I'll be back to torment you with my "art critic ways" bright and early on Monday, September 15.

(Thank you Scott!)

Facing a potential deficit of $266,000 on a $4 million annual operating budget, the Frye announced to Ott and to the rest of the museum staff on Wednesday that Ott's position, manager of youth and community outreach, would have to be cut (and Ott's programs shut down) in order to balance the budget.

The decision was not a reflection of Ott's performance on the job, said museum director Midge Bowman.

"We sweated over this," Bowman said. "What is lost is Yoko's spirit."

Ott, who joined the museum in 2006, is one of three managers in the education department, which is overseen by education director Jill Rullkoetter (formerly of Seattle Art Museum). The other two managers handle programs for adults and for younger children; Ott was in charge of teens and community partnerships.

But Bowman is right: what the museum has given up is far more than a demographic. Ott is known through the city—and beyond—for her innovative, thoughtful ideas. What the other managers in the Frye's education department do is important; it's also highly conventional (organize K-12 school tours and oversee lectures and studio classes for adults, for instance). That's the stuff of every education department in every museum in the country.

Ott was trying to go further.

Her SHFT teen studio program provided an introduction to the ideas behind contemporary art. In response to every exhibition in the galleries, Ott would invite an active, working artist in the city to develop a class that would engage teens in the same issues as those in the exhibition, and then their work would result in an exhibition on the publicly viewed walls of the education wing at the Frye.

Artist Gretchen Bennett, for instance, taught a sampling and storytelling class in conjunction with Dario Robleto's exhibition Alloy of Love; in preparation for the upcoming Napoleon on the Nile and Empire exhibitions, artist Susie Lee taught a geocaching class that revolved around exploring the city on assignments from artists (Steve Roden of L.A., James Coupe of Seattle, and Charles Labelle of New York all contributed assignments for the students), and using the city itself as an art medium. This fall, Stranger Genius Award winner Wynne Greenwood was scheduled to teach a video class called "Video and the Self-Governed Self." But that has been canceled.

Ott's other main program was Friday at the Frye, which on the surface was simply an opening night for the exhibitions. But actually, it was an interdisciplinary event curated by Ott in conjunction with—again—artists from around the city. Through that program, Ott brought artists and organizations into the Frye for collaborations, including Book-It Repertory Theatre, Richard Hugo House, Slide Rule (independent animators), Kristen Rask (DIY crafter), food critic and restaurateur Donna Moodie, KEXP, On the Boards, Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey (a team of dance and visual artists), Arts Corp, 11th Hour Productions (slam poets). She was working on an upcoming collaboration with Stranger Genius winners Seattle School.

Her projects were technologically savvy, tracked on YouTube and networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Her newest idea, which was to be implemented this fall, was to turn the museum into an interactive gaming site during the exhibition Empire.

What Ott did was not the bread-and-butter of the museum's education department—it was what made the museum's education department interesting and unique.

"She's one of my two favorite arts educators in this country," said San Antonio-based artist Robleto. "Education departments at museums really are the frontline of arts education in this country, and what she was doing was amazing."

In particular, he praised the way Ott's programs connected teens with professional artists, and rewarded them with the life-changing experience of showing work in a public, art venue as opposed to a school hallway.

"I got a lot out of those classes," said Tacha Stolz. "I'm not kidding. I really, really learned a lot. It was the gateway for how I feel about the arts. It made me want to go to First Thursday [Artwalk] or want to go and see other exhibitions at other museums."

That wasn't all, though.

"Those classes changed my course of direction," Stolz said. "They inspired me to do what I'm doing today."

Stolz just finished her first week at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She says she never would have gone into art if all she'd known was the high-school art classes she took at the International Community School in Kirkland and Lake Washington High School in Seattle.

"For me, art is really about conceptualizing and thinking and creating art from your own thought and concept and being able to use whatever means to create," Stolz said. "In high school art, you draw a grid, you look at a picture, and you draw what you see. That's not how you learn how to draw. You have to really learn to see and then learn how to create, and it's all about process. I felt like at the Frye, you go through this class, but then they tell you you can make whatever you want out of whatever medium, and they give you the tools you need to do that with. If you want to do something with tagging, they'll go into depth about tagging. Talking with Dario Robleto about his artwork was a really good experience. It's really, really meaningful to have those experiences."

In her first week, Stolz already feels ahead of her fellow students: "Since I've been here going to these slide shows at school of artists our teachers are looking at, like, those slides come up and I know where that's coming from: I've seen those exhibits, whereas most students don't get to see that and they only know a couple pieces by the masters but they would never be able to recognize different periods, because everything is always so focused on iconic art rather than just art."

Ott, who also curates Seattle University's gallery at the Lee Center on Capitol Hill, spent six years curating critically acclaimed and popular shows at Bumbershoot before going to the Frye. Bumbershoot, also in a belt-tightening move, did not replace Ott's position after she left.

"I kind of feel like I'm reliving a little bit of that heartbreak," Ott said in a phone interview Thursday. "I guess I need to do some soul-searching. I'm going, huh, how much do I believe in the nonprofit arts sector? Is it time for a career change?"

To develop SHFT at the Frye, Ott studied models for teen programs at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

"I wanted to look at what programs don't exist for teens, and then build that program, putting at the heart of it not just the professional working artist like Susie and Gretchen and Susan [Robb, another Stranger Genius who taught a sound art class] and Dario, but actually creating a platform for teens and believing that these are the future artists, and that we really wanted to support and mentor critical thinking and introduce a conceptual framework to them," Ott said. "In my mind, it was like, you [the Frye] have embraced being risky for so long, couldn't you have believed a little longer?"

Ott's program didn't bring in the same numbers as the school-tours program, especially because the brand-new program was slow to fill up at first. But it could easily be argued that its impact on those students it did affect was great, and that those students couldn't have received that kind of instruction anywhere else.

The Frye's financial woes come from the economic downturn, which has meant fewer rentals on the Seattle warehouses the museum owns. Income from the warehouses makes up more than half of the museum's budget, because the museum, unlike most, is not a not-for-profit corporation—it is a private foundation.

If the economy continues to adversely affect the rental market, the Frye may need to establish a fundraising program for the first time in its history. The Frye may need to ask for donations, like other museums.

"Stay tuned for that," director Bowman said. "When we were slightly smaller, we could live on [this structure], but we've got a bigger vision now, and we can't support it as our current funding structure is."

That bigger vision is reliant on programs like Ott's. If the museum is truly devoted to smart art education that places the museum among the best in the country, then it will move swiftly on fundraising—and take as its first project raising the money to reinstate Ott's programs as a part of the core mission of what has become a museum identified with intelligent innovation.

Business as usual is not what we have come to expect from the Frye.

I went to see the painting yesterday in person, and I just want to report back that it is some powerful stuff. That "spill" that covers the guy's head and runs upward is encaustic, and the unpainted canvas is left raw.

But it was the hands that got me: they're made of thick paint piled on top of the canvas, and then actually burned.

I've always loved the way that the thickness of Miller's paintings imply an excess of information that stands in place of any knowledge Miller has of his subjects, since they're always taken from found photographs. The artist can only guess about his subjects' characters, their situations, what they might make of him if they knew he was doing this, or how they might behave in a formal portrait sitting that actually gave the artist permission. Miller puts himself in a position that's the reverse of the all-knowing "cone of vision" effect you get in Renaissance perspective, or even the locked-in knowledge that comes straight from the artist's soul in much of modernism. Miller doesn't know these people, but he's determined to paint them, and what you see in each piece is the evidence of him figuring out how.

The "changes" were announced to the staff today, said Frye spokeswoman Rebecca Garrity-Putnam, who added:

I think that this was a very difficult decision, and a decision that was made for purely financial issues. It was very, very hard. I know that everybody at the museum is impacted, very much, and I know the community will be as well.

More on what this means for the Frye and the city's art ed offerings tomorrow.

But in other news, the inevitable art onslaught featuring her offensive face has begun.

^{Sarah Palin Alaska Fur Bunny Pancake Breakfast Art}

L.A.-based artists Harry Dodge (born Harriet, but now not identifying as either male or female) and Stanya Kahn are as uncompromising as they are hilarious. The entertaining but unsettling performances in their videos—both in front of and behind the camera—are plainly spontaneous, but the final works are carefully crafted. To get a sense of what they do, watch a segment of their Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out here (that's Kahn you see in the frame, and Dodge is shooting).

Then listen in to a sprawly phone conversation with them here.

For more, there's a comprehensive New York Times profile of the artists here, and a nice Time Out piece about them here.

Their 2006 work Masters of None (pictured above) is screening at TBA:08 in Portland through October 4, and the artists will talk at the Back Room Friday night, September 12.

At Howard House. (Gallery site here.)

I can't get the story of this painting out of my head. A man goes to his car. Everything is normal except that a roll of film is lying on the seat, with a business card rubber-banded around it. The business card says "Associated Counsel for the Accused."

The man figures he's been attempted-robbed. But nothing of his is gone. Instead, he's come away with something from the robber: this film. He gives the film to a friend of his, an artist who specializes in making painting from photographs of people he doesn't know, photographs he only half-understands. The artist makes paintings from the pictures. The pictures end up in a gallery in Pioneer Square.

In remembrance, Sprinkle's friends, family, and other artists will be meeting at 10 am at Hammering Man to set a memorial sign there. The memorial is both for Sprinkle's art, and for his life--he was killed when hit by a freight train in 2005.

The organizer, Doug Parry, says:

Please feel free to bring cut flowers to place around the memorial sign (no jars or cups of water for the flowers and no candles--just cut flowers, please).

This is an unofficial gathering, although our goal is to invite SAM to recognize Jason's artistic contributions to the city of Seattle, and, especially, his Ball and Chain. Therefore, this will also be a peaceful gathering and if we are asked to disperse (by either SAM or the SPD), we will peacefully comply. Cool?

The memorial gathering will last from 10:00AM to 10:30AM and will end with a moment of silence before we all go our separate ways.

My favorites so far:

1. A screen test for East of Eden wherein James Dean tells Paul Newman to kiss him, and Newman responds, "Can't here."

2. Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" not long before her death.

3. Jackson Pollock, filmed by Hans Namuth, saying pretty much everything that needs to be said about Pollock's painting, including that he got the idea from Native American sand painters.

4. Samuel Beckett's only film project, running in two parts (although like me, you may have to go three parts to piece together the whole thing, because of the original linkage) at about 15 minutes long, starring an old, wrinkly, terrifying, and still hilarious Buster Keaton. It's silent. Do watch it through to the end.

5. Kurt Russell trying to get the part of Han Solo.

There is also far, far more. I have to get back there. Now go!

Last week, when I posted an item announcing that local artists (including NKO) were starting work on a large mural on the side of the Monique Lofts, I asked this question:

Are they covering up all the ghost signage? I sincerely hope not.

Which brought this response from Gurldoggie:

I agree with preserving context when it's meaningful, but the importance of a decades-old service station ad eludes me. What's the history you want to preserve? It's not like it's a stop on the underground railroad - it's just a place people used to get their oil changed. To me it doesn't seem like anything worth preserving.

Except that ghost signs are part of a long history of sign-painting. Advertising may be corporate today, but back in the day, itinerant sign painters would go door to door offering their services to small businesses. That's how those signs went up. They represent a very cool, mostly lost tradition of independent craftspeople.

Which is exactly what the artists on the mural said they're thinking when I finally got out to ask them on Friday. They're not covering up the ghost signs.

We like them. We have histories as sign painters, too. It's part of the history of this wall, and it adds a layer of depth to the ground.

Photos of the project in process will be appearing here.

Check out this story and slide show by Pilar Viledas of Seattle artist/designer Roy McMakin's latest creation, a house on Vashon for the personal manager of K.D. Lang. From the outside, it looks like a Whiting Tennis painting, and on the inside, the cloudy concrete, gray paint, and vivid woods look like a blend of American Gothic, Northwest rustic, and Kafkaesque bureaucratic. If you can believe it, it's also child-like.

McMakin's the one who made the steel storage box, bronze lawn chair, and concrete bench at the Olympic Sculpture Park, not to mention his installation Love & Loss there.

McMakin has a solo show at James Harris Gallery coming up this fall.

For those of you who prefer the bow to the hanging (straight? long? what is the formal name for a regular tie?), please enjoy longtime Seattle art dealer and bowtie-wearer Sam Davidson's thoughts on why bowties are better, how bowties help people talk about art, and why he refuses to join any bowtie clubs even though he has been invited.

To listen to the entire podcast with Davidson, click here.

I've been looking forward to this, but my only question is: Are they covering up all the ghost signage? I sincerely hope not.

After I described my personal connection to the image in the post, I backtracked. Schad calls me on my insecurity, explains why I didn't need to backtrack, and talks about his own family and August Sander.