Earthworks Tour Inaugural Bike Ride

It starts, like all good things in life, in Kent. There, few Seattle artgoers know, are some large, significant installations you can tour today during the Earthworks Tour Inaugural Bike Ride. Three loops range from a mostly flat 12-miler suitable for families to a hillier 23-mile circuit that heads up the hill to Robert Morris’ Johnson Pit #30, a major excavation in the west slope above Kent, ringed with terraces and charred tree trunks. The eerie 1979 divot was funded by the King County Arts Commission, making use of an old gravel pit now flanked by homes and apartments. Down at the Herbert Bayer Earthworks Park (the ride’s start/finish area), that 1982 stormwater containment project comprises a series of nested grassy rings and mounds designed by Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). He was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, studied at the Bauhaus, art-directed Vogue in Weimar Germany, and was included in the Nazis’ notorious 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibit before fleeing to the U.S. Being dedicated today is the Inkwell Collective’s Filaments, a series of dangling orange guideposts along the Green River Trail. (The long ride extends over to Renton and the Waterworks Gardens, by Lorna Jordan.) At the start/finish, there will also be music, family activities, and displays of local artworks—some, of course, on wheels. (Register at KentArts.org/earthworks. BRIAN MILLER

Sat., June 2, 9 a.m., 2012