The Phillips Collection opens two abstraction exhibits, Irvine Contemporary prepares to pack up and move, and much more in this week’s Arts Agenda.
As the title of the show implies, this is the sixth year that Irvine Contemporary is presenting their BFA/MFA survey. Unlike Conner’s Academy 2010, which surveys local art schools, Introductions6 is meant to be national in scope, although this year’s selections skew heavily toward the Washington/Baltimore region.
Artist Vonn Sumner’s work will be on display at the new Morton Fine Arts space on Friday. >> On Friday evening, Morton Fine Arts will host the opening of a new exhibition of Small Works on Paper by Vonn Sumner, Laurel Hausler (who we have profiled here, here and here), and Rosemary Feit Covey from 6 to 9 p.m. You can find their new art lab at 1781 Florida Avenue NW. >> Also on…
Image courtesy Phil Nesmith By midnight tonight, photographer Phil Nesmith needs to have raised $2,000 to fund his mission to the Gulf Coast. Once there, Nesmith will use a wet collodion photographic process (read: old-ass-looking photography) to document what he finds. With $2,000, he can haul his gear, his glass, and a portable darkroom there to make the images. But with 9 hours to go, Nesmith has already raised $3,370 — and now he’s…
Al Farrow will accompany Shepard Fairey tomorrow night in a discussion on political art at the Corcoran. Mausoleum II (front view), is made of bullets, artillery shells and steel, and will be shown alongside the work of Fairey and Paul D. Miller in Regime Change Starts at Home. Image courtesy Irvine Contemporary. Phew, it’s a busy week for artlovers. If you dig political art, graphic design, or street art, head to cloud nine, and…
A closeup of Chris Jordan’s Barbies, which is featured in Close Encounters at the Katzen Arts Center. Copyright Chris Jordan. Courtesy Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles. Provisions Library, D.C.’s learning laboratory for the arts and social change, which opened its doors in September of 2001, launched a new initiative this past summer, BrushFire. By staging socially-minded public art events nationally, BrushFire aims to promote discourse about democracy, including key political and social issues such…
As a recent MFA graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Sebastian Martorana has found a calling in stone. A sometimes over-looked medium, Martorana creates work that is often somber and other times light in emotion. This fresh face in the art world is still finding his way as a sculptor as his style progresses, but he’s one to keep your eye on. You can see a sample of his work at Irvine…
Becky Alprin’s High Altitude City, courtesy Irvine Contemporary Over 250 artists from across the country were evaluated for Irvine Contemporary’s “MFA annual” group show, Introductions4. Each of the artists were chosen by a selection panel of collectors of early-career artists through studio and exhibit visits along with open submissions. The chosen nine, Becky Alprin, Reid Bingham, Christina Empedocles, Adam Frezza, Andrea Land, David Linneweh, Sebastian Martorana, Jimmy Joe Roche and Matthew Woodward, represent an…
James Marshall, or Dalek, has been a fixture in the urban art scene for ten years. Best known for his “Space Monkey” characters, Marshall brings this influence to Irvine Contemporary in his solo show, Overweight. Seen as a combination of street art, cartoon, Japanese pop and punk, Marshall’s paintings are very precise and highly complex compositions. Using bright neon colors he creates dizzying kaleidoscopic displays. The shapes that he employs are simple and minimal…
Violent, bloody and chaotic; these are the images that come to us from Iraq on a daily basis. But in My Baghdad, now at Irvine Contemporary, local photographer Phil Nesmith presents another view of Iraq, one that captures the quiet moments of the every day. His photographs are small vignettes, short snippets of life, printed onto glass. They are pieces of time, capturing a small moment in the motion of a waving flag or birds…
