Volunteer Websites for Public Art

INTERVIEW AND STATEMENT BY PUBLIC ART BLOGGERS

Seattle Outdoor Art Creators

Monday, March 31, 2003
A moment with ... Peter and Mimi James, public art chroniclers
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

While jogging around Seattle, retired banker Peter James noticed there was a wealth of public art in obscure as well as prominent locations, and notenough information about either. Today he and his wife, photographer Mimi James, run a Web site devoted to Seattle's public art, www.SeattleOutdoorArt.com. Online since last July, the site has attracted more than 20,000 hits and includes 282 pieces of art.

Regina Hackett: The site's beautiful. Did you design it? *
Peter: We hired a professional, Christian Patzer. That's why it looks so good. You can search for art by regions of the city or by medium, and click on any piece to enlarge it. We added a feature called art spotter, so anybody can tell us about an artwork we've missed.
Mimi: A lot of art in Seattle isn't well documented. We've had to do some sleuthing. We won't put the piece on the site until we've got the artist's name, name of the artwork, the medium and the date it was created.

Regina Hackett: Do you ever decide to skip something because both of you hate it?
Mimi: *We're more about celebrating art than criticizing it.

Regina Hackett: How'd you decide to go online?*
Peter: Mimi got a digital camera. Before that we had photo albums.

Regina Hackett: Who helped on this project? *
Mimi: Lots of people, but I'd say Peter was most encouraged by Wendy Ceccherelli, who was working in public art for the city. She told him we could make a record.
Peter: She said there's no up-to-date record of all the outdoor art in Seattle, and we could fill the gap.

Regina Hackett: Did you get any financial support?*
Mimi: It's our hobby. Every single corner of this city, we've been to. We do it for love.

Portland Public Art Blogspot Author
March, 2007

I grew up around artists, in a household that owned art and considered it carefully. I trained as an artist, but don't rely on the arts to earn a living. I decided to live in a provincial city - Portland, Oregon - and to never satisfy an audience, an editor, a curator. This was a long time ago and surviving as a thinking person engaged with the world meant a lot of correspondence - building relationships based on commonly held questions about the state of the world, and the state of creativity.

I started writing in journals and newspapers about art in the early 1980s, at first under my own name, but soon anonymously. I had a career, another persona in another industry that would alter how people considered the writing - and its intent. I thought of the work as a public service, but it was important I liked what I made. It is, in a sense, artwork itself.

As a kid I made friends with a local disk jockey who was very popular. He invited me to the studio and set me up to watch him work two back-to-back programs - about four hours. He did both as other characters - DJs I knew well, but associated with other faces and names. Turned out he played most of the station's DJs, not just the one I associated with. I asked him about this and he said, the music's all the same.

In his later years he did birthday parties as an impressionist. He had a repertoire of characters which had been popular a generation before - Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, Eisenhower, Phil Silvers. I don't think he got much work, but he liked what he was doing.

I like this city. It's small enough so you can, if you want, know everyone worth knowing, and it's history has been stable enough - no wars, no famines, no plagues - you can know the facts of almost any circumstance. It's a city that depended on shipping and lumber for 100 years, and in the next 100 years will depend on creative industries.

There's art here - collected and maintained by private individuals, companies, and by a public arts bureau. Quite a bit of it - maybe two thousand pieces scattered around. For people who started here, we overlook these artworks, take them for granted, and forget their origin or purpose. For newcomers - of which there is a hoard - the Portland Public Art blog serves as an introduction to the collection of a city.

We take our ability to see an object for granted - we imagine it's an almost innate skill, like reading or listening. But when you meet someone who is a trained see-er, someone who has intentionally cultivated an ability to look at a hundred things quickly and pick out the one that is beautiful, you'll understand this is a terrific and rare talent. I don't have this ability. I see things slowly, but I am persistent. I keep looking.

The blog gets thousands of hits each month, from all over the world, from people searching for all sorts of stuff. The blog also has a regular readership, a number in the high two digits. The people who read it are for the most part seekers, learners, readers - not makers of art. These seem to be two separate crowds.

C