Visual Arts Ken Price Spanning the ‘70s through the ‘90s, the recently
Published 8:39 am Saturday, March 7, 2015
Visual Arts
Ken Price Spanning the ‘70s through the ‘90s, the recently deceased L.A. artist is represented in Inside/Outside by colorful vernacular prints, many of them meant to illustrate the poetry of Charles Bukowski. Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 General $10, Seniors $6, Members Free Ongoing through Sunday, September 7, 2014
Chen Shaoxiong: Ink. History. Media The Chinese contemporary artist chronicles 100 years of history in 150 ink drawings. In a separate installation, he draws recreated news events culled from the Internet. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 free Ongoing through Sunday, December 7, 2014
Rineke Dijkstra & Thomas Struth The two contemporary European artists are represented with photos and videos. Running concurrently is more video art from Andrew Deutsch and Stephen Vitiello; and the group show With Hidden Noise, really a sonic exhibit, featuring Taylor Deupree and Stephen Vitiello, Jennie C. Jones, Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Parkins, Steve Peters, Steve Roden, and Michael J. Schumacher. Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 n/a Ongoing through Sunday, September 7, 2014
TOBIAS MØHL The Danish artist presents his blown glass platters, vessels, and bowls. Opening Reception Thurs, Aug. 7, 5-8 p.m. Traver Gallery, 110 Union St., #200, Seattle, WA 98101 Free Ongoing through Sunday, August 31, 2014, 7pm
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Sunday, August 24, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Sunday, August 24, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Sunday, August 24, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Sunday, August 24, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Sunday, August 24, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Monday, August 25, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Monday, August 25, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Monday, August 25, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Monday, August 25, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Monday, August 25, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Monday, August 25, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Kimiko Yoshida: Something Blue Is there anything worse than a wedding? Watching from the pews, all of us in uncomfortable suits and dresses. It’s always so hot. The service is always so long. And the poor bride and groom have to keep smiling and smiling and smiling like they’re actually enjoying themselves instead of performing. And a wedding is above all a performance, a kind of theater. That’s the spirit in which to understand Yoshida’s self-portrait series something blue, in which she dresses and photographs herself in the nuptial costumes of various traditions. Something like Cindy Sherman, with elaborate makeup, props, and lighting, Yoshida styles herself as a bride from (exaggerated) cultures as disparate as Communist China and West Africa. These characters never look exactly happy about their fate; they display the discomfort of being posed and presented to the public for approval. These brides are commodities being examined for flaws, for any sign of noncompliance or dissent. Yoshida, who won’t attend the opening, creates disturbing portraits of submission and resentment. (Through Aug. 30.) (Reception Thurs July 31, 6-8 pm. Gallery hours Tuesday – Friday 11-5pm and Saturday 12- 5pm). BRIAN MILLER M.I.A. Gallery, 1203 Second Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Mystic Modernism of the Pacific Northwest Coinciding with SAM’s show on the same topic, Seattle artREsource collects work from the School of Northwest Mystic painters, alongside contemporaries of the movement, Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa. artREsource, 625 First Ave, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Tuesday, August 26, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Tuesday, August 26, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Blood Moon A collective exhibition from over 40 Seattle artists that will be bound into a book available at the show. Artists include D.K. Pan, Sierra Stinson, Frank Correa, Emily Pothast, Aidan Fitzgerald, Lisa Orth, Trevor Brown, Joey Veltkamp, J.D. Banke, James David and many, many more. Hard L, 1216 10th Ave Free Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 6 – 10pm
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Kimiko Yoshida: Something Blue Is there anything worse than a wedding? Watching from the pews, all of us in uncomfortable suits and dresses. It’s always so hot. The service is always so long. And the poor bride and groom have to keep smiling and smiling and smiling like they’re actually enjoying themselves instead of performing. And a wedding is above all a performance, a kind of theater. That’s the spirit in which to understand Yoshida’s self-portrait series something blue, in which she dresses and photographs herself in the nuptial costumes of various traditions. Something like Cindy Sherman, with elaborate makeup, props, and lighting, Yoshida styles herself as a bride from (exaggerated) cultures as disparate as Communist China and West Africa. These characters never look exactly happy about their fate; they display the discomfort of being posed and presented to the public for approval. These brides are commodities being examined for flaws, for any sign of noncompliance or dissent. Yoshida, who won’t attend the opening, creates disturbing portraits of submission and resentment. (Through Aug. 30.) (Reception Thurs July 31, 6-8 pm. Gallery hours Tuesday – Friday 11-5pm and Saturday 12- 5pm). BRIAN MILLER M.I.A. Gallery, 1203 Second Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Mystic Modernism of the Pacific Northwest Coinciding with SAM’s show on the same topic, Seattle artREsource collects work from the School of Northwest Mystic painters, alongside contemporaries of the movement, Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa. artREsource, 625 First Ave, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Wednesday, August 27, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Wednesday, August 27, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Kimiko Yoshida: Something Blue Is there anything worse than a wedding? Watching from the pews, all of us in uncomfortable suits and dresses. It’s always so hot. The service is always so long. And the poor bride and groom have to keep smiling and smiling and smiling like they’re actually enjoying themselves instead of performing. And a wedding is above all a performance, a kind of theater. That’s the spirit in which to understand Yoshida’s self-portrait series something blue, in which she dresses and photographs herself in the nuptial costumes of various traditions. Something like Cindy Sherman, with elaborate makeup, props, and lighting, Yoshida styles herself as a bride from (exaggerated) cultures as disparate as Communist China and West Africa. These characters never look exactly happy about their fate; they display the discomfort of being posed and presented to the public for approval. These brides are commodities being examined for flaws, for any sign of noncompliance or dissent. Yoshida, who won’t attend the opening, creates disturbing portraits of submission and resentment. (Through Aug. 30.) (Reception Thurs July 31, 6-8 pm. Gallery hours Tuesday – Friday 11-5pm and Saturday 12- 5pm). BRIAN MILLER M.I.A. Gallery, 1203 Second Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 free Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Thursday, August 28, 2014
Mystic Modernism of the Pacific Northwest Coinciding with SAM’s show on the same topic, Seattle artREsource collects work from the School of Northwest Mystic painters, alongside contemporaries of the movement, Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa. artREsource, 625 First Ave, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Thursday, August 28, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Thursday, August 28, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Thursday, August 28, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014
Summer at SAM Seattle Kokon Taiko and Kate Wallich dance, Stephen Antupit leads a tour of the Sol LeWitt installation, and various parties and musical events are also scheduled. Be sure to see the big white head, Echo, by Jaume Plensa, a permanent addition to the OSP. Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Thursday, August 28, 2014, 6 – 9pm
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Friday, August 29, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Friday, August 29, 2014
Mystic Modernism of the Pacific Northwest Coinciding with SAM’s show on the same topic, Seattle artREsource collects work from the School of Northwest Mystic painters, alongside contemporaries of the movement, Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa. artREsource, 625 First Ave, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Friday, August 29, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Friday, August 29, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Friday, August 29, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Friday, August 29, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014
City Dwellers: Contemporary Art From India Photography, sculpture, and video art branch far from the usual peasant and Hindu themes. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 NA Saturday, August 30, 2014 – Sunday, February 15, 2015
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014
Mystic Modernism of the Pacific Northwest Coinciding with SAM’s show on the same topic, Seattle artREsource collects work from the School of Northwest Mystic painters, alongside contemporaries of the movement, Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa. artREsource, 625 First Ave, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Saturday, August 30, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Saturday, August 30, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Saturday, August 30, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Sunday, August 31, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Sunday, August 31, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Sunday, August 31, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Sunday, August 31, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Monday, September 1, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Monday, September 1, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Monday, September 1, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Monday, September 1, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Monday, September 1, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Monday, September 1, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Tuesday, September 2, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Wednesday, September 3, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Wednesday, September 3, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
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First Thursday Art Walk Beginning around 5 p.m. and often lasting to 9 p.m., the monthly art celebration includes venues like the Tashiro Kaplan Building, Roq La Rue, James Harris, Greg Kucera, and all the other Pioneer Square galleries. Occidental Park will also be full of artists and vendors. Occidental Park, S. Main St. & Occidental Ave. S. Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Thursday, September 4, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Thursday, September 4, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Thursday, September 4, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Friday, September 5, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Friday, September 5, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Friday, September 5, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Friday, September 5, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Friday, September 5, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Friday, September 5, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Friday, September 5, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
Etsuko Ichikawa and Yukiyo Kawano
One Thousand Questions/<5343><306E><554F>-From Hiroshima to Hanford is a joint exhibition examining the nuclear history of Japan and Washington State. In conjunction with the show opening, the artists will release floating lanterns on Green Lake to memorialize the A-Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Opening reception Wed., Aug. 6, 5:30-8:30 p.m. Columbia City Gallery, 4864 Rainier Ave, S., Seattle, WA 98118 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami This touring show features over 140 works by 45 artists from Japan, the U.S., and beyond. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Saturday, September 6, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Saturday, September 6, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Saturday, September 6, 2014
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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places-some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Deco Japan This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920-1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view-prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.-we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past. The country opened itself late, at gunpoint, to the West, and industrialized quite rapidly. By the ‘20s, there was in the big cities a full awareness of Hollywood movies, European fashions, and streamlined design trends. Even if women didn’t vote, they knew about Louise Brooks and her fellow flappers. We may think that, particularly during the ‘30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. For an urbane class of pleasure-seekers, necessarily moneyed, these were boom times. The luxe life meant imitating the West to a degree, yet there are also many traces of Japan’s ancient culture within these modern accessories. Think of the sybarites during the Edo period, for instance, and the women depicted here look more familiar-even if they wear cocktail dresses instead of kimonos. (Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open to 8 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
Ink This!: Contemporary Print Arts in the Northwest Over 80 Northwest print-making artists are represented in this contemporary survey show. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds.-Sun. Open to 8 p.m. every third Thurs. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, on the one hand, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brand-new SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party-derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific-including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all of Seattle’s new residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014
Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Photographic Presence and Contemporary Indians: Matika Wilbur’s Project 562 In her first solo museum show, Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur’s ongoing goal is to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S.-now 566 of them; the number grew after she named and conceived the project, which is about one-third completed. A member of the Tulalip and Swinomish tribes, Wilbur says her images are frankly meant to inspire. The question, she asks rhetorically, is “How do we lift our people up?” Wilbur also conducts audio interviews with her subjects. Some of these you can hear on TAM’s loaner mp3 players, which accompany selected images. (Four companion videos have also been created.) Most of Wilbur’s images, numbering about 50, are made from traditional silver prints, with faint colors added by hand; a few are digital, with the colors dialed down to near sepia tone. Faces have precedence over place; Wilbur crops out most of the backgrounds. There aren’t any towering mesas or totem poles, though some tokens of Indian life are familiar to Northwest eyes: Here a Lummi elder poses with two carved canoes; elsewhere, a Tulalip trio wears traditionally embroidered ponchos. Most everyone’s posed outside, often gazing into the distance. This small commendable show is but a preview of Wilbur’s grand project, which naturally recalls the epic North American Indian photographic series undertaken by Seattle’s Edward S. Curtis from 1907-30. The crucial difference, of course, is that Project 562 comes from an insider’s perspective. (Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
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The Art of Gaman The subtitle of this group show reveals its sad starting point: Arts & Crafts from the Japanese-American Internment Camps, 1942-1946. That shameful, illegal episode in American history has been well documented by historians and novelists (e.g., David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, about the forced deportation of Bainbridge Island residents). And certain renowned visual artists (Morris Graves, Roger Shimomura, etc.) have referenced that period in their work. But this is a broader show, more folk art than fine art. Over 120 objects will be on view, many of them humble wood carvings, furniture, even toys made from scrap items at Minidoka or Manzanar. The more polished drawings come from professional artists like Ruth Asawa, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Chiura Obata, and Henry Sugimoto. Some of the more touching items-like a samurai figurine made from wood scraps, shells, and bottle caps-come from family collections, not museums; they’re precious keepsakes from a shameful historical era. As for the show’s title, gaman roughly translates as “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” (Regular museum hours: 11 a.m-6 p.m. Curator talk by Delphine Hirasuna at 7 p.m. Thurs., July 3.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Sunday, September 7, 2014
The Unicorn Incorporated/Your Feast Has Ended
The Unicorn Incorporated is a career retrospective for Seattle’s Curtis R. Barnes that reaches back over four decades. As a child during the ‘50s, he took his first art classes at the Frye; and he later trained at Cornish. But, really, most of his work here was forged by the politics of the ‘60s, rather than by some particular school. Racism, Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, MLK, Malcolm X, black power, and the civil-rights movement all figure in his caricatures and illustrations for the Afro American Journal during the early ‘70s. Many of Barnes’ drawings show somewhat grotesque characters who’ve been warped and twisted by society-made into monsters, in effect. The Green River killer, ‘80s subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, apartheid enforcers, used-car salesmen, D.C. politicians, child molesters… these are the oppressors, yes, yet Barnes presents them almost like taxonomic specimens. Alternatively, and this comes as something of a relief, Barnes also draws a pantheon of the jazz icons he reveres (Monk, Bird, etc.). These figures become one with their instruments, transmogrified like some of his other characters-only in a good way. Your Feast Has Ended represents a new generation of minority artists: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (son of Curtis R. Barnes), Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu. The most conceptually cooked works here are by the Tlingit artist Galanin, who’s based in Sitka, Alaska. The politics and history he evokes are the most specific, and he does far less borrowing and appropriation. The 2010 SPD murder of John T. Williams is commemorated both with a drum (to be beaten with a police nightstick) and a video of a Tlingit dancer wearing cedar body armor. Of course that cladding wouldn’t stop a bullet, no more than art can stop history or redress historical wrongs. (11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m-7 p.m. Thurs. ) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Sunday, September 7, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Sunday, September 7, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Sunday, September 7, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Monday, September 8, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Monday, September 8, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Monday, September 8, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Monday, September 8, 2014
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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Monday, September 8, 2014
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Heaven & Earth VI The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a maintenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable all-weather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal-through an old diving mask-on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image-or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. (6 a.m.-10 p.m.) BRIAN MILLER Carkeek Park, 950 N.W Carkeek Park Rd., Seattle, WA 98177 Free Monday, September 8, 2014
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Skyspace James Turrell’s Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Monday, September 8, 2014
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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Monday, September 8, 2014
Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Monday, September 8, 2014
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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Monday, September 8, 2014
You Are Hear Just up the Moseley Path from the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Trimpin’s You Are Hear comprises three tractor seats embedded in a low concrete wall and three pairs of funnel-shaped headphones you put your head between while seated, all in the same traffic-cone orange as Calder’s The Eagle looming over your shoulder. At the first listening station, you hear one of the musician/sculptor’s toy-piano pieces, the darting, tinkling fragments a happy sonic analogue to the industrious bumblebees busy nearby in a tall bank of weeds. The second offers what’s billed as a “sound structure” inspired by the sounds of nature. If you say so; unless it was somehow shut off the afternoon I visited, I heard no more than what you would if you held a conch shell to each ear. The third invites you, John Cage-style, to contemplate the ambient sounds of passersby and the traffic on Elliott Avenue below-i.e., it does nothing. Drop the same concept into a concert hall, and you’re seduced or jolted into a radical rethinking of your definition of music; outside in a park, it’s just another place to sit. Is our universally beloved MacArthur “genius”-award winner, Guggenheim fellow, and upcoming Seattle Symphony collaborator due for a backlash? Among all the possible ways to combine sound-art and the environment, this one comes off as surprisingly perfunctory, despite the charm of the toy-piano music and the gadgetty whimsy of the funnel-and-seat contraptions. I don’t think he’s there yet, but Trimpin does seem at risk of becoming an aural Chihuly, making works that are fun, pretty, pointless, and celebrated primarily because his name is attached to them. (Open daily, sunrise-sunset.) GAVIN BORCHERT Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave., Seattle, WA 98121 Free Monday, September 8, 2014
At Your Service Ariel Brice, Gesine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, Emily Loehle, Caroline Slotte, and Amelia Toelke mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $8-$10 Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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Danish Modern: Design for Living A survey of modern-style Danish furniture from the 1950s and ‘60s. (Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.) Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle, WA 98117 $8 Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Tuesday, September 9, 2014
