FAX opens Saturday, September 12 at the Contemporary Museum

Matt Sheridan Smith, "Untitled (contrast test) (detail)," 2008. Black and white inkjet print, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lisa Cooley Fine Art.

FAX at The Contemporary Museum
Exhibition Dates: September 12 – December 20, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12

FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. Although the technology for transmitting printed images and texts over distance dates from the nineteenth century—a machine by Scottish mechanic Alexander Bain patented in 1843—it was the introduction of the modern fax through commercially available machines in the 1970s that turned facsimiles into a ubiquitous communications medium for international business. Artists readily exploited its immediate, graphic, and interactive character, making it an important part of the history of telecommunications art, nestled between the legacy of mail art and the nascent practices of new media.

FAX will include drawings by over 100 artists that have each been submitted via fax machine. Over the course of the exhibition, as new works arrive via the museum's working fax machine, the exhibition will evolve as new works are added to the walls of the museum. All the transmitted pages will be archived or displayed together with the active fax machine, which may produce new faxes from invited artists at any moment. The result—an ongoing cumulative project—is a show concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Here, reproducible yet erratic production via the fax machine displaces traditional notions of the hand, still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and foreground the role of drawing as a generative process.

Peter Coffin, "Untitled," 2009. Facsimile on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

FAX is a traveling exhibition co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI. The guest curator is Joao Ribas. The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were made possible, in part, by members of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded to support innovative exhibitions in The Drawing Center's project gallery; and by support to iCI from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and iCI Benefactor members Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.

Sublime Structure opens September 2 at Grimaldis

Artists Panel Discussion: Saturday, September 12 at 3:00 p.m. moderated by Virginia K. Adams, Ph.D.

Laure Drogoul's 'Follies' Exhibit at MICA - An interview with April Danielle Lewis

"Laure Drogoul: Follies, Predicaments, and Conundrums" just recently received a Best of Baltimore Award from Baltimore Magazine. Not everyone knows this, but the exhibition was the culmination of a year of classes in MICA's Exhibition Design Seminar, an innovative curatorial program for students. To celebrate the success of this ground-breaking show at MICA, I interviewed April Danielle Lewis, a Towson University art student, about her experiences in the class and the exhibit. And, of course, a hearty congratulations to everyone involved.

Cara: You just spend the last year of your life slaving away at MICA on the Exhibitions Seminar Class. Why did you, as a Towson University student, want to take this particular class? What did you hope to learn?

April: I had never heard of the Exhibition Development Seminar, before last semester. My advisor at Towson sent me an email with a description of the class and basically said "you need to do this!" Honestly, I was at first, a little hesitant about taking a class that was an entire year long and at another school. However, after meeting with George Ciscle, the creator of the Exhibition Development Seminar (EDS), to find out more about the class and what it entailed, it sounded like a crazy intense crash course in gallery work-- more like a project you would work on after you’d been doing gallery work for a while. I was thrilled to have been presented with an opportunity that many educational institutions (or galleries too) just simply don’t have the resources or manpower to put together.

I was really excited about seeing what it would be like to work on a project in a place that has an ENTIRE exhibitions department. I'd been to several shows at MICA and I knew the kind of space that we'd have to play with and all the resources that would be available and like how could anyone turn that down?

I didn't really have any hopes as to what I'd learn before the class started. I just decided I'd be open to learning whatever was there for me to take in. If anything I guess I was looking to expand the network of people that I know and I saw this as a good way to build relationships with other like minded artists.

Cara: Will you tell me more about this class? I know that students sign up and work in teams to put together a big exhibition each year at MICA. How does the class work? What goes on behind the scenes?

April: Tons of catfights and lots of name calling. Ha ha... just kidding.

I think the most interesting thing is that no two EDS classes have been alike. All of them have their own unique challenges. This year we curated the first retrospective EDS has ever put together. There are 17 students in the class and just about all the decisions we made had to be presented to the class before going forward. This can get pretty tricky and can really hold up the process of getting things done.

George Ciscle has run this class for like the last 10 years or so since it's inception. This year he took an advisory role and Glen Shrum took over the teaching/running things role.

For the first three or so classes in the first semester, we just looked at slides of Laure's work, met her and visited her studio, and did lots of talking and brainstorming about her work as a group. We all had to come up with a first draft of a class statement and a grant proposal. We later read everyone's drafts and dissected all of them to piece together THE class statement. As our first group task, it seemed like the hardest thing in the world to do.

When one of my sentence got a big fat red line through it as not making the cut, it only made me more critical of everything else on the dry erase board. Like if mine didn't make it and I thought that it was great writing, it forced me to really scrutinize everything that was being presented. I'm sure everyone felt like that and eventually we got things down. The final product was a really well written piece of work.

Also, we all took a group trip to new york to the Conflux Festival to see Laure's apparatus for orchestral knitting in action to help us get an idea of what her work was like and how she worked. After her performance we sat in Washington Square Park on benches and had a nice long conversation with Laure about her work and what she likes to try and get an idea of how she thinks and works.

We had to decide what teams we were going to be on (I guess around the 4th class or so, maybe even the 5th). We were told to send Glen an email of our top three picks for which teams we'd like to be on. The choices were project coordinators, curatorial team, exhibition development, web team, graphic design team, and the education team. When we came into class there was a spreadsheet projected that showed the minimum and maximum numbers of people that could be in one group. And by each of the teams where everyone's names for their first choice. It looked something like half the class wanted to be on the curatorial team and about a 1/4 of the class wanted to be on the exhibition development team. The rest of the spots were filled the way they were intended to, except for the web design team. No one wanted to be on the web team. The irony of the whole situation though is that our class had no graphic design majors and no web design majors.


Graphic Design isn't the most difficult thing to do if you don't have any formal training because we've all taken design classes and understand how to make things aesthetically pleasing. Web design is a whole 'nother monster. There is a lot of prerequisite knowledge needed to make a website. We were supposed to look at the projection and talk it all out. What ended up happening was a game of who can hold out the longest. Someone would say "Okay okay I'll be on the education team", or "I'll be a project coordinator" and then almost all of the spots in the other teams were filled except web design. It sat there empty for at least 10 minutes. Jeffrey Kent volunteered to be on the web team and no one else said they'd join him, so I decided I would. For the record, both of us are probably the least web fluent in the class, so it made our task a real challenge. However, I learned so much in the process. Choosing to be in the group that would be the most challenging allowed me to acquire invaluable skill.

After we determined the groups, the class took on a different form. Each team was an assigned a mentor currently works in the professional art world in a field related to each team's tasks. We met with mentors on our own time on an almost weekly basis and through email almost daily. We also met as teams regularly outside of the scheduled class time. We set up a wiki to post our development so that everyone in the class could see what we were doing and had the opportunity to comment and give feedback as we were working.

For me being in school at Towson and also as a working single mom, things got pretty hectic--it was killer. We'd work for a few weeks to determine what our roles, needs, and wants for the duration of the project and then during our weekly meetings report our progress and get feedback from the other class members. We proposed ideas to the class first and then over the course of the first semester we had give 3 proposal presentations to George Ciscle, Gerald Ross the exhibitions curator, Laure Drogoul, and all of our mentors.

What a nerve racking experience! At the end of each proposal we'd get feedback from everyone in the room and we all had a q & a session. We ended the semester with a final proposal and a definitive list of things to do and determined deadlines. Over the break we had tons of meetings, phone calls, and emails and just knocked things all out.

Cara: The exhibition your class worked on was 'Laure Drogoul: Follies, Predicaments, and other Conundrums,' a retrospective at MICA. What was working with Laure Drogoul like? Can you recall a memorable story about her?


April: During install Laure wore a flight suit everyday. The Sunday before the show was opening a few of us came in to help finish decopage-ing She-Pod-- the orgasmic greenhouse folly. At lunch time Laure and her sister Connie (who traveled from India to help out) offered to grab us coffee and snacks while they were out. Someone commented on her flight suit as she was leaving and Laure's response was "All you need is a jumper, a little lipstick, and a pair of sunglasses" as she was adjusting her blue faux fur fedora before heading out. When I saw this photo http://www.bthesite.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/drogouldollyopt.jpg, I chuckled to myself and I know that whenever I think of Laure I will always picture her looking like this.

Cara: What was most rewarding about putting this exhibit together? What was most frustrating or difficult?
April: I just received an email last week notifying all the class members that Follies, Predicaments, and Other Conundrums won a Best of Baltimore Award for best show of 2009. That’s pretty rewarding. I wonder if we will all get little BOB posters like the ones in all the coffee shops and stuff that I frequent.

The exhibition had thousands of visitors while it was up, received international press, and was covered on just about all the local media. I think it’s really exciting that this exhibit got so much attention and so many visitors and, in general, everything was really well received. It feels like we were successful. At the opening, while leading gallery tours, and when I was just hanging out in the space, I saw all sorts of people engaging with the work and really enjoying themselves. It feels good to have been a part of that. It was extremely gratifying.

One of the most frustrating things I had to endure during the class and exhibition was the managing all the deadlines and dealing with bureaucratic red tape. I know everyone has deadlines, and everyone has to follow rules, but typically as artists we are the managers of our own practices. We are all going to school for art and I personally have spent most of my academic career blatantly breaking rules. In the real world of large institutions, rule breaking isn’t applauded like it is when you are learning the rules. We had to figure out how to bend rules almost to the breaking point to actualize our ideas. That was ridiculously challenging. Putting together this retrospective was like one huge collaborative work; not only with my classmates, but with Laure, Gerald Ross the curator of the exhibitions department at MICA and his staff, and MICA communications. Things also had to be approved over and over by everyone. There where so many hands involved—it was insane!

Anytime you have a hand in a behind the scenes sort of situation or production of any sort--be it working on your own artwork, or being a part of something much larger like this show; each phase that you have to work through allows you a different way of thinking about everything. I guess you could say simply, that spending a significant amount of time on something affords a multi-faceted understanding of your project and helps you build a relationship with the work while allowing the opportunity to view the project from many different vantage points.

Cara: As an undergraduate art student, what skills or lessons have you learned about the 'real' world of professional artists?

April: During Laure’s gallery talk she revealed that She-Pod, the large greenhouse folly, was not complete. There were kinks that were not able to have been resolved and some editing had to be done to the piece. I guess I always thought that “real world” professional artists didn’t have to stay up all night the day before the show putting finishing touches on pieces and that somehow things magically came together or that having studio assistants and years of experience makes it easy. I discovered that the process of making work is complicated at many different levels.

Cara: In your opinion, what is Laure Drogoul's legacy for Baltimore artists?

April: Laure imparts on Baltimore a legacy of celebratory offerings of the fantastical and impossible, while simultaneously capturing the essence of the kitch and uniqueness of Baltimore. Her anything-goes-roll-with-the-punches sensibilities are very inspiring.

Cara: What have you learned, personally, as an artist from Laure or from the Exhibitions Seminar class, that you integrate into your own art making process?

April: It took me a good while of reflection and distance from the project to realize that working with Laure showed me how to use my environment as media and inspiration for art making.

Rush Hour at MAP Thursday, August 27 from 5-7

Steer clear of your car. Don’t get behind the wheel for an exhausting stop-and-go drive after a long day of work. Instead, walk over to our space for a complimentary glass of wine and light refreshments. Spend your time relaxing while you meet the artists and curators of our Summer/Fall exhibitions.

FREE, complimentary wine and refreshments!
Thursday, August 27, 2009 from 5-7 p.m.
Maryland Art Place
8 Market Place, Suite 100

2009 Dates: August 27, September 24, October 8, October 22, December 3

Book Report: "Art / Work" by Bhandari and Melber

As they say in baseball, the THIRD time is the charm! Eureka!! This is THE BOOK that covers it all: everything you need to know from how to pack and ship your artwork, how to consign your work, how to conduct a studio visit, and how to apply for grants and residencies. It is all in here. This book is da bomb, the bible, the way. As much as there can be, anyway.

Co-Author Heather Darcy Bhandari is the director of Mixed Greens Gallery in New York and Co-Author Jonathan Melber has been an arts lawyer in NY for the past ten years. Both authors bring a healthy dose of down-to-earth strategy to this publication, as well as a realistic perspective that is both encouraging and respectful.

The two authors conducted interviews with 'about 100' arts professionals from across the country - gallerists, dealers, museum curators, artists, and others - and their research is both eye-opening and empathetic. I would doubly recommend this book to emerging artists because it is written from the perspective of an experienced and successful dealer, and an experienced and successful arts lawyer, and NOT an aspiring artist. It takes much of the guesswork out of the picture for an artist and puts us squarely in the shoes of 'the other.'

Here is a short segment from the beginning of the book:

Chapter 1: The Big Picture

The art world is full of people who like saying "there are no rules in the art world," which is only sort of true. There's certainly nothing written in stone (there's barely anything written on paper). And sure, what you do in the studio is entirely up to you; there aren't any rules about what you choose to make or how you make it. But there are general customs in the art world, and widespread expectations among arts professionals, which you should know before you head out of the studio and start meeting these people.

The customs have changed, too. It used to be a given, for example, that you would need many years of studio time before a gallery would look at your work. Today, galleries compete over the newest talent to come out of school, even trying to scoop up MFA students before they've graduated. That's not to say everyone is ready for a commercial gallery, by the way. Pressure to sell can stifle development, especially at the beginning of a career. But because there's a real possibility to sell work as an emerging artist, you have to confront issues, and understand how the art world works, i a way that emerging artists never had to before.

Of course, you don't have to follow customs or accept other people's expectations. We're not prescribing a bunch of rules that you need to follow. If you want to buck the system, go right ahead. Do the WRONG thing. Just do it on purpose, not by accident, and know why you're doing it.

How about that for (dis)encouragement? That's what I mean: realistic but also empowering. Art / Work has 14 chapters, which start with the new basics - hallelujah! - submission materials, business cards, and websites. The book continues on to subjects like opening up your studio, showing your work, dealing with rejection, consignments, residencies, grants, and loans & commissions. At the end, the authors deal with gallery courtship & representation, and agreements for representation. There is no fluff or filler in this book. You can read it front to back and it builds in a logical fashion and an artist can also keep it on the shelf use this book as a resource for specific opportunities or projects. This is an incredibly handy book.

Even the quotes, printed in small type along the edges of the chapters, are from contemporary artists and art professionals - people who are alive NOW, and involved NOW - rather than the usual inspirational quotes from long-dead artists. Local names you'll see quoted are Andrea Pollan, of Curator's Office in Washington, DC, Leigh Conner of Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC, and Anne Ellegood from the Hirshhorn, also in Washington, DC. Other big names with lots to say in the margins are: Greg Kucera, Monique Meloche, Shamin Momin, Fred Tomaselli, Andrea Rosen, and Ed Winkleman. If you don't know who any of these people are, all the more reason to read this book. If you want to seriously exhibit your work and really take charge of your career, this book is your homework. It will answer 95% of the questions that you have about today's contemporary art world and how you want to engage with it.

I will leave you with a few sample quotes that I liked from the book:

"I apply for grants because they keep me less dependent on the commercial system. That has been important for me all along: finding ways where I won't have to sacrifice the quality of my work by making repeats or more saleable pieces. In the early days it was my day job - now grants and teaching keep me a better artist." - Charles Long, artist, Mount Baldy, CA

"It turns me off the most when artists are clueless about other work that might look like theirs or laid the groundwork for what their work is doing. I get excited when an artist knows the tradition in which they are working. I get excited when I hear an artist talking about another artist's work. It shows a passion for art that isn't about being an art star. They do not have to be eloquent, but something must be communicated. It shows there is an active intelligence." - Michael Darling curator, Seattle Art Museum, WA

To order from Simon & Schuster, click here. And, no, I am not receiving any royalties.

Zoe Charlton: PRIME opens Tuesday, August 25 at McDaniel College

The McDaniel College Department of Art and Art History presents an exhibit, Zoë Charlton: PRIME, Aug. 25 through Sept. 18, on campus in the Esther Prangley Rice Gallery in Peterson Hall. For information and gallery hours, call 410-857-2595.

The exhibit is free and open to the public. An opening reception will be held 7-9 p.m. Aug. 25.

In the tradition of art that has a social purpose, Charlton’s work tackles issues surrounding prejudice, privilege, racism and sexuality. “I explore social and racial interactions with subversive humor and irony to call attention to these concerns,” the artist says. “My interest is to identify present day motivations for behaviors rooted in prejudice.”

Charlton earned her master’s degree in Fine Arts, with a concentration in painting, from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, with a concentration in Studio Art, from Florida State University in 1995. Charlton’s art has been featured in several publications, including the New York Times. To view Charlton’s work, visit http://www.zoecharlton.com/.

4,000 Graffiti Stickers turned into a Wallpaper Installation at the Ace Hotel, NY

At the Ace Hotel.
(Photo: Douglas Lyle Thompson, from NY Magazine)

Peel Slowly and See: Four thousand graffiti stickers that you’d pass on the street become a hotel mural that demands lingering. By Steven Kurutz / Published Aug 2, 2009, NY Magazine.


Starting in the early nineties, Michael Anderson, a Bronx-born artist, began to amass what has come to be regarded—unofficially, and mostly by Anderson himself—as the world’s largest collection of graffiti stickers. Such a claim implies a consuming passion, but Anderson says he was never very dedicated. All he did was carry a Leatherman tool, and whenever he was out in the city he’d peel a few stickers off a wall or lamppost and slip them in a notebook. If he found one that was cool but hard to remove, he’d let the elements work on it and return later. If it was damaged or gone by then, so be it.

The collection now numbers at least 40,000—a testament to the sheer number of graffiti stickers, which are so ubiquitous in New York as to be nearly invisible, the visual equivalent of a honking taxi horn. For years, they sat quietly in notebooks in the artist’s Upper West Side apartment. Last April, the owners of the new Ace Hotel at 29th and Broadway came calling with a mural commission. Completed last month, it’s most likely the only museum devoted to this extremely ephemeral form.

Consisting of 4,000 or so stickers scanned from Anderson’s notebooks, printed in black-and-white on silk paper, and assembled into a dense collage, the mural evokes both the Giuliani years and a grittier, preboom downtown. “I think of myself more like the curator rather than the artist,” Anderson says, standing in the Ace lobby. As a curator and collector, he took an egalitarian approach: The mural contains stickers by well-known graffiti-ers like Barry McGee (who tagged as Twist) and Steve Powers (ESPO), as well as those of the unknown and untalented.

To read the article, click here.

Book Report: "Taking the Leap" by Cay Lang

Second on my summer reading list was "Taking the Leap: Building a Career as a Visual Artist" by Cay Lang. The sub-heading reads: The Insider's Guide to Exhibiting and Selling Your Art.

This publication has a conversational tone that is both down-to-earth and encouraging. In eleven chapters, which are structured mostly chronologically, the artist learns to set goals, create an 'artist's packet,' to plan a strategy, and stage an art exhibition. The author, Cay Lang, is a successful artist, educator, and writer and uses all of these areas of knowledge to put this publication together. After reading the first few lines of the book's introduction, I knew that I would enjoy reading it.

To be a successful artist, you need three things: curiosity, commitment, and good work habits. You were probably thinking I would say talent.

Talent, according to the prevailing wisdom, is a rare and unpredictable quality usually bestowed upon the lucky recipient at birth. It is commonly believed that if a person is fortunate enough to be born with talent, then everything he or she attempts will be effortless and will astound the world with its brilliance.

Let's not worry about whether you have talent. Talent is a nonissue. It can be neither measured nor defined, and agonizing over it serves no purpose other than to create both anxiety and, if you've developed a talent for worrying, an excuse for avoiding work.

From the very start, Lang makes the reader feel that their goals are worthwhile and that their success is attainable and realistic. Without gimmicks or false cheer, Lang discusses her own experiences, including her involvement with the College Art Association, as well as those of an emerging and then, more established, exhibiting artist. I liked that Lang included sample resumes and cover letters and I also appreciated the quotes by famous artists, critics, and dealers included on the outer edges of each page.

However, I did have a few issues with this book as well. One problem is with Lang's suggestion that sending 'artist packets' out to galleries is a viable way to grow one's career. Apparently she has found exhibiting opportunities and success in this way, but I don't know of any other artists who have.

To me, putting together an artist packet - resume, bio, statement, images - is an important step in becoming a professional artist, but not so one can send it out to various and sundry galleries in the hopes of being represented. In my experience and research it is the other way around: a gallery finds the artist because their work is already up somewhere else. I would concentrate more efforts on generating opportunities for the work to be seen in a professional setting by the people who may want to represent you.

Lang suggests that one way to grow an art career is for artists target and visit specific cities where they do not reside and visit hundreds of galleries as research. Then, send packets to the galleries that seem to be a good fit. Then follow up with phone calls to the galleries after the packets are sent, in order to to set up an appointment, and then bring your packet, or the actual work, to the space. She states that if one gallery out of ten is interested, then an artist should consider themselves successful.

Although there is a degree to self-determination in this process, an artist's ultimate success comes from selling themselves successfully and by being commercially represented. To me, this is too narrow a definition of success, as well as too much work for too little result. I think there are better, more organic and holistic ways to do this, and I don't like that this is the 'meat' of Lang's message.

Other, later topics include copyright, websites, how to hang work, and how to write a press release. All of these topics were helpful, but I still felt a nagging dissatisfaction that they were handled too generally or too lightly. To me, the website should be one of the first topics presented, and a press release is a topic for a gallery to handle. In a later section, titled "The Secret to Getting Media Attention," Lang advises to Pay attention to articles in magazines ad newspapers to see what the current news topics are. Is there a way to attach your art event to any of them? To me this is sort of obvious and also a bit disingenuous, but maybe I'm being too picky.

The beginning of this book is terrific - energetic, empowering, and helpful, but the second half seemed a bit fluffy and could have used a few more highly developed or more contemporary topics. I would recommend this book to an artist who is beginning their career, but I don't think I would have BFA or MFA students read it cover to cover.

- Cara Ober

Photos from 'In A Material World: Melissa Webb' at Gallery Imperato

To read the Baltimore Sun Article, 'Costume designer creates strange characters from a grim fairy tale: Webb to show whimsical works at Gallery Imperato in Baltimore' by Chris Kaltenbach, click on the link: http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bal-ae.li.costume20aug20,0,5866408.story

Photos from Manon Cleary at Addison Ripley Gallery, Georgetown

MANON CLEARY: New Pastels
July 18 - August 22, 2009
Addison Ripley Gallery
Washington, DC
July 18 - August 22, 2009