From the Publisher
At the Phillips, Tomorrow, The Sun Will Rise
The Phillips Collection, in Washington D.C. has brought the DMV’s 48 best artists to its juried exhibition of work created since November 2020, when the present president was elected to his second term in office. The exhibitioning artists’ content, techniques, and presentations relate to the time and place that is so important locally and globally to all of us right now. As the American President shows his concern with artists and their work, whether vocally, instrumentally, visual or sculptural, in the halls of instrumental concerts or in exhibited outdoor sculpture, in museums and government funded exhibitions, he shows his recognition of artists’ power to communicate. In this exhibition, reviewed by Belle D’Armon in this issue, many artists shown have immigrant backgrounds, and most are international, reinforcing the contention that global artists, drawing on different backgrounds, artistic languages drawing on different traditions elicit interest from DC audiences and our visitors, showing the power of artists to bring us together. D’Armon writes about five of her favorites, analyzing well the influence of these important works.
The high number of enthusiastic collectors and viewers of this exhibition, Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise, and Art Lantern congratulate the 48 artists, practitioners of video, photography, textile art, soundscape and painting, and Curators Tie Jojima and Tsedays Makonnen and the Director of the Phillips Jonathan Binstock on a superb exhibition, a job well done.
Jeanne Stanek conducts a masterful interview with Don Kimes, Professor of Studio Art and Head of the program at American University whose latest work, including his latest displayed in the Phillips exhibition, emanates from the tragic flood that turned his prior work to pulp. He explains and in so doing, encourages all of us to make beautiful art, as he did, inspired by ruined work. As well as the work of Don Kimes, with its sea blue on an ovoid canvas, representing, for me, a bisected world, of sky and sea, seemingly encompasses the detritus of ruined wood from trees felled by a storm, which is, as he relates in his interview with Jeanne Stanek in this issue, exactly the memory he paints. Don’s stories and history will inspire us all.
Elga Wimmer, reviewing Miriam Cahn’s abstract work, shows us how an artist’s work evolves over her career to the crescendo it has reached in her latest exhibition.
Both Jorge Benitez and Lanita Brooks Colbert comment on the use of gold, in its variations from paint to solid gold in different cultures and times, culminating in justified commentary on how it is now used in our nation’s capital to further the illusion of power by the present administration. Lanita Brooks Colbert brings taste or lack thereof into her argument, defining kitsch as the element that dominates art of the administration now, whereas Benitez shows how gold has been tied to power, and who has used it, justifiably by the nobility, or not, by those elected in a democratic constitutional nation.
Elaine King brilliantly reviews the work of Nick Cave, illustrating how he has brought together the arts, in film, music and sculpture to create marvelous, other worldly visions.
King’s review of Nick Cage’s comprehensive, and mind-blowing show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC shows Cage’s brilliant merger of music and visual art and filmed performance tied to both which we are continuously interested in at Art Lantern and which we will continue to explore more fully in the November issue.
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Thank you, Nancy.
