From Tyler Green: Effective immediately, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is extending free admission (and parking) to all active-duty United States and Canadian military members and their families, including Guard and Reserves. Good for them. (more)Excellent idea. The small cost to the bottom line would reap a big harvest in good will. In the Northwest, only the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum offer a military discount, and it's just for the the person serving, not families. With the military engaged in two wars, their families are … [Read more...]

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For every artist who elaborates on the outer edge of experience, there's another burrowing away at root causes.This is a small survey of root diggers and bone lovers, those who bring complexity to simple forms and would rather strip bare than decorate, even when they're painting on a plate. A suspiciously simple sense of life is that it is in any one man conclusive. (Robert Creeley)Claude Zervas David HammonsMark MumfordJudy CookeEd Ruscha Nola AvienneDavid LvieYuki NakamuraCris BruchPaul LeeEllen ZieglerCharles Krafft … [Read more...]

Desiree Edkins (at Photographic Center Northwest through Jan. 15)Via … [Read more...]

Elizabeth Sandvig's paintings have a willfully awkward quality, an insistence on the particularity of their visual experience. From her you'll never see the sort of polish that takes the edge off everything and calls attention to the intricacy of its smooth and flawless design. She favors the raw over the cooked, the crooked over the straight and the fantastic over the factual. Sonogram of the Blue Jay Monoprint, 2005, 12 x 10 3/4 inches.Although her paintings often have an odd and weightless delicacy, they are never finished to the point of … [Read more...]

In his dreams, none of it ever happened.(David Shrigley) … [Read more...]

Dan Torop, Birthday PartyMark Takamichi Miller Thieves: Man At PartySean M. Johnson, Five Drinks InJenny Heishman, BogieElizabeth Sandvig, Ice CreamMark Mumford, We Are All In This TogetherAlice Wheeler, Collins Ave., Miami, 2007 … [Read more...]

ViaWhile we're on the subject of no, there's always Peter Schjeldahl on Richard Prince:The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If "quintessential artist in a generation" were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff … [Read more...]

Those people who make lists of the three or four artists who matter amid the multitude who don't? Few include Bruce Nauman, whose nonchalant profundity continues to be pioneering.  List elitists are almost invariably thinking of the market, as if art were just another stock.Roberta Smith's review of Nauman's current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is splendid:Even after four and a half decades, Mr. Nauman still turns out videos, sculptures, installation works and sound pieces that tend to be stripped to the bone, no-frills, … [Read more...]

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At the edges of art, energy moves inward. It clears plaque from arteries and makes way for new images to hit us in the heart. Two exhibits roto-rootering into the new year in Seattle are Rattle My Cage at Vermillion and This Is The Future The Rest Is History at TARL.RattleAll the artists in Rattle (curated by Sierra Stinson) were students of the dazzling Gretchen Bennett when she taught at Cornish. Rattle has no duds although possibly a few too many toenails. The artists include: Amelia Layton who paints the unraveling world (geometries that … [Read more...]

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The phrase emerging artist means what people want it to mean, but only for them. Like a couple  who enter a revolving door together but wind up on different streets, we each summon to mind different images.Does it mean an artist who scores her first gallery show? (Tell it to Carmen Herrera.) How about someone who after years of toiling in a regional setting breaks onto a global stage? Maybe it's someone who finally connects meaning to matter after a prelude of dilly-dallying. Is it someone  whose sales tip over into something close to … [Read more...]

In addition to the usual financial problems facing art museums around the country, the Seattle Art Museum had its own special burden. To fund its 2007 downtown expansion, SAM made a deal with a bank, renting out 240,000 square feet of office space in its new wing.(Image of the ground floor of the museum's expansion via. Suspended from the ceiling, Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One, 2004)What could go wrong? A bank is where the money is. But SAM got clobbered anyway, because the bank in question was Washington Mutual. At Washington Mutual, … [Read more...]

Art can't fix what's broken, but hats off to artists who try. They turn the wheel or at least remind us that there is a wheel to be turned.HIGH FIVE TO FIVE:1. Shepard Fairey. This single image inspired a tipping point. Andy Warhol wasn't above a similar ploy in 1968 1972. His bests Fairey's, although not in voting booth results.Other Warhol contributions: He gave interviews. 2. Chris Jordan. From his most recent project, Midway: Message from the Gyre:These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and … [Read more...]

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1. Michael Darling's Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-79 at the Seattle Art Museum. From my review in Modern Painters: "Target Practice" focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40 talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the best contemporary-art survey in the museum's history. 2. The Old Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, curated by Toby Kamps … [Read more...]

Nothing like confidence. For his exhibition announcement photo, Grant Barnhart coded the theme onto a mug in his Rat Pack impersonation of a cool guy: Beg For It.In spite of its self-mocking arrogance, his pose is a comic acknowledgment of reality: He is a young painter in Seattle at the edge of even the Seattle experience, overlooked as a matter of course. With this image, he tells not only his nearly nonexistent audience but the wider world that it will have to work to keep up with him.Which is true. Those who know him expect attitude, and … [Read more...]

Daniel Carrillo is time-traveling Seattle artists into the past. Through a wet plate collodion process, he presents them as their own long-gone great-grandparents. Carrillo:These are positives on glass plates also called Ambrotypes and they are 7 x 9 inches. Collodion is poured onto a glass plate then sensitized in silver nitrate then exposed while the plate is still wet- hence the name. When developed they have an antiquated, quirky, unpredictable, handmade quality to them that has made them irresistible and has, for me, brought the magic … [Read more...]

From an anonymous source going by the name of Not Buying It in response to the post titled, Mary Henry - artists hidden in plain sight: Neglected abstract geometric artists are plentiful? Are you talking about painters who deserve to be well known? Name five. Not just anybody, but somebody who has created work that could stand up to international attention. The artists at the top aren't there by luck. They are better than the obscure. I've never heard of Mary Henry. Her work looks pretty good online, but online is nowhere as you must know. … [Read more...]

Engineering seniors at the University of Maine are using Buster Simpson's shovels to keep the walkways clear on their plaza. Simpson:This collective effort provides a passage for undergraduates, serve as a civic effort to save maintenance costs, protects the campus environment from salt and abrasive sand and suggests a mental and physical college credit. Stay off the machines, keep shoveling, peace on earth.In the 1990s, Simpson began leaving shovels in homeless encampments around the country. On the blade are painted images … [Read more...]

Cuban-born New York painter Carmen Herrera, 94, is heading toward limelight. A Deborah Sontag feature story about her reports that she sold her first painting five years ago, at age 89. Since then, her career trajectory is straight up. The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, "How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?"It's easy. Artists who would shine if those in charge of a significant stage managed to notice them exist all over the world. The interesting question is not why she was overlooked … [Read more...]

When Stranger art critic Jen Graves took out after Garrison Keillor, I took out after her in this links post:No humor allowed: Jen Graves posted this dazzling piece of (at least brief) nonsense yesterday: Remember: American men don't do art unless it involves naked ladies, unless the men have thin shoulders. I hate you, Garrison Keillor.Jen. He's kidding. Kidding. The whole thing is a spoof on sex stereotypes, not an indulgence of them. Hate Garrison Keillor? Save it for Dick Cheney.Surely the man who invented the place where all the women are … [Read more...]

By examining the connective tissue between parents and children, Parenthesis is art made from life's glue. My review here. Jen Graves here. Through Saturday.From Neil Goldberg's video, My Parents Read Dreams I've Had About Them, 1998. (He told them not to smile.)Also ending Saturday: Ten years of New work by SuttonBeresCuller at Lawrimore Project. that surveys ten years of their concerns. My review, Blowing in Blocked Wind, here. Jen Graves here.  … [Read more...]

Rachel Maxi, final holiday sale, Tuesday, December 22 from 4 to 8 PM  in Seattle: 1326 13th Ave S. 98144 . Tiny paintings for everyone! If you squint, it's almost a tree. … [Read more...]

In John Ashbery's River of the Canoefish, mackerel echo their meaning in Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, but with Ashbery's own note of revulsion for the mindless forces of biology: Yeats: That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees ---Those dying generations---at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. Ashbery:Today they are as … [Read more...]

All those moments will be lost like tears in the rain. - BladerunnerRichard Wright won the Turner Prize. It didn't hurt him that he frequently destroys what he makes, which means like traditional sand painting, that work is unavailable for purchase. Because nobody's in it for the money, everybody shares in the warm glow of the moment. Self-editing blue chips can get by on grants, patronage and prizes, as well as what they don't toss. What about artists of whom few have heard? When they make a habit of destroying their product, few care because … [Read more...]

The latest round of acquisitions at the Seattle Art Museum concentrates on Asian and Asian American work, which is, for the museum, a kind of roots music. SAM opened as a Pan-Asian art museum, a field that continues to be a strength.Highlights. Xue Song, Coca Cola, 1998, 24 x 20 inches. Miwa Yanagi, Yuka, from the My Grandmothers series, 2000. Chromogenic print on Plexiglas, mounted on aluminum.Chiho Aoshima, Red Eyed Tribe Maker, 2002, printYuken Teruya, Untitled, (Sigonas), 2002, paper bag sculptureJoseph Park, Tigerish Bean Maker, 2005, … [Read more...]