You Deserve A Medal

Applause for a pair of hard-working, community-building artists

Mar 06, 2024

At this time of year, it’s impossible to ignore the endless parade of awards shows where performing artists get together and give each other prizes: Grammys, Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, SAGs, Golden Globes and so many more. Every genre of writing, from romance to sci-fi, seems to have multiple awards ceremonies also. Visual art? Not so much. (You could argue that visual art is too diverse to be meaningfully compared, but they put Dune up against Licorice Pizza for Best Picture and nobody complained)

Visual artists deserve recognition too! While we wait patiently for the MacArthur Foundation to find us, I plan to use this newsletter to periodically award a few medals to artists I know who are doing great work and not getting thanked for it enough. My first two awardees are Glendon Mellow and Julia Bloom. Take a bow!

Glendon Mellow

Left: Study of magic beans , center: black and white crosshatched self-portrait, right, black and sepia image of trilobite with wings — Self-portrait by Glendon Mellow, flanked by examples of his artwork

A self-described “evopunk, paleo-illustrator and science communicator,” Toronto-based Glendon Mellow is the king of the online science-art community. Or perhaps I should say champion, because one of the things he does best is champion the work of others. He’s been writing, with creativity and passion, about SciArt since 2007, both on his own blog, The Flying Trilobite, and for many years at Scientific American. But Glendon’s unique role is as cat-herder for all the various groups of science-inspired artists – from photographers to glassblowers to metal sculptors to painters, from the obsessively scientifically correct to the wildly abstract - for over a decade on Twitter, and now on Bluesky. He invites us, he promotes us, he listens to us and he gets us. And for that, Glendon Mellow deserves a medal.

Julia Bloom

Julia Bloom could have been content with her successful career as an artist. Her thoughtful, playful sculptures and drawings have been shown in galleries and museums and included in prestigious collections. But about five years ago, she had an idea to use the freight elevator in the building that houses her studio as a gallery for super-short exhibitions. Freight Gallery has now hosted over a dozen shows, each lasting only two hours. This schedule highlights the ephemeral nature of art, while also bowing to practicality – when it’s not a gallery, the elevator is in regular use as an elevator. Freight Gallery shows have become must-sees in the DC art community and attracted coverage from Hyperallergic. But of course, putting on two-hour art exhibitions involves many, many hours of preparation, most of which Julia does herself. For creating a new exhibition opportunity for DC-area artists, for enriching the cultural scene, and for putting in all the work to make it happen, Julia Bloom deserves a medal.

To Glendon and Julia: Next time I get to Michaels, I will pick up some supplies to create suitably handcrafted medals, but for now, please bask in your awesomeness.

And now a few words about me:

I thought I would be using the usually sleepy month of February to doodle and tinker, but then Artomatic suddenly popped up, and I instead spent February busily painting, matting, framing, and hanging. Fifteen Algorithm paintings, most of them brand-new, go on display starting this Friday, March 8, in a huge building at 2100 M Street in Washington, DC, alongside the work of hundreds of other artists. If you’re anywhere near DC, don’t miss it - Artomatic is a show like no other. Check the website for hours and events. I’ll be there in person with small work available for purchase at the Artomatic Marketplace on the third floor from 12-6 on March 10 and 17. At all other times, you can find the Algorithm in room 5108.