Akio Takamori's figures are nearly always lost in thought, caught in that moment when the body pauses and the mind drifts freely across its mental sky. Born and raised in Japan, he pays his country of origin the honor of taking it lightly. Bold and loose, his figures include Japanese spirit babies with oversize heads, priests, warriors, peasants and royalty with the folds of their gowns flapping and more recently, figures drawn from the larger world.While still in Japan he apprenticed with a master folk potter producing utilitarian ware. After … [Read more...]

The Seattle Art Museum moved into the international limelight for its exhibit earlier this year, Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78. Reversing Garder Eide Einarsson's intent, All My Friends Are Dead brings to mind another kind of target practice taking place in the Seattle area - the gunshot murders of police officers, one in Seattle and four in Tacoma. They were singled out not because of anything they as individuals did but because of who they are as a class. Is this a new way for wars to come home?Einarsson: … [Read more...]

The power of horizontal lines that beat on the body's clock, like heartstrings pulled out endlessly.Agnes Martin, 1979Joanne Mattera, 2008 … [Read more...]

Left: Velazquez, from Las Meninas (1656-57) Right: Picasso,1957Akio Takamori, 2009 … [Read more...]

Lewis Hyde opened The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by describing a rift in understanding between Pilgrims and Indians. Because the latter expected that gifts would stay in motion, the English called them "Indian givers," meaning, those who take gifts back. From the Indian point of view, wrote Hyde, the Pilgrims might have been called "white man keepers (or maybe capitalists, that is, people whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay … [Read more...]

Baxter - brass knuckles with crystals, 2009 On Facebook, Cable Griffith wrote, "You could gut a unicorn with that." Eric Fredericksen added, "I'm going to realign your chakras, motherf*****!" … [Read more...]

Now Then … [Read more...]

Why do people assume artists love nature? Because they're sensitive? As Woody Allen liked to say, "Nature and I are two." Kelly Mark hails from the Woody Allen School of Environmental Art. Asked to participate in a nature-friendly exhibit at The Tree Museum, Mark told curator David Liss she wouldn't and later, agreeing to take part, that she had no intention of visiting the site. According to Liss, she told him she "despised the outdoors, rural environments and any thing and any activity associated with nature such as insects, dirt, inclement … [Read more...]

Seattle's James W. Washington Jr. was a stone carver who sought to reveal spiritual forces in the physical realm. His roughly hewn and symbol-studded stone altars, hatching birds, sacrificial lambs and marble reliefs are guides to higher ground. He was drawn to life that is on the point of coming into being or making a breakthrough, not only the birds for which he's best known, but also snakes ready to squirm out of their coils, sperm swimming across a marble relief to a radiant egg, and human figures caught in the moment of enlightenment. Each … [Read more...]

For 60 years, painting has been stomped, stabbed, stepped on; set on fire, bound in ropes and hung on a clothesline like wet laundry. When it comes to doing violence to the medium, the thrill is gone. (See my Modern Painters review of the Seattle Art Museum's Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78.) Damaging paintings is now just one more way to make them. Like the iconography of the Catholic Church in Africa and South America, painting expands to include its opponents. Case in point, Margie Livingston. Ordinarily, she paints in oils … [Read more...]

Laura Castellanos' buttons, available at the Seattle Art Museum's gift shop and online. … [Read more...]

Literature has a bad sex award. Despite stiff competition, this year Philip Roth walked away with it. If art offered something similar, Jeff Koons would be a shoe-in for lifetime achievement: From Made in Heaven from 1991.Lifetime achievement for best sex in an art context?Wayne Miller,  from The Way of Life of the Northern Negro, Chicago (embrace), 1946-48. Sixty-plus years later, nobody has topped it. … [Read more...]

Thanksgiving is an excellent time to remember the real story, buried under fiction. Miles Standish and his anger management problem cannot taint the efforts of individual Americans to do better. (See Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.) … [Read more...]

Via … [Read more...]

Discovered by happy accident in a lab at Oregon State:Online, it looks a lot like Yves Klein blue, but it's safe and (when generics appear) cheap. Glasstire's Top Ten art activists.The boom in Doomsday. Artists and the pain of recession.In Seattle, NUBE opens at the Odd Fellows Hall.Also Seattle, Jeffry Mitchell wins a Joan Mitchell.In New York, the Homeless Art Museum makes an appearance.Armenians celebrate the opening of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts.Jeff Shang's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" portraits via Culture Monster.MoCA revs up Chris … [Read more...]

Former PI editor Gil Aegerter on the play, It's Not In The PI, a response to my review:Finally got a chance to see the play on the final day, and I must say I liked it -- with reservations. I agree with Regina that if you weren't on the inside, you might find it confusing and disjointed. But I thought it captured the quirky character of the P-I quite well (kind of like the Adcock review that's quoted). And it works as metafiction -- the play as newspaper story, reported and written well or poorly, depending on your viewpoint, whether you were … [Read more...]

Sloth's best. Lolling on a sofa In a Chinese dressing gownWith the windows open in the heat,The breeze rousing the leaves.The flies dozing on the ceiling. The silky hush of a summer afternoon,Like floating on one's backWith eyes closed in some pondClogged with water lilies,Inhaling their scent as they nuzzle close.The light and shade dillydallying,The leaves sighing again.Afterward, not even that.Majestic stupor. Stirring only at midnightTo click on the yellow table lamp.Charles Simic, The Secret Of The Yellow RoomImages: 1. Geoffrey Chadsey. … [Read more...]

Makoto Saito (Image via)Robert Yoder … [Read more...]

JobWhence comest thou? From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. Scherrer … [Read more...]

From Jennifer Zwick, image viaPrevious in the same vein, Zwick's 100 Answers To What Might Go Wrong. … [Read more...]

John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler teamed up ten years ago as students at Cornish College, building a brick wall to block entrance to the faculty parking lot. Their current exhibit at Lawrimore Project gives them a chance to look backward to assess their accomplishments.The Answer, My Friend..., 2009 Acrylic, electric fans, 56 cubic feet of circulating air 88 x 34 x 34 inches  Every fan whirs away, generating nothing. It's not easy being the joker in the pack, the sane man in King Lear's court, the forward momentum surrounded by … [Read more...]

Christiane HaaseDan Webb … [Read more...]

Andrea SalvinoStorm Tharp' … [Read more...]

On the same block of Seattle's Capitol Hill are two galleries that take chances while hedging their bets. Both Grey Gallery and Vermillion are also bars. If the art doesn't sell, the drinks will. Even in the current climate, however, the art tends to move more quickly than in Seattle's gallery hub in Pioneer Square. Of the three artists showing currently at Vermillion, painter Ryan Molenkamp has almost sold out. With one exception, it's been a long time since that many red dots appeared in the Square. If I were going to imagine a stage set for … [Read more...]

Joseph GoldbergAndrew Keating … [Read more...]

Seattle's Aurora Avenue and other gateways to marginalized blight have their own poet. Kristen T. Ramirez makes these no-exit avenues of cheap dreams new again. She mines the noisy collision of mid-20th Century textures, colors, styles and cultural contrasts found in America. Ranch-style gas stations, the curving arrows beckoning you in, the birds on phone wires, the invitations to eat cheap, sleep in easy reach of a TV and buy a beater car become a survivalist's manual for a people's art form.Her collages are her signature, but not her only … [Read more...]

The fluidity in Warren Dykeman's paintings does not come from his figures. They are stationary; the footwork belongs to the field. His paintings are about breath. Hanging in the colored air in front of men in hats and horses frozen mid-gallop, breath does not take the form of a comic-book thought bubble or speech. It is an exhale on the beat. … [Read more...]

If you want to be surprised by the plot of Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark from 1938, skip the first two sentences.Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.Art is not plot. (Image via) … [Read more...]

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, with powder on my nose and makeup to hide my 4 o'clock shadow...Joe Johnson, from Mega Churches, via … [Read more...]

Tract homes in America are cookie cut, but slums in the Third World are hand made.Kader Attia's installation Kasbah is in Los de Arriba y Los de Abajo at Sala de Arte Publico Siqeiros in Mexico City, through Jan. 10.Attia's piece reminds me of what David Hammons called negritude architecture.I JUST LOVE THE HOUSES IN THE SOUTH, THE WAY THEY BUILT THEM. THAT NEGRITUDE ARCHITECTURE. I REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THE WAY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE THINGS, HOUSES OR MAGAZINE STANDS IN HARLEM, FOR INSTANCE. JUST THE WAY WE USE CARPENTRY. NOTHING FITS, BUT … [Read more...]