Karla Lieberman liked to build tottering things, held together by the force of their personality. In ceramic and later in glass and ceramic, she made elephants as spirit catchers, boats to cross troubled waters and towers to take you higher.She died at home on Tuesday a year and a half after being diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. She was 57."She was gracious about her illness," said her sister, Joan Lieberman-Brill. "It was devastating to get the diagnosis because there is no cure and its progression is terrible, but … [Read more...]

Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers, oil/canvas 1946 (image via)Robert Colescott, Love Makes the World Go Round, oil/canvas 1985Oliver Jackson, Untitled, 1988 Intaglio drypoint: ink on Arches cover white paperChris Ofili, Douen's Dance, 2007, oil on linen (image via) … [Read more...]

The man made of wine bottles sports a surveillance mirror. Like his maker, he's monumentally interested in keeping an eye on everything.Jerry Pethick's Le Semeur/Sunlight and Flies, 1984/2002, is at the Seattle Art Museum as a solitary representative of the artist's career. Born in 1935, Pethick died in his home of brain cancer on Hornby Island in 2003. He's affiliated in Vancouver with the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, which means he is far from overlooked. Why is it, then, that so few Seattle artists under 40 know who he is? (And I'm thinking of … [Read more...]

From Olympia Dumpster Divers: … [Read more...]

Some people do not believe that Seattle reads. Portland's bookcase is also bare. If we're going down, it's good to take Portland with us. (Ron Arad, image via Look Into My Owl) … [Read more...]

Into every life advice falls. Few things are as unwelcome, except if it comes from an artist who wraps it in spin. Such messages can be comically explicit, fearsomely obscure or rooted so deeply in banality as to turn on the light inside a cliche. (Previous post expanding on the theme here.)What follows is a small survey of artists whose visual exhortations and aphorisms deserve to be cited.Dave McKenzie, Self-Help Hyperventilation Bag, 2002 (Image via)Shawn Wolfe, Panic NowZack Bent, 2007Charles LaBelle Exterior Song, (detail) Hollywood, … [Read more...]

Hoping to best whatever the present day offers by way of minotaurs, Man Bartlett, son of Seattle painter Bo Bartlett, approached midtown Manhattan this morning as if it were a maze and set out to walk it in less than 24 hours, from 59th and Lexington to Times Square and back. Follow him on Twitter, here. He expects his own personal minotaur to be waiting for him on the red stairs.His map: Another view of the confrontation, Michael Spafford's Minotaur & Maiden I, 1987, oil/paper, 28 x 18 inches. (Note the red stairs.) … [Read more...]

Assume since 1915, the bride has grown weary of being stripped bare by her bachelors. There are the conventional methods of fighting back, including broken promises, failure to deliver, failure to appear and failure to care. The more daring brides turn their bachelors into spectacle.In 1999, Maurizio Cattelan taped Massimo De Carlo to a wall. The following year, Cattelan talked Emmanuel Perrotin into spending a month dressed as a pink phallus. Making a spectacle of one's dealer has taken a more intimate turn in Seattle.Susan Robb's DIGESTER … [Read more...]

Bob Dylan's text prompts in Don't Look Back (1967) are the most famous part of the documentary. (That's Allen Ginsberg on the left, a celebrity non sequitur.)Euan MacDonald's headless tribute (the video, Where Flamingos Fly, 2005) has no similar loose ends. MacDonald eliminates what he can, including, on occasion, the point. At the opening of MacDonald's exhibit at Western Bridge, A Little Ramble, bewilderment prevailed. The question in the air could be succinctly summarized as, What? MacDonald's work is full of narrative, but its connections … [Read more...]

Few objects signify as quick a trip to the bottom. Besides the slippery peel, there's the flesh, which is on its own personal bullet train from ripe to rotten.   SuttonBeresCuller … [Read more...]

Whenever you are, you've gone the wrong way. (Via) … [Read more...]

Caleb Larsen's Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is on view at Lawrimore Project, but it sold on e-Bay earlier today for $6,350. Auction over? No. This auction will never be over. Review here. Frquently asked questions below. Q: Doesn't the first sale doctrine prevent you from collecting further payment past the initial sale of the item? A: In order to be recognized as a work of art the contract must be adhered to, and regards of who owns it and who buys it the contract remains between the artist and the purchaser, not between buyer and seller. … [Read more...]

The art world is always saying next, please. I'm bored with your dead tiger shark and live nudes, your singing museum guard and your fallen Pope. The shark that is never dead is the art world itself, which, as Woody Allen explained in Annie Hall, has to keep moving to stay alive. Those who work in that world shovel the present into the past as a kind of necessary clean-up. For market reasons disguised as aesthetics, key power players determine who among the previously celebrated remains a live wire. The rest will be regulated to the heap of … [Read more...]

Zinn died Wednesday of a heart attack. He was 87. Boston Globe obit here.If American history is hard to read, it's because the country's aspirations fall so far short of its practices. Textbooks tend to respond with cover-ups, but not ones written by Zinn. A People's History of the United States is a courage teacher. Not only is it scholarly, clear and elegantly written from original source materials, its focus is justice: how and when it was denied and how and when it was achieved. His outrage is accompanied by his hope, wit and … [Read more...]

Unlike the other major members of the Northwest School, Kenneth Callahan did not seek transcendence. What was on earth was good enough for him.He started out strong as a figurative painter in the 1930s. Forging a silky yet monumental style, he created men to match Northwest mountains. He liked muscle-bound grandeur but released the figures who displayed it from the confines of gravity. Full of light, many hover on the edge of floating away. By the 1940s, he had pinned his figures to the ground with webbing. There are excellent paintings from … [Read more...]

Somewhere between Paint By Numbers and overexposed film negatives are the blue paintings of Joey Veltkamp. Boldly present and barely there, they are illusions floating on soap bubbles and gone.The series started last year with 1977, below. (The last good kiss you had was years ago.)Bear is more recent. It appears to be a self-portrait. (I am the name of my desire.)Hunter toys with the stereotype, with what it means to be male.Cowboy celebrates the fun. Note the underwear. This isn't your grandmother's cowboy. These images and others are on … [Read more...]

Nicholas Nyland paints on paper, which he crumbles up or tears into shreds and hangs in garlands. His painted clay looks crumbled too.His work can look like nothing at all, tidbits left over from an elementary school art class.  What makes it distinctive is time spent. Stand in front of them long enough, and these fragments become wholes. They evoke not rocks on a beach but scholar's rocks in a studio, each plane and  color pattern worthy of attention. Nyland is in Soil's back room through Saturday. In the front gallery is a terrific … [Read more...]

From the file of up-and-out: Seeking to expand their reach beyond Manhattan, artists send their work to... Seattle. Outside The Time Zone, the curatorial partnership between Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, is pleased to announce its first collaborative project outside of New York City. The exhibition is also the inaugural exhibition for Kymata Project Space. Seattle was chosen as the first host city because the exhibited artists and the curators have intimate connections with the Emerald City and the Northwest. The four-person exhibition of … [Read more...]

Nancy Grossman, Head, 1968Sarah McDougald Kohn - Wrapture,  2008First tragedy, then Elmer Fudd. … [Read more...]

On a personal note: Seattle's Doug McLennan, founder and publisher of ArtsJournal, interviews an ArtsJournal blogger at Town Hall Tuesday night, 9:15- 10 p.m., free admission. Because I am the only ArtsJournal blogger located in Seattle, that means he's interviewing me. To date (and time is running out), the event promises to be free form. We have yet to discuss content, but I'm assuming it relates in some form to arts journalism. Maybe he'll surprise me and ask about baseball. I could change the topic to fine wine and dining or string theory … [Read more...]

From Randy Kennedy:In 1969 (Ida) Applebroog, then known by her married name, Ida Horowitz, was a mother of four, a native New Yorker living unhappily in San Diego, where her husband had moved the family to accept an academic position. Ms. Applebroog had been struggling to make a name for herself as an artist and struggling with depression. Her only sanctuary in her chaotic household came at night, when she shut herself in the bathroom and climbed into the tub. Over a period of several weeks just before her 40th birthday, she took a sketch pad … [Read more...]

I've gone to the countryside outside computer range to root around in the mud, admire the naked fists of bare trees and avoid eye contact with the methamphetamine farmers who populate the neighborhood. Christopher Buening, MethheadNot as lovely, but far more likely to be loitering around: … [Read more...]

Scott Wayne Indiana from Coin Op … [Read more...]

At Elizabeth Leach through Jan. 30. Interview with Christopher about his father, Robert, after the latter's death in 2008, here. Podcast interview with Eva Lake (30 minutes, worth it), here. … [Read more...]

Philip McCracken, Buddha's Mind (Via) - Eternity as dinner … [Read more...]

As long as artists are using your work, you're not dead.Leo Kenney, Formation No. 4, New Center, 1966 (At Seattle artREsource)Jeffrey Simmons, Proxima, 2008 (At Greg Kucera) … [Read more...]

Susan Dory's paintings could not have existed before satellite transmissions, personal computers and cell phones. Like Tim Bavington's, her color sense is electronic. But while his stripes relate loosely to musical tones, her horizontal pulses appear to be celestial. When sending messages to galaxies far, far away, we could code them on her color wheel. There are worse ways of saying hello.At Winston Wachter till Feb. 26. … [Read more...]

At Roq La Rue Gallery till January 30. … [Read more...]

Post-It Notes are raw material for Marc Dombrosky, and so are notes on the backs of envelopes, receipts and letters. He cares about what people want to remember after they've forgotten it. Dombrosky is the kind of person who does not look up. What interests him is on the ground. When a written fragment speaks to him, he takes it home and reinforces the text by sewing over the script. With homespun domestic skill, he returns trash to the bosom of the family. Lost or tossed messages are upgraded into a kind of street poetry.Lately, Dombrosky has … [Read more...]

In college in the late 1960s, a friend of a friend knew a guy named Fred. Thanks to Fred's bad luck, his fame spread beyond his immediate circle. He walked into an elevator that wasn't there and had to be rescued, clinging to the cables. If he was on a bus, it broke down. A teaching assistant lost his research paper. There were no copies. He went fishing, and his girlfriend's hook snagged his cheek. Rumor had it that Fred carried Kenneth Fearing's Dirge in his pocket.1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;   … [Read more...]