Obadike + Villareal + Bass (This Week!)

This is a week of openings for exhibits and performances by several multitalented people I know pretty well. I've been under the weather so I may miss the openings, but when I'm feeling better I intend to view the exhibits.

First up, fellow CCer Dr. Mendi Lewis Obadike, who brilliant posts on SWEAT, will be showing some of her work in the Rhizome Artbase exhibit, beginning tomorrow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 210 11th Avenue 2nd Floor NYC 10001. The opening was tonight at 6:30 pm.

RHIZOME ArtBase 101
June 23 - September 10, 2005

RHIZOME ARTBASE 101 surveys salient themes in Internet-based art-making, a practice that has flourished in the last ten years. The exhibition presents forty selections from Rhizome.org's online archive of new media art, the ArtBase, which was launched in 1999 and currently holds some 1,500 works by artists from around the world. Featured works are grouped by ten unifying themes and include seminal pieces by early practitioners as well as projects by some of the most pioneering emerging talents working in the field today. Encompassing software, games, moving image and websites installed on computers or elaborated in installations, Rhizome ArtBase 101 presents the Internet as a strapping medium that rivals other art forms in its ability to buttress varied critical and formal explorations.

You can view the digital work, "Keeping up Appearances," here.

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A very good friend of a very good friend, writer and artist Rebecca Villareal, is having her first Chicago exhibit at the Jumping Bean Cafe in Pilsen.

Her photos (like "New Window" at left) are visible here.

Today Alison Neumer positively blurbed the exhibit in the Chicago Tribune:

Philadelphia-born artist Rebecca Villarreal captures quiet daily moments in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood in her first photography exhibit, "Intimate on 18th Street," a collection of 22 black and white images that opened Friday in the neighborhood's Cafe Jumping Bean.

Villarreal, who also is a published poet, photographed a nearby barber shop and the men who wield scissors there, a ballet class for young girls taught out of a neighbor's spare room, and a sewing machine store packed with old models.

"I'd like to see more people embrace the small joys of life," Villarreal said, pointing to the subtle details and emotions in her photos that eventually emerge for the patient viewer. "New Ballerina" is a straight-on portrait of a small girl in a ballet skirt and shoes whose face is bright with pleasure and concentration.

Last year Villarreal, 36, moved to Pilsen from Washington, D.C., where she had lived starting in college. She was inspired by her new surroundings, she said.

"It's like a muse falling down on you," she said. "It needs to be shared, and that's why I make art."

"Intimate on 18th Street" runs through July 21 at the cafe, 1439 W. 18th St.

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Finally, this Saturday, fellow CCer and sower of beautiful spirits Holly Bass presents her one-time, one-woman performance, "Diary of a Baby Diva," which the press release describes like this: "A giddy concoction of comedy, monologues, lipsynching and musical dance sequences--the Village Voice called it 'mesmerizing'--it bends genres and genders. It'll take place at this year's Downtown Urban Theater Festival, during Gay Pride weekend.

Diary of a Baby Diva
for one night only at the
Cherry Lane Theatre Studio
Written and Performed by Holly Bass
Directed by Barbara Colaciello-Williams

Cherry Lane Theatre Studio
7:30PM, Saturday, June 25, 2005
38 Commerce Street, New York City

Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door.

To order call 212-352-3101 or go to theatermania.com (then go to "Downtown Urban Theater Festival 2005 (DUTF)" and click on "The Dakota & Diary of a Baby Diva."