Word just came in last night that Anne Fenton won the Brink Award. Congratulations, Anne! She'll get $12,500 and a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in the spring.

Fenton formerly worked under her maiden name, Mathern, so you may know her that way. At first, she made highly stylized photographs. She branched out quickly into video, sculpture, collaborations. She ran Crawl Space, working her ass off for other artists, and got exhausted doing it. Then she worked the desk, also for years it seemed like, at Western Bridge, the private collection space of Bill and Ruth True that closed last fall. (These days her day job is overseeing retail at Ruth True's Capitol Hill store Nube Green, which according to its web site is shuttered for renovations until June 10.)

Keeping up with her day jobs, Fenton has been almost invisible in the last few years in Seattle, which has been a drag.

I have no idea whether she subscribes to this idea, so this may or may not apply—I need to ask her: She came of age with a group of artists who sometimes subscribe to the theory that productivity is a slavish practice given a productivity-obsessed, wildly unequal world, and that making things for people to see is in some ways worse than making nothing at all.

I am both deeply irritated when wealthy collectors lick their lips at this approach, and deeply irritated by the definition of an artist as being limited to somebody who produces things, however dumb.

Don't get me wrong: there are good reasons for dropping out. I have sometimes considered writing a piece on Seattle's Nonmakers. They sometimes resurface later, like Sarah Bergmann, who won the Genius Award in Art last year for her Pollinator Pathway after several years just taking time away from what can be the very ungood world of art.

I guess you could call me a Fenton partisan, insofar as she has made things that have made me feel humongously grateful that they exist, and that's saying a lot.

The last big show she was in was Moment Magnitude at the Frye, with two pieces: a light-show-installation involving a locally produced treatment for depression and a video in which she took the reins of an Iggy Pop song. (Who takes the reins from Iggy Pop?) Back in 2008, she and Chad Wentzel had a stunning show at Crawl Space (I could have sworn I wrote more about it than just this Suggests).

I also wrote about it when I thought that her mature work was ahead of her, yet the hype was deafening.

Basically, I always want more of Fenton and from her, and I respect her. I think her statement in the announcement for the Brink Award is jargony bullshit and gives no sense of what she's like in her best moments, which are kind of magical in a childlike way but also sad and adult and tired: "In my current practice, appropriation and collaboration allow for a re-authoring of images and ideas. Objects and images that pass into the work often pass between strangers or materialize through translation and memory." Not that this is different from what usually passes for words about art from a museum, but still, our eyes have to roll across it and I'm in the mood to ask for more.

Congratulations, Anne. Now that the Neddy Award is established in its new incarnation and location, and the Brink is past its infancy, we can start talking about what these awards are about and for.