All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Roll With the Music: Scott McKnight & The Jelly Roll Mortals are performing for Second Thursday Music at the Athenaeum (201 Prince St.) in Alexandria, Virginia, on November 12 at 7:00 p.m.

Check out the group's five band members,  music, gigs, and pictures at myspace.com/jellyrollmortals or www.jellyrollmortals.com.

David LaFleur will be playing in the same space at the same time on December 10. More about this master of the guitar, dobro, mandolin, and dulcimer can be found on LaFleur's Website: www.davidlafleurmusic.com/.

Second Thursday Music at the Athenaeum is presented in association with the Songwriters Association of Washington.


What Matters to You?: An imaginative collaborative art project, executed under the auspices of the contemporary Nevin Kelly Gallery in Washington, D.C., offers artists and non-artists alike the chance to participate in art-making live.

As part of an upcoming Nevin Kelly exhibition, "What's Important to You?", artists Sondra Arkin and Judy Byron are asking the public to answer, in 100 or fewer characters, the question, "What's Important to You?" The artists plan to incorporate respondents' answers into their show piece, the final conception of which will be unveiled at the exhibition's opening reception on November 19.

Members of the public who want to offer their thoughts should log on to a Website created expressly for the project: http://www.important2you.com. Multiple entries are permitted.

Nevin Kelly is located at 1400 Irving St., Ste. 132, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20010. The exhibition will run from November 19 to December 12. The opening reception will be from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Direct inquiries to info@nevinkellygallery.com or telephone 202-232-3464.


Talking Art: An engaging show of the work of American sculptor Anne Truitt (1921 - 2004) is now on view at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. On Saturday, November 14, in celebration of the exhibition, James Mundy, director of The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (FFLAC) at Vassar College, will be joining Kristen Hileman, curator at the Hirshhorn, and Mary-Kay Lombino, The Emily Hargroves Fisher and RIchard B. Fisher Curator at FLLAC, for a conversation about the Vassar collection.

This special event for FLLAC members will be preceded by a 10:30 a.m. tour of the museum exhibition, with Hileman and Lombino, and a reception at 1:00 p.m. at the home of Sheila ffolliott and Shepard Krech. The conversation with Mundy is set to begin at 2:00 p.m.

Advance reservations ($70 members, $100 nonmembers) are required. Please direct inquiries, before November 7, to Jennifer Cole, FFLAC's coordinator of Membership, Special Events, and Volunteer Services; telephone 845-437-5391 or e-mail jecole@vassar.edu.

Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection will be on view at the Hirshhorn through January 3, 2010. Images from the show and podcasts are available here. For one of many interesting posts on the Truitt show, see Deborah Barlow's essay "Color Ecstacist" (October 29) on her blog Slow Muse.

FFLAC's collection comprises more than 17,000 works, including Truitt's Signature (1975), in acrylic on wood.


Give Her a Hand: Maryland artist Judith Olivia HeartSong, the subject of an All Art Friday Special Edition interview on October 23, just celebrated her seventh year in the Washington, D.C., area. Congratulations, Judith! We look forward to many more years of creativity in your VisArts studio.


In New York Now: I was in New York City recently and spent much of the time taking in the city's many wonderful exhibitions. Two of particular note are Slash: Paper Under the Knife, at the beautiful Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle, and Kandinsky at the Guggenheim.

Slash features work of 43 artists from around the world, all working in cut, torn, shredded, or burned paper. The exhibition is on view through April 4,  2010. If you go (and you should), stop by and visit for a few minutes with MAD's resident artist Jil Weinstock. Represented by New York City's Charles Cowles Gallery, Weinstock is working with vintage clothing and rubber to create imaginative, highly tactile, and profoundly evocative pieces, including old frames recast in rubber and a family tree made out of antique antimacassars.

The Kandinsky show, on view through January 13, 2010, is eye-opening. Comprising nearly 100 large-format paintings and more than 60 works on paper spanning some 50 years of artistic output, the show is lyrical, inspiring, and highly informative. Kandinsky's later works and his works on paper are among my favorites. Before you go, treat yourself to these excerpts from the self-guided audio tour. (And take the full tour while you're onsite; it's worth your time.)


Painting by iPhone: Take a look here to see how a Jorge Columbo New Yorker cover gets "painted" by using an iPhone app.