Showing posts with label Lane Hagood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lane Hagood. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

The Bart Book of the Dead

Robert Boyd

The catalog says it best: "Sketch Klubb is a group of friends who get together every other Saturday morning to draw." It was 12 guys, but one of them, Michael Harwell, recently died. 1,000 Crappy Barts for Michael Harwell plus Klay Klubb is a tribute to their lost compadre.



When you walk into the big back gallery of Box 13, there is a vitrine with an open sketchbook. This is Harwell's sketchbook, and the page we see has 16 drawings of Bart Simpson's head. There are a minimal number of lines in the Matt Groening-designed head of Bart, and Harwell deliberately takes them apart.

Starting from this page, the surviving members of Sketch Klubb--Seth Alverson, Rene Cruz, Russell Etchen, Sebastian Forray, Lane Hagood, Cody Ledvina, Nick Meriwether, Eric Pearce, Patrick Phipps, J. Michael Stovall and David Wang--drew 1000 versions of Bart Simpson, which are on the three walls surrounding the vitrine.







They aren't very memorable drawings. The goal was quantity over quality. This may reflect the ethos of Sketch Klubb. They've put together a few zines and a book before, but I suspect the idea is to get together and draw without having an endgame in mind. Doesn't matter if it's "good."



Not that there weren't a few drawings that were clever. Like this Creature from the Black Lagoon Bart.



Or this Bart who looks a little like Hank Hill crossed with Walter White.



How about an airbrushed Bart with 13 eyes?



Or a sweaty Bart with a beard and boobs for eyes. (There were a lot of mutant Barts in the show.)



The work was hung in a off-hand, unprofessional way--pages curled up in the humidity. But that seemed right. After all, they weren't creating something for the ages--this was a temporary tribute to Harwell that no doubt recalled their casual Saturday morning get-togethers.

Slightly more finished work was on display in the front gallery of Box 13. These were ceramic objects made by Sketch Klubb. None of the work was labeled, so for the purpose of this review, just assume a collective authorship for these bizarre ceramic knick-knacks.





(Thank God the "MAN MILK" jug was empty.)










Some of them are pretty funny, and they seem like a natural extension of the artistic ethos of Sketch Klubb.

The individual artists in Sketch Klubb do a wide variety of work on their own, but as diverse as their styles are, I'd say that what they have in common is an element of humor. The question I have is that was it their sense of humor that drew them together in 2005, or is their sense of humor as artists partly a result of their time together in Sketch Klubb?

I saw this exhibit on opening night. The crowd was boisterous and good humored. I wonder what it would be like to see when the galleries are quiet and unpopulated.



Sunday, December 30, 2012

Pan Art Writing Contest

Robert Boyd

Calling all would be art-writers! We live in a world that is hostile to art writers. Artists simultaneously--schizophrenically--love to be written about and complain about how we fail to understand their work. Collectors apparently ignores us (Don Thompson said that art writers and art magazines were the least important determiner of art's monetary value, while Sarah Thornton spoke of people who read Artforum for the ads). Newspapers have been eliminating the art critic position for decades. The art world has become so odious that some writers are leaving it.

On the other hand, you have the proliferation of art blogs (including this one). Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, Art Fag City, greg.org, etc., are all excellent venues for lively art writing. And you have Creative Time | Warhol Foundation, who give lots of money every year to art writers. The Great God Pan Is Dead can't give grants to art writers (because we are a no-revenue operation), but we can give prizes. Hence the first annual Pan Art Writing Contest.

OK, here's what we are looking for. A blog post between 750 and 2000 words about art. The following types of posts are acceptable:
1. a review of an exhibit that is still on view
2. a review of a performance from the last month
3. a review of a piece of public art that has been installed in the past three months
4. a review of a book or film about art that has been published or released in the past six months
5. an editorial on some current issue in the art world
6. a report on a local art scene
7. an interview or studio visit with an artist
Your entry should include at least one jpeg image (with proper credits)--more than one if possible.

The work should be original, and should be previously unpublished.

The submission deadline is January 31. Winners will be announced no later than February 28.

Here are the prizes:



Nic Nicosia. This handsome hardcover published by The University of Texas Press covers the career of Nic Nicosia, an really great photographer who we have reviewed here before.



Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this classic collection helped reintroduce America to an all-but-forgotten part of its artistic heritage. A brilliant anthology.



I Am James Ensor. This artist's book by great Houston artist Lane Hagood stars the ghost of James Ensor. It's number 44 out of an edition of 50.



The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song by David Lasky and Frank M. Young. A graphic novel biography of the famous country music pioneers, drawn by David Lasky in a style that evokes early 20th century comic strips, this is a moving work of Americana.

 

Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston by Alison de Lima Greene. Published in the centennial year (2000) of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, this enormous, well-illustrated book is kind of a first stab at an art history of Texas, in a way. Focusing mainly on modern and contemporary work, it's quite fascinating to see how artists who are still quite active were seen in 2000. We have two copies of this excellent book to award.

The first prize winner will be able to select one from this list. The second prize winner can select from the remaining, and so on.

Send all entries to robertwboyd2020@yahoo.com.

Writers retain all rights to their own work. The Great God Pan Is Dead may wish to publish the entry, but the writer retains the right to decline.The contest is open to everyone except for current writers for The Great God Pan Is Dead.


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Monday, November 26, 2012

Wrapped Up In Books with Seth Alverson and Lane Hagood

Robert Boyd


Cronopios installation view at Kaboom Books

Lane Hagood is a bookworm. This was obvious when he won the Hunting Prize for a painting called Books I Have Possessed. Books have remained a subject for his work. And even when books are not directly referred to in his paintings, his work still feels bookish. It gives one the feeling of old libraries or cramped bookstores like Kaboom.




Kaboom is the kind of place where one might find an out-of-print book like Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar, and Lane Hagood is the kind of person who would pick it up. Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) was an Argentine writer who was one of the first writers of "el Boom," a flowering of writing in Latin America that reached across borders and languages in the 1960s and 70s. He's best known in the English speaking world for his short stories (his first book in English was Blow-Up: And Other Stories--the movie Blow-Up is loosely based on Cortázar's story) and his novel Hopscotch. Around the World in Eighty Days is an unusual book, a collection of short non-fiction pieces, reviews, essays, etc., that is considered somewhat autobiographical. I say "considered" because I've never read it. (The extent of my Cortázar is the Blow-Up collection.) One thing about it is that it is full of illustrations and collages, some by Cortázar and some chosen by him. These illustrations intrigued Hagood and inspired this exhibit, Cronopios. Hagood and his collaborator in this project, painter Seth Alverson, describe the genesis in this brief dialogue:
Seth- Hey this book has really cool pictures in it.
Lane- Yeah, it’s a good book. That’s why I bought it, idiot.
S- Wouldn’t it be neat if I picked my favorite pictures out of the book and painted them, and you picked your favorite pictures out of the book and painted them, and I didn’t know which ones you picked, and you didn’t know which ones I picked? Th
en we would see how much we have in common. It would be a fun surprise at the end!
L- That sounds like a good time. I like little paintings.
S- I like little paintings too. How many pictures should we paint?
L- I dunno. Like 15?
S- Sure, that’s enough. 



A "cronopio" is a type of character in Cortázar's stories of the 60s. In this exhibit, Hagood and Alverson claim to be cronopios. Cortázar described cronopios like so:
When cronopios will travel, the hotels are full, the trains have already left, it's raining buckets, and taxis do not want to take them or charge them high prices. The cronopios not discouraged because they firmly believe that these things happen to everyone, and at bedtime they say to each other: "The beautiful city, the beautiful city." And dream all night of the city's fantastic parties to which they have been invited. The next day they rise thrilled, and that's how cronopios travel. [from "Historias de Cronopios y de Famas" by Julio Cortázar, 1962, translated by Google with some help from me.]
A friend of mine recently wrote "One thing about no one reading anymore is I'm somehow more okay with people not reading anything than I was with people reading stuff that was wrong." That he shared this aphorism on Facebook is probably meaningful. It feels as if the age of reading books is ending. That gives this show an elegiac feel. In its content and its setting, it is a celebration of bookishness, a quality diminishing in the modern world.



To see the paintings, one must mimic an activity of browsing in a bookstore. This activity is less adventurous than being a flâneur or walking in a Situationist dérive, but it's related to them. You wander the shelves--so expansive and maze-like at Kaboom--looking for the paintings, but also seeing the spines of innumerable books that you will never read. But, if you are a bookworm, you also know that you will eventually read some of them.



And sometimes you see where Hagood and Alverson have painted their own versions of the same image. Their choices are different for the most part, just as any two readers reading the same book have a different understanding of the book. This was something that Barthes theorized about, and which Borges discussed in a much pithier way. Given the number of potential readers for a number of potential books, meanings multiply explosively. A bookstore is a symbol for infinity.



Bookstores are hangouts for anti-social nerds, for people who would rather read than live. This is what we bookworms sometimes believe about ourselves. But going to Kaboom affords us the chance to speak with someone who is a priest or shaman to our class--the bookstore owner. Kaboom is owned by John and Dee Dillman. They prepared a veritable feast for Cronopios, served out on the back patio of Kaboom.



And John Dillman won't let me leave without telling me what he is reading and asking about what I am reading (biographies of Harold Ickes and Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, respectively). He's the one who told me that Donald Barthelme was great but that his brothers are terrible. I don't totally agree, but as I looked at this show, I thought about Donald Barthelme. Like Cortázar, he favored the short story, and like Cortázar, he occasionally made texts sprinkled with his own illustrations and collages.



Dillman was inspired by Hagood and Alverson and Cortázar. So he drew the following image on the street in front of Kaboom.



An enormous hopscotch court. A beautiful homage to the ultimate cronopio, Julio Cortázar.

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Thursday, November 15, 2012

Pan Recommends for the week of November 15 to November 21

Robert Boyd

Lots of interesting shows, including some at highly unusual venues. But why did everybody schedule their openings for Friday? Planning for gallery hopping this Friday will require some serious effort!

FRIDAY

Sojourner at the Menil Collection Bookstore at 5 pm (on view through January 15). I love the notion that the Menil is such a font of art that even the bookstore has art exhibits. This one, on the theme of travel, is curated by Anne Regan and features art by Libby Black, Alika Cooper, Ryan De La Hoz , Rachel Foster , Bryson Gill , HellaCrisis , Isaac T. Lin , Gaelan McKeown-Hickel , Casey Watson and Travis Wyche.

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the CAMH at 6 pm (on view through February 15). Features Derrick Adams, Terry Adkins, Papo Colo, Jamal Cyrus, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Theaster Gates, Zachary Fabri, Sherman Fleming, Coco Fusco, Girl [Chitra Ganesh + Simone Leigh], David Hammons, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Wayne Hodge, Satch Hoyt, Ulysses S. Jenkins, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Kalup Linzy, Dave McKenzie, Jayson Musson aka Hennessy Youngman, Senga Nengudi, Tameka Norris, Lorraine O’Grady, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Rammellzee, Sur Rodney (Sur), Jacolby Satterwhite, Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons, Danny Tisdale, and Carrie Mae Weems. And on opening night, there are two performances starting at 7:30: "The Last Trumpet" by Terry Adkins and "Costuming the Body with Nothing" by PopeL, as well as performances Saturday and throughout the period of the show.

Shane Tolbert: Talk of Montauk at Bill's Junk, 6 pm (on view through December 22). Shane Tolbert spent his summer vacation residency at Montauk, and the paintings on view at Bill's Junk were the result. Come out and see them and pretend you spent your summer in an idyllic seashore setting painting...

Stacks curated by Robert Pruitt at the Art League, 6 pm (on view through January 14). This isn't just a show--it's a series of residencies that will feature performances and installations. The participating artists are Jamal Cyrus, Nathaniel Donnett, Autumn Knight, Phillip Pyle II, and M'kina Tapscott, along with writer Garry Reece and on opening night, poet Douglas Kearney. Opening night will feature the destruction of racist memorabilia donated by the audience, so if any of you have any pickaninny dolls that you are, you know, slightly embarrassed to own, bring it to the Art League Friday.

Franklin Evans: "houstontohouston" at Diverse Works, at 6 pm (on view through January 5). I don't know much about this artist and the show description makes it sound like a hi-brow version of Hoarders, but it's the first official exhibit at the new Diverse Works, and that's pretty exciting!
Wax at Cardoza Fine Art, 7 pm with a performance by V.R.S. and Screwed Anthologies sometime after 9 pm. This show features the work of Bret Shirley, Erin Joyce, and Lauren Moya Ford. Some of Houston's wildest shows are at this funky loft gallery, so you shouldn't miss this one. 

SATURDAY

Cronopios by Seth Alverson and Lane Hagood at Kaboom! at 6 pm. Two of Houston's finest painters read Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar and decided to make paintings of all the illustrations in the book. Naturally, they chose a bookstore--the always excellent Kaboom!--to display them.

French Neon and Cody Ledvina at galleryHOMELAND at 6 pm (through December 30). Skydive and galleryHOMELAND are teaming up for this duel exhibit. French Neon is a collective consisting of Daniel Bainbridge, Zachary Bruder, Donald Cameron, Leah Dixon, Erin Lee Jones,David Teng Olsen, Kassie Teng, Adrian Tone, Lauren Seidan, and Mark Sengbusch. Cody Ledvina will be presenting a new video called "Dad Town is an HJ Hub." French Neon will also be presenting an artists' talk at 1 pm at Skydive.

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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Why I Did the Pan Art Fair

Robert Boyd

Readers who have been wondering where the reviews are may be slightly irritated that the Pan Art Fair has dominated the attention of this blog. Now that it's over, I want to explain why we expanded the blog to include this event.

PHILOSOPHY

Part of the reason I publish this blog is to engage the local Houston art scene. And it is a great vehicle for engagement, but it engages in a certain way. It is about art. It thinks about art. That is only one kind of engagement--an important one, but after doing the blog for a while, I was interested in trying other kinds of engagement.

The social--getting to know artists and curators and dealers and collectors and various scenesters (not to mention other writers like Dean Liscum and Virginia Billaud Anderson, who joined this blog over time)--is a kind of engagement that arose organically out of the blog.

But two other kinds of engagement interested me. That of curator and that of impresario. I got to try on my curator's hat first with a small show at the 2010 Fringe Festival then with a show co-curated with Zoya Tommy of P.G. Contemporary called Pan y Circos in 2011.

The art fairs, Houston Fine Art Fair (HFAF) and Texas Contemporary Art Fair (TCAF) started in 2011. I had never been to an art fair, and I found them pretty fascinating. I thought about doing a hotel counter-fair last year, but didn't really have time to put it together. Later, I went to Frieze, Pulse and NADA in New York.  I liked seeing the smaller satellite fairs that showed a somewhat different range of artwork than the big fair. So I resolved to do it.

Pan Art Fair isn't a critique of TCAF. Quite the contrary, I'd say that our existence helps validate TCAF--a fair knows it has arrived when it attracts satellites. Our goals were identical, really--to show and sell artwork to the art-loving public in a concentrated place and time. The reason I did it was to engage art locally in a different way than I do with the blog--as an impresario. In a certain way I was a curator (I chose who would exhibit work) but in another way I was little more than a comic book convention organizer. And I think the latter is just as noble as the former. The idea of commerce here is just as important as the idea of connoisseurship. But most important was getting a bunch of people together--including a bunch of people I didn't already know--and having fun.

EXECUTION


Brad Moody, Emily Jockers and drawer artist Aron Williams at preview night. Party Viking David Lake is in the background

Initially, I chose four exhibitors. My idea was to have two alternative galleries (the kind that would be too small to exhibit at TCAF) and two "un-galleried" artists--who due to their lack of gallery representation would also be frozen out of TCAF. This was how I saw the Pan Art Fair as being an alternative--it would show art that you couldn't see at the other art fair.

I had met Sharon Engelstein when Zoya Tommy asked her to be in Pan y Circos. I loved her gallery Front Gallery (in the front room of her house), so it was an obvious choice. But it turned out to be a fortuitous choice because she brought a combination of great local art and "blue chip" art. But even more important, she engaged me on the practical philosophy of running something like this--how to set it up, how to do the money part of it, etc.

Cardoza Fine Art is basically a gallery in a loft space run by Pablo Cardoza. I wanted him involved because I was a big fan of Chris Cascio's work (which I knew Cardoza could bring) but also wanted someone who was plugged into the street art scene in Houston. I figured that would be a genre of art underrepresented at TCAF, which in the previous year had demonstrated a somewhat narrow, focused conception of contemporary art.


Emily Peacock and Pablo Cardoza before they had a chance to pose

Lane Hagood and Emily Peacock are young artists whose work I admire a lot. Neither one of them need validation from me--they both have high reputations within the segments of the local scene that I most respect. But neither has a gallery and both of them need to break out into the consciousness of local collectors. So including them fit my mission for the fair perfectly.

At this point, I thought my job was mostly done. But other people disabused me of the notion. I thought this was my thing. It ended up being lots of people's thing, which was fantastic. First, Paul Middendorf approached me at an Art Palace event and asked if I was doing any performance. I had thought about it but hadn't really followed through. He had a germ of an idea and we made a deal. This became "Make It Official," which Middendorf performed out by the elevator doors on opening night.

Then at the Blaffer Gallery opening for Tony Feher, Devin Borden (owner of the eponymous gallery) asked me if I had rented out the dresser drawers. I thought he was joking, and he was in a way--but he was also making a serious suggestion. He said I should even describe them art fair-style as "project spaces." So with tongue in cheek, I offered up the drawers as "micro-booths" for $150 apiece. It was a joke--I never expected anyone to actually do it. And yet, I sold six drawers, including one to Devin Borden, who showed two small pieces by Geoff Hippensteil. The other micro-booths were taken by d.m. allison, who showed a perfect piece by Chris Hedrick; Jim Nolan who did a highly appropriate site specific piece called the process of failure/it's better to regret something you have done; Bryan Keith Gardner, who showed portfolio of drawings; Murray Goldfarb Fine Art, which showed a single piece by artist Aron Williams (who rented a room down the hall Thursday night, where the party went on until 2 am); and Solomon Kane who put a grab-bag of goodies in his drawer.


Murray Goldfarb's shoes


Jim Nolan, the process of failure/it's better to regret something you have done installation


Jim Nolan and his underpants--one of the pieces that sold

Someone on Facebook (and I can't remember who you were) suggested I do t-shirts. I pooh-poohed the idea, but then my sister Sarah requested one so I broke down and made 20 Pan Art Fair t-shirts--all of which sold.


Clifford Peck and x-ray artist Sarah Whately bestowed their cool capital onto the Pan Art Fair by buying t-shirts

The night before the fair began, I was at a party at Skydive when Emily Sloan and David McClain came up and asked me if the room had a refrigerator. They wanted to do an ongoing installation in it--it would be branded the Kenmore art space for the duration of the fair. Again, I resisted for a moment--it was the day before the fair started, after all. But I went ahead and let them do their thing, and of course it was great!


Urgent urgent urgent--Peter Lucas's tribute to 70s butt-rock

And finally, in the middle of the Pan Art Fair, Peter Lucas came by and without asking permission put in an installation of found objects (copies of the album sleeve for Foreigner 4). And the amazing thing is that he found the one "dead" spot in the otherwise very crowded suite. And is was hilarious and wonderful.


Two art lovers and a Lane Hagood

The thing I'm trying to express here is that except for picking the original four exhibitors, all the good ideas that were done for the Pan Art Fair were other people's ideas. If it weren't for Middendorf, Borden, Sloan, McClain, Lucas, and someone on Facebook who I can't recall, the fair would have been smaller and a little less interesting. I loved seeing how the local art community's hive mind worked to create a very interesting whole. Thanks to all of you who contributed your great ideas and art to the Pan Art Fair.

THE FUTURE

I lost money on this deal. Sales were meager. I had to take two vacation days from work to do it. So naturally, it is my intention to do it again next year--even bigger, if possible. See you then.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Pan Recommends for the week of October 18 to October 24

Robert Boyd

This is a big weekend, what with the art fairs and all. But there are actually other things happening in the Houston art scene, so here are our recommendations.

Thursday through Sunday 

The Pan Art Fair opens tonight at 6 pm in room 307 of the Embassy Suites hotel in Downtown Houston and runs through Sunday. Exhibitors are Lane Hagood, Emily Peacock, Front Gallery, Cardoza Fine Art, Murray Goldfarb Fine Art, Bryan Keith Gardner, Solomon Kane, Jim Nolan, d.m. allison gallery and Devin Borden Gallery. Paul Middendorf is doing a performance at 8 pm, Thursday, and the Kenmore Art Space will be creating a new work over the course of the fair. Personally, this is the only thing on my personal "recommends" list, but I realize that not everyone wants to spend three-and-a-half days in a hotel room with me. (But if you do, call me sometime.) So at Dean Liscum's suggestion, here are some other events this weekend.

The Texas Contemporary Art Fair is going on across the park from the Pan Art Fair at the same time in the Brown Convention Center. Featuring 65 exhibiting galleries, TCAF also has panel discussion and installations, and I heard there will be a live alligator at the Glasstire booth tonight.

Saturday

Skatestock at the Lee and Joe Jamail Skate Park on October 20, 2012 from noon to 9 pm. Lots of music, skating (including a bunch pf physics nerds from Rice doing "velocity experiments"!), and, of course, art: Wiley Robertson, Blue Dozen Collective, Burning Bones Press, Daniel Angullu, Drive By Press, Sketchy Neighbors and Steve Harris.

Project Row Houses: Round 37 at Project Row Houses opening October 20 from 4 pm 7 pm preceded by an artist's talk from 2:30 pm to 4 pm. Four individual artists and two artist groups have installations: Miguel Amat, Jason Griffiths, Autumn Knight, Maurice Roberts, and In Situ from the UK (Paul Hartley, Kerry Morrison and William Titley) and Question Bridge: Black Males (Chris Johnson, Bayeté Ross Smith, Hank Willis Thomas and Kamal Sinclair).

TX/RX Labs hosts Dennis Nance for a night of art crits and pizza at on October 20, from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Nance is the Exhibitions and Programming Director at Lawndale, so he knows his stuff. TX/RX Labs combine the worlds of engineering with art--I heartily approve this mission!

And this just scratches the surface--there's actually quite a lot happening. If there's an event you are looking forward to, add it in the comments!

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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Pan Art Fair Begins Tomorrow

Robert Boyd

If my usual posting rate has declined in the last week or two, I apologize. The reason is simple--I have been working hard to get the Pan Art Fair ready. Since my last update, we've had a lot of new things come together.

Micro-Booths
Gallerist Devon Borden came up with this idea. He suggested I make the dresser and end-table drawers available to exhibitors. I announced this, honestly thinking that there would be no takers (and that people would get a chuckle out of it). Instead, all six available drawers were snatched up!


Aron Williams' drawer

Murray Goldfarb Fine Art will be showing the work of Aron Williams




Artist Bryan Keith Gardner will have his own work on display




Ditto artist Solomon Kane

Jim Nolan, the process of failure/it's better to regret something you have done

Jim Nolan is installing a site-specific installation to be called the process of failure/it's better to regret something you have done




d.m. allison gallery will be showing work by sculptor Chris Hedrick


And Devin Borden Gallery will be showing Geoff Hippensteil!


Also, we will be having a performance Thursday night at 8 pm by Paul Middendorf called Make It Official.


Middendorf's offer to you: Spending all of your days proving yourself to your peers? Spending hour after hour day after day in the grind, paving your way as an artist? Make it official today! Two minutes of a paperwork, light conversation, and mild to heavy judgement and you will be officially stamped and certified as an artist! Come join us and welcome yourself to the rest of your life.
All this in addition to work from Front Gallery, Cardoza Fine Art, Emily Peacock and Lane Hagood!


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