ART BLOGGERS PANELIZE AT ART MIAMI 2009
Panel to be held Saturday, December 5th 11:00am to 2:00pm
In the Midtown Miami Arts District

Art Bloggers @, an organization founded by Sharon Butler and Joanne Mattera in 2007, is hosting a panel discussion at Art Miami on Saturday, December 5th from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Entitled, “Beyond Basic Blogging: Carving Our Niche in the Blogosphere,” the panel will discuss developments in art blogging from the past year. Participating panelists include: Sharon Butler, Thomas Hollingworth, Paddy Johnson, Carolina A. Miranda, and Hrag Vartanian. Joanne Mattera will be the moderator. The event will be held in the Art Miami Pavilion on Midtown Boulevard (NE 1st Avenue) between NE 31st and NE 32nd Streets.

With conventional print media in decline, art blogging has filled an unexpected niche. Armed with free or low-cost web hosting and a raft of photographs and videos from tiny cameras (sometimes even cell phones), art bloggers are posting reviews, reports, interviews, opinions, advice, links, and Tweets. Bloggers are not The New York Times. And that’s precisely their power. In an art world chronically short on coverage, they are covering events – often from an artist’s perspective – with a democratic and regional take on who, what and where. The best of the art bloggers have carved out identities with defined points of view, good writing, and you-are-there pictures.

About the Panelists:
Sharon Butler, an artist and writer, maintains the art blog Two Coats of Paint, and writes for The Brooklyn Rail. In July 2009, she started @ Bushwick & Main, an online photographic sketchbook that features iPhone notations from her wandering art practice.

Thomas Hollingworth is a graduate of London Guildhall University who now lives and works in Miami. In addition to teaching and coordinating exhibitions on behalf of Miami Dade College he is the editor of Artlurker, a Miami based contemporary art blog that he founded in 2008. By documenting local, national and international cultural subjects and involving the local community for the local community Artlurker functions as both resource and a platform representative of the relative accessibility of Miami’s art scene.

Paddy Johnson is Art Fag City.

Joanne Mattera is a studio painter and occasional curator who maintains the Joanne Mattera Art Blog to record and share what she’s seeing in the New York galleries, at the art fairs, and in galleries and studios around the country. Though the blog’s description is “Guaranteed Biased, Myopic, Incomplete and Journalistically Suspect,” she is in fact journalistically responsible (though, OK, she’s biased toward painting and sculpture). She recently instituted Marketing Mondays, a weekly feature that helps emerging and midcareer artists navigate the art world.

Carolina A. Miranda is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City, where she contributes articles on travel and culture to a variety of national and regional media, including ArtNews, nytimes.com, Fast Company, Travel + Leisure and Time magazine. She is also a contributor to Lonely Planet guidebooks, having covered destinations such as Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru for the company. Last fall, she was named one of eight fellows in the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program for her cultural blog C-Monster.net, which, among other media, has received mentions in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She lives in New York City.

Hrag Vartanian is a New York-based writer and critic. His work has appeared in the Art21 blog, the Brooklyn Rail, the New York Foundation for the Arts Current, Huffington Post and Modern Painters. He writes a street art column named Re:Public, which will soon be part of his latest project, hyperallergic (subtitled “sensitive to art and its discontents”).

About Art Bloggers @:
Art Bloggers @ is an ad hoc project founded by Sharon Butler and Joanne Mattera. Recognizing that artists and art bloggers need an opportunity to connect in real time and space, Butler and Mattera organize blogger gatherings at events in Miami and New York City.

About Art Miami:
Art Miami is the city’s longest running contemporary art fair and considered one of the most important venues for modern and contemporary art in the U.S. It is scheduled to take place December 2-6th in the Midtown Miami Arts District, adjacent to the Miami Design District and Wynwood Arts District, and will feature works from more than 80 national and international contemporary art galleries. For additional information, visit www.art-miami.com.