After losing this court case  on its attempt to redefine the standards by which artists are included in its rosters, the Washington State Arts Commission emailed me a list of its current standards:High artistic standard · Conceptually enduring · High technical standard · Cohesive body of work · Ability to work at scale appropriate to public art · Demonstrates experience · Site and/or context responsive · Potential or ability to work in media appropriate for public art · … [Read more...]

Two of James Ensor's many progeny, painting the face inside the face:Robyn O'NeilJames Deitz Dream, Dream oil / canvas, 2009 26⅝ x 19⅛ inches … [Read more...]

Talk about living in your head. Gala Bent's Matrix for Praxis (Graphite and gouache, 30" x 22") conjures an animal that has freed itself from animal nature. Its head is celestial, its body vestigial. Bent is in Transubstantial  at Catherine Person, along with Colleen Hayward, Renee Zettle-Sterling and Heidi Schwegler, opening Thursday night as part of Pioneer Square's First Thursday Gallery Walk, 6-8.Also opening Thursday night in the Square:Made in the U.S.A., group show of gallery artists at Greg Kucera. Sean M. Johnson at Howard House. … [Read more...]

Twenty-six street bands from the U.S. and Canada are in Seattle April 9-11 at a variety of places, including Art Attack on April 10. (The Art Attack link is a month out of date. Nobody's perfect. Locations and participants are still good. )Think Caliban as band master, not Ariel, playing winds, strings and all manner of percussives. They are the Anti-Fascist Marching Band, Artesian Rumble Arkestra, BeatCrunchers, Bolting Brassicas Marching Band, Brass Messengers,The Carnival Band, Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band, Environmental … [Read more...]

Gone till March 27. No posting till I get back. Till then, a little traveling music. John Wesley, 2009. Painted Bronze, 24 x 17 x 7 in. (Image via)Henry TaylorKaz Oshiro Zero Case Spinner (Gun Metal - Dust) 2008-09 Acrylic and Bondo on stretched canvas, 31 x 19 1/2 x 10 1/4"Alan Bechler Gun, 1987 color photos mounted on canvas, masonite, hardware, life-sizeTodd Simeone Suitcase, 2003 Ultrachrome Inkjet Print Ed. of 5 24" x 40" … [Read more...]

What do you get when singers, dancers and actors join forces with those who work in arts industries, including but not limited to curators, publicists, ticket takers, grant writers and critics, to put on a show with strippers, lounge lizards, lawyers, librarians, social activists and hat-check boys at the roller rink? You get punk-indie-soul-defiant-bleeding-heart love children with large vocabularies who forsake their business suits and shake their tail feathers.Imagine Stephen Crane's dream world. When he reads a poem, his horse applauds. … [Read more...]

In a significant policy shift,  the Seattle Art Museum has agreed to let visitors take pictures of the art in the galleries. There are a few trifling limitations, which Nicole Chism Griffin explains on the museum's blog, called Soap. In a story I wrote late in 2008, Seattle Art Museum's Search for Youth, this shift was part of my number one recommendation. 1. Lighten up:  Let people take notes using a pen. Major museums in New York have no problem with pen users, but in Seattle the guards say no. Let people take photos in the … [Read more...]

Sheila Klein and Ries Niemi met at art school in 1972.  Klein: I thought he was cool, but he was so androgynous in those days, super skinny with so much jewelry and long hair in braids, that I didn't think about him (romantically) until I did, and then I really did. He was 17, I was 20. We got together in '76 and married in '78. Because we have such a long history, it's impossible not to be influenced by each other. We have two sons. Marriage is a problematic institution, but we try not to get in each other's way. (more)Now sharing the … [Read more...]

Speak For The Trees is a book to adorn the coffee tables of people who don't read books. It's excellent fluff to be picked up and paged through between cocktails and dinner. A theme is not enough to tie a group of artists together, and the 76 featured in nice, full-color images do not belong together. Nor do they engage the quotes that hang beside them, pithy thoughts from the mostly dead and mostly famous. Observations from the artists tend to be the book's high point, but there is little sense of shared engagement, of ideas played out in a … [Read more...]

Louise Bourgeois Swaying, 2006 Etching, ink, watercolor and pencil on paper 149.5 x 33.9 cm (Image via)Elizabeth Jameson Red #3, watercolor on paper, 5.25in x 3.375"Teresita Fernandez (Image via)Katy Stone SPILLING STREAM (ODE), 2005 Acrylic on duralar, pins 73 x 7 x 3 inchesTara DonovanAlyson Shotz Detail of Untitled (3 Views of an Object) # 1, 2009 yarn and pins on wall 183 x 132 inches Some waterfalls are barely there.Fred Wilson Viscous Risk, 2005 21 blown glass elements 120" x 204" x 84" (304.8 cm x 518.2 cm x 213.4 cm) And other … [Read more...]

 Barbara Earl Thomas:I am from a family of fishermen who migrated from the South in the early 1940's, specifically Louisiana, Texas and Florida. While they left much behind, what they brought with them was a love for being out of doors on the lakes fishing for food to feed the family and sometimes the whole neighborhood. What set us apart from the Native Americans and the Scandinavians who came before us was our ritual of fishing for bottom fish. For years after my family's arrival in the Northwest in the 1940's there was no concept or … [Read more...]

Using mostly oils and rarely extending his painted ground beyond a grown man's hand span, Gaylen Hansen staples his canvases onto a wall, rips them off when he's done and considers them finished without frames. His colors are orchestrated, but he makes a fetish out of flatness. Like Japanese scroll painters, he conveys distance in layers. He paints wolves the color of sage who contemplate a deer drinking in a fish-filled stream. Buffalo, crickets, fish, dogs, cats, deer, bears, crows and magpies muscle Hansen's stand-in, the Kernal. When fish … [Read more...]

Christian Holstad's emblem of a marketplace of crushed hopes and dreams.... The Road to Hell is Paved (Whole Foods and Target) 2009 Installation View: vintage millenery tubing, vinyl, reflective fabric, lame, tubingreminds me of an earlier series.Cris Bruch 93 Pieces 1988 Hammered shopping cartNext to Holstad's silky fabrications, Bruch's 93 Pieces is raw evidence of  the poverty, bad luck, mental illness, alcoholism and outcast eccentricity that collided with the Reagan administration to produce the homelessness we now take for granted. … [Read more...]

This is what the world will look like after it has become its shadow and just before it disappears. (via) … [Read more...]

From Art Chantry's disquistion on the theme: sign painting is (for my money) the true secret brotherhood of graphic design everywhere. when pompeii wand herculaneum were excavated, guess what they found painted on the walls of those ancient buried cities? murals? beautiful artworks? no, they found ads. painted by professional sign painters. for the last 150 years, sign painting has been the bedrock of american graphic design. without it , there would have been no training, no skill set, no place to learn the aesthetics of typography and design. … [Read more...]

Thursday night is lecture overload on Seattle. At the Wing Luke Museum, Roger Simomura surveys 40 years of his aesthetic engagement in conjunction with his exhibition, Yellow Terror, at the Wing Luke. At the Frye Museum, Tim Rollins discusses the Kids of Survival with Angel Abreu, a K.O.S. artist who first worked with Rollins in 1988 at age eleven, in conjunction with their exhibit at the Frye. Both lectures start at 7 p.m. Only one person could make it to both. … [Read more...]

You're going to love me. (via) … [Read more...]

The issue is not The Things They Carried, but the things they left behind. University of Washington's Jason De Leon is building a portrait of Latinos who try to slip into the U.S. without benefit of passport. He's creating it from what they are forced to drop on their way: backpacks, water bottles, shirts, jackets, photos, toys and shoes. Shoes are especially ominous. Where do they go without them?De Leon has collected at sites around the Mexican border in his work to better understand one of the world's largest ongoing modern-day … [Read more...]

In the pavement at Second and Battery in front of the hostel, via … [Read more...]

Christian Boltanski Altar to the Chases High School (Autel Chases), 1987Curtis Erlinger single file (detail) 2005 file drawer, slides, eraser shavings, watercolor, paper (each slide: 1.5 x 1.5")Carlos Vega, Clean-up Site , 2007 Acrylic and collage on canvas 18 3/4" X 10 3/4"Walid Raad and/or onlookers 2005Liz Magor Mouse on Tray … [Read more...]

More than 40 years after the generation that practiced duck-and-cover stood up to resume its normal programming, artists continue to imagine what the moment might have been, and the moment after. Mostly, they're interested in the light. Bailey Russel - Space Needle 1Russel, Space Needle 3Curtis Erlinger SoundClaudia X. Valdes (Image via)Kenji Yanobe Atom (Image via)Yanobe is not conjuring with a potential crisis or one averted. The light to which he refers rocked his country. Twice. … [Read more...]

In the 20th Century, artists who devoted themselves to rigorous abstraction tended to live in cities. Not Mary Henry. Her taste for the rural deprived her of the company of her peers. Wherever she was, she was the only person doing anything close her kind of work. Not until she was in her 70s, still living in the countryside but showing with regularity in Seattle, was she able to bask the force of collective admiration. She counted it not as the beginning of her life as an artist, but the beginning of her life as an artist with a career. When … [Read more...]

Alejandro Diaz knows how to refry a stereotype. He conflates art-world cliches with cultural stupidities and prices everything-to-go on beggar boards resting for pickup on a Mexican blanket. Every 30 years or so, a sidewalk sale hits the spot. (David Hammons. Note the blanket. Image via) … [Read more...]

Update: Sorry the link didn't work. It worked on my computer, which misled me into thinking a similar bounty would be shared by all. Document now attached in full.Superior Court Judge Richard J. Hicks of Thurston County, Washington, recently handed down a verdict that so ably parses the issue of the meaning of art as to be required reading in contemporary art issues classes. When the Washington State Arts Commission culled its list of artists eligible to be selected for public projects, one of the culled was Simon Kogan. After his appeal was … [Read more...]

Thursday might at Vermillion Gallery, Jay Steensma and Ree Brown, partners in life, share a gallery space.  Steensma died in 1994 of heart disease. He was 53.  Although he struggled with manic-depressive disorder for most of his life, it was under control for several years before his death, time he used to good effect. He painted solitude and weather, with small figures on barren gray plains, abandoned houses, ravaged trees. His grays were creamy, his whites begrimed and his blacks full of shadows. In the 1960s, he studied with Morris … [Read more...]

The name of that link is Dan Rauch. The similarities struck me thanks to the photo accompanying a story about Rauch's work for Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in San Francisco. (Traditional example here.)Also innovating off the same deep source, Shawn Hunt and Luthier Rob Bustos of Paragon Guitars. (via) … [Read more...]

If this is what you see, pull over. (From Reflective Dreams via This Isn't Happiness) … [Read more...]

(Get out of that state!) 4Culture is helping to fund artists to work with a Low Impact Vehicle exploration (aLIVe). The deadline was January. Here's the pitch:A Low Impact Vehicle exploration, invites artists to submit ideas that will inspire and engage the broader community in a conversation about transportation. Produced in collaboration with artist Cheryl dos Remedios and Great City, the project seeks artists' thinking in solving energy, transportation and livability issues facing us all.  Following the application deadline, a selection … [Read more...]

In 2001, Elizabeth Brown (senior curator at Seattle's Henry Art Gallery) wrote a catalog essay for an exhibit in Dallas titled, Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century. She took the artist to task for the sexism in his work, which earned her a rebuke from The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately not online. Brown:No matter how deeply he observed, empathized with, and enthused about his female subjects, Moore had a decidedly phallocratic perspective that he never came close to shedding. Both women and landscape represented territory to be explored … [Read more...]

Chicago painter Hebru Brantley opens Friday night at Pun(c)tuation, the mystery meat in the Seattle art scene. To find its Web site, you have to know to look for Punctuated Life. What's there is a dead zone. No wonder it has so little traction. Nobody would care, except it has something genuine to offer.Case in point, Hebru Brantley. Judging entirely by images on his Web site, his Lions Disguised as Lambs promises to be an event.Brantley is also an illustrator.What's the difference between art and illustration? The artist gets paid for the … [Read more...]