Like a corset leaving little room for breathing, tight budgets curtail curatorial choices. The Henry Art Gallery is dipping into its collections for answers, which in Henry's case is overdue. Aside from photography and contemporary art from Bill and Ruth True, what the Henry owns tends to be unexplored.Part of the reason is unwieldy diversity. Only in the 1980s, under director Richard Andrews, did the Henry clarify its identity as a contemporary art venue, leaving the bulk of its collections with no reason to surface. Besides contemporary art, … [Read more...]

Mainstream journalists do not break up their lines to weep, laugh or jeer. Even when the question is ridiculous, they're devoted to their version of a call-and-response pattern.Exhibit A: (It's in the PI)Question: What is the significance of the pedestrian crossing sign with the circle?Answer:Eric Widstrand, city traffic engineer for the Seattle Department of Transportation, says the hula hoop is a sticker (which is graffiti) that has been applied to the sign to make it look like the pedestrian is hula-hooping. "There is no significance to … [Read more...]

Relatively well known on the East Coast in her youth, Yvonne Twining Humber moved to the Northwest with her husband in the 1940s and promptly fell off the art map. Yet she kept on.In 2001, she set up the award that bears her name (administered by Artist Trust) as a shout out to other women who find life getting in the way of art. It was her way of saying, "You're not alone; keep working." To win, artists have to be female, 60 years old or older, have worked as an artist for at least 25 years and live in Washington State. Humber puts me in mind … [Read more...]

Sol LeWitt:He is the tide on which all these boats rise. Barry McGee:Michael Knutson:Jim LambieMark GrotjahnEmily PothastJulia Haack:Tim Bavington:Susan Dory: … [Read more...]

Starting in January, Chiyo Ishikawa, the Seattle Art Museum's Deputy Director for Art & Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, is one of 12 curators selected to participate in the 2010 fellowship program at the Center for Curatorial Leadership at Columbia University. From press release: Christophe Cherix, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books The Museum of Modern Art, New York • Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs El Museo del Barrio, New York • Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, Department of … [Read more...]

The Seattle Art Museum's blog, SOAP, is off to a promising start with three entries by new director Derrick Cartright. After receiving a certain amount of (gentle) ridicule for its (what the?) name, (here and here), Cartright countered with a description of the process of choosing it and a few image associations, chief among them:Considering the alternatives, floating is a good thing. … [Read more...]

When Michael Knutson was 19 and doing summer farm work, a grain thresher grabbed his left hand and chewed. If he hadn't been wearing a sweat shirt, he would have bled out. The shirt twisted in the machinery to form a tourniquet just under his shoulder, leaving him dangling. Help arrived 20 minutes later. He did not lose consciousness. The accident helped him focus, he said. "I was vague about what I wanted to do. After that, I knew I wanted to paint." In his early 30s, Robert Hardgrave was making a slim living as an illustrator when his kidneys … [Read more...]

Nancy Spero, 1926-2009. Holland Cotter obit here.    The Bite - Olga BroumasWhat I wear in the morning pleases me:     green shirt, skirt of wine.          I am wrapped in myself as the smell of night wraps round my sleep when I sleep outside.          By the time I get to the corner bar, corner store, corner construction site, I become divine.          I turn men into swine. … [Read more...]

Faris McReynoldsAaron Morse … [Read more...]

On the first day of the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Conference in Seattle, I walked uptown to the Sheraton hear Morris Dees talk about the history of the Southern Poverty Law Center. On route, I found myself surrounded by a sea of people in turtle suits, if not a sea, then a substantial cluster. They were in town to represent the ocean, which didn't have a representative at the conference. By the time I left the hotel, the turtles had company: labor unions, other environmentalists, progressive religious groups, anarchists from … [Read more...]

(Previous in rosaries ).Dan Flavvin at Donald Young through Nov. 14. … [Read more...]

The Dance (for Robert Duncan) Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi JonesThe dance (held up for me byan older man. He told me how. Showedme. Not steps, but the fixof muscle. A positionfor myself: to move.David HammonsDuncantold of dance. His poemsfull of what we calledso long for you to be. Adance. And all his wordsran out of it. That therewas some bright elegancethe sad meat of the bodymade. Some gesture, thatif we became, for one blank momentwould turn usinto creatures of rhythm.Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987-2006I want to … [Read more...]

On Labor Day, 1993, Jason Sprinkle and a few of his friends attached a ball and chain to the foot of Jonathan Borofsky's "Hammering Man" in front of the Seattle Art Museum. To prevent damage to the sculpture, they padded the chain with foam. (Image via) Elmgreen & Dragset at the Frieze Art Fair in London, 2009. (Image via)  … [Read more...]

Still traveling around the U.S., the Chinese Corpses exhibit Bodies - The Exhibition returns to Seattle.I wonder what Zhang Huan thinks.Who's bodies are those in the exhibit? Questions raised and unanswered here. … [Read more...]

In their extended synthetic panoramas, Scott McFarland and Paul Berger tend to shrink shadows or misdirect them. They look like raisins added to cookie dough at the last minute.McFarland:Berger: Mary Temple: Her trees painted in latex on walls and stain on floors suggest a fragility they have transcended. They will not dissolve when the sun goes down or lose their form in a larger dark.Pat De Caro - When it really is too late to have a happy childhood.Roger Shimomura: When Japanese Americans were shadows to their fellow citizens.Susie J. Lee - … [Read more...]

From W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric … [Read more...]

Jorge Macchi - shadow as the end of the road.Claudia Fitch: A parenthesis primed to delete its internal aside.Glenn Rudolph: The solace of a gathering dark. Harrison Higgs: What you don't know can never be retrieved.Patrick Holderfield: A landscape of negatives.John Divola, from series, Dog Chasing My Car In The DesertKaren Ganz - There's nothing quite as noir as a girl with a gun, especially if she's a shadow.Robert C. Jones - Black holds the blooms in place. … [Read more...]

Browning: Glass, 2009Just kidding. It's not a history of NW glass. It's a history of adolescent boys throwing empty beer bottles into a campfire, with a hat tip to these guys. … [Read more...]

In Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi 's The Adoration of the Magi, 1440/1460, light framed in an arch on the upper left serves to echo the light of the event, central to Christians.The Annunciation, 1898, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, deals with the strangeness of the moment - an angel visiting a girl to announce her future - by turning the Angel Gabriel into a column of light.In Lead Pencil's Adoration Turning Yellow from 2008, Gabriel is worse for wear. Not only is he no longer the light source, he's making a mess. … [Read more...]

Thanks, Crawl Space. Last show, Stranger Circumstances, opens Nov. 7 at 6 p.m. … [Read more...]

If you drag your life behind you in a sack, it's your shadow. A shadow is a fact when you cast it and otherwise a metaphor for experience, except in art, where its meanings are myriad.Cat Clifford's shadows do not depend on light. They have their own lives and creatures who move within them.William Kentridge gives flesh to James Joyce's aside, that history is a nightmare from which he is unable to awake.In An-My Le's war, soldiers set up shadows to take the hit. (more)Matt Browning's Honest Labor is a droll sham even though it's real, which is … [Read more...]

Via … [Read more...]

It would have been a stronger show.As it is, The Old, Weird America is a hell of an accomplishment. Its curator Toby Kamps proved that folk themes encased in stereotype can become fluid when reconsidered by contemporary artists. The 18 featured come from around the country, everywhere but here. Kamps had no responsibility to include all regions. His goal was an alchemical  series of relationships, each building from each to enrich the complexity of his themes. Most of what he delivered is magnificent, but there are a few artists hitching a … [Read more...]

There are points in any life when people burrow. I know I'm in one when I'm reading almost nothing but essays about art with murder mysteries on my I-Pod, the latter to guarantee that as I engage in humdrum tasks, the voice in my head is not my own.I surfaced into a (slightly) larger world this weekend when I looked up an old friend online and found her writing for Dwell. I don't care about Dwell, which appears to be fetishistic about the finer points of gracious living, but I do care about leads. My friend, Deborah Baldwin, writes them as well … [Read more...]

Previous post, that ends with Marclay: The visual score, after KandinskyScores that are paintings, drawings and collages are everywhere in recent years. They function as art on their own but can, depending on the performer, inspire sound. We are all ears.A few of my favorites:Paul Rucker, Strange Fruit, a score he plays on his cello:Strange Fruit is part of an exhibit at Cornish College called Live in the Hyphen, with Rucker and Wynne Greenwood, through Oct. 16. Greenwood talks in the gallery noon-1 on Oct. 16.Other scores: … [Read more...]

...can go to sea. Kassandra, via … [Read more...]

Ulli Weiss photo from Pina Bausch performanceSean M. Johnson, Family Portrait (Nothing but tape holding it to the wall) … [Read more...]

Tom Huber … [Read more...]

 If you start hereor hereyou can stop herewith a leapfrog to Trimpin and Christian Marclay without missing much in between.Minus the mysticism, Trimpin and Marclay are as committed as Kandinsky to the visual implications of sound. While many of Kandinsky's ideas about spiritual color and visual sound found few takers in the second half of the 20th century, they are in play today.Trimpin- Score for PHFFFTI remember as a child helping to build huge, wooden discs to set on fire at night and roll off a ramp to hang in the air and fall into … [Read more...]

Tim Roda comes from a family of makers. His Italian-immigrant grandfather and father built the  family home out of the same scrap and recycled wood with which they built their chicken coop. My father built a two-car garage whose three sides look like a patchwork quilt of various wood surfaces and textures. Although I used to question my father and grandfather's way of building and "fixing" things, I now recognize and embrace this style not simply as a legacy but as an hereditary fingerprint. As a father himself, Roda is intent on passing … [Read more...]