Cadmus, Getsy, Berry, Sonsini

Last week was the annual conference of the College Art Association in Washington. The conference hotel, the Marriott Wardman Park, was pretty far from the museums so I didn't get in much galleryhopping, just a quick visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum which shares its building with the National Portrait Gallery. There, I saw three paintings by Paul Cadmus entitled "Aspects of Suburban Life." Some suburb I've never been to. The paintings were transferred from the Department of State.

At the hotel, I saw David Getsy several times and did a fly-by greeting as we passed in the hallway. I was pretty excited that his new volume entitled Queer, in the Documents of contemporary art series co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, was available at the MIT Press booth.

Last night at the library, I was looking at the February issue of Art in America and the "Sightlines" column was a selection of things that are inspiring Ian Berry at the moment. One of them was David Getsy's new book Abstract bodies. Berry says the essay on Nancy Grossman "should be required reading for anyone looking at and thinking about contemporary sculpture." Berry is the director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. He and the museum do the finest shows.

There was also an advertisement for a John Sonsini show at the Ameringer McEnery Yohe gallery in New York City. Sonsini hails from Los Angeles and paints wonderful portraits of Latino day laborers. The exhibition catalog is available online via issu.com and includes essays by Ian Berry, Jeffrey D. Grove, and Allan M. Jalon. The name Allan Jalon seemed very familiar and then I remembered that I ran into him at Anton Kern gallery in New York City when I lived there, in late 2002. Allan used some of my comments in an article on Matt Mullican that he wrote for the Los Angeles times. It's such a small world, except when it's huge.

This is a Sonsini portrait from the Ameringer McEnery Yohe artist page.