Artist of the Day: Shepard Fairey's Obama "Hope and Progress"

The offical poster for Barack Obama's campaign, this image was commissioned for 50,000 copies and was even immortalized on a t-shirt collaboration with The Upper Playground. For information on the artist, view the QBN Sessions listed below.

Richard Avedon's " Portraits of Power" at The Corcoran

Richard Avedon (1923–2004), America’s pre-eminent portraitist and fashion photographer, photographed the faces of politics throughout his career. As the country enters the next presidential election season, the Corcoran will bring together Avedon’s political portraits for the first time. Juxtaposing images of elite government, media, and labor officials with counter-cultural activists and ordinary citizens caught up in national debates, this exhibition will explore a five-decade taxonomy of politics and power by one of our best-known artists.

Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power includes approximately 250 photographs from the 1950s through the artist’s death in 2004, displayed chronologically and grouped within Avedon’s specific editorial projects. The exhibition includes many rarely-seen and some never-before-exhibited or published photographs. A major catalogue, published by Steidl, accompanies the exhibition.

Avedon, with unparalleled access afforded by his fame and his work for such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Egoïste, and The New Yorker, photographed important figures of the American political scene throughout his career. In addition to single portraits commissioned to accompany magazine profiles, the artist made several extended photographic essays with political themes.

Among these, his groundbreaking 1976 portrait series “The Family” is most significant. Commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine, Avedon made 69 portraits depicting elected officials, government bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists, captains of industry, and union leaders—all representatives of the American political, military, media, and corporate elite. He photographed people on both sides of the civil rights debate for his book Nothing Personal (1964), and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he documented the American anti-war movement and the war in Vietnam. In 1993 Avedon combined past work with new images for a nostalgic New Yorker photo-essay called “Exiles: The Kennedy Court at the End of the American Century.” In 2004, the artist accepted a New Yorker commission to make portraits that would illustrate “a sense of the country” during a politically fractious time. While working on the project in Texas, Avedon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage; he died a short time later. “Democracy” was published by The New Yorker in incomplete form just before the election.

This exhibition traces one artist’s fascination with the animating forces of American democracy. Seen together, the photographs comprise a kind of historical group portrait, showing key figures from a half-century of political life. They provoke questions about the complex motivations of portraitists and their subjects, who work—sometimes at cross-purposes—to depict or project an image that conveys personal history, character, ambitions, and ideals. Finally, they reveal an extraordinary career-long investigation into the complex nature of power. Surrounded by the faces of the powerful, leaders and ordinary citizens alike, the audience is itself empowered by the dialogue that results between those who use power to exercise control and those who seek it to affect change.

Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power is organized by Paul Roth, senior curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 Seventeenth Street NW
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 639-1700
www.corcoran.org

SOURCE: Corcoran Gallery

DWR & Metroplis/ARTS & ARCHITECTURE launch party, SoHo Taschen Store, October 30, 2008

Arts & Architecture Launch Party

Thursday, October 30th

7-9pm

-at-

Design Within Reach

110 Greene Street

Between Prince and Spring

www.taschen.com

Exhibition Invitation from WHATIFTHEWORLD: How the Troubles Started by Wilhelm Saayman & Lizza Littlewort 05 - 29 November 2008

Lizza Littlewort, How the Trouble Started, 2008, Watercolour on Fabriano

How the Troubles Started
An exhibition by Wilhelm Saayman and Lizza Littlewort
Opening: Wednesday, 05 November 18h00

The exhibition How the troubles started shows the work of Wilhelm Saayman and Lizza Littlewort, two artists whose renown in the contemporary art scene is based in dark humourous commentary conveyed through annotated drawings which stretch and wrench graphic language. Here, the two are brought together into one show for the first time, and from the outset the intense contrasts and similarites in their work set up a strong debate. The setting is the context of South Africa, around which they weave a dark shadowy mesh of tales.
Saayman’s work heads into the underbelly of the human condition, and is peopled with a rich population of sharply observed characters: the dodgy, the dangerous, as well as the guttingly human and despairingly personal. His highly evolved anti-art style places his work neck-and-neck with the bleak and brilliant humour of British contemporaries like David Shrigley, and brings to his work the urgency and power usually only found in the drawings of children or the criminally insane. It is exciting, relentless stuff, charged with a gleeful energy that makes for compulsive viewing.


Wilhelm Saayman, The Future is Better with Pills, Watercolour on Fabriano

Littlewort’s work for this show forms a hilariously bleak comment on the predicament of contemporary art in South African society. To ‘get’ much of the content of contemporary art, its audience needs a level of knowledge about art that is simply not the norm in South Africa, leaving the “art world” cut adrift, in an absurd conversation with itself. The show centres around a picture book, 'Let’s buy some art for Christmas,' in which Littlewort weaves a droll storyline from common platitudes about art. She interprets themes from the book through cartoonish paintings and painterly cartoons, providing a send-up of romanticized genius and a very concise crash course in Art Criticism 101.

Limited edition publications by each artist will accompany the exhibition, and will be available for purchase through the gallery. Click here for more info.

SOURCE: WHATIFTHEWORLD

Bond Street Gallery to close door EFFECTIVE Saturday, November 1, 2008

BOND STREET GALLERY, known for showcasing various forms of contemporary works from emerging and established artists, is closing its doors effective Saturday, November 1, 20008 at 6pm. Please remember this gallery as it says farewell; I am sure this is not the last we will hear from Director/Curator Amani Olu. Listed below is the contact information:

BOND STREET GALLERY
297 Bond Street (at Union St. in Carroll Gardens) | Brooklyn, NY 11231

P 718 858 2297 | F 718 858 7297 | E info@bondstreetgallery.com


Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Smithhaven, NY, 2003

Wassily Kandinsky Retrospective held at Lenbachhaus (Munich), Guggenheim (New York) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris)

Munich, Germany - The Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York are the three museums worldwide that hold the largest collections of works by Wassily Kandinsky. Together these three museums organized a large joint show on this outstanding modernist artist and founder of abstract painting. On view 25 October through 22 February, 2009.

This large and ambitious retrospective includes some 95 paintings from all the important periods of Kandinsky’s oeuvre, with the collections of the three participating museums complementing each other perfectly. While the Lenbachhaus draws on the outstanding collection of works from Kandinsky’s Blue Rider period from 1908 to 1914 donated by Gabriele Münter, the focus of the collection at the Centre Pompidou is on the artist’s output during the Russian Revolution and his Bauhaus years from 1917 to 1933, although it is also in possession of some extraordinary works from the Paris period donated by Nina Kandinsky. Finally, thanks to the purchases made by Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay, the exhibition also features a number of Kandinsky’s late works produced in Paris between 1933 and 1944, together with several of the early Expressionist gems now held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The coming exhibition is based on an unprecedented number of paintings of great variety from each of the three participating museums. To be able to shed light on the role Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) played as both a pioneer and theorist of abstraction, the organizers intend to bring together only those major, large-format works that were crucial to his development, and hence to focus the show on some of the very best examples of work he produced when at the height of his powers.

In addition to an ideal selection of the best works from the three aforementioned collections, the show also includes some magnificent loans from Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Basel, all chosen so as to present Kandinsky’s series of large-format “Impressions,“ “Improvisations,” and “Compositions” as comprehensively as possible.

By bringing together three separate collections never before loaned on such a vast scale, this first—and to date only— collaboration between the world’s three largest Kandinsky museums provides a unique opportunity to experience the artist’s work more directly and more intensively than ever before, and to review the periods he spent in Moscow, Munich, and Paris, and his collector contacts in America. It also constitutes an unprecedented opportunity for international cooperation between major museums.

For the Lenbachhaus, this Kandinsky retrospective represents a new high-water mark in its role as exhibitor of treasures by the Blue Rider group, as well as enabling it, for the first time on these premises, to show Kandinsky in a larger context encompassing even the late works of 1942. It is also the last major show to be held at the Lenbachhaus before it closes for the modernization work due to commence in March 2009, immediately after the exhibition finishes. Visit : http://www.lenbachhaus.de/cms/

SOURCE: Art Knowledge News

Mohamed Bourouissa "Peripheries" at Galerie Les Filles du Calvarie

Mohamed Bourouissa
Périphéries
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
17 rue des Filles du Calvaire
75003 Paris
France


October 30th - November 22nd
Opening:
October 30th 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM


WEBSITE: www.fillesducalvaire.com
NEIGHBORHOOD: 3rd Arrondissement
EMAIL: paris@fillesducalvaire.com
PHONE: +33 (0)1 42.74.47.05
OPEN HOURS: Tue - Sat 11am-6:30pm

Photo credit: BourrissaMohamed Bourouissa, La fenêtre, 2005
© courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire

Peter Gronquist's "The Revolution Will Be Fabulous: A Weapons of Mass Designer Show"

For more information on these pieces, or to purchase anything, please contact the gallery at gallery1988@aol.com.

To visit the gallery, please click here.

For more information on Peter Gronquist, please click here.

P.S., I need the Hermes piece in my life!

Sotheby's Says It Lost $15 Million on Art Auction Guarantees

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Disappointing art auctions in London and Hong Kong this month cost Sotheby's $15 million in losses on guarantees it provided sellers.

The losses occurred because the artworks either sold for less than the minimum price the auction house guaranteed to sellers, or not at all, Sotheby's said in a filing late yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Sotheby's agrees to pays some consignors a guarantee regardless of whether a property sells or at what price. Auction houses use guarantees to encourage art owners to sell through them.

The New York company can ``comfortably weather'' the loss, said Lawrence Creatura, a fund manager with Clover Capital Management in Rochester, New York. As of June 30, Sotheby's had cash of $375.4 million, according to a company filing.

``The larger concern may be what it says about the state of the art market,'' said Creatura, whose company held almost 112,000 Sotheby's shares as of June 30.

He wouldn't comment on current holdings.

A year ago, Sotheby's disclosed a loss of $14.6 million on guarantees from its Impressionist and modern-art sale in New York, prompting a same-day 8.6 percent drop in its share price. Yesterday's announcement was made after the close of the U.S. stock market. Sotheby's shares have fallen 77 percent this year to their lowest since July 2003.

Third Parties

Sotheby's said that it has outstanding guarantees of $285.5 million, of which $63.3 million was taken on by third parties it didn't disclose. Chief Executive Officer Bill Ruprecht said in May he will reduce risk by cutting guarantees.

Yesterday, the company disclosed that guarantees have fallen 50 percent from a year ago, and that it plans to ``continue to substantially reduce its use of auction guarantees until stability is restored in the global economy and financial markets.''

In London, sales by Sotheby's, Christie's International and Phillips de Pury & Co. brought in a combined 59 million pounds ($95 million), against minimum estimates of 106.2 million pounds, according to Bloomberg calculations. Sotheby's Hong Kong sale totaled $141.7 million, about half its presale estimate.

Spokeswoman Diana Phillips declined to say whether the London and Hong Kong sales were profitable.

The filing said Sotheby's will account for the loss from the guarantees in third-quarter earnings, due for release early next month.

SOURCE: Bloomberg

November Target First Saturday: London Calling!

Saturday, November 1:
London Calling
FREE admission from 5 to 11 p.m.



5:30 - 7:30 p.m. Singing Sculpture Interactive
Schapiro Wing, 5th Floor
Bring your favorite song on your MP3 player to lip synch, mime or dance to, and create your own singing sculpture like Gilbert and George's famous performance art project.

6 - 8 p.m. Music
Hall of the Americas, 1st Floor
Nigerian Brit Adama shares her repertoire of world- and jazz-influenced alternative pop, known in London as Electronica pop.

6 - 8 p.m. Film
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd Floor
In a triumph of documentary storytelling, Election Day (Katy Chevigny, 2007, 90 min., NR) combines 11 stories of street-level experience of American voters on November 2, 2004. A discussion with director follows. Free tickets (340) available at the Visitor Center at 5 p.m.*

6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Artist Talk
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Forum, 4th Floor
British-born artist Edwina Sandys discusses her work on feminist themes. Free tickets (30) available at the Visitor Center at 5 p.m.*

6:30 - 8:30 p.m. Hands-On Art
Education Division, 1st Floor
Be inspired by Gilbert and George's dedication to their London neighborhood and create a collage of your own neighborhood. Participants are encouraged to bring photographs or items from their neighborhood to include in their collages. Free timed tickets (380) available at the Visitor Center at 5:30 p.m.*

7:30 p.m. Young Voices Gallery Talk
Meet at the entrance to the Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor
Student Guide, Simone Herbin leads a lively Sign Language-interpreted gallery talk on the work of Gilbert and George.

8 p.m. Artist Talk
Meet at the entrance to the Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st Floor
Artist Jesper Just discusses the exhibition Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions. Free tickets (30) available at the Visitor Center at 7 p.m.*

8:30 p.m. Film
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd Floor
The enchanting film My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1986, 97, NR, content advisory) shows an interracial, same-sex couple's struggle for love and success in England. Free tickets (340) available at the Visitor Center at 7 p.m.*

9 - 11 p.m. Dance Party
Beaux Art Court, 3rd Floor
DJs Miss Modular, Dr. Maz, and Kevington of Mondo NYC's legendary premier indie dance party host a dance party celebrating the creative sounds of young Britain, spinning Brit Pop, Northern Soul, New Wave, Beat, and British Indie.

* Due to limited capacity, some programs require tickets.
Free tickets are available for these selected programs. There are THREE ticket distribution times: 5 p.m. for ticketed programs that begin before 8 p.m.; 5:30 p.m. for Hands-On Art; and 7 p.m. for ticketed programs that begin at 8 p.m. and after. Lines for tickets often form 30 minutes before tickets are distributed. Members may pick up tickets from the Membership Desk beginning at 2 p.m. while supplies last.

Programs subject to change without notice.
Free general admission and $4 parking (flat rate), 5-11 p.m.
Museum galleries are open until 11 p.m.
Cash bar, food concessions, and Shop open until 11 p.m.

Learn more about the Brooklyn Museum and its rich selection of ongoing programs and resources.

Photo credit: Adama. Yaniv Edry

SOURCE: Brooklyn Museum

NANA' DALLA PORTA, SoHo, NYC, October 2008

This Italian illustrator/artist was selling limited edition prints on Broadway & Prince down in SoHo, NYC. I was able to purchase a couple for $7 bucks each and were well worth the amount. Some people buy stocks; I buy art. For more on Nana' Dalla Porta:

www.nanaus.com
www.myspace.com/nanaus
nanaus@email.it
+039-3346113371

Chris Anthony at Randall Scott Gallery This Saturday, Oct. 25, 2008

Randall Scott Gallery

opening this Saturday


Chris Anthony
im the most normal person i know


October 25th-November 22nd

opening reception
October 25th 6pm-8pm

The Artist Bio:
Chris Anthony photographs within a world lined with antique wallpaper, creaky hardwood floors and vast ballrooms dimly lit with grand chandeliers. His imagery draws inspiration from Victorian and Flemish painters, Caravaggio and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron with stylized set designs making use of vintage props that are mainly from his personal collection of masks, costumes and furnishings. His process equally moves between modern digital technology, and a large format film camera mounted with vintage lenses dating back to 1870. Within this space, Anthony is wonderfully adrift in time, deep within the narratives of history, technology and imagination. In his first exhibition at the gallery, we present "I'm the Most Normal Person I Know" his current series of images that utilize both grand spaces and intimate tableaux.

Randall Scott Gallery
1326 14th Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20005

202-332-0806
202-332-0807 fax
www.randallscottgallery.com
info@randallscottgallery.com

Hours:
11AM-6PM Wed-Sat

Location
1/2 block south of Rhode Island at 14th Street NW
2nd floor above Thai Tanic Restaurant

SOURCE: Randall Scott Gallery

i heart art @ tracey keilly's "recent work," chair and the maiden gallery

a student of life, experience and the 'Universe," Keilly's counts as her influences Andre Beton, Marie Louise Von Franz, Carl Jung, Kienholz and Basquait. Her mind is beautiful and so are her works of arts; before I arrived, socialite and songwriter Denise Rich purchased her piece entitled "royal self." Currently on display at the chair and maiden gallery; see additional information below.

chair and the maiden gallery
19 christopher street
ny ny 10014
212 255 0562
chairandthemaiden.com
info@chairandthemaiden.com