Kerry James MarshallJudith Page … [Read more...]

Spilled milk with a touch of the street: Dante Marioni's vessels are a high class version of high jinks. He favors bright primaries and a mosaic grid of monochromatic patterning so fluid it seems to be circling the drain, ready to dissolve. He likes hourglass curves, delicate feet, swans' necks and flattened bubbles in towering stacks. His work has rhythm, grace and attitude. Son of glass artist Paul Marioni, Dante grew up with glass, taking his first rod out of the furnace at age 10 and saturating himself in his teens in the practice, history … [Read more...]

Kurt at the Seattle Art Museum closes Sept. 6. Eric Yahnker isn't in it but could have been. The freak note would have been welcome. This too. Nothing like a Jackson Family-Cobain mash up. Kurt could have featured YouTube tributes in a corrdior, any corridor. My personal favorite, also, of course, not in the show, is from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Smells Like Teen Spirit traveled many miles to get there. Wanting more doesn't suggest a lack of respect for curator Michael Darling's excellent product. I love this show. My review in … [Read more...]

John OhannesianRich Lehl … [Read more...]

Like the quilters from Gee's Bend, Marita Dingus uses what she has, in her case, rags, pop tops, pull tabs, computer innards, film negatives, bottles, shells, stones, eye glass lenses, yarn, telephone wire, crime scene tape, drains, battered baking tins, light-bulb sockets, paper clips, plastic flowers,  paint brushes, bits of wire, bent silverware, pacifiers, colored tape, paint and coarse thread. And glass. Her glass heads (thick, flat and transparent) and bodies (pearish) were created in the hot shop at the Museum of Glass under her … [Read more...]

Juan Alonso is interested in the decorative flourishes of old Havana. In his paintings they are smoke - vaporous trails edging toward extinction. Flourishes are for him a family affair. His father was an iron worker from a family of iron workers, responsible for the designs of windows and gates. His mother painted flowers on pots.Alonso was born in Havana in 1956, three years before Fidel Castro came to power. Alonso remembers food being scarce and people being taken away at night for speaking with less than revolutionary fervor. When he was … [Read more...]

She could have...1. Held her breath.Adriana Zarate2. Shed her heavy clothes and swum to shore.Alan Graham Dick3. Kept her clothes on, relying on youth and excellent muscle tone to pull through.Ryan Jeffery 4. Let her grievances keep her afloat.Eric Fortune5. Sought  RevengeMartina Randles6. Remembered that, as Tom Robbins likes to say, it's never too late to have a happy childhood. Lina Raymond … [Read more...]

Zack Bent's family is his instrument, and his activities with them an arena in which he acts. Unlike others who have made their families their muse, Bent proceeds as if he's walking a grid to collect trace evidence.The process is the product: both forlorn and fugitive, like shoveled smoke.At Vermillion through Sept. 4. … [Read more...]

Claire Johnson recently wondered aloud:  "What's the deal with all of the fake lesbians in erotic art?" Except in the Bible Belt and Afghanistan, gay has a cache no longer available to the straight, not that it's easy to tell the two apart. Those addicted to visual cues are frequently wrong. Molly Norris, Self-Portrait, 1982A character in Sarah Schulman's 1988 mystery novel, After Delores, felt confident she had cracked the code.Where are we going?Charlotte's place. I have the key.How did you know it was okay to come out to me so quickly? … [Read more...]

Because memories are fragile and easily distorted, Lynne Yamamoto casts hers as solids, in marble, slip ceramic and thick black thread. She grew up in Hawaii with no artists in her family save for a grandfather, who wouldn't have called himself one. In his shed in his spare time, he carved dolls that carried his understanding of his cultural heritage. What Do-Ho Suh floats, Yamamoto makes as heavy as a tomb.Currently at Greg Kucera: GRANDFATHER'S SHED, 2008-10 Lāna'i City, Island of Lāna'i Digitally carved and hand finished marbleHawaii is a … [Read more...]

Tim Bavington can see the strip from his studio, which is part of what he likes about Las Vegas. Aside from the cheap space, cheap shrimp cocktails and free parking, he likes the neon at dusk. Dusk is the magic hour, when the signs smeared against the sky fight the dark.The first time he saw Vegas he was 14, visiting his father after the divorce, leaving the airport in a Cadillac. From a bleak London neighborhood, Bavington rode into the culture of flash American Etch-A-Sketch.He'd grown up drawing. Drawing is as natural to him as brushing his … [Read more...]

Like the unnamed narrator of his first novel, Life With A Star, the Jewish writer Jiri Weil had a chance to escape from Prague just before the German invasion in 1939, but he couldn't bear to leave. Life With A Star:I was born here, I knew almost every street, I had my own cafe, my movie house, my newsstand and tobacco shop.Weil faked a suicide so his name would be struck from the Nazis' list; he survived the war in hiding. His characters didn't fare as well. At one time we all dreamed of miracles and now we didn't like it when they occurred. … [Read more...]

First a story from 2006: Three ace P-I business reporters, Todd Bishop, John Cook and Dan Richman, were strolling past the Olympic Sculpture Park, which will open Jan. 20 on the Seattle waterfront. Richman asked his friends what they thought of the eraser. What eraser, asked Cook. Bishop looked around and nodded. Yeah, what eraser? (Photo via)Cook and Bishop are too young to have used or even seen a typewriter eraser. By the time they were old enough to correct a text, they let their pudgy fingers do the walking and press delete...To somebody … [Read more...]

Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala Dalton GhettiRobert LazzariniTim RodaZack BentMira MorseYoko Ono, Painting to Hammer A NailGrant Barnhart … [Read more...]

Original post. Suggestions from readers below. Thank you all. From MWnyc, at the Metropolitan Opera House From Gala, Appendix Project Space: Tabor RobakFrom Emily Pothast, Adam Ekberg's Disco Ball on the Mountain, 2005, via Platform GalleryFrom EllenL, Todd Simeone's Record Cover in a Flash (Air Supply), 2006 Ultrachrome Inkjet print 28" x 28" Ed. 1 of 3, via James Harris GalleryFrom Jill, Dave Muller's Centers & Radii b/w Celebrity Top Tens, via Anthony Meier Fine ArtsFrom Netherzone, John Armleder, (first image via)Laura Castellanos, from … [Read more...]

My original post concentrated on the romantic use of sepia and related tones. Part two is its opposite - anti-romance sepia, following James Joyce, that the past is a nightmare from which he is unable to awake.Jason Mitchell, Portrait of Scott D. Wilson Marsha Burns, from Portraits of Auschwitz and Buchenwald … [Read more...]

Christopher Knight's disdain for Jerry Saltz has a religious quality. (What is truth; said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.)Knight:Never pass judgment on the merits of art you haven't actually seen. I would no more review art from reproductions on a museum's website or in a magazine than I would from seeing it on a TV show. Be there or be square. My surprise in finding myself stating what I've always thought obvious comes from reading an item posted Wednesday on New York magazine's website. New York's Vulture blog (Editor's … [Read more...]

From scraps of fabric not worth saving, women used to make what they called yoyos - fabric bouquets for ornament. Kathryn Glowen makes them from men's ties as an all-over field - abstraction from personal craft.Detail:Reducing men's ties to knots (even floral knots), is (however sweetly) an emasculation of the male. Glowen's insistence on the feminine, however, is less a critique of the male than a celebration of a certain kind of woman who is anonymous inside a female sphere: the career-waitress at a cheap diner, the divorcee who picks up her … [Read more...]

When the Bellevue Arts Museum shut its doors in 2003, the board said the museum had been hobbled by a tough economy, a difficult new building and a failure to find an audience. In 2005, it reopened with a focus on crafts. Even in craft circles, plenty of people didn't think it would work. As Vicki Halper, Seattle crafts curator, put it at the time: It didn't work as an art museum. If it doesn't work as a craft museum, maybe it can be a cat museum. (more)Halper deftly summarized Seattle's attitude toward its nearest neighbor, the shopping … [Read more...]

The Frye is Rip Van Winkle with a sequel. It slumbered through the 20th Century and woke up in the 21st. Here's the sequel: After striving mightily to keep its eyes open, it's once again nodding off. Little that Charles and Emma Frye acquired rises to the ranks of first-rate. Charles Frye saw Modernism as an unworthy aberration. Ida Kaye Greathouse, who followed her husband Charles Walser as the museum's head, was if anything more conservative, although I am fond of a core of her late 19th and early 20th-century American purchases. Yes, she was … [Read more...]

The casual unfolding on the street, the elaborately effortless ritual, the bit with the dropped paper (working with accident), the deep friendship, the art of the body in motion: I love these dancers and this video. (via)Dancers: No Noize (red jacket), Man (back jacket), BJ (striped shirt), Dreal (white shirt). Directed and edited by Yoram Savion, Music by Erk tha Jerk!! … [Read more...]

Imagine that the three top contestants on Work of Art were felled by injuries. A sad situation would have ensued. On So You Think You Can Dance, the talent was far deeper. Even though the top dancer (Alex Wong) and two close seconds (Ashley Galvan and Billy Bell) were either taken out or compromised by injuries, they left the show in good hands. About those injuries, here's a reasonable comment from Sara Marsh:The intensity has doubled for the contestants this year, which is something that the judges have regularly mentioned. Often, we hear … [Read more...]

The moment I saw John Travolta walking to a Bee Gees' beat down a Brooklyn street, I began to take pop-culture dance seriously. Looking back, the movie is weak in the way all but the best dance movies are. The plot's creaky to the point of unendurable, and that's not counting the '80s clothes and hair. Travolta's dancing still shines. Thirty years after the fact and trapped in a bad movie, he works silence into cheap dazzle to get gold. He the man, but what hung over the dance floor continues to make its appearance in art. Below, the disco ball … [Read more...]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge  The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free;We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.Samuel BeckettBirth was the death of him. Alice Tippit SuttonBeresCuller - Working for a livingAlex Schweder - Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice...Adam Satushek - a cup to lip problemBrian Tolle- building your home on family valuesHans van Meeuwen - We've got to get out of this placeFred Muram- romancing the unavailable male... Mark Mumford … [Read more...]

Edward Curtis, 1958-1952More from those who are not afraid to go back in order to go forward. Dan Carrillo, Jason Hirata, 2010Luis Gonzalez PalmaCarrie Mae WeemsDeborah Luster … [Read more...]

The Quileute on the Northwest Coast did not anticipate hordes of visitors would seek them out to say they are way cool. How could they? Previous to the Twilight saga, they were not exactly on pop culture's radar, and now they're bright lights based on false information. Yes, in Quileute mythology they dervive from wolves, but not (crucial difference) werewolves.Wolf headdress, late 19th-early 20th century, Quileute, wood, paint, hair, 6 x 13 x 5 ½ in., Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian InstitutionWorking with … [Read more...]

If an art critic wrote that he/she was startled to see a work of genius made from found objects, that critic would be consigned to the school of out-of-it. Since the early 20th Century, reworking found objects has been a staple. Needless to say, that critic would not be employed by the New York Times, where Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Ken Johnson and Michael Kimmelman set a higher standard. Dance criticism is another matter. The school of out-of-it is in session at the Times whenever Alastair Macaulay ventures into the contemporary. In … [Read more...]

...more is better. Stacked, clumped, stored and piled. Below, a dip into the ocean of those who use repetition as an aesthetic principle. Jannis Kounellis UNTITLED, 2006 Found wooden tables, bowl, knife, red fish 32 x 172 x 179 inchesAnn TuominenChris Engman ABANDONED CRATES, 2007 Archival inkjet print 40 x 49 inches Edition of 6, and THE AUDIENCE, 2004 Archival inkjet print 40 x 48 inchesAnissa MackMatt SellarsZelig Kurland File Room, Multnomah County Courthouse 2004 chromagenic print, edition 8Colleen Wood, Pencils via I'm RevoltingEd … [Read more...]

Will Rogan … [Read more...]

The Cartoonists Network is in favor of freedom of expression. I would have thought that went without saying, but considering the many death threats leveled at cartoonists around the globe, they must have felt the redundancy necessary. Petition here, signed by screens full of scribblers, sent by email from Seattle's Molly Norris. She is one of the cartoonists the Network defends. If Norris were any sweeter, she'd cause cavities. Threatening her life throws into high relief the insanity of radical Islam. Typical Norris cartoon below: … [Read more...]