24-Hour Art and Music Co-op OHM Preparing to Open in the Central District: OHM (Office Home Musicspace) is getting ready to open its studio on 23rd Ave and Olive. Its goal is to provide a place where painters, musicians, photographers, glass blowers, DJs, writers, and other creative individuals can do their things unhindered by touchy neighbors. The nine-member team running OHM says it’s a “24/7 collaborative arts studio,… safe and cozy like home, where you can play your music loud.” The OHM collective plans to expand to allow new members into its group to share OHM’s 600 square foot multipurpose room. OHM’s Kickstarter is striving to raise $16,000 by Sept. 9. Read more about this endeavor here.
Hugo House Announces New Writer-in-Residence, Hugo Fellows: We got this in our inbox today:
Hugo House announced today the writers selected for its two residency programs: fiction writer and memoirist Joan Leegant, a Seattle newcomer, will serve as the prose writer-in-residence; the Made at Hugo House fellows are nonfiction writer Steven Barker, poets Alex Bleecker and Laura Da’, and fiction writers Jean Burnet and Deirdre Lockwood.
You can read more about the Made at Hugo program here. As a new Seattleite, Leegant on the surface seems like a weird choice—is she so good that she leapfrogs all the other worthy local authors?—but Barker (who runs the podcast Ordinary Madness), Laura Da', and Alex Bleecker are all exciting choices. We'll look forward to learning more about the other fellows in the months to come.
A New Art Power Team: LxWxH is the small Georgetown gallery that's been a gem for the past year and a half, run by artist Sharon Arnold. It's consistently shown interesting art by living locals, most recently Ellen Ziegler's delicate red battlefields. Arnold has regularly teamed with others to make LxWxH a gathering place—and a little-known fact is that her silent partner from the start was Kirsten Anderson, the star Pop Surrealism dealer who owns Roq La Rue Gallery in Pioneer Square. At the end of the year, Arnold is going to close LxWxH and become co-owner and director along with Anderson at Roq, which will in turn expand its scope to include non-Pop Surrealism artists brought on by Arnold. (Arnold will start at Roq in September, but keep running both for a few months.) No announcement of the full expanded roster yet, but Anderson said over email that Mark Mitchell will be showing there in January to start. Congratulations all around, and we're rooting for this new team.
You Pick the Art on the Frye Museum's Walls: One of the Frye's two fall exhibitions will be #SocialMedium, a show created not by museum staff but by that nifty thing the kids call crowdsourcing. On various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, et cetera), you can "like" or heart or whatever paintings from the Frye's permanent collection. Those with the "Top Likes across all platforms" will make up the show, according to Frye spokesman Jeffrey Hirsch. All who vote will have their names listed on the wall as curators, and comments left online are eligible to appear in wall labels. Voting is open now through August 22. Yes, yes, everybody is already voting for the ducks. For those who aren't on social media, there's a ballot on the Frye website as well as a large printed ballot at the museum itself.
It’s the summer of 1963, and something strange is afoot in the quiet town of Farro, Iowa. The school district’s most notorious bully has gone missing without a trace, and furthermore, seventh grader Henry Nilsson and his friends have just found an odd book stashed in the woods by Longbelly Gulch—a moldy instruction guide written to teach the art of “subtle travel,” a kind of out-of-body experience. The foursome will soon discover that out-of-body life isn’t so subtle after all—there are some very real, very dangerous things happening out there in the woods.
The Trap will be released probably in the spring of next year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It's got a really nice cover.
Scarecrow and The Alamo: The Scarecrow Kickstarter news has us all very excited around the office. We're also excited to see that Alamo Drafthouse founder and CEO Tim League is on the board of The Scarecrow Project. We want League to be invested in Seattle so we can hopefully get an Alamo Drafthouse theater of our very own here one day. The food, the booze, the special screenings, the hardcore no-cell-phone policy—Seattle is ready to add an Alamo to our (admittedly already remarkable) lineup of movie theaters.
