Last September, Artist Trust announced the finalists for its new Arts Innovator Award, which delivers $25,000 to two Washington State artists each year, the first three years funded by Dale and Leslie Chihuly. Early in October, the Artist Trust panel picked its winners: Leo Saul Berk and Margie Livingston.
Jen Graves decried these choices, calling them “devastatingly conservative.” I’m tempted to say that by her reasoning, the fascinating people at parties are the ones who wear lamp shades and dance on tables, but I want to take the question of innovation more seriously.
Yes, neither Berk nor Livingston is Bruce Nauman. Neither has redrawn the map of contemporary art practice. But doing so is not any artist’s job. Impact is determined by others, by their own dim or bright lights. Collectively, based on a necessarily incomplete idea of who’s out there doing what, art history is made and remade.
What artist choose is the arena of their engagement. Innovators are those who make their visual thinking tangible and extend it, each piece a part of an internal symposium brought to light. In a consumer culture, where the new is not a shock but an economic imperative, the most innovative act might be steadfast loyalty to the depths and nuances of a single point of view.
Leo Saul Berk Spider Hole, detail, at Lawrimore Project
Margie Livingston at Greg Kucera
Congratulations to both artists, the Chihulys for their generosity to other artists, and to Artist Trust.
On a wide, white atrium wall, her cut-out silhouettes had the space and time they needed to make a world. It’s a world inside the world, where, as Henry Miller once put it, “chaos is the score on which reality is written.” After more than a decade of international prominence, she continues to weasel out with sinister exuberance the crazed core of her American experience.
The title of Lundin’s new venture is Prographica: Fine Works On Paper.
Yoder’s motivation for opening his space is to offer more of the work he’d like to see in Seattle but doesn’t, save for shows at 
In Turundlandschaft, a door opens onto wallpaper in the artist’s studio. It’s a mountain with no cliffs of fall, available by the yard at a home decorating store. In a photo, already flat, Sauter could have restored a sense of volume. Instead, she took the Lynch road to lurid, cranking up the color of the ground. She has no wish to trick anybody, yet within her contrivances is a sense of the tragic.
On the left in Hofmauer, brick from the artist’s backyard. In the center, an alley from Hitchcock. The blur of the blue throws the dark brick in high relief.
Sauter’s Shapely Shadows and a New Apartment at 
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Few jobs are secure. You may do your able best, but you’re still going to be fired. Then you’ll hole up by yourself and think it’s your fault. (Via
Even when artists make money, they don’t make money. 
Of course there are exceptions, although most of the exceptions are dead. 
Tight as money is, collective action can make a difference. 
Inside a mess, there is always an opportunity. In 2007, 
Finding a gold penny is once-in-a-lifetime discovery, and the one in our lifetimes has already been found. Back to out regular programming, where the rich get richer and everybody else gets the joker – Anonymous, in circulation. 
In the 21st Century, his influence is everywhere, or, as Auden wrote about Yeats, “he has become his admirers.”
A happy hum
And choreographed symbology, life in death.