 2010

Sam Gilliam print

Last weekend I visited this year’s edition of the annual contemporary print fair hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Fourteen exhibitors were there, representing major presses and dealers from around the country. They showed limited editions and individual prints, often hot off the literal presses, like DC’s own Sam Gilliam’s brand new monoprints made at Tandem Press in Madison, Wisconsin. Our Fair City's Renee Stout was also represented at th Dolphin Press booth.

Renee Stout's work

This print fair is a smallish event, which is a good thing, since you can linger at each booth and talk to the exhibitors. In the best cases, they are master printers themselves, meaning they work closely with other artists to create limited editions. When you see an edition of prints by any major artist, they have been made with a master printer whose knowledge, experience and instinct allows the artist to achieve her intentions and to repeat the print exactly each time for the number required for the edition. The latter is a lot more difficult than you might imagine.

Andrew Mockler of Jungle Press

Markus Linnenbrink print

Many of these people were delighted to share information, unfailingly enthusiastic about their artists and often very free with information about how the work was made. I was delighted to be able to spend a bit of time with a teacher of mine, Andrew Mockler, master printer and owner of Jungle Press in Brooklyn, who works with the painter and printmaker Joan Snyder, among others.
I’ve said this before but this event gave me the opportunity to observe once again how you can always identify the printmakers at an exhibition – they are the ones with their noses pressed as close to the glass as propriety permits, trying to figure out exactly what combination of techniques were used to achieve the effects in the piece.

Mark Mullen work

Henrik Dresher

I am myself a printmaker and something of a print junkie, so I loved a lot of work and pressed the GessoHead nose against a lot of glass. I’d particularly note a German artist named Markus Linnenbrink whose large scale monoprints were made by painting directly on the press bed. I am most definitely going to try that myself. Also Mark Mullan’s stunning etchings, the Joan Snyders in Jungle Press’s booth and the booth run by Dolphin Press and Print @ MICA, a unique endeavor that creates collaborations between resident artists and faculty and student printers from MICA. The quality of their work is outstanding and they are certainly close enough to qualify as local.

Adrienne Mills at the Anacostia Boutique and Gallery

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 28, 2010

Adrienne Mills' work

Before it utterly slips from my putative memory and into effective oblivion, I want to mention the Anacostia Boutique and Gallery. My good friend Adrienne Mills, who paints bodies and photographs them, is part of a show of sensuous art there. It is a fascinating place in a part of the city many of us rarely visit, an old decorated Victorian kitty-corner cross the street from the Sithsonian Anacostia Art Museum.

Adrienne and Jaye (a paintee)

scary teeny little folk

The place is stuffed with art and objects mostly imported from Africa and supplemented with the artwork of local African American artists.My head kept swiveling around as Mr. Weiss or I would notice something new and interesting, from the dolls to the ceramics to the big old throne to the tiny little totem people. The people are very friendly and couldn’t be more happy to tell you all about their inventory, so it’s really worth a visit.

Grand Opening of the Gateway Arts Center

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 21, 2010

Ani Kasten, Pete Duvall and Mila Kagan

Alec and Good-Looking People

The long-awaited grand opening of the shiny new Gateway Arts Center took place Friday and quite a shindig it was. First the political kissy-face where all the relevant Prince Georges County pols showed up to christen the ship, followed by open studios for the dozen or so lucky artists who have found new homes here and a reception for the public and the artists represented in the inaugural juried show featuring artists who live and/or work in the Gateway district, including moi. That’s the waiting-to-be-gentrified swath along Rhode Island Ave/ Rte 1 from Mt. Ranier, through Brentwood to Hyattsville. The GAC itself is at 3901 Rhode Island, Brentwood, about half a mile north of the little bitty traffic circlette in Mt. Ranier.

African American museum

In addition to studios, education facilities and galleries, the center is also the new home of the Prince Georges County African American museum.

John Hicks wall piece

Ani Kasten's work in her studio

Not gonna lie, I was kind of surprised at how impressed I was by the strength of the work. I just loved the big ceramic wallpieces by John Hicks, all beat up, pock-marked and decaying like abandoned buildings.

Lindsey Sherman's piece

the adorable Julia Morelli

And I have always been a fan of Ani Kasten, whose rough/refined vessels seem to be expanding in her high-ceilinged new studio space. Lindsey Sherman’s evocative small figures – ceramic covered with wax then stippled with red thread – are new to me and most welcome.

one of my monoprints

Leila Holtsman has a strong metal and ink piece, a good example of her talent for using metal in unexpected ways: Erwin Timmers’ glass wall pieces have an industrial context and great luminosity and Michael Janis’s is luscious, as always. And there’s lots more.

Alec looking sharp

his is a great new resource for local artists and for the community. The galleries are directed by our own Alec Simpson who is an artist and a veteran of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The center as a whole is run by the Gateway Arts district, led by Cheryl Dericotte, who gets a huge shout-out for bringing a project that had a somewhat tortured history to a very happy point. And you all should think about getting out to see it.

Picasso, His Cohorts and Their Spawn in Philadelphia

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 11. 2010

The Man Himself

Every once in a while I visit some Picassos just to ascertain how I’m feeling about the Big Man. It varies over time. Of course, I am in awe of his prodigious output and of his singular place in the history of the last 100 years, not just in art but in virtually every aspect of the way we view ourselves and our culture. But. With very few exceptions, Picasso’s work has never moved me viscerally and I keep checking in to see whether that’s still the case.

Gris, The Lamp

With that in mind, I traveled to Philadelphia last weekend to see the blockbuster Picasso show. Actually, notwithstanding the advertising and the gigantic “Picasso” banner affixed to the front of the (truly fabulous) Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibit is titled “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris and even that is deceptive. The Picassos in this yoooooge exhibit are outnumbered by a factor of about 10 by artwork by the large cast of the artworld characters who lived or tarried in Paris from about 1905 through post-World War II. That includes everyone from the usual cubist suspects – Gris, Braque, DuChamp – through a whole raft of surrealists, traveling Americans and migrating Eastern Europeans (that would be the Jews).

Picasso, Glass of Absinthe

The true value of the exhibit is to place Picasso in context, to assess his impact and to demonstrate that the astonishing influence Paris exerted as ground zero for western art was the product of the creative collaboration of a shifting group of artists and movements. The case becomes a bit tenuous as it approaches mid-century, but on the whole it is well made.

Brancusi, Portrait of Mme Pagany

So what did I learn? First, the earliest cubist workfrom 1910 - 13 by Picasso, Braque and Gris is virtually indistinguishable and I really like the stronger, more distinct forms that are characteristic of Gris. One could credibly contend that Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending A Staircase” was a more advanced example of cubism than anything Picasso had done to date. Leger’s 1919 “The City” is a masterpiece that foreshadows the urban, industrial themes of the 20’s and 30’s.

Leger, The City

Second, Picasso and his cohorts in the first tranche of cubists were themselves influenced by the movements that succeeded them, most notably surrealism and the conservative “back to order” movement after WWI. There are a number of paintings that make this abundantly clear. So the exchange of ideas was hardly all one way.

Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas

Paris was the magnetic epicenter of the art world and artists and wannabes flocked there to worship at the altar and to try their hand at the new way of seeing. There are examples here of a couple of dozen artist’s work who experimented with cubist principles before moving on to their own styles. There is also a suite of fabulous photographs, many formal portraits by Carl Van Vechten, of many of the artists and a few of the popular entertainers like Josephine Baker and Bricktop. Picasso always looks dapper and satisfied.

Picasso, Man With a Lamb

And my Picasso/Weiss self-assessment? Nothing dramatic. I am more attracted to Picasso’s sculptural work and maybe even “viscerally” moved. There is a small painted bronze made in 1914 in the show called “A Glass of Absinthe” that looks like nothing else from that time and it knocked me out. And the post-WWII “Man With A Lamb” is a monumental image of sacrifice and supplication in the face of the carnage of war. I am even more impressed than ever with the chutzpah and fearlessness of this group of artists early in the 20th century who proclaimed that the world had to be seen differently.

Nevan Lahart at Salon Contra

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 9, 2010

Nevan Lahart

You gotta love Nevan Lahart. He looks just like one imagines an Irish artist would look: a bit disheveled, a little dessicated; wiry, to be kind, skinny to be accurate; gap-toothed, big-smiled and gripping a can of beer. Words pour forth that could be poems of urban decay and disillusionment. My favorite: “Giotto didn’t make art, he made propaganda for the Church.” Hard to argue with that.

Lahart's mechanical painter

He makes his art quickly, spontaneously, with whatever is at hand. He doesn’t overthink or overplan and he makes in-your-face work about what he is thinking and doing at any time. His titles are terrific, e.g.: “The Everyday Miracle of Turning Drink Into Piss.” I don’t know about you, but I really wish I’d thought of that one.

Lahart and Kathryn Cornelius

Lahart has been brought to Washington by Solas Nua, an organization dedicated to showcasing contemporary Irish culture. He will be here for a month, during which he will fill a large space on the ground floor of 1200 First St. NE, made available by the NOMA Business Improvement District. Last night he was the featured guest at Salon Contra, Philippa Hughes’ series of episodic evening arts events. Kathryn Cornelius was there to act as questioner, but there was hardly ever any need for prompting or probing since Lahart is a life force of ideas and opinions.

part of the Royal Hibernian installation

Much of the talk centered around Lahart’s recent exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, which came down just a couple of days before he flew to DC. Titled “A Lively Start to a Dead End” (originally ‘Shit in my Brain at 40 cents an Hour”, an accurate assessment of the value of an artist’s labor), it is a sprawling installation of dozens of paintings on wooden structures, a deconstructed car, a dead horse, a painter’s garret and much much more. It is messy, assaultive and all over the block and, amazingly, it manages to work. I cannot wait to see what emerges in NOMA.

Thoreau's Legacy at the Union of Concerned Scientists

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

March 6, 2009

Been missing me? I've been in Boston and then in Florida but I'm back in DC and seeing some art. The first is a show, an organization and a cause tthat I have a strong connection with.

Tom Drymon, Elliott Negin, Micheine Klagsbrun

In 2009, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) (which I serve as a member of the Board of Directors) in partnership with Penguin Classics published “Thoreau’s Legacy,” a book of personal essays on the effect of global warming in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” More than 70 writers participated in the project, which can be viewed at http://www.ucsusa.org/americanstories/.

Rita Elsner and "Tranquil"

As a follow-up, UCS invited visual artists to submit work responding to the same theme, the personal significance of the environmental changes associated with climate change. Over 140 pieces of work were submitted with 15 ultimately selected by the jurors, which included Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post art critic; Elliott Negin, UCS Media Director, and yours truly. The artwork is hung in the public spaces of UCS’s Washington, DC green offices at 1825 K St. NW (ask them to tell you about that if you visit) and will be there for a year.

Kathy Karlson, simon O'Sulivan, Pat Goslee

I am constantly bowled over by the generosity of my fellow artists who donate work to worthy causes many times each year. On this occasion, the artists have agreed to lend their work for a year, which is just amazing and I can’t thank them all enough. Note: it is all for sale without commission, so come on by and take a look.
Having said all that, I must confess that the reception was so crowded that I really couldn’t take pictures of the art, just the people with little hints of the art in the background. I will get some images of the art soon and post them.

Sondra Arkin, Jessica Beels, Jenny Freestone

The work, which covers the widest range of media, truly reflects distinctly individual responses to climate disruption, from the delicate drawing of bees, whose pollination makes our food grow, by Rebecca Clark; Laura Moriarty’s wax “Erosion Mountain”, her imaginary geological structure; Elizabeth Morisette’s ominously disquieting oil spill made of shoelaces; JoAnne Schiavone’s photograph of a work of environmental art made by placing a long rope of crocheted plastic bags at the water’s edge, mimicking the tide line; Rita Elsner’s goache of a homestead sinking beneath the rising water; Sondra Arkin’s encaustic of the Sargasso Sea, where the convergence of ocean currents brings the plastic detritus of civilization to one of the world’s great biological nurseries.

Michael O'Sullivan and UCS's Cheryl Siebert

Meanwhile, as you can see, the reception was cooking and of the 15 artists, the 11 who live more or less locally were all there.
The artists include: Sondra Arkin, Jessica Beels, Joan Belmar, Rebecca Clark, Rita Elsner, Jenny Freestone, Pat Goslee, Kathy Karlson, Micheline Klagsbrun, Laura Moriarty, Elizabeth Morisette, Mary Ott, Mark Parascandola and JoAnne Schiavone.

Margo Humphrey at the David Driskell Center

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

February 7, 2010

Margo Humphrey at the David Driskell Center

The David Driskell Center at the University of Maryland has mounted a show of the work of Margo Humphrey that must be seen by afficionados of the art of printmaking and anyone else who loves vibrant in-your-face color and the energy of art that reflects a richly idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s that good.

The Last Bar B Que

This is the first time that I have ventured so deep into the territory of the University of Maryland campus at College Park and I have to say that Ms. Sondra and I came close to giving up after an hour’s crawl through rush hour traffic from DC, followed by a frustrating search in the dark for the location. Note to the rest of you: 1) do not go in rush hour; 2) the Driskell Center is in the same building as Cole Field House. When you’re asking directions, no-one knows the former but everyone knows the latter.

The Red Bed

But I am so glad we persevered, because this is a terrific exhibit. Margo Humphrey has been making prints – mostly stone lithographs, a difficult and dying technique – for more than 40 years. While she is academically credentialled with a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Stanford, plus a faculty appointment at the University of Maryland, her work has the immediacy and subjectivity characteristic of the naïve, or “outsider”, artist. Nor does it for a moment seem forced. This is the work of a woman who has been able since childhood to access and express her individual world and lush imagination. Each piece is teeming with fecund (I love that word) imagery, thick with figures, objects and designs, pushing through the edge of the picture plane.

We managed to arrive just as Ms. Humphrey was beginning her discussion. She’s the person you wished you had for your favorite auntie and the person who had to make this work: animated, energetic, full of life and without pretense. She said that her objective is to "give things a soul and make them come alive" and I would have to say that she has accomplished that goal in many of her prints. So what are you waiting for?

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