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Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize

Monday Links: Cindy Cheng Wins Sondheim Prize, “Art Barbie” Fails to Win Art Battle L.A.

by Michael Anthony Farley on July 17, 2017

Frida Davidsson, winner of Art Battle Los Angeles. Image via @fridadavidssonart Instagram, [h/t artnet News]

There’s now a booming outlet for fanfic, including stories “portraying a near future where the Trump administration has criminalized selfies, radicalizing Kim Kardashian as a freedom fighter for women’s rights.” The Toronto startup Wattpad has moved the online subculture closer to the mainstream publishing world, and former AFC editor Rea McNamara has written a fascinating profile on the subculture and its transition. [NOW]
Designer Raul Lopez has deconstructed the uniforms of corporate America into genderless cubist forms and they’re amazing. [Vogue]
The Broad’s upcoming exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is expected to be a huge blockbuster when it opens on October 21. The museum announced yesterday that they’ll be pre-selling all 50,000 tickets for the show online on September 1st at noon. I’d be worried about servers crashing from that volume of traffic. [Los Angeles Times]
In other L.A. news, Art Battle just took place in the Arts District and it sounds like it was terrible. It’s a live painting competition, which involved lots of paintings of pop culture things, dollar signs, hearts, and someone named “Art Barbie”. [artnet News]
Wow. Add this to the bucket list: the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle left behind a 14 acre sculpture park in Tuscany inspired by Gaudi’s Park Güell. Her “Tarot Garden” is populated by giant goddess figures and a feminist takes on the tarot deck. This looks really cool. [Artsy]
Hong Kong high school students just set a world record for a display of 1,214 3D-printed sculptures of buildings from the city’s skyline. It kinda looks like a Won Ju Lim installation! (The 3D printing marathon was organized to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to mainland Chinese rule… which has been a less than great thing so far for the city’s pro-democracy activists, but that’s another story). [South China Morning Post]
Congrats to Cindy Cheng, winner of the 2017 Sondheim Prize of $25,000. (As a curator, I’ve worked with Cheng before and can vouch that she totally deserves it!) Here, Angela N. Carroll, Bret McCabe, and Cara Ober discuss all the finalists. [BmoreArt]

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NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Wickerham & Lomax

by Michael Anthony Farley on October 21, 2015

This Summer, we checked out Wickerham & Lomax’s winning Sondheim Prize installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art. That exhibition offered dark humor informed by a queer perspective on various subcultures—dominated by larger-than-life hazing paddles emblazoned with Greek letters. Here, they’ve sent us a GIF vision of frat-boy hell.

Get initiated, after the jump.

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We Went To Baltimore Part 2: Too Many Semi-Finalists in the Sondheim Semi-Finalist Exhibition

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on July 21, 2015

MICA
1300 W. Mount Royal Ave.
Baltimore, MD
Sondheim Semi-Finalist Exhibition
What’s on view: 54 Semi-finalists for the Sondheim Prize held inside several MICA Galleries. Lots of sculpture, lots of photographs, and a few paintings that made the short list for the Sondheim Prize, an annual open call juried exhibition for baltimore-area artists. (This includes artists living in cities like Washington.) There’s no theme, and no attempt to forge one. All the galleries were crammed with work.

Michael Anthony Farley: Really, I think everyone has the same complaint every year: there is just too much stuff! No matter what strategies are employed, the show just always feels overhung and uneven.

Paddy Johnson: Honestly, I think you’re being overly-generous to this show. It was terrible.

Find out why after the jump.

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Artscape Baltimore Gallery/Survival Guide: Events

by Michael Anthony Farley on July 15, 2015

If you’re planning to visit Baltimore for the Artscape festival this weekend, this guide helps navigate the back-to-back art openings. If you’re not planning on coming, you should.

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