Across the street from Rapunzel, Seattle artist Kristen Ramirez has turned the northeast tower of the historic Fremont Bridge into her own personal artist studio. She's got paints, sketchbooks, and a box of art history and other books (Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art edited by Suzanne Lacy, The Lure of the Local by Lucy Lippard, Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler).

It's a cramped little space, it doesn't have a web connection, and the nearest bathroom is all the way across the bridge—so it's not exactly a convenient place to work. But Ramirez is not there for convenience, or even to do her own private musing. She has been commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs to spend the summer in the tower (which until last week, when the kindly SDOT guys brought her an A/C unit without her even asking, was sweltering) in order to make some temporary public art.

According to the project specifications set forth by the city, Ramirez is not supposed to know what she's going to make until after she spends the first four weeks up there. The rationale for this is that the project is not just plopped down in the place, but results from the experience of having spent 20 hours a week on the site for a month straight.

This is week three. At this point what she's considering is a sound piece that people might be able to call while they're waiting to cross the bridge, when it's up. (It would also be accessible online.) You'd be able to hear the loud bells and honks of the bridge and the boats, as well as the quiet sounds of the moving bridge itself. And you'd hear stories people have called in to tell Ramirez.

The best story so far was about a 70-year-old woman who for years wanted to ride the bridge as it was going up. She staked it out, figured out the operator's blind spot, and hid herself behind one of the enormous painted-blue steel girders, and then up she went. You might hear that story.

Or you might hear your own story about Fremont Bridge. The number to call to leave a message for the project is 206-455-9983.

Ramirez also has a blog about the project, where you can see her Fremont Bridge Quiz and hear more about her plans as they develop, here.

UPDATE: I almost forgot two of the best parts. One is Patty, the veteran bridge operator, who can be seen roaming around her tower days, and who calls out to people over the PA system when she feels like it (voice-of-god-like); and two, is that Ramirez is giving out free buttons that say "PONTIST," which means bridge enthusiast.

Jeff Koons and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are still working on putting up outside the museum's entrance what may be the most expensive museum commission ever. It's a life-sized replica of a steam train that will actually emit sound and steam, suspended from an actual construction crane, and it's supposed to look like this.

This morning I was out visiting Kristen Ramirez, the artist-in-residence on the Fremont Bridge, and she had in the bridge tower with her a pamphlet from the Seattle Arts Commission's 1991 project In Public: Seattle, which brought together a group of local and far-flung artists to do temporary and permanent installations funded by the percent-for-art money that was generated by Seattle Art Museum's then-new Robert Venturi building.

Turns out Chris Burden's proposal was to hang a real trawling vessel from the front of the museum like a trophy. Evidently local artist Cris Bruch, who also had a project in the exhibition (involving a weird unfinished roadway that looks like it went right into the water), was the one who drove Burden around looking for vessels.

Burden's dangling fishing boat never materialized. Would it have been more interesting than Koons's train? We'll never know. I wonder what they talked about in the car, though...

You wanted a little more of Dawn Cerny's flags and banners from the Gallery4Culture show celebrating the centennial of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition?

This one is We Get High (not very), with the word "Rainier" in the beer font. The mountain is hand-stitched and you can't really tell from this photograph, but the fabric is beautiful and slightly silky. It should hang at the city's door.

And here's an homage to the Frye Guy, who stands outside Nordstrom and yells about the Frye Apartments, the Seattle police, and communism.

If we had another exposition, these would be the subjects of some of our awe-inspiring exhibits today.

In October, I wrote a post here about the panel discussion of the survey show of Washington artists at the Wright Exhibition Space, Century 21: Dealer's Choice. The post was called "Scariest Art Event This Year." The panel discussion felt like a painfully limited and self-satisfied conversation, and it made me feel weird about the Seattle art world at the gallery level. I wrote:

It felt like a small-town meeting, with everybody congratulating everybody else on the installation of a new four-way stop.

Oh, really? If you think you're so smart, then do your own panel on the identity of Northwest art, responded longtime dealer Greg Kucera, who'd moderated that earlier panel.

Well, he didn't actually say that (he's an elegant fellow), but he did offer me the chance to put up or shut up: Kucera invited me to moderate a panel of my own at his gallery tomorrow night, at 7 pm. The panel goes along with the meaty group exhibition I.D.: Individual Demographics, which is all about identity formation.

I'd be nervous if the thing rested on me, but it doesn't: the panelists are artist Dan Webb, dealer Stephen Lyons of Platform Gallery, and art historian Ken Allan. (Webb's work in the show—a body with an array of possible heads called The New You Machine—is pictured.) The title is "'Local Is the New Conceptual'"—something Webb said once (in a podcast here) about the periodic obsession with regionalism. We'll be talking about how hard it is to talk about the identity of a city's art scene, and then we'll also be talking about the identity of this city's art scene: How can it be described? What is lacking? In a pre-panel conversation the other day, we really got into it. Our only concern is that we could talk about this for hours.

Not that it matters much, but I'm so impressed with Kucera for taking on his critics directly. I wasn't the only one who complained about Century 21: so did artist Mary Ann Peters (she pointed out the show's heavy reliance on white male artists), and Kucera invited her to put together a panel, too. That one will be next week (June 17) and it's called "Blowing Up Demographics."

Who the hell are we? Let's talk about it. Thank you for the platforms, Greg.