Moderator: Andy Grundberg. Please join us at the Warehouse Gallery and Theater to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the event with a presentation featuring two of the original organizers of the demonstration, Andrea Pollan (curator, writer, and Director of Curator’s Office) and Bill Wooby (local arts entrepreneur and visionary) as well as former WPA Trustee and First Amendment rights attorney, Jim Fitzpatrick. The discussion will be moderated by Andy Grundberg, chair of the photography department at the Corcoran College of Art & Design and former art critic for The New York Times. Panelists will discuss the assault on the National Endowment for the Arts and its lasting effects, issues of censorship, the story behind the demonstration, and how the WPA came to present the exhibition.

Instructor: Megan Irving. Make a pile of wax and it will charm and delight! Encaustic paint is such a versatile and beautiful medium. It is solid at room temperature, infinitely re-workable, and more waterproof than acrylic, and compatible with collage, oil, photography and drawing. We will demystify the basic techniques and give you courage and know-how to set up your studio and make some successful work.

Authors of the book ‘Art/Work’, Heather Bhandar and Jonathan Melber, give a talk about the tools artists need to make it in the art world. Books will be available at the event. Co-presented with Connor Contemporary Art.

Juror: Kelly Gordon, Associate Curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Artists: Stephen Ausherman, Stephanie Barber, Bret Battey, Patrick Bergeron, Manualla Blackburn, Aaron Bowles, Lin Culbertson, Robert Ladislas Derr, Nhieo Do, Brian Evans, Harvey Goldman, Lee hederson, Janne Holtermann, Danial Iglesia, Ben McCormick, Karl J. Mendonca, Jonathan Monaghan, Neil Ira Needleman, Julia Oldham, Kala Pierson, Gerard Freixes Ribera, Stefan Riebel, Alberto Roblest, Jack Dingo Ryan, Eldad Tsabary and Robert Voisey, and Jessica Westbrook.

This year’s selection of finalists’ works will present the leading edge in electronic media works. The most compelling entries, as selected by the juror Kelly Gordon, Associate Curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and based on overall quality and innovation, will be awarded the Kraft Prize for New Media and the WPA Experimental Art Prize, two cash prizes of $750 each, to be presented on October 1 at The Phillips Collection.

Washington Project for the Arts and Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts (WALA) invited guests to a No Artist Left Behind workshop on Copyright and Contract basics at Arlington Art Center. John D. Mason, an attorney at The Intellectual Property Group, PLLC., shared valuable information about contemporary issues in copyright law that artists need to know, followed by a question and answer session.

This event is part of Art21 Access ‘09, a celebration of contemporary art and Season 5 of Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century sponsored by Art21. Art21 Access 09 is held at over 300 museums, schools, libraries, art spaces, and community centers and is organized in collaboration with Americans for the Arts’ National Arts and Humanities Month. Visit art21.org for more information.

The day before the opening of OPTIONS 2005, Susan Noyes, an artist in the show, was driving into the adjoining parking garage to deliver her work when a freak accident occurred.  The automatic door to the garage slammed down onto the top of the car crushing her most important piece, which was tied on top.  It was damaged beyond repair and after consulting with Paula Crawford, her instructor at George Mason University, she decided to go home and make another piece.  She worked through the night and the next day, and brought it in a few minutes before the opening.  We hung it on the wall and opened the doors.

Post Secret was the most overwhelming experience in my tenure at the WPA  — the 15,000 plus people who came to the show, the media coverage, and the daily poignancy of being with people moved by the cards.  Not a day went by without several people leaving the space sobbing from the uncontrollable emotion they felt after viewing the cards.  People drove from all over America to stand in line and see the cards, so we kept the exhibition open extra late every night in order to accommodate as many people as possible.  My mother was dying of cancer at the same time as the exhibition, and I went to the hospital to be with her in the last week of her life.  One night in the hospital while I was sitting next to her as she slept, I glanced up at the television and CNN was covering the Post Secret exhibition.  It was surreal.

The final show was Wall Snatchers, curated by Kelly Towles.  Kelly selected street and graffiti artists to create work on site.  The collective Faile came from Brooklyn to create a very large and ambitious piece, which took them three solid days.  They pretty much lived in the space and worked 24/7; so one night I cooked dinner for them at my home.  During dinner, they were all talking about how they had never seen any of the monuments on the Washington Mall and it did not look like they would have an opportunity on this trip.  We took the back seats out of my van, piled everyone in, and drove to the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, and the Vietnam Wall.  We walked around each one and I told them what I knew about the history of the monuments.

WPA presents SynchroSwim: a synchronized swimming showcase and competition at Capitol Skyline Hotel Pool.

SynchroSwim is presented in conjunction with a series of video lounge / poolside art projects hosted by The RUBELL FAMILY COLLECTION + Conner Contemporary Art at the Capitol Skyline Hotel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwF323IZ-90

Tina Torpedo and the Factory Flippers, winner of Best Visual Spectacle award,
at the first annual Washington Project for the Arts SynchroSwim competition.

SynchroSwim @ Capital Skyline by Max Cook. We Love DC.  July 21, 2009.

Artists: MG Berkovic, Mary Early, Rachel, Waldron, Adam de Boer, Kendall Nordin, Lisa Marie Thalhammer, Victor, Ekpuk, Michele Montalbano, Tim Tate, Erwin Timmers, Michael Janis, Novie Trump, Laurel Lukaszewski, Rafael J. Canizares-Yunez, Isabel Manalo, Judy Byron, Pat Goslee, Holly Bass, Mark Parascandola, Jonathan Monaghan, Patrick Donovan, Rob Tarbell, Jason Horowitz, Jenny Mullins, Bridget Sue Lambert, Victoria F. Gaitán, Kay Chemush, Carlie Leagield, Bonner Sale, Carol Brown Goldberg, Cory Oberndorfer, Barbara Josephs Liotta, Adriane L. Connerton, Ryan Hackett, F. Lennox Campello, and Helen Glazer.

Well-known curator Mera Rubell, of the Rubell Family Collection, conducted 36 studio visits over the course of 36 straight hours. Rubell, one of eight curators for Cream, WPA’s 2010 Art Auction Exhibition, took the opportunity to get to know DC area artists and to choose work for her section of Cream.

More on 36 Studios in Art in America and The Washington Post.

Seven (photo by James Bailey)

My own experiences with the WPA have been terrific and go back many years. But clearly the most important one was in 2005, when I had perhaps the most difficult and most fun curatorial job ever. This happened when I was retained to curate the massive “Seven” exhibition for the then WPA\Corcoran. My goal in curating the show was to expose WPA artists who rarely, if ever, got any attention from previous curators and pair them up with some well-known names. In order to do that I reviewed 24,000-plus slides in the WPA\C Artfile, plus about a 1,000 digital submissions – the first time that the WPA had used digital entries for a show! I reviewed all those slides and files not once, but twice over a six month period of trips to the Corcoran, where the WPA lived at the time.

“Seven” got its title because it filled seven different spaces at the Warehouse Theatre and Gallery complex on 7th Street, NW. At the time it was the largest WPA exhibition ever, and it was the WPA’s best-selling show up to that time (nearly 70% of all the artwork from 66 artists sold, including two Sam Gilliams, three Chan Chao photos, a major Tim Tate glass piece, huge Graham Caldwell glass piece, Cornelius videos, Jamison painting, etc.) and about a dozen WPA member artists without representation got picked up for representation by galleries from that show (as I took groups of gallerists for one on one tours of the show). These dealers then picked up new artists for their galleries… such as Susan Jamison by Irvine Contemporary.

It was a huge opening with estimates of 600-800 people all spilling out onto the streets. We had a live nude drawing class during the opening show, with the model posing for several artists who created drawings on the spot. They were in what I had dubbed the “Nude Gallery,” which was hung with the work of artists who focused on the nude. We also had opera singer Hisham Breedlove, who had been body painted ahead of time by Adrianne Mills, singing around the galleries as a walking, living work of art. On the top floor gallery, Kathryn Cornelius conducted a performance several times that night. All of this was going on at the opening.

The show got major reviews by the DMV press with coverage in The Washington Post, the City Paper, Georgetowner, and all the new art blogs. It was even covered by local TV as well as covered by CNN – It was the first WPA show ever covered by CNN! The show was the buzz of the town for the whole month and it accomplished what I had intended to do: expose as many “new” artists to the DC art scene as possible while getting the WPA some buzz and selling some artwork. It did all of that and more.

And most important for me: I met the woman who eventually became my wife at the curator talk that I gave during the show! I challenge anyone to beat that success story!