• BY LEMUEL CHARLEY At Wing Luke Museum.

Charley, as you'll see in the video below, grew up on a Navajo reservation during a time of land disputes between the Hopi and the Navajo. He became an Army paratrooper and heavy equipment engineer serving in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, and Haiti. Now he's an artist.

Scroll to 1:20 to hear how Charley learned that a gun barrel gets hot:

Charley's road sign is part of Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century at the Wing Luke Museum.

• Courtesy of Henry Art Gallery
• Sanctum is reading his "soft biometrics" right there.

Before the Boston bombing—before surveillance first saved the day and then re-terrified us when a phone conversation between the bomber and his wife was revealed to have been recorded because every phone call period is being recorded by the government now—two technology artists at the University of Washington created an artwork that profiles people who walk by it 24 hours a day. The art piece, called Sanctum, is as innocent as warm pie compared to the National Security Agency. It opened May 4, projected on the facade of the Henry Art Gallery. The museum commissioned it; it will run for two and a half years. Before that, it spent two years in development, artists James Coupe and Juan Pampin not only building and programming its system, but consulting with lawyers and UW's Office of Risk Management to make sure Sanctum wasn't violating whatever remaining privacy we have in public places.

You activate Sanctum.

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In the new Rain Room installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there's a room where a big pretend storm is dumping hundreds of gallons of water per minute. None of this water will fall on you as you walk through it because sensors detect human bodies and give each one a 5-foot berth. Unless, that is, you wear a raincoat:

In order for the technology to work most effectively, visitors are discouraged from wearing dark, shiny, reflective fabrics, fabrics made of raincoat material, or skinny high heels.

I don't think I'd be able to go in there without hoping for a malfunction.

• Ginny Ruffner's painted glass sculpture of a water cycle on display inside Traver Gallery, with the rainy bars of Doug Aitken's video installation MIRROR running on the northern facade of Seattle Art Museum across the street.

I've been vocally unmoved by Doug Aitken's big new video installation on the facade of Seattle Art Museum, called MIRROR.

But yesterday the rain was coming down outside, and I was visiting the new exhibition at Traver Gallery by Ginny Ruffner, the most exuberant and kindly artist who ever graced the grounds of this rainy city, and what you see above appeared before my eyes, and I was glad. I had forgotten that MIRROR is not limited to its more narrative/decorative/flashy displays on the western facade of SAM—it also turns the corner and extends into these skinny little rain bars best seen up inside Traver Gallery. It was a good moment.

All I can say is that Bea Arthur deserved better.

(h/t Todd)

I don't know who's painting these portraits on the Burke-Gilman Trail, but I kind of like them.

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• ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GREG KUCERA GALLERY
• Still not sold: Making Bed in Coal Country, 2002, oil on canvas, 20 by 24 inches.

Fact one: This is Byrd's first commercial gallery show. Ever.

Fact two: This will be the last time for a long time that all this material will be seen together. Sixty-six of the pieces have sold.

Fact three: People aren't buying the paintings to match their sofas. The imagery is tough, most of it taken from the decades Byrd spent working quietly as an orderly in a VA hospital mental ward.

Littlest-known fact, fact four: The day before Byrd was supposed to fly out to Seattle from his central New York home for his big opening, he was diagnosed with lung cancer that had already spread to his brain. Now, he's undergone a few weeks of punishing radiation and decided to quit treatment, according to Kucera. (Byrd is not keeping it secret.) He may not have much strength to make art this year. But he already has future shows lined up that I hope he'll beat that thing long enough to celebrate (and many more), such as...

• Still not sold: Filling Station at Night, 1997, oil on canvas, 20 by 24 inches

I'm posting here three of my favorite works in the show, none of which have sold. The Agway filling station especially reminds me of where I'm from in upstate New York, those dark roads and hard forms. And...

Fact six, one for the nerds: Byrd's early teacher in New York City, the French cubist Amédée Ozenfant, did a stint in Seattle! He taught at the University of Washington in 1938. Kucera: "I learned this from Virginia Wright over the weekend. After I told her that he also showed up in Richard Artschwager's obit in the NYT, he joked that maybe he was 'the Zelig of the art world.' Francine [Seders] suggested that he left France on several teaching stints, and probably came here at the invite of Walter Isaacs, then head of the U of W Art School. ...David was amused when Jody [Isaacson, Byrd's friend, neighbor, and fellow Kucera artist] told him this."

On the jump I'm attaching the outlier painting in the show. There's nothing else like it in Byrd's whole body of work, as far as I can tell, and I think Ozenfant would have loved it. It's a portrait of his refrigerator. Next to it stands one of his sculptures, two segments of staircases stacked. (One of these sculptures is at Kucera.) It's called Refrigerator with Ghost, as if his art is haunting his domestic life, which clearly, it has been for all these years while he kept painting and painting and painting, but never showing or selling anything. The stiffness of it feels both funny and sad to me. It's so perfectly Byrdian-strange; he just went for it. He only made it in 2012. It makes me wish he could go on making art forever.

It's still not sold. Byrd, who doesn't have family, says he's considering giving the money from his sales to a nonprofit that works to support psychiatric patients.

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