A Memory of Artomatic (Washington, DC)

It has been a couple of weeks now since I spent the day in DC touring the officeless office building where the most recent edition of Artomatic was housed. I'd never been before (though it's been going on for around 10 years) and I wasn't sure what to expect. After entering the lobby and taking the elevator up, I found nine floors of work by artists mostly unknown to me, perhaps mostly unknown in general. Taking in so much visual information in a such a short amount of time quickly becomes tiring; it is quite difficult to give full attention to everything in such a situation. Most often I found myself passing over many displays in search of something that would simply grab my attention. This happened only once, when I came upon a series of small drawings done with colored pencils which depicted ambiguous scenes taken from anonymous internet videos. I do not remember the artist's name, unfortunately, but the fuzzily rendered images remain fresh in my mind.

Some Thoughts on the Sondheim Prize

The Sondheim prize is a relatively new award given yearly to an artist from the Baltimore/Washington region. For the past three years the finalists have displayed their work at the Baltimore Museum of Art prior to the announcement of the winner. This year there were six finalists, including two artists who were also finalists last year, Molly Springfield and Karen Yasinsky. For the first time a youngish artist's collective, Baltimore Development Cooperative, made it into the competition. Overall, the show contains some interesting ideas but the works themselves seem less than compelling. My initial thought was that Karen Yasinsky might win by virtue of her having been a finalist before and the fact that she offered something new this year while Molly Springfield (the other two time finalist) displayed work that looked very similar to last year's. When the winner was announced last Saturday evening I was surprised that the award went instead to the Baltimore Development Cooperative (who built a "participation" dome on the front steps of the museum). After some consideration, though, it all made sense. Compared with the somewhat dry artwork by the more "experienced" artists, the DIY kids may have seemed like a breath of fresh air to the three jurors entrusted with awarding the $25,000 prize.
http://www.artbma.org/exhibitions/special/2009_Sondheim/#Sondheim