Arts What in the Sam Hill?
Two Seattle artists had the idea to pay tribute to the outsized, largely failed ambitions of the wealthy early 20th-century entrepreneur Samuel Hill, a Quaker who built the earliest paved roads in Washington, put up a full-scale replica of Stonehenge outside Goldendale, and made friends with the celebrity Queen Marie of Romania, who called him “scatter-brained and simple” but helped him to create his Maryhill Museum of Art anyway.
The tribute opens today.
It is called Maryhill Double, made by Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, who work under the name Lead Pencil Studio. Maryhill Double is a replica of the Maryhill Museum, made of construction materials. It stands a mile away from the museum, across the Columbia River Gorge, facing its poured-concrete doppelgänger. (It is only open Sundays, from noon to dusk, through Oct 1.)
Hill originally built the museum as his own mansion, but it could never have been a family home. His wife and mentally ill daughter, both named Mary—the museum’s namesakes—had left him years before, in Seattle, and returned to their former home, Minneapolis. He had three more children with women he didn’t marry. He envisioned surrounding himself with fellow Quakers instead of family, and set about forming a Quaker farming community on the land around the mansion. But despite his advertising, nobody came. The mansion, now the museum, basically sits out in the middle of nowhere, on its own, except for the Stonehenge a few miles off.
When Han and Mihalyo approached the museum with a proposal to build a double next to the museum—which is known for a Rodin collection (secured by a modern dancer who was another friend of Hill) and not contemporary art—the museum’s curator told them the museum wasn’t interested. It turned out the Creative Capital Foundation was, though, so, with the foundation’s money and support from Artist Trust and the Henry Art Gallery, Han and Mihalyo got permission from another landowner, and moved their proposal across the river.
I can’t wait to walk through both. Oh, and Stonehenge. There are also peacocks on the grounds.
Here’s the mansion in 1926. It, and the surroundings, look pretty much the same today, I’m told.
Here are details.
beware of those peacocks on the museum grounds... last summer I went to a wine tasting at the nearby Maryhill Winery (pretty decent stuff, fucking GORGEOUS views), and afterward we went over to the museum where a horny peacock chased me through the sculpture garden and tried to make me his bitch. being chased around by a horny peacock is never awesome, but it becomes exponentially less awesome the more tanked you are on shiraz.
the museum itself is pretty cool, though. and there are always lots of places around to stop and buy cherries from the yakama tribes. mmm, cherries.