Earlier this year Seattle collectors William and Ruth True commissioned a full-scale installation from sound-art pioneer Bill Fontana, and the piece now occupies the entire building of Western Bridge, the Trues' private gallery space. Below, the San Francisco-based artist talks to Jen Graves about the installation.

^{P Is For Poodle}

General Idea was a trio of artists who lived and worked together for more than 25 years until two of them died of AIDS, about four months apart, in 1994.

Their remaining member, AA Bronson, is giving a talk at the Henry tomorrow at 7 pm that you shouldn't miss. I just got back from a press preview with him this morning, for the exhibition that opens Saturday at the Henry called General Idea Editions 1967-1995.

It's a small show, but packed with the famous (the AIDS adaptation of Robert Indiana's "LOVE" sculpture) and the obscure (the Miss General Idea pageant, the sharp-fingered couture-hand, the pills, the placebos, and the 1980s poodles meant as a taunt to all the writers who refused to address the themes of sexual identity in the work).

There are portraits of the artists as poodles (above), as doctors, and as white baby harp seals. ("We were always picturing ourselves as something other than artists," Bronson said this morning.) The work captures the consumerist, appropriation-minded attitude of the late 20th-century, slyly, kindly, and playfully, to the end.

UPDATE: I've corrected the day of the lecture, which is tomorrow (Friday, June 1), not Saturday. Apologies.

In case you're at the Olympic Sculpture Park this weekend and notice that those white vinyl woven structures inside the pavilion are missing, here's what's up: A bunch of teenagers swinging inside them (they're sculptures called Capulas by the artist Pedro Reyes) broke one. (It fell to the floor, which wasn't far up, so nobody was hurt.)

The pieces were made for sitting and swinging in, so it's no big deal, Darling said. They've been taken down to be restrung and they'll be back up probably in a matter of weeks.

Darling said the art in the pavilion is scheduled to change over in January. He can't say for sure who's coming up to replace Reyes, but he's talking to the hard-to-categorize LA artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, animator, and Yeti-admirer Geoff McFetridge.

(McFetridge was a graphic designer and graduate of CalArts when he started having art exhibitions 10 years ago. In addition to art, he's made commercials, music videos, and he did the opening titles for Adaptation and The Virgin Suicides. Check out this short doc about him and his work.)

I was disappointed in this year's exhibition of MFA grads from UW, but two artists stood out, and Fred Muram is one of them.

Thing is, Muram's three videos in the show are only half the story. They're part of a performance series he does that's like a mild satire on artist lectures and autobiographical documentaries.

In this one, which is, unfortunately, not on display at UW (he sent it to me after I requested it), he plays a regular guy playing an artist.

His low-key narration gives the distinct impression that, as an artist, he doesn't know what to make. So he goes about it by trial and error, and all of his experiments, not just the successes, are shown. His character is sort of nervous, sort of a failure, and sort of lost, but determined and lovable and vulnerable, like someone out of Miranda July.

He sets things on fire (which his professor declares is dumb). He watches his remote-controlled airplane crash in his apartment living room and wonders whether shooting it in a studio instead would have improved the piece. He stages a friend keeping the song "Sabotage" alive through an electrical brownout.

It's funny, and clever, and at times, touching and slightly intimate. And it's unlike anything else being made in Seattle. I want to see more of this character.

Will Monica Lewinsky market a new Portland Monthly spinoff that former Oregonian urban design critic Randy Gragg will run?

Thanks, Artdish.

As if BAM hasn't been through enough, Regina Hackett reports this morning that the museum has sent a letter to its members announcing that the museum's chief financial officer has stolen $200,000.

The museum has let the employee go and didn't name names to the P-I. It's conducting an internal investigation, and viewing this as "a fundraising opportunity," director Michael Monroe told Hackett.

For the last three weeks, six artists, including Seattle's Alex Schweder, have been living in a four-story, two-foot deep "vinyl tenement," as Gothamist called it--a sort of human ant farm based on a 19th-century science fiction novel.

The rooms are barely wider than the artists's shoulders, the floors connected by slim ladders. They can not pass each other in the hall, but must go around each other, above or below.

The project is called Flatland--"Six people, 20 days, an expedition into 2 dimensions"--and is happening at the Sculpture Center in Queens.

Flatland ends this Sunday, May 20, but by reading the blog you find that at least two of the artists have thrown in the towel and liberated themselves already--and Schweder is planning to leave today. (The two who did leave found themselves with cramps in their feet just from walking in the big, regular world.)

This from Schweder's last entry on the blog, dated Saturday, May 12:

This space is tight, it is a restraint of one direction. Limits also exist in the amount of space I have, 16 square feet. If I were to take off my skin and stretch it over my floor, I would have some skin left over.

There are other limits that inform how we relate to space based on our instructions for occupation: For twenty days, you can leave anytime you want, but cannot re-enter if you do. This points to another facet of occupation, duration.

... The most difficult thing about this proposition is not the tight space, but the duration that you need to stay in it. I could ask someone to get me a scarf at the back of the closet and it would not be a problem. If I asked you to stay in that closet for a week it would likely be met with hesitation.

... This project is a three week house. To follow Wurm's example, what would a one minute house look like? What would a five year house look like?

Schweder promises in an email that he'll talk more about living two feet wide when he gets reacclimated and back to Seattle next week.

Something's been on my mind since SAM opened. (Sorry I'm behind, I was in Chicago last week lavishing love on buildings like this and art like this, this, and a gorgeous little El Greco of Mary and Jesus saying goodbye to each other that I can't find online.)

It's just a little thing: the muted Barnett Newman painting at the entry of the special exhibition gallery is lost in that spot. Meanwhile, it would be gorgeous on the wall facing Brancusi's Bird in Space, where the exhibition text is printed. I wish they could be switched.

But since that probably won't happen, make sure you stand back and to the side of the Brancusi so you can see its golden, wooden, and white-marble forms lining up with Newman's raw vertical patches.

(And to the Seattle critic who complained that Bird in Space needs more room around it: buh. Check out Brancusi's studio outside the Pompidou, or MoMA's grouping of his works. They're not meant to stand in a vacuum.)

Damien Hirst, according to Bloomberg, may rise into the stratospheric auction-record ranks next month when his For the Love of God--a skull made of platinum and covered in 1,106.18 carats of diamonds--goes on sale for $99 million. (Clever cheater, dealing in jewels to get up there.)

White Cube isn't handing out any images (it will be damn disappointing if the thing doesn't exist), so instead I leave you with 99 cent II (2001), the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction ($3.3 million in February at Sotheby's in London).

It's German artist Andreas Gursky's giant diptych of a dollar store.

Today the online mag posted a piece called "The best (and worst) of Seattle's architecture," and yikes.

The writer, Witold Rybczynski, profiles all the notable buildings in the city--with nary a mention of the new Seattle Art Museum, which opened downtown less than two weeks ago to national coverage in the press. (Editors didn't notice the oversight?)

Making matters worse, Rybczynski mistakes Richard Serra for Anthony Caro, twice.

It's not only that Serra is famous and that Serra and Caro are impossible to mistake for one another, but that Serra's works are among the most architectural in the history of sculpture--well within the bounds for an architecture critic.

Ouch.

"Congratulations," I told Richard Andrews this afternoon when I learned he was planning to leave his job in February.

"Thanks," he said after a short pause, seemingly never at a loss for civil words even when the comment he's responding to is slightly ... off. "I mean, a couple of other people have said the same thing to me, and I guess that's the right thing to say."

"Yes, right," I said. "I didn't know quite what to say, actually. I guess it's a good thing. You're getting a break, and it has been quite a while, after all."

"Well put," he said, laughing now at my awkward attempts, thankfully, instead of taking offense.

I do mean them kindly. Andrews is the man who has been in charge of the Henry Art Gallery's emergence as an innovative force in art in the Pacific Northwest--at times, it has seemed, the only institutional force for innovation in this city--and the only real contemporary art museum in the Pacific Northwest. The Henry's trustees will do a national search for his replacement.

He says he's leaving for personal and professional reasons. Personally, after 32 years in the workforce--leading a nationally acclaimed public art program in Seattle, then going to D.C. to head up the visual arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts (when it still existed), and then running the Henry for almost 20 years--he says he could use a break. As for his involvement with the Henry, he takes quite a selfless position.

"This was an unbelievably difficult decision because I am not at all short on interest, optimism and enthusiasm for the Henry," he said in a phone interview just now. "But on the professional or institutional level I also believe that--particularly for a contemporary art institution--that an influx of new ideas that a shift in leadership can provide is a good and healthy thing. You don't ever want to be hanging on so long that you become an impediment to innovation."

It would be difficult to imagine Andrews as an impediment to innovation, considering his long record of it, from co-organizing the first Russian Constructivist show after the dissolution of the Soviet Union with the Walker Art Center to inviting Ann Hamilton's installation of yellow canaries and rooms whose walls and floors were covered in smudge marks from burning candles to this year's installations by Maya Lin. (I didn't like Lin's works, sure, but I love Andrews's record and longstanding philosophy that the most important work a museum can do is to help artists realize new artworks.)

Andrews, 57, and his wife, artist Colleen Chartier, are staying in Seattle. "Who knows what I'll do? Maybe become a zen monk. I don't know. Seems less likely," he said, in his characteristic way of throwing out something mildly surprising, and then responding to it almost academically.

Andrews recently became the president of the board of trustees for the foundation in charge of assisting James Turrell with his masterwork in the middle of the Arizona desert, Roden Crater. Turrell is turning the crater into a series of celestial observatories and art experiences, and has been working on the project more than 30 years--about as long as Andrews has been helping other artists get their work done. Andrews was an artist himself, a sculptor who earned his MFA at the University of Washington. He stopped making art while he was in D.C., when he had plenty else to do, including traveling for work and trying to be a good father for his young family.

Andrews really has been a force for other artists, including Turrell. The Henry commissioned a Turrell skyspace in 2002. Now, Turrell's big project--which still needs well over $25 million to be completed, Andrews said--is in good hands.

Andrews describes Ann Hamilton's installation experience as the ideal relationship between a museum and an artist. When she was high up in one of the museum's skylights preparing her show (all the artificial lights were turned off for the duration of the show), she kept looking down and telling Andrews, "Richard, I can't believe you're letting me do this."

Since Andrews's arrival, the Henry has grown from a staff of 5 or 6 to more than 40. The operating budget has ramped up from under $300,000 a year to $3.4 million, and the endowment has raised from $100,000 to $10 million--plus the Henry has quadrupled in physical size, with the addition in 1997 of the expanded facility designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, in conjunction with LMN Architects.

Before he arrived, the mixed-repertory museum even flirted, in a series of late-19th century exhibitions, with becoming an American art museum. Andrews steered the museum toward contemporary work, and toward viewing historical work, such as the Russian Constructivism of the early 20th century, in a contemporary light.

"I hope one of the hallmarks of both my tenure here and what the Henry is, is this commitment to risk-taking and this commitment to commissioning art from artists," he said.

I love his description of the museum's sometimes-overlooked role as a university presence: "Part of our mission is to be a museum of closest approach to young people when their minds are opening up. What I hope for is that they would open the door to the Henry and. like an explorer, come in and find new vistas."

At its best, that's what the Richard Andrews Henry did for people of all ages.

Near the middle of the Morrison Bridge in Portland is this sign:
The simple drawing of a daffodil is supposed to make a suicidal person stop and think about the beauty of the known. He or she is on the brink and this flower makes them rethink the jump to the no-thing of the unknown. I can imagine certain people having the kind of mind that might look at this drawing and say "yes" to life, say "yes" to more of this world, this city of roses, this slow river which flows on to the largest ocean, and this bridge which is the largest machine in all of Oregon. But the more sensitive of us (too sensitive for this dumb world) will look at the drawing and see yet one more reason to end it all--bad art.

Tonight, I spent a good 2 1/2 hours wandering around the Seattle Art Museum during a preview event, marveling again.

I'm telling you to go. At 10 am Saturday the doors open. They remain open for 35 hours straight, until 9 pm Sunday.

I saw people stretching their legs. Stretching their legs. Yes, the Seattle Art Museum is now so large that it can not really be covered properly in a single visit. Know what this means? That it is no longer a place largely suited to tourists, but instead to repeat visitors, committed visitors, locals, scholars, careful lookers.

"How do you like the new museum?" one man asked another tonight.

"It's like a museum now," the other one answered.

In my review of the new SAM experience (the story also has a great slideshow), there were several things I couldn't mention because I just didn't have enough room.

First, the most shocking work of art in all the museum* is the painting that hangs in the special-exhibitions gallery to the right of Matta's gaseous-green geometric-surrealism painting. It looks, as one artist told me tonight, like something thick and graphic, like Jean Dubuffet. It has arrows pointing in various directions, and is brightly colored. Are you ready for this? It's a 1964 painting by Eva Hesse. Do. Not. Miss. It. It caused another artist to proclaim, "I never knew she was a tube-squeezer!"

(If you're interested, there's an essay on Hesse and color in the current edition of October.)

Another unsung thing to behold: the circa-1600 Italian room, made of wood and never before seen (or smelled--smell that wood smell) at SAM.

More: the Chinoiserie room on the fourth floor, decked in Belgian tapestries.

And: the 1640s oil painting Boys Blowing Bubbles, also on the fourth floor, which SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa, in her research for the reopening, recently re-attributed to the female artist Michaelina Woutiers, about whom I know nothing and am thoroughly curious. (The painting has been in SAM's collection since 1958.) As Ishikawa pointed out, the bubbles are 350 years old and still haven't popped.

Anyway, have fun. I won't lay a bunch of stuff on you all at once--or any more than I already have. Do go. You'll be glad you did. (Although the Larry Bell fans in the house should return on Tuesday, when the fragile transparent cube by Bell will be replaced in the minimalism gallery after the opening crush.)

*(Sadly, SAM doesn't have seductive high-res images of any of these things on its web site ...)

It pains me to say it, but it is that time of the year when the lovely and talented Abigail Guay must retire to her South Pacific hideout. Otherwise, she'd *totally* continue performing the thankless, pay-free task of compiling the visual art calendar week in and out, doing the occasional research on arcane subjects, and cracking open the strange missives and first novels that arrive in my mailbox.

So until you must retire to your own South Pacific hideout (read: running and screaming from the tedium of data entry), would you like to take her place?

Here's what I need: Organized. Meticulous. Knowledgeable about contemporary art. No flakes. Seriously about flakes: I'm not fooling.

And ideally, I'd love someone who, like Abigail, wants to write as an art critic. Here, here, and here are some of Abigail's writings. (Not every intern writes, but the internship can lead to writing opportunities.)

If you're interested, get in touch with me at jgraves@thestranger.com. The internships tend to last about 3-4 months, are unpaid, and take about 10 hours a week, at least some of which are during daylight hours.

When you write me, feel free to say something, anything, about this:

^{Camouflage by Julie Blackmon (2006, archival pigment print, 22 X 22 inches), in a show opening next Thursday, May 10, at G. Gibson Gallery.}

At the top of ArtsJournal this morning is a link to LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's review of the new Seattle Art Museum.

The ArtsJournal teaser reads:

A Museum Where Art And Architect Cooperate
Christopher Hawthorne loves the Seattle Art Museum's new home, mainly because it manages to properly showcase the art inside it without subsuming the architect's skill and vision.

And then I read the review, which is a sly one. Hawthorne doesn't love the Seattle Art Museum's new home at all. If I'm reading correctly, he seems to find it decent, fairly good, but lacking in the sort of "real architectural cleverness and daring" that you find at the new ICA in Boston or the new Walker--buildings, he says (I haven't been to either one, sadly), that have calm and well-proportioned galleries but are not humorless.

And I will admit, I hadn't thought of it before, but the new SAM is humorless.

In my review of the new SAM experience, coming out today, I fail to notice the humorlessness. On the issue of art versus architecture, though, I come out siding with Hawthorne. All the discussion of the new SAM not being "look-at-me" architecture during last week's press opening events, of the new SAM putting the art first, was tiresome hooey.

As both Hawthorne and I point out, there's a lot of room between aggressive architecture that forces the art into a corner (and at the art world's latest architectural bete noire, Denver Art Museum, reportedly, there are some interior corners so sharp they had to be cordoned off), and a humble servant of a building that simply fades into the background and barely registers as architecture. "There is plenty of ego, after all, in Cloepfil's design," Hawthorne writes. Indeed. (Check the minimalist majesty of the elevator bank, and you can start there.)

I am skeptical of the interior usefulness of Cloepfil's brise soleil. Hawthorne questions another one of the sun shade's stated purposes, its ability to transmit the outdoors into the museum:

The sections of the museum facing west are shaded by a stainless-steel brise-soleil system that can be manually shifted when curators want to change the lighting as they rearrange the exhibitions. But Cloepfil also uses the system to frame and restrict views and even to actively block them. It's a game he's played before, particularly in an impressive recent house in Sun Valley, Idaho. The result here is a museum whose views can't begin to match those of Rem Koolhaas' nearby public library ...

But where Hawthorne really twists the knife is at the end of the piece, when he describes that it's fashionable to diss the 1991 SAM design by Robert Venturi (the old SAM building). I call Cloepfil's new SAM a kinder, gentler MoMA (the new MoMA in NY, by Yoshio Taniguchi). Hawthorne writes:

The truth, though, is that cycles of taste move much faster than construction in the architecture world. Planned at roughly the same time as Taniguchi's museum and in something of the same spirit, the new SAM arrives just as many of us are feeling ready for at least a small corrective to MoMA's upright and largely corporate approach — for a bit of humor and maybe a splash of decoration as well.

That doesn't mean going back to the stage-set Postmodernism that Venturi and Scott Brown were turning out in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was often tinny and overly mannered. It only means that every time Cloepfil or Gates or Walsh brought up the Venturi design just to knock it, it served mostly as a reminder of what the new wing is missing.

This is provocative writing, and convincing.

I only have one thing to add: Mr. Hawthorne, you're lucky you didn't have to actually use the Venturi building for the last 16 years. It may be vogueish to slam it, but how can you blame us? It was a terrible building, inside and out. Was it worse for having tried at wit, and failed? Perhaps. I suppose that the prospect of another grossly failed attempt at levity and decoration may have seemed too much for this city to bear.

And so we have SAM The Serious.

The museum opens Saturday morning at 10 and stays open for 35 straight hours, until 9 pm Sunday.

Andras Szanto over at Artworld Salon reports today that the EU has passed a law to keep cultural promoters from misquoting critics.

Szanto writes:

For those of us in the visual art world, this news raises some disquieting questions. First, how would promoters shrink sentences that run, on industry average, four to seven lines of text, into their meager advertisement space? Second, how would these unscrupulous arts advertisers manipulate the meaning of critical utterances, when those utterances themselves are so often nonsensical and, as surveys have documented, devoid of clear judgments?

Yes, yes, we are terrible. Imagine if the US passed a similar law, and we had to be legible, strict, and sound-biteable without reverting to mere punditry? As Szanto points out, it may be a good imaginary restriction for us to put on ourselves before we sit down to write. Who really is smart, opinionated, and quotable?

So I'm headed to Chicago next week, and I was checking out the Art Institute of Chicago's web site this morning when I saw this:

In 1425 Lorenzo Ghiberti was commissioned to design a pair of bronze doors for Florence’s Baptistery. He labored on the task for 27 years, fashioning a masterpiece that Michelangelo called “truly worthy to be the Gates of Paradise” for its remarkable beauty and grandeur. For the past 25 years, Ghiberti’s gates have undergone extensive conservation, and they are now nearing completion. To celebrate the conclusion of this arduous project and its stunning results, three relief panels from the left wing of the Gates of Paradise and sections of the door’s frieze will travel to North America. This exhibition will afford viewers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe Ghiberti’s work up close before the individual elements are reintegrated with the rest of the doorframe and put on permanent display in a hermetically sealed room in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, never to travel again. Other Venues: The exhibition will also travel to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Seattle Art Museum.

That's not hyperbole, folks--these gilt panels are founding monuments of the Renaissance, both beloved and important, and this is their first time traveling to the United States since they were made more than 500 years ago.

If they are in fact coming to SAM, it's a huge deal. (I didn't even get to see the doors when I was in Florence a few years ago, because they've been replaced by replicas and the originals have been taken in for safekeeping.)

It has been repeatedly reported that they'll come to Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, and then be whisked away back to Florence. But has the West Coast found a way in?

A SAM spokeswoman said nothing is yet firm, and SAM's web site doesn't list the show under upcoming exhibitions.

But that's not a denial, is it?

As for timing, the show just opened in Atlanta Saturday and will spend the summer in Chicago and the fall in New York. After January, maybe we'll get a glimpse at the gilded bronze panels depicting scenes from the Old Testament.

For now, here's a CNN story with a good slide show with the curator posted yesterday, timed to the Atlanta opening.

Here's an image from one of the restored panels:

And here are images of the replicas of the panels that are traveling (top to bottom, Adam and Eve, Rebecca giving birth to Jacob and Esau, and David cutting off Goliath's head):

Back in September, I reported here on Slog that Seattle Art Museum has owned a James Turrell light room for two decades but never shown it--but that it would soon come out of storage for the grand opening of the new SAM.

Scratch that.

The Turrell is still in storage.

This from SAM:

The Turrell was going to be installed in the Venturi galleries on the fourth floor, but the exhibition schedule meant that it would only be on view for six months. So curatorial decided to postpone the installation so that it could stay on view longer. We are working on the schedule now and hope to have it view in the near future.

Just didn't want you showing up this weekend expecting to see something like, you know, this

or this.

^{For Eighty Cents! (Per ottanta centesimi!), 1895, oil on canvas, by Angelo Morbelli.}

Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia & Anarchy: All right.

(Straight-up impressionism makes its next celebrity appearance in Seattle a year from now, in this.)

In this week's feature on Gage Academy of Art, I write about the academy's conflicted director, Gary Faigin.

Faigin is one of my favorite characters in Seattle art. He is eccentric and stubborn, and openly admits he is threatened by a newfound open-mindedness that has taken him over in the last few years. The fight at the heart of Gage Academy is the fight at the heart of Gary Faigin, between an emphasis on time-tested skill in art--the stuff you can't bullshit--and ideas, feelings, all the things you can't measure, but which ultimately make art what it is.

Actually, that's the conflict at the heart of art, too. Which must be why I like Faigin so much--he invites the conflict and sits with it.

What I couldn't fit into the story were the details of Gary's life. As one-half of the couple that founded Gage Academy (Pamela Belyea is the other half), Faigin might seem from a distance to be a patrician. After all, he's the guy behind Seattle's only "classical" academy, a place from which all manner of finely honed drawings of nudes and genteelly painted still-lifes issue forth like a parade of dead white kings.

But Faigin is no silver-spooner. Here's a section I had in the original draft of my story, but which got cut for space:

Faigin got started in art the way most artists do: by drawing. He dropped out of college in the name of political activism (among other things, Faigin protested the Democratic nomination of Hubert Humphrey over the anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, in 1968) and generalized hippie wandering ("a couple of guys came and said, well, there are whole sheets of blotter acid in San Francisco, and what were we doing wasting our time in Ann Arbor?"). Then, he tried becoming a novelist. He discovered he liked doing illustrations in the margins better than writing. His first complex drawing from life was in his 20s, of his own feet sticking out of his sleeping bag. (Belyea still has the drawing.) He was so satisfied with the act of achieving a likeness that he decided to go back to school—"art school, not college." In December of 1976, Faigin and Belyea hitchhiked from Vancouver, B.C., to New York on less than $100. He was headed for the Art Students League of New York. In a catalog he'd found, the school listed its prerequisites as, "There are none."

Yesterday, in a perfect twist, I found out that Faigin plays prominently in a new photograph by Thomas Struth--the artist who shoots museum visitors as they survey masterpieces. Turns out Faigin was leading a Gage tour at the Prado, and gesticulating in front of Velazquez's Las Meninas when the photo was taken, in 2005. (The photograph is up at Marian Goodman Gallery in NY through this weekend.) Faigin is the only person in the photograph whose face really shows, and in an April 10 review in the NYT, Michael Kimmelman mentions him, "the smiling tour guide, leaning into a goggle-eyed scrum of visitors who lean oh so slightly away from the Velázquez, as if intimidated by its reputation.”

"How about that for a crossover of the Classical and the modern?" Faigin emailed me. Indeed. Thomas Struth had no idea what he'd captured.

Damn you, Tyler Green!

Yesterday, Modern Art Notes reported that Aqua Art Miami, the fair concurrent with Art Basel Miami Beach run by two Seattle artists, Jaq Chartier and Dirk Park, will be expanding this December.

And not just expanding, but doubling--and improving.

In addition to the hotel part of Aqua on the beach, Chartier and Park will be renting out a warehouse across the bridge in Wynwood, near where NADA holds its popular fair. Asked whether Aqua is going head-to-head with Nada, Chartier told MAN: "Definitely."

Aqua's warehouse presentation will have larger booths than NADA, permanent walls (since Aqua will be renting the warehouse year-round--which raises the question, is Aqua expanding beyond a December phenomenon?), and a layout that does away with the usual shopping aisles setup.

Bold, bold, bold, bold, bold.

The press preview for the new, expanded Seattle Art Museum begins right now. I wasn't in Seattle for the opening of the Robert Venturi building downtown in 1991, the first of the rash of capital projects across the region. But I was at the early walk-throughs for the Bellevue Art Museum, then the revamped Bellevue Art Museum, the Museum of Glass, and the Tacoma Art Museum, so I'm feeling a little nostalgic, and I'm tempted to consider how this building stands up to the others.

I've been through the new SAM a few times already. These spaces are much, much better than the Venturi galleries. But I don't think this museum will steal the title of best work of Northwest museum architecture from Antoine Predock's 2003 Tacoma Art Museum, which manages to be open and light-filled while providing a surprising level of intimacy and subjectivity in each space. It's also warm where the new SAM is cool, even corporate.

This is TAM (photos from SAM forthcoming as they're available):

One exception: I've never been in love with TAM's great big high-ceilinged contemporary gallery. I'm not sure whether it's the dark slate floor that dampens the place, or the way the window slits are placed at the base of the room instead of up high. SAM has a gallery in the same mold, but, I think, far better—with a large corner window, a lookout onto the public area of the museum, and a cutout in an upper wall into the antiquities gallery.

Did the finance and operations director of the Austin Museum of Art really have to steal at a street fair?

Caught art-handed in Texas, thanks to the Art Law Blog.

The Back of the Line is a collaboration between artist William Powhida (remember his enemies and friends lists?), writer Jeff Parker, and the design firm DECODE (Stephen Lyons of Platform Gallery). It's $25 and available here or by calling Platform Gallery, which, by the way, is having this great show by Jesse Burke.

Here's the description of The Back of the Line:

Through four stories interwoven with images, The Back of the Line follows the plight of ornithophobic, cuckolding, leering, scooter-thieving, laundromat loving, peeing-while-sleepwalking James J. Wreck. The narration—in the suspect, second-hand account of James's best friend—sometimes agrees and sometimes conflicts with the documentary evidence of James's deeds, creating fissures in the story as each of the two men see it. Motivated alternately by revenge, jealousy, altruism, and obsession, they continually misread one another in a train wreck of egos and desires.

I wish I could show you an image of One Shot, the other release today, because it's a good-looking little black book with an even littler white pistol embossed on the cover.

This is the parting work of Visual Codec, which was a great online regional art mag run by M until earlier this year, when she needed her life back. One Shot is simple, like the process that prompted it. A group of jurors working individually (including Liz Brown of the Henry, Beth Sellars of Suyama Space, Greg Bell of 4Culture, and me, representing Seattle, plus jurors from Portland and BC) received a series of single images, one from each artist, but without names, cities, artist statements, or gallery affiliations attached. The only information we got was medium and title.

The images the judges chose are in the book, which is a straightforward, vivid parade with little text to clutter the experience of a regional overview.

The book is $20, on sale at Powell's in Portland (or online) and Wall of Sound in Seattle. The Hideout hosts the release party this Saturday night from 6 to closing, and One Shot also will be for sale at the opening of the Lead Pencil Studio show at Lawrimore Project the night of May 3.

Last year was a great one for new, graduating talent in Seattle: Susie J. Lee and Tivon Rice, among others, emerged from the crop. In a few weeks the annual BFA and MFA shows will open up, on May 11 at Cornish and May 12 at the Henry.

I know of at least one grad who'll be in the UW show at the Henry, Nola Avienne. I ran into her work recently in the UW Art School gallery, and was momentarily stopped in my tracks at its spidery strangeness. Avienne makes her small sculptures (that also function as spatial drawings) out of metal filings and magnets:

1. This spicy conversation over at Artworld Salon about the Jerry Saltz v. Alanna Heiss, museum v. market debate. Clearly the subject is ready for an exhibition taken from the other side: how the museums are part of the market, not separate from it. Any curators out there willing to take on that ball of wax?

2. Great post by Tyler Green over at Modern Art Notes called "The national mood as reflected in arts criticism".

3. Robert Storr with Richard Lacayo on the big show at the Venice Biennale this summer:

The underlying premise of the show is that there has been a division between the conceptual and the perceptual, between the "criticality" crowd and the beauty crowd. The argument of the show is that first rate work is always both conceptual and perceptual and the artists making art are far less concerned with these divisions than people who write about them.

^{Untitled (Gene Simmons Inspires Me), alabaster, weathered foam, 2006}

^{I like you (I almost don't hate you anymore), mixed media, 35 x 21 inches, 2007.}

^{Untitled (neck crack), alabaster, 8 x 6 x 7 inches,2006}

Debra Baxter is the only sculptor--and one of only two emerging artists--to be nominated by Bard College to receive the Joan Mitchell Foundation 2007 MFA grant award. (She goes to Bard in the summers but lives here the rest of the year and is a member of SOIL, where she recently had a striking show that included the Gene Simmons homage and the neck-crack in alabaster above.)

The award is $15,000. It is designed to "help painters and sculptors as they begin their professional art careers outside the academic environment," according to the foundation's notification letter.

This year's round of awards includes about 50 graduate schools, each of whom was invited to nominate two candidates. The jurors will select up to 15 finalists to receive an award. Past winners have included Tara Donovan, Nicola Lopez, and Anthony Goicolea.

UPDATE: Seattle's Tivon Rice won the award last year and is heading out for a recipient's group show this June in NY.

Betsey over at Hankblog broke the news about Lead Pencil Studio: They're winners of this year's Rome Prize!

They'll spend 11 months in Rome starting in September, working on a project centered around X-raying the volumes of architecturally beloved spaces using something called Lidar technology.

They explained this to me about a month ago (I was holding onto it until the academy made its announcement), but this morning I called for a review. The technology is "not exactly an X-ray, but works in a similar way," Annie Han, one-half of LPS, said. "It's survey equipment that sits on a tripod and is often used in mining, to see how deep a tunnel goes. We'll be using it to map the interior spaces of the great buildings of Rome as well as the spaces between buildings."

The interiors of the Parthenon and the cathedrals, the pockets of space in the narrow streets between huge buildings--Han and partner Daniel Mihalyo will be measuring them, capturing them, seeing "what we find out." They'll bring the results back to Seattle next August.

This prize is a great honor for the artists, but no surprise to me. My love for LPS is well-documented here, here, and here.

They have an installation up at the Exploratorium in San Francisco through June 3, and when I talked to them this morning they were in Colorado to give a lecture. Ten days from now, on May 3, they open their first solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project, with all new work, including installations, drawings of fictional spaces, and manipulated and documentary-style video and photography works based on Maryhill Double, their outdoor installation last summer.

It's worth noting that Seattle artist/architects are becoming a franchise in Rome: Alex Schweder won the prize last year, and returned with all new bodies of work, including the beautiful A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day, which recently closed at Suyama Space.

Tonight from 7 to 10 p.m., the opening reception for new work in the medium of embroidery and hankies by Allison Manch at No Space Gallery, corner of Summit and Mercer.

This hankie, "Fools Gold" (2006), makes a plain white Club Room™ hankie from Macy's look like a fool here.

That's what Jeff Jahn over at PORT is calling the new plans for an exhibition program that will overhaul the Oregon Biennial and instead turn it into the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards: an authoritative, curated, $10,000 award-ceremony with an in-depth, small-roster exhibition attached.

The decision by Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso, chief curator Bruce Guenther, and Northwest curator Jennifer Gately sounds like it will certainly ramp up the museum's biennial in scope and excitement. Portland carves out a place of authority for itself with living artists this way; it's a position Seattle or Tacoma could have taken, but didn't.

Selections begin not with an open call, but with a nomination process.

The Museum will invite a select group of respected arts professionals, including regional curators, scholars, dealers, writers, artists, and critics, to nominate visual artists based on the quality of their work, innovation, skill, relevance to community or global issues in the arts, continuity of vision, commitment to their practice, and level of development in their career. Nominees may be both emerging and well established artists currently living and working in the Northwest, defined by the Museum as Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.

"What excites me most about this new approach is its organic, community-oriented nature that engages with the region's great wealth of arts professionals. In essence, the program's success is a reflection of them and the result will be something that has the potential to be highly regarded nationally, much like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's SECA Award," said Gately.

Working with a special guest curatorial advisor from outside the region, Gately will review the nominees' materials and select finalists whose studios she will visit. The Museum is pleased to announce the curatorial advisor for this inaugural exhibition will be James Rondeau, Curator and Frances and Thomas Dittmer Chair of the Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

By December Gately plans to present her findings to the Museum's curatorial staff and announce the award recipients. The number of recipients selected will vary depending on the quality and scale of work. The work of these artists will be will be featured in the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards exhibition opening in June 2008. At that time, the recipient of the first Arlene Schnitzer Prize will be announced.

"This approach will provide an opportunity to experience a greater number of works by a given artist than is possible in survey-style biennials, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the artists' concerns and creative practices," said Gately.

According to Jahn's post, the nominees who are shortlisted and who get studio visits with the curators will be announced, a la Turner Prize. (The museum, Jahn writes, is still deciding whether to publicize the nominating committee.)

I've written extensively about what I thought were the procedural contradictions and tediums that sucked the wind out of this year's Northwest Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum.

The Seattle Art Museum's only comparable effort is the annual Betty Bowen Award, which doles out about $11,000 to an artist in an entirely private process. Michael Darling, SAM modern and contemporary curator, is already making the Betty Bowen more appealing by setting aside room in the downtown museum for a solo show for each year's winner. But what about the selection process there? I hope Darling and other art professionals get the chance to become more active in that, too.

In a press release sent out less than an hour ago, the Vancouver Art Gallery, hosting Huang Yong Ping's installation with live animals, Theater of the World, announced it will remove all the animals by end of business tomorrow. In their place--as a protest--the museum plans to put up documentation of the museum's dialogue with animal-rights activists, who envisioned the artist's intended artificial microcosm instead as "something that resembles a zoo or a pet shop, where each species is neatly separated into different glass boxes," the artist wrote in a statement.

I wrote a few days ago about the controversy brewing up north over the installation.

The museum and the artist still contend that the conditions for the insects and lizards were absolutely livable. When I asked for an interview, the Vancouver Art Gallery did not respond. But at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, the installation's display depended on first consulting a local exotic pet expert to ensure that the animals were fed and watered properly, although the stress of the strange, bare environment was unavoidable--and part of the artist's intent. By the end of the exhibition, the Walker curator noted, most of the animals had adjusted to the presence of each other and to their new surroundings, "and just looked bored."

But the prospect of an imagined bloodbath was too much for the Vancouver SPCA to bear, evidently.

I'd like to know why the museum folded (the Walker made its case to local animal-rights activists, and they backed down), and maybe to do that I'll need to visit the show and talk to the curators, providing they make themselves available. My hunch is that the censorship is a shame, and a sham. Human culture is built on the exploitation of animals; this installation, intended to prompt a consideration of that among other things, to me would barely seem to register on the scale of abuse.

Sometime around the turn of this century, what was then just a glimmer in the eyes of its founders--chiefly George and Jane Russell of the Russell Co. in Tacoma--came to be called the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art.

And a great groan spread throughout the land.

The museums would be the Henry, the Frye, SAM, BAM, TAM, and MOG: ICCA.

And after the first wave of dread passed, and shoulders had shrugged themselves tired over whether MoG or MOG was correct, why, people started wondering just what was the epistemology of that little old colon. Was this a "Museum of Glass" or an "International Center for Contemporary Art"?

Considering the split between the world of studio glass and mainstream contemporary art, this division took on meaning inside and outside the museum, and ultimately confused the hell out of just about everybody who wondered where, anyway, was the Chihuly? (Dale Chihuly visited the museum to work in its hotshop approximately once a year, but there was no permanent display of his work--that display was over at the Tacoma Art Museum, further confusing things. Chihuly, in fact, is not involved in the glass museum. Further complicating matters, the City of Tacoma, not the museum, owns the Chihuly Bridge of Glass leading from downtown to the museum. And yet plenty of people still persist in calling it the Chihuly Museum--maybe because their eyes glazed over at the prospect of deciding between MoG: ICCA and MOG:ICCA?)

In any case, a new day has dawned. A day of nomenclatural clarity, at the very least. I can only imagine that the whole of Tacoma--where the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art was and continues to be the largest arts organization hands down--will breathe a sigh of relief to hear it.

The glass museum will now be called the Museum of Glass.

No more colon.

No more "international center" of anything, let alone contemporary art. (Did anyone ever hear of a name so provincial and depressing?)

This, I imagine, does not mean that contemporary art from around the world will not be seen in the museum. But I presume that when it appears, it will have something, at least marginally, to do with glass.

The board also approved a new, streamlined mission: The Museum of Glass provides a dynamic learning environment to appreciate the medium of glass through creative experiences, collections and exhibitions.

I should give the place a visit. Haven't been there in a while.

In any case, the Unbearable Length of Museum Name is dead, and maybe the Unbearable Confusion of Museum Mission is, too.

To pin things down even more, the museum specifies in its press release that MOG, with all caps, is the preferred acronym.

After five years open, the museum finally has a legible name on its birth certificate. Long live clarity!

A press release this morning announces that the Portland Art Museum will be expanding its biennial--which for years has been Oregon-only--to include the entire Northwest. Exactly what the biennial will look like will remain a mystery until this coming Monday morning, when the museum will unveil its "plans for a broader Biennial exhibition program celebrating the most compelling contemporary art of the Northwest" at a press conference in Portland.

I won't be there, but I'm dying to hear PAM's plans. Tacoma Art Museum has had a lock on the Northwest Biennial for the better part of two decades, and now a larger institution will step into the fray, giving TAM a run for its money. What will become of the two shows? How will their reputations and their values differ? Which one will be better?

It should be fun to see how it all plays out, considering how contested and overheated biennials get, and ultimately how important they can be seen to be. Also, will PAM's plan urge TAM to revise the wrongheaded strategy that I believe it employed this year? We'll see ...

I reached TAM curator Rock Hushka on his cell phone in New York and delivered to him the news about PAM's expanded biennial plans. "How fascinating," he said. TAM has no plans to overhaul its biennial, he added.

But fascinating indeed.

There's a little stir up in Vancouver right now over an artwork by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping at Vancouver Art Gallery. The piece is a container shaped like a turtle's shell. In it are tarantulas, scorpions, crickets, millipedes, and lizards. The environment is bare, and the intervention nil. The animals are fed, but otherwise left to their own devices in their little microcosm. It's called Theater of the World (1993).

This is far from the first time an animal has been seen in an art gallery. Just recently, the Vancouver Art Gallery itself showed Brian Jungen's closed-off room containing birds resting on products from IKEA. Probably the most famous example is from 1974, when German artist Joseph Beuys sat in a gallery for three days with a coyote. Theater of the World is not Huang's only piece with a live animal; another one involves a lone tarantula.

There's something necessarily unsettling about animals in a gallery or a museum. They're serving at the pleasure of humans. But the artists who use this device purposefully invoke its taboos.

I couldn't find an image of Huang's Theater of the World on the Vancouver Art Gallery's web site, but here's what the piece looked like when it was installed previously at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which organized the traveling Huang retrospective:

In Vancouver, The Globe and Mail reports that animal activists have complained about Theater of the World on principle. But to me their view sounds like a prognostication based more on the bloodshed and devastation happening in the human world, rather than an understanding of the artist's intent or the actual conditions in the gallery.

"It's pretty clear that the intention is that the observer is intended to witness potential conflict between the animals, which frankly I think is kind of sick," Mr. Fricker [of the Humane Society] said.

(The Globe and Mail also calls Vancouver "an animal-loving city"--is the implication that residents of other cities are coldhearted bastards?)

I haven't seen the piece yet. To test Fricker's hypothesis that it is nothing but a voyeuristic bloodbath, I called the Walker to find out exactly what happened inside the cage in Minneapolis. Did the animals kill each other? Was it like a Shakespeare play in the end, with no one left standing? When an animal was killed, was it removed for reasons of decorum or left as a tough testament to the authenticity of the artificial ecosystem? Did people torch the place? If the microcosm was a symbol for the world, which animal came closest to behaving like the United States?

Doryun Chong helped to organize the show at the Walker and is curating the international tour. (The 40-work show closes in Vancouver Sept. 16 and goes after that to Beijing.) He admitted that while the show has many works, Theater of the World was transfixing for viewers. "It's kind of a showstopper," he said. "You would see people going around the exhibition and they would just stop and congregate around it. And we had people coming back to see the exhibition because they were interested in seeing what was going on in Theater of the World."

Hearing about Chong's experience with the piece is fascinating. He learned that crickets are very resourceful—some mysteriously escaped from the piece, probably when the snakes were being removed to be fed or when water was refilled. He learned that hissing cockroaches and African millipedes are antisocial. They congregated in their own corners and hardly moved. Scorpions were the Americans of the bunch. They went after tarantulas. Most of the aggression was limited to the early part of the exhibition, when the animals were acclimating.

Chong saw a scorpion molting, its exoskeleton splitting open. It didn't survive the process.

When the animals got killed or died, they were left alone, not removed. Some disappeared, having been eaten. Some died naturally, "and I couldn't exactly tell what happened," Chong said. "There were a lot of things that happened in there that I couldn't understand how it happened."

Chong said the fights were fascinating, but also a little scary. It sounded like the same could be said of the entire installation, of not knowing what would happen, of the mixture of artificiality and human control with alien animal instincts and natural orders.

The Walker got a complaint on its blog, and that blog commenter contacted the Humane Society and Animal Control shortly before the show closed; representatives from those organizations visited the show and approved the conditions. "On the one hand, I can understand the outrage, but human interventions are always interrupting ecological systems, and always creating new ecological balances, disruptions, and microcosms. We put animals to human use all the time," Chong said.

Before the show began, curators met with Bruce, the owner of the local exotic pet store, in order to procure the animals. The artist based his list of animals on an ancient recipe from southern China for a magical potion--created by putting five venomous creatures (centipede, snake, scorpion, toad, and lizard) into a pot and leaving them there for a year. Huang also wanted locusts and spiders; he ended up with crickets and tarantulas.

The museum asked Bruce to be on-call constantly during the exhibition and to check in twice a week. For his part, he told the museum that he'd only feel comfortable providing animals if they all came from the same ecological region so that they weren't entirely alien to one another. All the animals at the Walker came from Africa.

On the Walker's blog (unfortunately, the Vancouver Art Gallery does not have a blog), Bruce issued a call for people to resist anthropomorphizing so much: "It gives people who go there and look at [Huang’s work] with an open mind the realization that, yes, they are predator and prey and they can cohabitate together--the lion sleeping with the lamb. Most animals don't kill for the sheer pleasure of killing. It's either defense or obtaining prey."

Theater of the World just opened a week ago in Vancouver. The Vancouver Province reported Sunday that the museum was missing two toads. I called the museum, and spokesman Andrew Riley was cagey as hell (pun intended), probably tired of dealing with dim accusations regarding animal rights but coming off as defensive. He couldn't say what was going on with any of the animals. For that I'd need to speak with chief curator Daina Augaitis. I waited all day. Unfortunately, she never called. At the very least, I can't wait to hear more, and to see the show. Huang is one of the most radical artists to come out of China in recent years, and the Vancouver Art Gallery was smart to take the show.

I picked up my New York Times Science Times today to discover--in the midst of layers and layers of other completely uninteresting reporting about sex, as if the Times discovered sex existed a few days ago and rushed to deadline with the vaguest of scoops--that only men are hetero or homo.

The scientists refer to this as a hardwired sexual female "flexibility."

Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

Dr. Bailey believes that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.

Similar differences between the sexes are seen by Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University. “Most males are quite stubborn in their ideas about which sex they want to pursue, while women seem more flexible,” he said.

Was this not worth its own story? Or is the research too flimsy to base an entire story on, so you bury it in another one? Seems like a big story when you're declaring that half the population is incapable of having a sexual orientation.

If it were the male half, wouldn't this be on the front page? Is it buried here because women are just considered such creatures of indecision anyway that a little matter of sexual ambidextrousness is like a tough choice between colors of nail polish?

There's more--in another story in the section, written by a different reporter and citing a different scientist. Is this becoming common wisdom?:

Women’s sexual fluidity extends beyond the strength of desire, he said, to encompass the objects of that desire. In his survey, heterosexual women who rated their sex drive as high turned out to have an increased attraction to women as well as to men.

“This is not to say that all women are bisexual,” Dr. Lippa said. “Most of the heterosexual women would still describe themselves as more attracted to men than to women.” Still, the mere presence of a hearty sexual appetite seemed to expand a heterosexual woman’s appreciation of her fellow women’s forms. By contrast, the men were more black-and-white in their predilections. If they were straight and had an especially high sex drive, that concupiscence applied only to women; if gay, to other men.

Dr. Diamond of the University of Utah also has evidence that women’s sexual attractions are, as she put it, “more nonexclusive than men’s.”

And then it starts to get messy:

One factor that may contribute to women’s sexual ambidextrousness, some researchers suggest, is the intriguing and poorly understood nonspecificity of women’s physical reactions to sexual stimuli. As Dr. Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and other researchers have found, women and men show very divergent patterns of genital arousal while viewing material with sexual content.

For men, there is a strong concordance between their physiological and psychological states. If they are looking at images that they describe as sexually arousing, they get erections. When the images are not to their expressed taste or sexual orientation, however, their genitals remain unmoved.

For women, the correlation between pelvic and psychic excitement is virtually nil. Women’s genitals, it seems, respond to all sex, all the time. Show a woman scenes of a man and a woman having sex, or two women having sex, or two men, or even two bonobos, Dr. Chivers said, and as a rule her genitals will become measurably congested and lubricated, although in many cases she may not be aware of the response.

Ask her what she thinks of the material viewed, however, and she will firmly declare that she liked this scene, found that one repellent, and, frankly, the chimpanzee bit didn’t do it for her at all. Regardless of declared sexual orientation, Dr. Chivers said, “with women, there’s a discrepancy between stated preference and physiological arousal, and this discrepancy has been seen consistently across studies.”

Now, in addition to being indecisive biologically, our various systems are not even connected. (Even though when you ask us what we want, we know.)

I'd write more, except that this office is full of interesting men and women. It's all I can do to figure out which ones I am attracted to today.

This, from Caryn over at art.blogging.la, is a great watch, and a perfect counterpart to Christian Marclay's Video Quartet. In fact, Baldessari's performance would have fit right in with Eric Fredericksen's entire current show at Western Bridge, Kit Bashing. (I review it in tomorrow's paper.)

The Guggenheim Fellowships have been announced, and one goes to Ann Gale, professor of painting at UW. Below are a few of her works, with plain reference to Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacommetti, even Cezanne. I've never seen them in person, but they do carry a certain weight even in reproduction.

During a preview tour of the new Seattle Art Museum (opening May 5) recently, I noticed that the lobby of the old Venturi building was scrubbed clean of bright color, instead showing only muted colors—white, gray, tan. Sounds regular enough for a museum lobby, except then I remembered what I missed: Sol LeWitt's vivid wall drawing of blocks that used to hang over the entire space, forming an implicit contrast with the ancient sculptures on the other side of the museum's first floor. The drawing was made according to the artist's specifications, directly on the wall, and when the wall was torn down, so went the drawing. The artwork was not the drawing, but the specifications, and it can be remade at any point. But even given its conceptual framework, it is possible to feel the pang of it being missing. When I heard this morning that LeWitt had died, I felt the pang again.

^{Seattle Art Museum's Seven Cubes with Color Ink Washes Super-Imposed (1997), consisting of India ink washes and installation rights, by Sol LeWitt, 1928-2007.}

^{Seattle Art Museum's 1,2,3,4,5 (1980-1983), balsawood and chipboard, by LeWitt.}