^{Ed Ruscha's Azteca/Azteca in Decline (2007), acrylic on canvas (diptych), 48 by 330 inches each}

At Portland Art Museum. (Museum site here.) Nice interview with Ruscha on PORT here.

Saturday night in Portland, Whiting Tennis was given the first $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the first Northwest Contemporary Art Awards competition and exhibition. (Portland Art Museum organized the awards, and intends to do them every two years.)

The show is a knockout. New work by every artist. Well worth the drive. A podcast with the five artists—Tennis, Dan Attoe, Cat Clifford, Jeffry Mitchell, and Marie Watt—will go up later this week, and later today, I'll post more.

But for now, here's a detail of an enormous new Tennis painting (6 by 14 feet) in the show, called Bitter Lake Compound. It's based on a dilapidated backyard the artist came across.

^{An installation view of Eric Thompson's Cleaning Out the Dead (2008), 5-channel audio, custom fluorescents, reel-to-reel machine}

At Lawrimore Project. (Gallery site here.) *This show, featuring the UW's DXArts grads, is only up for 10 days, through June 22. More information about the show here.

Last week, I walked into Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square and apologized. As soon as I saw the current show (which closes after tomorrow), I knew it was one that I should write about—and one I wouldn't have time to write about in-depth.

But I do want to recommend it here in short. Please take these three images as testimony to the power and strangeness of the 13 included works by these three artists, all of which depict a beautiful world infected with panic.

^{Joy Garnett's Paris Riots (#3) (2005-2006), oil on board, 11 by 14 inches}

^{Michael Schall's Volcano Fabrication Project (2007), graphite on paper, 40 1/2 by 62 inches}

^{Saul Becker's Weed Explosion (2008), ink and gouache on paper, 41 by 59 1/2 inches}

More here.

Hi there,

I was told that the Stranger ran an article recently about how empty storefronts on Broadway were being given temporarily to artists for gallery space....but I have been unable to find it on your website...

Do you have any more information about that, or can recall the article's title?

Here tis.

^{Gregory Blackstock's Attitude Annie's, San Diego County Fair (1993), photograph, 6 by 4 inches}

At Garde Rail Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

*Blackstock was at the opening of this show last week (his first photography show?), and he was wearing his own designs on his back—in a shirt adapted from his art made by Comme des Garcons. As someone remarked to me later, "The shirt costs more than the art." Still, it was a great look on him.

^{Jack J. Raynard's Women's Restroom, The, photograph (digital print), 8 by 12 inches}

At Suite 100 Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

I'm about to leave for an all-day Vancouver art binge, including this. Then, Saturday, it's this.

I shall report back.

Meeting by accident this seemingly mundane image a moment ago...

...directed my thoughts to a passage that appears in the late pages of Plato's Republic:

You would never believe -- unless you had seen it for yourself--how much more liberty the domestic animals have in a democracy. The dog comes to resemble its mistress, as the proverb has it, and the same is true of horses and donkeys as well. They are in the habit of walking about the streets with a grand freedom, and bump into people they meet if they don't get out of their way. Everything is full of this spirit of liberty.

This message, titled "Art Criticism Criticism," arrived in my inbox last week from someone named Christopher Shelton:

Regarding your coverage of the Cornish BFA show, anyone who had been to the show on more than one occasion might be struck by how far your opinions deviated from the unspoken consensus of visitors. Jen Graves praised Katie Miller and Charles Mudede praised Rachel Cavallo. Katie Miller's art was so safe it attracted only fleeting attention from visitors. She will have a fine career designing ads for Rolling Stone and liner art for bands named after monosyllabic plural nouns (Strokes, Hives, etc). Rachel Cavallo's ideas seemed like obvious pandering to fashionable political thinking. Her art might genuinely reflect feelings, but it could also be an opportunistically crafted "clever idea," like Ron Popeil Design. Overall the most blatantly political stuff in both shows was by the least skilled or laziest artists. MEANWHILE, the people who sold a lot of art and drew a lot of visitor affection were people that put real effort into their work and people with genuine human feeling communicated by their art.

In other news, Seattle Weekly was busy sucking in their usual way, ripping on your art criticism section while copping your racy cover style. So you're better than awful. Still, your art section, just like the fine art establishment itself, is a useless dinosaur with nothing real to offer the human race.

Better than awful is something, right?

Seriously, I appreciate this email. It's obviously from somebody who actually cares about art, and who expects me to do the same—which I do.

A few things: First, I love hearing about audience response. As a critic, I often feel like people don't talk honestly around me, and I, too, get tired of the sound of my own loud voice. So, Mr. Christopher Shelton, that's two thank-yous to you.

Now I have some explanations and some questions. First, where did you get the idea that I praised Katie Miller's work at the Cornish show? Because I Currently Hung her? I give lots of art that treatment, and hers happened to be particularly legible online (an ostensible criterion of the Currently Hanging selectees). Plus, I put together a slide show featuring several artists from the show, including Claude Andrew, Sierra Stinson, and James Brittain. Showing their works constitutes neither a yay or a nay.

But I didn't review that show, anyway: Charles Mudede did.

Maybe you thought Rachael Cavallo's designs for refugee housing were panderingly political. Why? Was the design bad? Or are you of the opinion that being political at all is necessarily disingenuous and aesthetically ineffectual—out of place at an art school? (As a side line, check this story from the New York Times mag this weekend.)

Basically, Mr. Shelton, I just don't think you went far enough in your art criticism criticism.

Which artists did you—and this faceless (and buying) majority—like, and why?

Should reviewers be reviewing student shows in the first place?

Come on now, Mr. Shelton. You started this, now let's hear more.

For anybody jumping in late, here's a link to this year's Cornish BFA show web site, including plenty of images.

Last week I posted here about about a piece I wrote for Newsweek on why museums sometimes exhibit copies of artworks rather than originals.

I added an anecdote about the Getty's copies of Allan Kaprow's activity books in that Slog post, and here's another anecdote I ran into while doing the reporting.

It turns out that Carl Andre copied one of his own works to cancel out the original because he felt the original was being so mistreated.

Andre "completely disowned" his original, declaring it "a corpse."

"And to force the point, he had the sculpture remade, displaying it in his own counter-exhibition, in an ugly, disused warehouse space in downtown New York. So for one month in the spring of 1976, intrepid enthusiasts of contemporary sculpture had the chance to visit two identical versions of 29th Copper Cardinal, both made from identical copper plates, and both passing as Carl Andre sculptures."

This story was related by Alistair Rider, an art historian working on a book about Andre, at the Tate's fascinating conference last year on sculptural replication.

I emailed Rider to ask for elaboration, and here's what he wrote back:

1. CA is invited to install 12th Copper Corner at the Whitney museum for inclusion in '200 Years of American Sculpture.' He goes into the museum with the Whitney staff and selects a corner for his work. The piece is photographed for the catalogue (200 Years of American Sculpture, ed. by Tom Armstrong, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1976). The work is an unsold piece, but he and his gallery are hopeful that the Whitney will buy.

2. In March, just before the show's opening, Andre pops into the museum to check up on the piece. He discovers it has been moved to another corner, which in his view is not so appropriate. There is a window in one of the walls and a fire escape with a neon sign that casts a reflection on the surface. At the earlier location, the walls had been blank.

3. Andre asks for 12th Copper Corner to be moved back to the original location. The gallery designers Venturi & Rausch refuse, and so Andre withdraws the piece from the show.

4. The Whitney is now in a fix. They feel Andre is too important an artist not to be represented, so they include a replacement work, which in this instance they do own—29th Copper Cardinal. They install this, and Andre comes to have a look at it.

5. Andre dislikes the presentation: to counteract the uneven floor in the gallery, the curators have installed it on a rubber mat, which in his mind destroys the effect of the piece entirely. (Nowadays it's common practice to install his larger pieces on mats—but that's another matter.)

6. Andre asks them to withdraw this piece as well. The Whitney refuse and argue that he has no moral rights over the piece, because they own the piece.

7. Andre is furious and offers to buy back the work for £26,000. Initially it had cost £23,000. But the Whitney never responded to his request.

8. So Andre remakes 29th Copper Cardinal and installs it alongside 12th Copper Corner in a warehouse Rosemarie Castoro has procured for him on West Broadway.

And that's how one 29th Copper Cardinal came to be two.

Here's an installation shot of 12th Copper Corner at the Whitney along with Andre's (wonderfully histrionic) postcard response to the situation.

^{Eric Elliott's Artist's Studio: View from Easel (2008), oil on canvas, 36 by 36 inches}

At SOIL. (Gallery web site here.)

From the press release sent out this morning by Kurtz's supporters (background here):

Buffalo, NY--Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face." This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.

...Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a statement, responded stoically: "I don't have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?"

...(CAE coordinator Lucia) Sommer added that the next step for the defense will be to get back all of the materials taken by the FBI during its 2004 raid on the Kurtz home, including several completed art projects, as well as Dr. Kurtz's lab equipment, computers, books, manuscripts, notes, research materials, and personal belongings. The four confiscated art projects are the subject of an exhibition entitled SEIZED on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 18.

The Bellevue Arts Museum hasn't exactly had an easy time of it, what with the shutting down, the "signature" (read: impossible) architecture, and the embezzling.

Okay, but what does its contemporary curator, Stefano Catalani—who has produced more exhibition catalogs in the last few years than any other local curator—have to say about working at BAM?

Here he is. (And here's a site that says he is actually an Italian prince. He does have a princely mustache...)

^{Jeffry Mitchell, The Sphinx (2008)}

The Portland Art Museum has decided to step up its role in shaping the Northwest landscape by abandoning its old tradition, the limited Oregon Biennial, and creating a new tradition: the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards.

The exhibition opens Saturday, and a panel discussion with the artists will be held at the museum at 2 pm Sunday.

The idea was the brainchild of Jennifer Gately, who arrived at PAM as the museum's Northwest art curator 2 1/2 years ago. The fruits of her labor go on display Saturday, in a major exhibition that displays new and preexisting work by each of five selected artists: Dan Attoe, Cat Clifford, Whiting Tennis, Jeffry Mitchell, and Marie Watt. They were vetted in a long process. It started with 250 nominations from curators, critics, academics, artists, gallery owners, and collectors. Those were whittled to 28 by Gately and curator James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then to the final 5 by Gately.

On Saturday night, the museum will announce the single winner—from among these five—of the $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer Prize, selected by the PAM curatorial team (including Gately and chief curator Bruce Guenther, among others).

Next week, I'll be posting news about the prize, the exhibition, and a podcast with all five artists and Gately, but this morning I caught up with Gately for a phone Q&A. Check it out on the jump.

Continue reading "Art Lovers: Go to Portland This Weekend" »

Tomorrow night (Wednesday) from 5:30 to 7:30 at Capitol Hill Arts Center (1621 12th Ave) is your chance to stop the madness.

It's the second public meeting about the large installations by Brooklyn artist Mike Ross and Seattle artist Ellen Forney that will go inside the Capitol Hill Sound Transit station.

The first public meeting resulted in a steaming pile of idiocy, of small-mindedness and xenophobia (including catcalls to Ross of "You're not even from here!"). I wrote about it a few weeks ago:

Brooklyn artist Mike Ross is proposing to entomb, in the underground Capitol Hill Sound Transit station, two vivisected fighter planes that are painted pink and hung nose-to-nose to look like they're kissing. Last month, after a public meeting in which Ross presented his idea to a firestorm of criticism, the 43rd District Democrats condemned it. The Democrats passed a resolution calling for "more culturally sensitive themes for public art... instead of warplanes."

If purchasing said planes means sending money to the Defense Department to fund more war, then Ross might want to reconsider his methods. But a wholesale ban on the "theme" of warplanes in deference to a neighborhood's projected vision of itself? Why? So that if a war, god forbid, is ever fought on pristine Capitol Hill soil, at least we can say we never saw it coming because we're just so, you know, different and interesting and peace loving?

Tomorrow is your chance to drown out the dum-dums.

Here's the deal: Ross's project has plenty of promise. (It makes me think of a sort of '00s public-art version of Claes Oldenburg's lipstick tank.) He's working in the most impossible medium (public art), in a completely impossible space (an underground cavern choked with architectural cross-beams), and yet he still has managed to come up with something that has poetic potential.

Much will depend on the details—it's never possible to judge a sculpture before it's built—but Ross's idea has legs, and that's saying a lot in the usually deadly-awful category of public art. His piece, working in tandem with Forney's playful murals, could even actually succeed down there.

But not if it's not built. It is possible that Ross's proposal could be killed by a few dimwits.

I'm not the only one driven crazy by this possibility. Ellen Forney is, too.

Forney's proposal has been completely overlooked because of the fighter-jet controversy, and yet she's spending her time not hawking her own deserving work but throwing her weight behind Ross.

Here's what she wrote in an email titled "knee-jerk jerks":

Personally, I like it. Mike's piece has a lot of interesting interpretations (transformation, gender, aggression and non-aggression, fragility and strength), plus I think it looks pretty cool. I hope my neighbors can relax and think beyond a knee-jerk reaction to fighter jets. (Please!!) FYI, there’s some well-regarded precedent for deconstructed war machinery in Seattle—Magnuson Park has those half-buried nuclear submarines that are arranged to suggest orcas, Seattle artist Charlie Krafft has his Delft machine guns and hand grenades. I also think Mike did a great job with the limitations of the space—it’s so full of crossbeams and metal mesh that it’d be a monster project for anyone to design art in that space.

I'll be painting big murals in the entries, which I designed to relate to Mike's piece in the main station. I'm totally excited about it, for a bazillion reasons. And as I told David Schmader and Jen Graves, they have my "signature feel-good flair," playful and welcoming, which I hope will add another interesting dynamic to the art in the station overall.

So, look: Get out there. If you don't, you deserve this.

^{A still from Tim Roda's Untitled (#1172) (2007), 8mm film, 3 minutes}

At Greg Kucera Gallery. (Gallery web site here.)

That's what my partner said to me last night as I gasped when I opened up my New York Times to find a 30-page, glossy, full-color insert from Seattle Art Museum advertising its upcoming "Inspiring Impressionism" show.

The insert must have cost a staggering amount of money, and for what? To advertise what is already going to be a popular show? To express sentiments like this one?: "They say diamonds are a girl's best friend. On the diamond anniversary of SAM's arrival on the Seattle scene, we're here to tell you that SAM wants to be Seattle's best friend." (This is not the first time SAM's marketing team has proved its, uh, skills: Remember the slogan "I AM SAM," quick on the heels of the Sean Penn movie?)

And in the bottomless pit of these 30 pages, which boast about everything from a Nordstrom fashion show to the talents of SAM's cafe pastry chef, there was no room to list, describe, or recommend the "Black Art" exhibition?

Gross.

In writing about the departure of Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gates last week, I had cause once again to refer to the famed billion-dollar gift of art to SAM that was announced last March.

I added a caveat to it ("the museum announced what it called a billion dollars' worth of gifts of art from private collectors"), but that wasn't enough. I'm going to stop using the number altogether.

Here's why: In an unrelated interview, Seattle-based American collector Barney Ebsworth let slip to me one day that he was the one who came up with the billion-dollar figure for the public announcement.

Not to minimize the gifts, which are substantial, but I seriously doubt the figure we all threw out at the time of the announcement (which came from Christie's auction house) has much factual value. It's probably time we all stopped using it.

^{Shawn Patrick Landis's Suspension of Belief (2008); air, vinyl and non-particular furnishings; 8 by 15 by 11 feet}

At Grey Gallery & Lounge. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Various installations by Anna Skibska, glass (photo by Donna Keyser)}

At Bellevue Arts Museum. (Museum web site here.)

^{Sherry Markovitz's Gone (2007), gouache on silk, 44 1/2 by 47 1/2 inches}

At Greg Kucera Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

^{Going Home, 1946}

Rep. Jim McDermott has introduced legislation to name the University District post office after the late artist Jacob Lawrence. Lawrence lived near UW, where he taught, for nearly 30 years before his death in 2000.

It makes me wonder: There are oodles of donor names all over this city, but what about spaces named after artists? I can't think of one.

Lawrence nearly ended up a postal worker, it turns out, according to Sharon Fitzgerald, writing for American Visions.

Jacob Lawrence often describes Augusta Savage—a leader both among artists and within the community—as the person who stepped in and made his later success possible. The occasional sales of his paintings to friends, local teachers and librarians were not sustaining him, and his mother had started urging him to take a job in the post office, one of the few secure positions available to blacks. When Savage learned of these difficulties, she took him to the WPA Federal Art Project and had him signed on for the easel project. With the standard weekly salary of $23.80, he was at last a professional artist.

"If Augusta Savage hadn't insisted on getting me onto the project, I don't think I ever would have become an artist," Lawrence has stated. "I'd be doing a menial job somewhere. It was a real turning point for me."

The legislation has been filed, but no date has been set yet for consideration in the House of Representatives. Co-sponsors include every member of the House from Washington.

She's ill and will talk next Friday, June 13, same time and same place, instead.

My favorite art blog right now is being typed right here in Seattle. If you're not reading it, your brain is missing out.

Thanks so much, Erin.

^{Installation view of Mandy Greer's Dare Alla Luce (2008), various media*}

At Bellevue Arts Museum. (Museum web site here.)

^{*Yes, this is a repeat Currently Hanging, for two reasons. One, there's a great new Flickr pool of images from this show here; and two, Greer is giving an artist talk tonight next Friday, June 13, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm at the museum.}

Remember when I wrote about the Cai Guo-Qiang tumble of cars at the Seattle Art Museum that was also, somewhat mysteriously, at the Guggenheim in New York at the same time?

It turned out that the one in New York was an "exhibition copy" made by the artist.

It delivered the same experience as the original, was created painstakingly by the artist, and was made of basically the same readymade parts.

So why wasn't it an original again?

I answer that question and raise lots of others in a new story in Newsweek.

This was one of those stories that was really fun to report. Curators responded with great tales of their own experiences with copies. I couldn't fit them all in the piece. Here's one that got cut but that I love:

For an exhibition including Allan Kaprow's "activity books" at the Getty, curator Glenn Phillips wanted visitors to be able to handle the books, to read them—not just to look at them as sculptural objects.

So, he set about having copies made.

But the technology was almost too good. When he got the facsimiles, they felt to him like ethical hot potatoes.

"They were so shockingly good that my first inclination was that we had to ensure that they would be destroyed" after the show, Phillips said.

He also decided to have the word "COPY" stamped right on their covers.

One of the best parts of my research for this story was a symposium the Tate conducted last year, called "Inherent Vice: The Replica and its Implications in Modern Sculpture," and you can read all the papers presented there, along with a thoughtful series of after-commentaries, here.

I'll be back soon with more great copying stories, including a tantrum thrown by Carl Andre and a pair of curators who made shows entirely of copies...

^{Laylah Ali's Untitled (from the Greenhead series) (1999), gouache on paper, 10 by 11 1/4 inches}

A few months ago, I wondered what Seattle Art Museum planned to do with its gallery devoted to artists of African descent. There was talk of residencies? Group shows?

The new group show, Black Art, is not only the first broadly themed effort in the small gallery, it's also a self-reflexive exhibition about the function of the gallery itself. It asks, how useful is the term "black art"? What if blackness were looked at as broadly as possible?

The show is a harvesting of SAM's permanent collection for "black art," plus a handful of loans. The results are sometimes surprising.

Listen to Jackson-Dumont tell it by clicking here.

Here are more of the images in the show:

^{Randy Hayes's Victor/Victim (1982), pastel on paper, 83 1/4 by 50 7/8 inches}

^{Halford Lembke's Crouching Negress (1932), wood, 6 3/8 by 3 1/16 by 2 7/8 inches}

^{Max Beckmann's Jahrmarkt (Annual Fair): Der Neger (The Negro) (1921), drypoint, 29 by 26 cm}

^{Mark Tobey's Broadway Girl, Head (1957), sumi ink on paper, 23 1/2 by 15 1/2 inches}

^{Jon Haddock's Andrew Meyer (Don't Tase Me Bro) (2008); wood, papier-maché, casein paint; 20 by 24 by 12 inches}

At Howard House, opening tonight during Artwalk. (Gallery web site here.)

This week's cover image comes to us from local artist Stacey Rozich. Check out her skecthbook to see more...

New York police and the Secret Service have shut down an art installation that recently popped up in a storefront across from the New York Times building in Manhattan and titled: "The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama."

You can see images from the exhibit—which was apparently intended to be about "character assassination" and appears to contain a giant black penis that wraps around a room and a comment on the sex life of Hillary and Bill Clinton—here and here.

Via the City Room:

By 9:30 a.m., New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents had shut down the exhibition, and building workers quickly covered over the inflammatory title with large sheets of brown paper and blue masking tape...

The police officers declined to answer any questions, and at first would not permit reporters to speak with Mr. [Yazmani] Arboleda, who was wearing a black T-shirt and making cellphone calls from inside the makeshift gallery.

Later, Mr. Arboleda, who is 27, said in an interview: “It’s art. It’s not supposed to be harmful. It’s about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media.” He added, “It’s about the media.”

Mr. Arboleda said the exhibition was to open on Thursday and run all day.

The interview was abruptly ended as Mr. Arboleda was led off to the Midtown South police precinct for what he called an interrogation.

^{Kara Walker's I'll Be a Monkey's Uncle (1995-96), lithograph, 39 1/2 by 35 inches}

At Seattle Art Museum. (Museum web site here.)

The current weather condition in the Pacific Northwest is unspeakable. Therefore, divert your eyes to other landscapes.

This painting is Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade, and it's up now at Seattle Art Museum (on extended loan from the Roy Nutt Family Trust).

There are three magical things about it. First of all, it hangs above this marvelously overheated piece of furniture from around the same period, and the pairing is terrific.

Second, according to the wall label, the Heade painting includes 10 hummingbirds of various species, each one painted at life size. They look pretty small to me, but perhaps hummingbirds, like humans, used to be just a little littler. In any case, it's cool to identify hummingbirds, but it's even cooler that a native of rural Lumberville, Pennsylvania (born in 1819), made a far-out tropical painting that also strains at being factual.

This gives me an excuse to share one of my favorite Hudson River School paintings, also by Heade.

It's called Gremlin in the Studio II, and Heade painted it sometime in the 1860s. It looks very much like dozens of his other marshland paintings, but with a major difference: See how the picturesque view of the Massachusetts marshland is set on sawhorses? And how there is a gremlin dancing underneath there? (He's hard to make out in this reproduction, but not in the flesh.) And how the gremlin and the sawhorses are draining water off the marsh onto the studio floor below?

This painting made me laugh out loud when I saw it in the Wadsworth Atheneum traveling show that visited Tacoma Art Museum in 2004, and made me fall in love with Heade. None of his other paintings will ever look the same again after you see this one. The life-sized hummingbirds even seem like they incorporate a sly joke on painting while at the same time doing the work of a straight-up naturalist.

The third and final thing I love about Heade's hummingbirds painting at SAM is that it features passionflowers. They're those pink, slightly obscene-looking things.

Also in 2004, I wrote an essay about the passionflower, because I saw it on the street one day and found it so strange. I discovered that when Spanish missionaries found it in the Amazon jungle, they saw it as God in flower form. (I'd send you a link to the essay, but The News Tribune, where it was printed, makes you pay to read it.)

Here's an excerpt:

Under [the] gaze [of the misssionaries], encrypted symbolism melted into a botanical Passion play. The 10 splayed petals became the unwavering apostles of Christ. The fiery halo of multicolored filaments was his flaring crown of thorns, his imagined body bound by the flower's tightly coiled climbing tendrils. Five stamens jutted out from the bloom, one for each of Christ's wounds, and green leaves with five lobes were the interfering hands of the prosecutors.

To them, it was a divine sign as plain as a lightning bolt. They named it passiflora, or passionflower.

The flowers inspire awe even in novices who know nothing of the religious associations. They're electrifying, elaborate little sculptures with more than a hundred tiny parts on a single blossom.

Passionflower is a vine traced to South America - Peru or southern Brazil, depending on whom you ask. In the Amazon, where it grows best, they call it by another name: maracuja.

It has about 500 species with purple, blue, white, red or pink flowers and orange, yellow or purple fruits roughly the size of lemons with black seeds inside.

According to the Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of Plants and Earth Sciences, the passiflora edulis var flaviocarpa, of Hawaii, forms the basis of the passion fruit juice industry. That includes Hawaiian Punch.

Passiflora's flowers and fruits have been used for centuries as calming sedatives, a practice the Spanish learned from South American natives. Some say it's an aphrodisiac.

The vines are fast-growing and climb up to 20 or 30 feet. They're also hardy - they can stay evergreen through a Northwest winter - and aggressive. One species threatened to smother a forest in Hawaii in 1987 and had to be eradicated from there.

It's best to buy common blue passionflower, passiflora caerulea, at a nursery in gallon or 5-gallon pots or on a trellis. Starts can be hard to get going. And other colors are generally not hardy enough to thrive here, said Watson's nursery manager Bev McFarlane...

Passionflower is not well-known, but its startling beauty casts a spell that results in a rush of impulse buying.

"A lot of people who buy them have never seen them before," McFarlane said.

^{Jamey Braden's Optimism (2008), watercolor and ink on paper, 11 by 14 inches}

At McLeod Residence. (Gallery web site here.)

^{Bill Gates, are you listening? Does this really have to stay at St. Peter's if you say it doesn't?}

Mimi Gates, the single most powerful person in art in Seattle, announced today that she's retiring at the end of June 2009. By then, she will have been director of Seattle Art Museum for 15 years.

This is no surprise. Last year was the mother of all SAM years, and directors habitually depart on a high, usually after a building project. SAM had two: the opening of its brand-new sculpture park and the expansion of its downtown hub. At the same time, the museum announced what it called a billion dollars’ worth of gifts of art from private collectors. And then it followed its opening exhibition—of those gifts—with two blockbuster displays, of Lorenzo Ghiberti's restored Renaissance Gates of Paradise panels, and of Roman art from the Louvre.

Her headlining accomplishments—buttressed by her fundraising—are plain to see. There are subtler components, too. Gates quietly inaugurated the only on-site conservation studio in the region at the museum in 2001. And while SAM has made the most of limited collections through creative installations that integrate art from around the world, Gates has worked behind the scenes to update the board of trustees from what chairman Jon Shirley says was once "a bunch of elderly white people."

Gates's regime has specialized in leverage. Under Gates, SAM has partnered with museums in China, Japan, India, and across Europe and the U.S.—and with Bill and Melinda Gates, Mimi's stepfamily, too. (From them, SAM borrowed Leonardo's Codex Leicester before they sold it to the Hammer Museum after they bought it from the Hammer Museum [duh]. As for India, there's a historical show of large Indian paintings that sounds interesting coming to SAM next year.) Before coming to SAM, Gates was director of Yale University Art Gallery; now she's on the boards of the university and its museum. Yale's vaunted American collection will visit SAM next spring.

To replace Gates, SAM's trustees will search internationally. Gates will become director emeritus, and Shirley hopes she'll stay involved in the field of Asian art, which is her passion and her background.

When I asked Gates why now, she said, "It's just a good moment; it just feels right." It does feel right. After a certain amount of time, every museum needs to press refresh.

There’s one quality from the Gates years that must be preserved: Gates may be able to woo the wealthy, but she also is a serious scholar, even a nerd. No museum can afford to lose that root of substance. It helps to explain the sense of intellectual freedom you see in some of her curators' choices as well. (The first time I saw Gates speak, I gasped at her almost total lack of conventional, hucksterish charisma.)

There’s also one deficit that must be eliminated: Gates doesn’t get the web. During an interview a few months ago, I found myself introducing her to Wikipedia. In Seattle? (In the Gates family? OMG! WTF?)

What will Bill and Melinda give the museum in honor of Mimi's distinguished tenure? They’ve never given a work of art to SAM from their personal collection, and it’s time to pony up—with a thoroughbred. Is, say, Michelangelo's Pieta out of the question for such a couple on such an occasion? We’d settle for a simple Vermeer, Rembrandt, or Caravaggio in a pinch.

It's official. Mimi Gates, director since 1994, is leaving the Seattle Art Museum July 1, 2009. More to come...

^{Tina Aufiero's swansonata (2002), found suitcase, VGA monitor, swan feathers, mac mini, audio loop of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata}

At 911 Media Arts Center. (Gallery site here.)

^{D.W. Burnham's XXXX (XXXX), xxxx, xx by xx}

At Helm Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

^{Anne Siems's On the Way to the Petmarket (2008), mixed media on panel, 54 by 72 inches}

At Grover/Thurston. (Gallery web site here.) The show closes today.

From the Independent:

When the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman bought a series of paintings by Adolf Hitler for £115,000, many questioned the morality of paying for works produced by one of history's most brutal dictators.

Yesterday, the brothers unveiled 13 of the watercolours, on which they had added psychedelic rainbows, stars and love hearts, and placed them back on the market for £685,000.

The clever dicks (who once bought Goya prints and painted clown heads on them) also recreated their installation Fucking Hell which burned, along with most of Charles Saatchi's art collection, four years ago.

(The images are too depressing to foist on Friday afternoon readers, but follow the link if you want to see its murderous, apocalyptic glory.)

The exhibition is called "If Hitler Had Been a Hippie How Happy Would We Be."

The site of the gallery (White Cube in London) is here.

And one of the Goya defacements, just for fun: