...and, what else have we been doing...

...for the last two weeks?

For the first week after my birthday we spent a large amount of time finishing up our Creative Capital grant proposal that we submitted on March 4th. We feel pretty good about our proposal, but even if we don't get it I think the process was really fun and informative. There are three rounds to their review process and we will hear if we made it through the first round in the beginning of June.

On Thursday, Feb. 28th, SS came over and helped us proofread. We were joined later by my friend, WH, who I met at Skowhegan. He actually just won a Creative Capital grant so it was great to be able to talk about that process with him, although he applied in the Fine Arts category while we actually are applying under Emerging Genres. On Friday, after spending the afternoon at KW (for a show that wasn't that great), we joined WH at the 'Global Alien' exhibition that R blogged about before.


Antonio BALLESTER MORENO, Peres Projects

On Saturday, we went to an opening at Peres Projects here in Berlin (there is also a space in LA). Our friend, DK told us about it because he works there and we also ended up meeting R's studio-mate ES there. The crowd was young and 'hip' and the work was mostly bad painting, so it felt like a little bit of SF here in Berlin (like a big Jack Hanley opening) but it was interesting to see their expansive space which spreads over two different buildings.

We submitted our CC proposal on Tuesday, March 4th, and then we had another deadline on the Thursday the 6th for "Anonymous Drawing #8" exhibition here in Berlin. It is kinda like the Monster Drawing Rally at Southern Exposure in SF, but is just an exhibition in itself. They accept 1-3 drawings from about 100 international artists and these are hung on the wall with the artist's names written underneath. All drawings are 150€ and when someone buys one they are taken down and then they find out who the artists is. The organizers take 50€ to help produce the show and catalog and the artist gets 100€. This is the 8th year of this project and we were both interested to see how this plays out. We find out if our drawings are accepted toward the end of the month and the show is on or around April 4th.



Later that day we went to a dinner over at Babylonia with my former class there. Most of the people had continued on to the next class and they invited us over for a dinner they were holding. Just like class, English, German, and Spanish languages were flying around in all directions throughout the evening. It was great to see my classmates again...esp. with the addition of their significant others. We met a Swedish couple that live pretty near us and from them learned that a large percentage of Swedes chew...as in tobacco. Both brandished their skoal cans proudly, which they brought with them from Sweden (I believe you cannot sell chewing tobacco in Germany). Who knew?

We resumed "Kunst-Tag" (Art Day), on Friday the 7th by going over to the Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie).


left of entrance arch, Old National Gallery
I really hoped these wooden attachments were someone's contemporary sculpture, and not some badly constructed...protection?...support?...couldn't quite figure out their function.


Caspar David Friedrich: Klosterfriedhof im Schnee, um 1810

It was great to see the collection, but nothing blew us away. Sometimes, it is nice to just see a bunch of portrait and landscape paintings. They had a great room full of Caspar David Friedrich paintings.

After that, we headed over to the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (DAZ) for the opening of an exhibition called 'Berlin-New York Dialogues'.




As the site says, "Two of the world’s most dynamic urban centers, Berlin and New York, are making radical transformations in their streets and skylines. "Berlin – New York Dialogues: Building in Context" investigates the changes in these two cities by looking at the contemporary built environment and mechanisms of urban regeneration – the social, political, economic, and cultural processes that affect building." They compared three neighborhoods in NYC (Chelsea, Red Hook, and South Bronx) to three areas of Berlin (Spandauer Vorstadt, [East] Spree Area, and somewhere they called Chaussee- & Invalidenstrasse).

Alot of the information was common knowledge to anyone who is, or knows people who are, trying to negotiate these cities...well, maybe not everyone, but esp. artists. It was a pretty academic view of things ultimately...and while the topic of gentrification was discussed we both felt they didn't take a very critical view of it. The show was informative to see in light of our CC proposal, which is about artist-initiated live/work spaces, to help us think of ways that we could, and would not want to, approach our project.