Northwest Art Collection

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More About

• Glen Alps
• Mark Tobey
• Kenneth Callahan

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Up on the eighth floor, hidden by a wonderful bent-metal screen by Glen Alps, the library is showcasing other items from its Northwest Art Collection; and the small alcove would be packed with visitors if it were located in the Tashiro Kaplan Building. On view are one sculpture and a dozen-plus paintings, all of them good. There’s a lovely little coastal landscape from Kenneth Callahan, painted in oil in 1943 and strongly suggestive of the San Juans. Nearby is a charcoal study of a woman’s head that Mark Tobey executed as a demonstration during a series of 1948 library lectures; more polished is one of his signature orange suns (from 1961), fog-shrouded and diffuse, cold beneath its crackling gray surface. Paul Horiuchi’s Thrust Fault (1960) is no less emblematic: a paper collage of torn, granite-shaded panels that becomes a rockslide in thinnest relief. It’s also nice to be reminded that Doris Totten Chase was a painter before she turned to sculpture and video. Less well known are the traditional woodcuts of Chinese-born Fay Chong; his simple Drydocked manages to suggest fishing communities on both sides of the Pacific. BRIAN MILLER
Fridays, Saturdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sundays, 12-6 p.m.; Mondays-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Starts: Jan. 22. Continues through Aug. 31, 2010