Tag Archives: art

Artorama

It’s such an artsy weekend! There’s an opening reception tonight from 5-8 p.m. for the Mid-City Artists Spring open studios. The reception is at Coldwell Banker, which is at 1606 17th Street, NW. If you prefer to wait and see the artists in their natural habitats, there’s a map of the participating studios that will be open on Saturday and Sunday. I’m glad I took another look at the map because I want to drop in on Sondra Arkin and it turns out her studio is only open on Sunday. My fellow Artomatic Board member Chuck Baxter is only going to be in his studio Saturday. Chuck is one of the most audacious and ambitious found-object sculptors in the area and I’ve never seen his studio. This is all going to require more planning than I realized. I’d better check that schedule again.

Saturday, the Washington Glass School open house is from noon-6 p.m. The Gateway Arts District is really doing it up, with maps and a free shuttle and a parade. That’s just too much excitement for me. If I make it out there, I’ll most likely stick around the ultra-trendy 3700 block of Otis Street, which is where the Glass School, Red Dirt Studios, Flux Studios, and Sinel/Stewart/Weiss Studios (Ellyn Weiss) can all be found in one convenient place. Convenient for me, anyway, and that’s all that really matters, right?

more art events for you

Tonight you can get a double-dose of Kevin Irvin’s work. (His website seems to be down, but I’m posting the link anyway – I suspect he prefers to use his MySpace). Kevin’s studio is the site of tonight’s Flux event, which features work by:

Michael Auger, Jennifer Beinhacker, Matthew Clark, Jacob Cohen, Andrea Collins, Paula Endo, Cavan Fleming, Vickie Fruehauf, Casey Goldman, Kevin Irvin, Julianne Fuchs-Musgrave, Mimi Xang Ho, Angela Kleis, Emily Liddle, Ashira ‘2C’ Malka, Bono Mitchell, Joe Morey, Caren Quinn, Heather Schmaedeke, Raju Singh, Ashley Sullivan, Kimberly Stark, Henrik Sundqvist, Davin Tarr, Meghan Taylor, Duy Tran, Pindar Van Arman, Peter Van Riper, Liz Vance, Lloyd Wolf

.

Flux is produced by Art Outlet.

Kevin’s work is also featured at tonight’s Art Whino event, Inked Soles, which is being held at 2450 Crystal Drive in Crystal City.

Craft Week DC

Next week is Craft Week DC. Today’s WaPo Weekend section features two of my favorite artists, which is great because I can link to it even though I’m too tired to blog extensively about Craft Week or the upcoming Smithsonian Craft Show right now.

Michael O’Sullivan’s articleis a guided tour of the week’s events as curated by Washington Glass School co-founder Tim Tate (the guy who made the monkey reliquaries) and a profile of “Ceramics That Go Beyond Cups and Bowls” of Laurel Lukaszewski.

My favorite line of the whole article: “We’d call him the Craft Whisperer, except that Tate never whispers.”

We don’t have any of Laurel’s work (yet) but she’s one of the many groovy artists who live in my groovy neighborhood and I covet her work madly so I’m always excited to see her getting the positive press she deserves.

There’s also a profile of Gayle Friedman a local jewelry artist who shares studio space with my guru, Michele Banks. (Not to be confused with my spiritual advisor, Roger). I only recently started to get acquainted with Gayle’s work – I’ve really liked what I’ve seen so far.

So there you have it. It’s sort of a Friday Five, even. I kind of want to babble more about art and craft, but somewhere around mile 4 of the run I just took my brain solved the thorny problem of my Artomatic installation. Namely, how to do it at all. Before I headed out, I’d reconciled with the fact that I was almost certainly going to have to drop out, but I believe that all is well now. I need to take a shower and get to work, though, if I’m going to make this happen.

Onward and upward with the arts

Lots of other arty things were happening during this, the first weekend of Spring – although Artomatic registration is not open yet.

I’m a bit cantankerous because I want to start recording the soundtrack for a potential installation and a major construction project sprang up 200 yards from our recording space. Pile-driving and sound recording are not the very best of friends. We have a little time, but this kind of installation requires a lot of planning and construction that can’t be done at the last minute.

Did I mention that Artomatic registration is not open yet? It’s not.

David Fogel’s 88 hosted the 4 day Forward Festival at various locations. Artery 717 opened “Private Arts” a new show of work by 40 local designers showing off the art they create after their design clients go home. Anna U Davis closed out her show at Long View Gallery. Artomatic registration did not open, although Sean Welker opened a new show at R. Coury Fine Art Gallery in Savage, Maryland. Transformer Gallery opened Fabrication of Blindness/Fabricating Rain, an intriguing looking show. There is/was a whole bunch of music stuff going on this weekend that I’m too tired to blog about, but luckily dcist has a roundup.

We were going to go to many of these things – instead we stopped at Artery 717 and said hello and then drove by BeBar for X in DC, but by then I was too tired to get out of the car – let alone go inside – so we went home. It is indeed a life glamorous and exotic.

In far more important news, the pattern for the cables on the cute little ballerina sweater from Glampyre Stefanie Japel’s Fitted Knits are totally fucked up. The sweater looked wrong because it was wrong. If I’d just looked up the errata to the pattern to begin with I would have figured out why much sooner. It’s an eyecatching cable and the mistake is centered right at breast level – you’d think someone would have caught that before the book went to print. I’m just grumbling because I don’t feel well and I hope this would be a quick and easy project, not one I had to rip out and redo repeatedly. It’s a beautiful sweater and I love her designs.

And, of course, yesterday was National Corndog Day, as you may have read in the accidentally epic meatblog post, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Corndogs.” You can go read that while you wait for Artomatic registration to start – if you’re on the mailing list you’ll be the first to know when it opens.