From Douglas Britt:Two from Marfa: … [Read more...]

So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. (Revelation 3:14-22)Titus Kaphar vomits history. He tars, feathers and tears it up. He peels it off, like sunburned skin. He allows it to leak through surface paint slathering, first eyes, then mouth: the white behind the black and the black behind the white, the racial stew of our collective story.Seen in reproduction, his paintings can pass for tricks. First he makes copies of the past, then he destroys them. In person, however, the intensity of his … [Read more...]

In The New Yorker via  email from Douglas Britt, in honor of The Puppet Show at the Frye: … [Read more...]

Formerly with the real PI, the two-woman force field in food writing, Rebekah Denn and Leslie Kelly, each have their own thriving blogs and related writing projects. That leaves the online PI with a citizen journalist restaurant critic, who in this context works for free.In mainstream food criticism, if you to eat with a restaurant critic, you'll get a lecture ahead of time on what not to say and what you're responsible for ordering. Critics want to sample the menu without being obvious. The main thing you can't say? That you're eating with a … [Read more...]

When an exhibit is traveling, local venues frequently complement what arrives in crates with what can be carried across town. A Picasso and Matisse, together again, blockbuster? We can add to that. European Impressionism, peak and post?  We can match that.The exception is contemporary. If an exhibit on a contemporary theme is on the road, rare is the regional museum able/willing to integrate the home grown with the imported.  Why? If done badly, it's better not done. Good examples of Picasso exist lots of places. But faith that … [Read more...]

Check it out. In my case, he means he tough-loves me. Dave Horsey to me:Regina, I still love you, even though your comments about me are preposterous.This post - Dave Horsey derides his former (fired) PI colleagues - remains big in journalism circles, although most of the discussion is not on this blog. But good responses continue to trickle in, from the irritated (Emily White, whom I think might have intended to respond to this post, which referred to her PI tenure) to the amused (Casey Corr).White was at the PI for (roughly) a hard … [Read more...]

Enjoying a conversation with a hospital security guard who once slammed a man face first into a glass wall for spitting on her, I missed the fact that I'd followed the line out onto Lead Pencil's ramp rising on a steep diagonal at Seattle's Moore Theatre.I'm afraid of heights. Titled Exit Ramp, the piece cut the theater in half and gave those traveling on it a new view of the space below. What that new view was I can't say. As my knees locked, I focused on a woman in a wedding dress with gray ashes on her white-washed face who was leaning out … [Read more...]

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The new ornate: Kehinde WileyThe old rough and tumble: Ed Templeton (with stigmata)Their merger: Debra Baxter - Brass Knuckles/Tongue (Hurts So Good) … [Read more...]

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In the catalog for The Puppet Show at the Frye (organized by the ICA), John Bell claims that a puppeteer frustrated by his unachievable desire to control people (Being John Malkovich) the "way he controls marionettes...has nothing to do with real puppetry and is instead a misdirected metaphor about puppets: the idea that the goal of puppet performance is complete control of the object."The word "complete" saves the sentence, but not by much. Subtle undercurrents are not the ocean. A bottom is not a top, and a puppet directs nobody's action, not … [Read more...]

Because he and his girlfriend just broke up and he remains broken up about it, a guard at the Frye cannot force himself to rotate through the gallery in which Cindy Loehr's two-channel video, Colloquy, runs on two monitors.The Frye has a tight crew. Other guards are covering for him.He's not the only one who backs away as if the gallery's a gun. Loehr's pair of talking hands with rhinestone eyes and mouths that move in the crack between thumb and palm recite a text that anybody who's not extraordinarily lucky has already heard and/or … [Read more...]

I did not hustle to see The Puppet Show from the ICA when it opened at the Frye last month, partly because (already been chewed) puppets are everywhere. Pretty sure the exhibit plucked a few stringed bodies from the contemporary image stream as easy-to-chew crowd pleasers and sorry more compelling explorations tend not to travel, I filed it under an ever-receding-into-the-future to-do list. I should have listened to Jen Graves, review here. (Mine in multiples soon to follow.)The Puppet Show is killer good, and so is its catalog. Catalogs for … [Read more...]

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Theodore Roethke, images Charles LeDray. From Sperone Westwater except portrait of the artist. My Papa's Waltz The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt. … [Read more...]

After Chase Bank bought the failed Washington Mutual in 2008, Chase found itself with more art than it had space for, as Chase's Washington Mutual is a slimmed-down version of the disgraced original.What happens to roughly two-dozen paintings, drawings and sculptures by veterans of the Northwest mainstream that Chase decided not to keep? (Including Alden Mason, Joseph Goldberg, Jeffry Mitchell, Robert Sperry, Frank Okada, Doris Chase and Gaylen Hansen.)Earlier this week, Chase staged a give-away. Museums were invited to choose what they wanted, … [Read more...]

Arts patron and irrepressible character Max Gurvich died at home in Seattle at age 94. (Seattle Times obit here.)Board member and donor (with his wife Helen) to a variety of Seattle arts groups, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Gallery and Cornish College of the Arts, Gurvich's lasting legacy might be a hideous pair of woven, window-blind style metal sculptures that rise 22-feet out of the water at the west end of the Evergreen Point Bridge, which connects Seattle to its  Eastside suburbs. I wrote a story for the PI when they … [Read more...]

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Everybody's got something to hide 'cept for me and my monkey.- John LennonAndrew Miksys:Miksys won his first bingo game at 11, collecting $280. In high school he delivered a newspaper his father published, Bingo Today, to veterans halls, fraternal associations, churches and sports clubs in Seattle. He knows the people he photographs in bingo halls, most of whom are dead and don't know it. The routine of the game keeps them in a pretense of motion. They stare are their cards the way the empty eye sockets of skeletons stare into eternity.Below, … [Read more...]

From Ms.C, my favorite monster (where high gets low), photo of Muro by Raquel Paiewonsky. C-Monster commentary: "Boobies!" Who says art criticism on blogs is not of the highest order?  Click to enlarge. (Previous from me, Breasts at work and play here.)Topping the charts (again): Holland Cotter with his review of Light of the Sufis, here. Cotter is where I go to shop for images. Two from Sufi review:  A 17th century Indian painting he describes as "an ego reduced by love to an ash on the arm of God." Nobody with as wide a view of art … [Read more...]

Hooyman here via Kate Speck, who graduates from high school today. (Hi Kate Speck!) Hooyman's title should be, global warming on the way to the grocery store. Love the hat. … [Read more...]

On the question of why live at the end of the earth, two things fall squarely in the plus pile: In Seattle, I get personal letters from my bar and spring greetings (below) from my funeral parlor.Dear Friends:Seattle is a wonderful place in the springtime. The grass grows thick and technicolor green and flowers and trees burst with vibrant color. Rhododendrons unveil purples and pinks, yellows and red, daffodils and magnolias and cherry trees line the streets like pom poms. Spring is in full swing and boy is it a colorful affair. Lundgren … [Read more...]

We are what we eat but also what we reject, admire and aspire to be.I.D.: Individual Demographics at Seattle's Greg Kucera Gallery is about self, an identity that's imagined, implied, cataloged, remembered or projected outward like a fog machine.For Anne Appleby, color carries the world. In Faded Sweet Pea (oil/wax on four panels, each 16 inches square, 2008) there is a homage to the dying in the layered mutations of her shadings, impossible to see reproduced. Nola Avienne is not interested in elegies. As she notes in her artist statement, some … [Read more...]

The supple line Tom of Finland (Touko) is entirely devoted to articulating the robust bodies of young men. Always hung, hard and willing, they represent a state of imperishable bliss.In the gap between the artist's idealized fixations and the reality of flesh, the audience for Tom of Finland's drawings live. The drawings arrest time, which ticks onward. They are a time out that never ends, all coming and no going, all light and no dark. Some who disdain his work are homophobic, but there are other reasons for giving it a pass. The artist … [Read more...]

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Robert Colescott (1925-2009) was a trim, soft-spoken man with a halo of white hair on his handsome head. His manners were courtly, his eyes appraising. He could walk into a room and take everything in. He knew the dirt and failed to hold a grudge.Ode to Joy (European Anthem),1997  (Via NYT)As a young painter, he lived in Seattle and found it comfortable but provincial: Influences came in slowly but didn't mature and go back out again.He had just graduated with an MFA from UC Berkeley and had spent a year in Paris studying with Fernand … [Read more...]

Four (ace) former Seattle PI photographers are in business as Red Box Pictures: Scott Eklund, Andy Rogers, Rob Sumner and Dan DeLong. (Blog here.)Their past gave them their moniker. … [Read more...]

Previous on tattoos here. Lysohir's Small Tattooed Ladies and Tattooed Dresses below. Her site here. … [Read more...]