In a lecture Tuesday night about the antecedents of contemporary sculpture, Seattle Art Museum curator Michael Darling started with Tony Smith's Die (thankfully not skipping the double-entendre of the title) and soon arrived at the Misdemeanor and Felony series of Jack Daws, a Seattle artist represented by Greg Kucera Gallery. It was a short leap. Smith's Die looks like a blank black die, as in the singular of dice; it also looks like a nihilistic crushing machine, an obliteration carving itself into space.

I haven't had the pleasure yet of meeting Daws, or of seeing a solo show of his work. But I first came to know his work in a Twin Towers-inspired photograph he submitted to the 2004 Northwest Biennial at Tacoma Art Museum (remember this one?):

For the image, he constructed the towers out of McDonald's freedom, er, French fries, and Richard Nichol shot the photo.

His Felony and Misdemeanor series were similarly formally restrained and bracingly topical. In Felony, each 8-inch black box had locked inside it, according to the labels, one of the following substances: cocaine, crack, crystal meth, ecstasy, heroin, or LSD. You can imagine what Misdemeanor carried. Here are five of the six Felony works.

Daws hasn't shown in town recently, but on the morning of March 29, he put a new sculpture out into the world. It began its trip at LAX airport. It is a penny cast in 14-karat gold and plated in copper. It looks just like any other penny, but weighs about twice as much, is slightly smaller due to the casting process, and does not have a mint mark. It is dated 1970.

Daws spent it somewhere at LAX that morning, after carrying it in his pocket for months in order to give it a patina. It has about $100 of gold in it, he says.

"Whoever finds the sculpture could sell it for the value of the gold, but they might want to hold onto it," he wrote in a statement. "Daws has more of them, and his Seattle art dealer is selling them. Prices start at $1,000."

In other words, the circulated penny may well be worth more than $100 and possibly more than $1,000. Well—worth? Its use value is one cent. Its gallery value is $1,000. Its auction value? Who could say. In today's art market, plenty of people looking at art see piles of money in its place.

Money as a subject for artists has a long history, at least in part because of the inevitable comparisons between meaningless objects that are then assigned value in a collective way. Warhol's first silkscreens were dollar bills. He suggested that artists should simply tape the worth of a painting, in dollar bills, on the wall, instead of making the art (I seem to recall an artist recently doing this—can anyone help me out?). The artist JSG Boggs made a name for himself by drawing precise dollar bills, spending them with people who don't know what they are (art), and then tipping off collectors if they want to find the bills for themselves. (Yikes! Looks like Boggs may not be doing so well these days.)

I love how Daws's penny is alone in the world, possibly never to be discovered. Pennies aren't like dollar bills. They're barely even money anymore. There's a great chance that this gold-hearted penny could lie in the street the rest of its life, kicked along until it falls down into a sewer line and rides its way into waste treatment, a piece of old value (gold, pennies) lost, the most valuable artwork of its series, the original, you might say, gone. That seems about right.

UPDATE: The press release said this: "When asked if he was concerned about possible criminal charges for counterfeiting, Daws replied, 'If they're looking for criminals they should raid the White House and the Capitol.''"

He needn't have worried, points out Slog commenter Josef:

And, apparently there is no fine for forging a penny. Check this out:

"Manufacturing counterfeit United States currency or altering genuine currency to increase its value is a violation of Title 18, Section 471 of the United States Code and is punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to 15 years, or both.

Possession of counterfeit United States obligations with fraudulent intent is a violation of Title 18, Section 472 of the United States Code and is punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to 15 years, or both.

Anyone who manufactures a counterfeit U.S. coin in any denomination above five cents is subject to the same penalties as all other counterfeiters."

The lowly penny is above the law!

First Christgau, now Saltz.

Story here.

(Hat tip to D.K. Row's Oregonian blog.)

Product designer Nadine Jarvis takes "in remembrance" to a new level altogether:

This is only one part of her project on post mortem traditions. See also her bird feeder and her precariously brilliant Rest in Peaces urn.

Death, where is thy sting now?

With the charming English conservator Nicholas Dorman and the resident Tiepolo. Check it here.

SOIL, Seattle's oldest artist-run nonprofit gallery, announced today that it has received an unusual and unexpected gift that could be its biggest donation ever: a cache of 26 maritime oil paintings it can put up for sale at auction.

The paintings, given to SOIL from Safeco Insurance's collection, will be sold through the auction house of Bonham's & Butterfield's, said SOIL member artist Randy Wood. They were appraised, he said, at $100,000. While that may or may not be indicative of what they'd bring at auction, of course, SOIL's operating budget for an entire year is around $40,000, so "either way, it's a big deal for us," Wood said. The gallery, financed by an auction, donations, and artist dues, plans to use the money for an endowment that will simply help the doors to stay open, he said.

Jackie Kosak, Safeco art curator, was unavailable for comment this afternoon. In a press statement, she wrote, "With our move to a new headquarters located in downtown Seattle, we took the opportunity to evaluate our art collection in light of our mission to collect the work of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists. ... As we considered where to make the donation, we looked for organizations that could store the pieces safely, effectively organize them for auction, and use the proceeds to enrich the Northwest arts scene."

The gift was a pleasant surprise to SOIL, Wood said: "I guess one of the curators over there was just hip to SOIL. It was pretty crazy."

The artists, many British, include Edwin Hayes (1819-1904), Frederick James Aldridge (1850-1933), Hugh Boycott-Brown (1909-1990), John Brett (1831-1902), Gustave de Breanski (1856-1898), and W. Ayerst Ingram (1855-1913). Other artists are John DeLacy, Jenny Guo, George E. Hering, D.H. McLean, Arthur J. Meadows, Thomas R. Miles, Ernest Roe, G. Rogers, Clarkson Stanfield, Theodore Weber, William Wilcox, and William H. Williamson. (I'll admit to never having heard of any of these artists, but several have auction records online.) The press release did not disclose when the paintings came into the Safeco collection, whether all at once or as part of a long-time collecting pattern. Maybe it was a strategy of taking in waterside art for a waterside city?

I can't help but be reminded by this of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, which is selling off some of its oldest works because of its focus on modern and contemporary art. That decision has raised a firestorm in Buffalo and beyond, and a group of Buffalonians even tried to stop the museum from putting the works up for auction, but they lost. The museum prevailed, and is selling its treasures in order to help pay to support newer art and artists. (A level-headed summary of the action there is here.)

When art disappears from public walls and passes into private living rooms, protests are understandable. And the trend of selling art to protect art institutions seems backwards, if not perverse. But in this case, Safeco is sending privately held, little-if-ever-seen pieces possibly to equally obscure locations--but benefiting, along the way, a public Seattle gallery where living Seattle artists get to experiment in a non-commercial venue. Sorry, Hugh Boycott-Brown, but that sounds like a worthwhile exchange to me.

^{Frederick James Aldridge's Crabbers Returning in a Squall will be up for sale to benefit SOIL.}

Charles brings us the totally hetero, totally creepy "Woman With Octopus." I present the totally homo, totally creepy Boytaur. Here's a safe-for-work 'taur...

And here's a pair of totally NSFW 'taurs...

With "Wack!" in LA and "Global Feminisms" in NY, there has been a rash of writing lately about feminism and art, but most of it I've found disappointing. Why is this so hard to write about?

Then come Roberta and Jerry, of course. (Smith and Saltz, that is, of the NYT and Village Voice respectively, husband and wife.)

Roberta is smooth, personal, critical, and level-headed, and it's hard to be all of those at once when you're dealing with such an enormous and loaded subject. She doesn't have to declare herself a feminist; she just, plainly, is one. She smartly interrogates the category of "feminist art," and argues subtly that the Brooklyn exhibition sidesteps this basic question. She points out the essentialist, body-centricism of much of the work, in contrast to the focus on digital, disembodied media instead of painting or sculpture. (I can't wait to see the show in April.)

Here she is, taking it home:

But feminism is not a style, or a formal approach. It is a philosophy, an attitude and a political instrument. It is more important than Pop, Minimalism or Conceptual art because it is by its very nature bigger than they are, more far-reaching and life-affecting. In addition feminism is not of itself an aesthetic value. It is an idea that can assume an organic force in some artists’ work, but others just pay it lip service without much exertion or passion. ...

After the press releases proclaiming a “museum within a museum,” the smallness of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is surprising. But perhaps it will become unnecessary: it will certainly never be able to accommodate all the art, by women as well as men, that has feminist consciousness somewhere in its DNA. The word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name on the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted men.

And then there's Jerry's review of Rachel Harrison's NY show, written with a velocity and urgency you'd never see in the NYT, but with that same engagement with larger subjects that marks Roberta's work.

Her current work is particularly prickly when it comes to the subject of men. This hits you before you even walk in the door. Harrison's exhibition is sarcastically titled after O.J.'s un-televised confessional special, If I Did It—as if to say, "Only a man who's a probable murderer could come up with such a cocky title." Here, Harrison, who at 41 has slowly become one of the better makers of walk-around sculpture working today, bitch-slaps Simpson and at the same time implicates herself in some crime. In this case, she's immersing herself in two forms in apparent crisis—men and autonomous sculpture. ...

Harrison obviously has divided feelings about sculpture and memorializing men. On the one hand, she lovingly made these "guys" with a very sensuous, attentive touch. On the other, she's pointing at how relatively rare and maybe old-fashioned stand-alone medium-sized sculpture is. Indeed, nowadays museums and galleries are brimming with atrium-and-room-filling installations of stuff. Harrison is acknowledging that the form she's using is considered conservative and passé. Yet, like Amy Sillman who approaches painting similarly, Harrison evinces a real passion for tradition. Along with lots of other contemporary artists, Harrison and Sillman love art; they're not arguing with it as postmodernists or casting themselves as somehow against it. They continually contest and question the forms and structures of art but they also use artists whose work has either been deemed too well-known or tapped-out to tinker with. They remind us that just because certain movements and artists go out of fashion doesn't mean they can't still yield aesthetic pay dirt. Their work is a further indication that what might be called the "Oppositional Aesthetics" of late postmodernism, the boring binary idea that one thing always has to negate another, is finally—and may I say thankfully—waning.

Well, considering it's a party, he would come. He'd get drunk. He'd say something rude, probably, but also probably true. And he might come out of it with yet another wife (he's had seven).

Woodside/Braseth Gallery is throwing a 90th birthday party for Cumming tonight, and it doubles as an opening for his latest show at the gallery.

In 2003, when the Tacoma Art Museum opened its new building with the exhibition Northwest Mythologies (co-curated by Sheryl Conkelton and Laura Landau and with a terrific catalog), I sat down in the galleries with the remaining few artists from that Graves-Tobey-Callahan-Anderson crowd, including Cumming, the photographer Mary Randlett, and the artist and paleontologist Wes Wehr (who has since died).

Things started off this way with Cumming, who was at that point still teaching at what is today the Art Institute of Seattle:

Mary Randlett: Bill knew my mother, and he used to come over to Bainbridge. At one time I remember, before we were in college, you were trying to talk my sister and I into being communists.

Bill Cumming: Fortunately, it didn't work. I spent a few years as a Marxist myself. If I were to meet the party leaders today, I'd say hi to them very friendly before I machine-gunned them. I don't believe in a better world. The world was designed to be full of evil.

Why are you looking so evil? Are you going to rebut me or something? You have that intense look that I mistrust in anybody.

Wesley Wehr: Petit moi?

It continued:

Jen Graves: Which Northwest artists are the three of you interested in now?

BC: My students. But they're not painting students, generally. I'm a boor and a peasant, and so I like these kids and I like commercial art. Fine art is just an excuse for meaning, "I don't sell. I'm better than other people."

When I came to town, I was in awe of rich people, but I thought they were damn Yankees and natural-born enemies. But Dr. Fuller was graceful, and he was real. One New Year's Eve - (SAM PR director) Betty Bowen told me this story - Dr. Fuller was down at the Rainier Club celebrating and at about 11:30, looked at his watch and said, "I've got to get home to be with mother at 12 o'clock." A guy swaggered up drunkenly and started calling "Dickie Boy, gotta go home to Mama!"

Fuller put up with it for a while. Finally, he took off his jacket, folded it and handed it to somebody. What nobody knew is that Dr. Fuller was on the boxing team at Harvard in 1914. He went pop! and creamed this drunk with one little jab.

Cumming was none too impressed with Graves.

JG: Did any of you attend the party at Morris' house when he didn't show up and instead left out dirty dishes to greet his guests?

BC: The uninivited party! I wasn't around for it. But people received an uninvitation. You were uninvited to a party, and the damned fools all went. I thought it was a rather minor victory for sensitivity and creativity.

^{William Cumming's Pike Place Market}

Festivities start at 5:30.

Metropolitan Museum curator and sometime NYT and Slate critic writes about why it's so hard to find video art online, and then, thankfully, shares what you can find.

Check out the 61-year-old Joseph Beuys as a bouncing pop star, performing with band and backup singers the 1982 song Sonne Statt Reagan. The title is a play on the pronunciation of the US president's name, which in German is the word for rain. Beuys stands, iconoclastically, behind his band, not in front of them, moving jerkily, like David Byrne.

The beginning lyrics go:

From the land that is destroying itself and dictating our "way of life" comes Reagan and brings weapons and death. And should he hear 'freedom' he sees red. As president of the U.S.A., he says 'Atomic war? Yes, please, there and there.' Whether Poland, Middle East, Nicaragua, he wants the Final Victory, that's just clear.

Verse:

We want sun
instead of rain/Reagan,
to live without armament!
Whether east
whether west
The rockets must rust!

In the second verse, instead of "the rockets must rust," Beuys declares, "A plague upon cold warriors!"

(Hat tip to Patrick the Teuton.)

Bloomberg critic Martin Gayford on how Anish Kapoor's accidentally discarded sculpture is part of a larger (and amusing) pattern.

Just up: Margie Livingston, winner of Seattle Art Museum's 2006 Betty Bowen Award, talks to me about her new show at Greg Kucera Gallery.

It seems like everywhere you turn lately, there's a show about light, or a magazine cover story about a show about light. (We're in the game, too: last week we ran Bruce Nauman's Mean Clown Welcome on the paper's cover in reference to the exhibition of his neon works at the Henry.)

Then comes the news this morning that the Tacoma Art Museum will lux it up this summer, in what could be a promising exhibition that will mix local and national artists. Here's the museum's press description of what will be in the show:

One of the themes of the exhibition explores the idea of celebrity and fame. The gallery will be populated by selected celebrity images of Kurt Cobain (the legendary lead singer of Seattle-based band Nirvana) by Seattle photographer Alice Wheeler and a promotional campaign by 0100101110101101.org for United We Stand, a non-existent film starring Penelope Cruz and Ewan McGregor. The Myths by Andy Warhol feature Uncle Sam, Santa Claus, and Howdy Doody, each with a patina of diamond dust. Each of Warhol’s characters pinpoints the changing nature of the American psyche. A central theme is self-perception. Works by Marilyn Minter, Kathryn van Dyke, and Josiah McElheny, and assume vivid astro focus examine the fleeting nature of identity and pleasure. Minter twines desire and sexuality in her stunning images of jewelry and designer shoes. McElheny and van Dyke both employ mirrors to fragment reflections and destabilize a sense of solidity and unity. Installations by Alex Schweder and Monique van Genderen also reflect a sense of self-perception through color and movement. The sculpture Anywhere But Here by Jack Daws uses the metaphor of found pharmaceuticals as a commentary on American culture’s growing use of medication to mitigate society’s complexities and contradictions. The painting of Gift-Wrapped Doll #14 by James Rosenquist captures the fascination with new and perfect consumer goods. A giant inflatable flower by Jeff Koons, a deer encrusted in Swarovski crystals by Marc Swanson, a pixilated image of a Northwest forest by Claude Zervas, and Anya Gallacio’s delicate recreation of a small tree all serve as reminders about the fragility and artificial constructions that define the human interaction with the natural world. The idea of the ephemeral qualities of memory are highlighted by a large, knitted Mylar sculpture by Oliver Herring and the exquisite light sculpture by Jim Hodges. Working on minimalist impulses, both Herring and Hodges use light to suggest loss and memory. Issues of race and justice are explored by Glenn Ligon and Donald Moffett. Ligon’s coal-dust painting references the experience of an African American, while the series What Barbara Jordan Wore is Moffett’s tender homage to many contributions of the distinguished politician and civil rights leader.

In tomorrow's edition of The Stranger, Cienna Madrid takes a look at the early memorial statuary of Seattle, the bronze portraits of William H. Seward and the like, and she wonders who might make a good candidate for a civic statue now.

In Amsterdam today, not far from where he was murdered, the writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh was honored with a memorial sculpture that depicts him in mid-scream. It is a layered outline of his face in profile, head thrown back, mouth opening, cast in ceramic and coated in stainless steel. The thin layers are formally reminiscent of the flatness--both physically and emotionally--of Lichtenstein's pop sculptures, but the layers also carry the appearance of a face veiled, like the outlined nude bodies of the Muslim women depicted in van Gogh's controversial film, Submission. The film, written by the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsa Ali and directed by van Gogh (a descendant of Vincent's brother, Theo), was mentioned in the note that was attached to van Gogh's chest with a knife by his killer, the 26-year-old Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri shot the filmmaker eight times, slit his throat, and stabbed him in the chest, out in the street on Tuesday morning, November 2, 2004. (Bouyeri is in prison without parole; Hirsa Ali went into hiding for a while and now travels with bodyguards.)

The sculpture's most obvious a reference is to van Gogh's painful death, and the moment of action in it is at the mouth, which also refers, according to Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen, to van Gogh's reputation as a loudmouth who satirized and criticized several religions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Van Gogh was not a loudmouth but a titan of free speech, Cohen says. The artist, Jeroen Henneman, titled it The Scream, as if to declare it a defiant symbol of free speech. But of course the mouth is not the center of this work, the neck is, the throat open and closest to the ground so you come right upon it when you pass. The mosque-torchings, the fiery and unresolved debates about censorship and immigration--it's a moment well-memorialized by the frailty of an exposed throat.

''Why a Northwest Biennial?' (ART PANEL) Although something else is going to be on everyone's mind, Stranger art critic Jen Graves, independent art critic Matthew Kangas, and Seattle P-I art critic Regina Hackett have promised to stay on topic. The topic: the Northwest Biennial currently up at Tacoma Art Museum. What does this show tell us about what art's heavy hitters are thinking about? What does it tell us about biennials? And exactly how long did it take Alex Schweder to cast his entire bathroom in packing peanuts and spit? (Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave, Tacoma, 253-272-4258. 3 pm, free with $7.50 museum admission.) CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

Seattle Notables Costume Party

(DUMB ART PARTY) Apparently the "Seattle Notables" party celebrates some photography exhibit and you're supposed to come dressed like a person from McLeod's list of local (read: third-rate) celebrities. I'm not saying that I'm insulted I didn't make the cut (even though the Sonics' Squatch and Christopher "Already-Too-Big-For-His-Britches" Frizzelle did). I'm just saying I don't even care. It's just a dumb popularity contest. Whatever. (McLeod Residence, 2209 Second Ave, 441-3314. 8 pm, $15.) BRENDAN KILEY

Here are a few great reads that have sustained me through the last week:

1. Elizabeth Bryant's look on Artdish at death, obsolescence, the post-medium condition, and commodification--is there anything relevant that this amazing essay does not cover? It covers shows at the Frye, the Henry, Western Bridge, Lawrimore Project, and Francine Seders Gallery.

2. Roberta Smith's brilliant, in-depth description and assessment of Rauschenberg's use of a medium I had no idea he worked in: transfer drawing.

3. Tom McDonough's essay on vision, architecture, and the new ICA in Boston in Art in America, also suggested by the always insightful erin82 over at Hankblog. (For this piece you have to pick up a copy of AiA; no links available.)

The large, never-before-realized piece by Felix Gonzales-Torres that will be created posthumously this summer in the entryway to the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale is a work first imagined and proposed by the artist in 1992 for the Western Washington University Sculpture Park.

Spector described it this way in her proposal for the show, according to MAN: "two adjoining reflecting pools that form a figure eight, the sign of infinity, as both a silent mirror on our collective culture and a beacon of hope."

As the Brooklyn Museum prepares to open its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on March 23, with Judy Chicago's 1979 installation The Dinner Party permanently installed as its centerpiece,

a nod to Chicago passed through Christie's auction house on Monday night. It was LA artist Jim Shaw's 2003 The Donner Party, a dark pioneer parody which had never before been seen in the United States. It outsripped its estimate ($400,000 to $600,000), selling for $656,000.

The piece was part of an exhibition on Shaw's invented Oism religion, a goddess-based theology supposedly invented in the Finger Lakes region of New York in the 19th century. The Donner Party, then, was "made by" Oist artist Mandy Omaha, and it includes references to characters real and fictional. In the place of Chicago's triangular dinner table is Omaha's circling of 12 covered wagons, transpierced by arrows, each one the base for place settings made up of thrift-store junk. Religion consumes.

(In the Christie's catalog description of the piece, this is my favorite sentence: "Like the members of the Donner party, Jim Shaw emigrated to California from the Midwest and went on to become one of the major figures associated with the West Coast school of installation art and Cal Arts in particular." I knew those installation artists were cannibals.)

Also for sale was the installation Flying Rats by Kader Attia, in which pigeons feast on children made of birdseed for days (check out this week's Talk of the Town piece on it by Rebecca Mead). The Henry Art Gallery is working on a major exhibition with Attia that will include new and old work, set to open a year from now.

(Hat tip to Liz.)

That's what the Seattle Art Museum said it wanted to create with the Olympic Sculpture Park, and so it situated the park in the middle of downtown, in the middle of the urban fray--but then filled it with almost entirely old and conservative art. Because of the infrastructural challenges of the site, the park cost $86 million.

It's hard not to notice that for less than half that amount--$40 million--the Indianapolis Museum of Art is opening a 100-acre sculpture park that will have a spectacular opening lineup of 10 contemporary artists and artist collectives making special commissioned work for the site, according to an announcement the IMA made yesterday.

Read the roster and weep: Haluk Akakçe, Atelier Van Lieshout, Kendall Buster, Sam Easterson, Peter Eisenman, Alfredo Jaar, Los Carpinteros, Tea Mäkipää, Type A, and Andrea Zittel.

Matthew Kangas, a longtime critic for the Seattle Times, wrote the essay in the brochure for the exhibition of paintings and drawings by Mary Henry at the Wright Exhibition Space. (I profile Henry here.)

What the brochure doesn't say is that he owns one of the paintings and one of the drawings in the show, a credible source let slip to me the other day. In the checklist, those are listed simply as the property of an unnamed "Private collection."

It is outrageous for Kangas to write about shows in which his own holdings are featured, especially without disclosing his ownership. And how did he come by the painting? Did he buy it? Did he take it in exchange for a review? I've had several Seattle artists over the years tell me that Kangas has not been above exacting payment of one sort or another for his editorial services. If they are telling the truth, then why does this persist?

And why did the organizers of this show, Henry's gallery, Howard House, allow this to happen and to be concealed?

This town is not that small. These practices shouldn't be tolerated, let alone condoned.

^{So enfolded in that gaudy house (2006)}

^{The color of the land through which they passed (2006)}

I just saw about a dozen of these, and they surprised me, most pleasantly. (In person they are far subtler than in reproduction.)

Every once in a while, as your eye scans across a Joe Shlichta painting, you will be unable to tell precisely what color you're looking at—in these luxurious moments, the hues are precisely between one and another, hovering in the middle of strange-scapes that might be taking place in the sky, or in a foggy swamp, or anywhere but on the plain, gravity-bound earth.

This emerging Seattle painter was a children's book illustrator before
he decided to begin painting abstractions for adults. (He was trained at Otis Parsons in LA and Cornish in Seattle.)

Check out his work through Saturday at Ballard Fetherston Gallery.

Once during a fellowship with other arts journalists in Washington, D.C., a writer for the Chicago Tribune remarked that what's challenging about arts reporting is finding the other side.

The National Endowment for the Arts is not a regulator for the field like, say, the Environmental Protection Agency is for its purview, and there are really no non-governmental organizations regulating the activities of museums. The American Association of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors presumably ought to provide checks and balances, but the truth is that they have never been as powerful as the museums themselves. They also refuse to speak publicly about individual museums, and sometimes they don't react at all, or very slowly, to apparent violations of ethics.

The only organization that occasionally gets involved as a watchdog is the Internal Revenue Service, because IRS laws govern certain aspects of nonprofits, and most museums are nonprofits. One of those aspects is compensation. It's hard to tell what compels the IRS to get involved, or even when it gets involved—it also does not discuss individual taxpayers publicly. (When I reported that the Museum of Glass in Tacoma was paying its director far above her colleagues at similar museums and in fact more than the vice president of the United States was making, the IRS didn't seem to get involved, but the director, Josi Callan, left not long after and her successor's salary was lower; Callan is now heading up EMP.)

On Feb. 16, Stephanie Strom of the NYT reported that Glenn Lowry, the highly paid director of the Museum of Modern Art, was also making millions on the side from a fund directly supported by a few powerful trustees.

Today, Richard Lacayo over at Time details a real-world example of how the trustees' influence may have been felt in the galleries: the replacement of a lightweight Signac portrait that just happens to be a fractional gift of David Rockefeller, one of the powerful trustees, for Cezanne's The Bather in "first position" in the galleries—starting the story of modern art, in other words.

The Signac:

The Cezanne:

^{Lost in Vermilion (1996) by Mary Henry, who is having a retrospective at Howard House and the Wright Exhibition Space.}

My profile of the abstract painter Mary Henry, a 93-year-old woman who once studied with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and who has lived alone on Whidbey Island for 26 years, is out now.

That's the amount that the Tacoma Art Museum took in from entry fees for its biennial. The cost to each artist was $25, and the number of artists who entered their work, hoping to be put into the show, was 891.

But the museum made no secret of having selected the artists based on already-established reputations. Trying to have it both ways makes for a namby-pamby biennial, as I wrote in this week's edition.

Does it also mean that the 850 artists not in the show were made to bankroll somebody's else's show unknowingly?

TAM is not as wealthy as SAM, and perhaps it sees the biennial as a sort of tit-for-tat with the regional art community: you pay a fee, we'll give you the chance to show in a museum, along with your peers. And $25 is not going to make or break any individual.

But if the artists had little or no chance to begin with, then it seems a dastardly move, not to mention unsustainable (after a time, will anybody be left willing to apply but the most desperate?).

I'm waiting for comment from biennial curator Rock Hushka.

UPDATE:

"It was not an open call, it was a call to artists," Hushka says. "It was with a specific statement, and the artists who applied self-selected."

Hushka says that the call to artists did not state that anyone and everyone would be considered equally, but instead communicated that the show was intended to be a review of the already critically and popularly received work from the past two years.

Hushka will send me the exact wording, and I'll share then. If that's the case, then artists were informed, and applied at their own risk.

As for the $22,275 (plus $225 the museum kicked in): the money went to $500 honorariums to each of the included artists, and to pay $1,500 to the critic's choice award recipient (Denzil Hurley). Five hundred dollars will go to the people's choice award, and voting for that will continue through the show, which closes May 6, Hushka says.

UPDATE #2:

The call is as follows (I'll highlight the part meant to give fair warning about the exhibition's content):

The 8th Northwest Biennial will provide a strong critical analysis of the region’s contemporary art production and is structured to prompt a meaningful dialogue about the Northwest’s artistic strengths and accomplishments. The biennial will provide a timely opportunity to understand how the region’s artists respond to broad national and international trends and ideas while developing their own independent artistic vision and nurturing the region’s artistic vitality. Artists working in a broad spectrum of media including traditional forms, craft-based work, and digital projects are encouraged to apply. Artists exploring alternative aesthetic impulses such as conceptual, performance, and installation also are encouraged to submit portfolios.

Rather than select specific works of art by a slide jury, the focus of the 8th Northwest Biennial will be the scope of the artist’s contributions and recent accomplishments. Individual artists will be invited to participate in the exhibition through a collaborative jury by David Kiehl, Curator of Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Rock Hushka, Curator of Contemporary and Northwest Art at Tacoma Art Museum. All artists will be reviewed through portfolio submissions, and finalists will be selected after studio visits by Kiehl and Hushka. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

In other words, untested talent need not apply.

You still have to wonder: is a call to artists the most effective way to put together a best-of exhibition? And is an already-established, best-of retro the best biennial for the NW?

The museum is having a panel on this very subject (including yours truly, along with other critics and curators) at 1 pm on March 10, titled "Globalism, Nationalism and Regionalism: Why a Northwest Biennial?"

Show up--it should be a lively discussion.

The Unpaid Intern already posted about the entertaining—and sometimes scary—photos by John Divola of dogs running alongside cars:

These coarse, smudgy images are offset by the still, crisp images of another show (the opening act) also running at G. Gibson Gallery—Animal Holes by Eirik Johnson.

Divola's photos the dogs are positive—almost heroic—figures, a blur of action in the middle of a vacant desert. (I'd say something about Dasein but I'm afraid of sounding pretentious.) Johnson's photos are the exact opposite—quiet, careful consideration of the negative, where all the texture and detail comes from the subject's surroundings. They are not images of bodies, they're images of the absence of bodies, but it's hard not to see them as close-ups of (or metaphors for) the flesh. In this photo, from San Francisco, the grass makes its hole look like a navel:

This hole looks slightly more obscene (blame it on the leaves):

The detail in these big photos is what makes them—you can see every blade of grass, every grain of snow—and their empty centers make Divola's positive dogs seem wilder, funnier, and even more alive. It's an excellent pairing.

In today's Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green muses on the future of Dia, the sprawling artist-support network whose opening of a museum in a massive renovated factory an hour north of New York City in 2003 was a culmination of decades of production and collecting.

But what should Dia, this giant of late 20th-century art, do now? Earlier this week, Dia appointed a new director, Jeffrey Weiss, who will start this spring, and whose first task is to find a site in New York. Fine, except that the art world grows only less New York-centric, and Dia was always a champion of remote projects (one thinks of de Maria, Turrell, Heizer, and Agnes Martin all in the Southwest).

A champion of projects and artists, not a builder of museum spaces. That's one of Green's points. And when he thinks of which young, talented artists Dia might support?

If I were Jeffrey Weiss, I'd make an early phone call to Lead Pencil Studio, and then fund them to do something significant.

LPS (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, Stranger Genius award winners, represented in town by Lawrimore Project) would help to update Dia. Their investment in real, written history, and the way their work reacts to it by situating itself in a particular moment in time would be a major addition to the forever-and-ever monuments Dia is known for. Thinking about it, there's no museum in the world where their gallery work would look better than in Dia:Beacon. Picture these small wall sculptures

considered amidst the Heizer black holes of North, East, South, West, the Dan Flavins, the Fred Sandbacks, Smithson's pile of glass, Hanne Darboven's relentless serialism, and Judd's box assortment. It's difficult to imagine a better processer and inheritor of the classic Dia artists than Lead Pencil Studio.

But Green is talking about Dia throwing its weight behind more ambitious projects. Lead Pencil's outdoor masterwork, Maryhill Double, was pulled off without institutional support except Creative Capital. Where will they get support next and what can they do with it? They're determined and independent. Having day jobs as architects means they don't--and they don't have to--compromise on art. (In a recent proposal, they violated the single rule put forward by a committee jurying a public art project because they felt the infrastructure needed to change for the whole site to be transformed, and they handily lost the competition.)

Maybe Seattle attorney Charles B. Wright is already onto this idea. He's the son of collectors Virginia and Bagley Wright, former director and board president of Dia, and still a trustee. Maybe he'll start that phone chain.

Meanwhile, Han and Mihalyo are out of town installing a new work, In Transit, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The artists have been mum on the specifics of the piece, but here's the museum's description:

Han and Mihalyo create an installation that responds to the nervous energy, tremulous earth, and unknown site conditions that arise out of migration; the state of being in neither one place or another. They will employ common materials such as sculpted dirt, wire, and fluorescent lighting to transform the Exploratorium into a place from which to observe the condition of betweenness as it relates to buildings, identity, and memory.

In Transit, part of a group show including Seyed Alavi, Alex Clausen, Paul Hayes, and Erica Gangesi, opens March 8 and runs through June 3. In May, LPS has a show at Lawrimore.

For their first two outings, Jason Puccinelli, Jed Dunkerley and Greg Lundgren (PDL to you) may have been toying with their link to the artist trio SuttonBeresCuller (with whom they're longtime friends), but as of March 1, they're their own entity.

This new artist trio, known as PDL, will spend the next twelve months aggressively creating new works, challenging perceptions of contemporary art, and causing general mayhem in the great Pacific Northwest. This collaboration will culminate with a retrospective in the spring of 2008, showcasing the images, video and artifacts of their performances and installations. This public launch will kick-off with a performance piece on the streets of Pioneer Square during first Thursday’s art walk from 5 to 8 pm, with a party to follow at the Hideout. Select footage of the trio’s recent projects will be presented, as well as a few special surprises. Extraordinary circumstances have brought together these three talented artists. Their collective skills allow them to perform a complexity of projects no single person could reasonably execute, and together they will work with a single voice and objective. Please join us March 1st and watch PDL tip the first domino in an explosive year of collaborative work. Some future performances and events dates will be announced, others, well, you’ll just have to be there.

I am a native of rural New Hampshire: many dogs have chased my car. (As a teenager, I drove a Festiva, which is smaller than many men and beasts, and so a popular target.)

A dog usually will start his pursuit from the wing, bounding over an embankment or popping from a tangle of roadside weeds. After moving within five or so feet of the car, he will shift direction to begin running alongside the vehicle, barking if he’s got the breath for it. (Most have an innate ability to avoid being bumped or flattened.) If the driver does not accelerate, the dog will keep pace beside the vehicle, all bliss and stupid energy. For the car passengers, these attitudes are contagious--even more so than the ticklish, nice feelings one gets from the flapping ears and tongue of the canine-head-out-the-car-window, although that has mass appeal for good and similar reasons.

From 1995 to 1998, John Divola took photographs of isolated houses in the desert of the Morongo Valley in California. Dogs would occasionally chase his car, and he turned his lens on them, capturing all the excitement, the scrambling and bounding. Selected photographs from this series, Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, are on view at G. Gibson Gallery through March 24.

Divola’s use of a motor drive and grainy, high-speed film blurs his black-and-white images to varying degrees. Some look like well-executed charcoal drawings, coarse and carefully smudged, the running creatures ghostly. In others, Divola highlights the behavior of his canine subjects. In this crisp image, a dog is captured in mid-air, eyes on the camera, arms and legs stretched for flight. With a pole and some cable, he could be rigged up as an airborne carnival ride.

-- Abigail Guay

Right around the time that Gary Hill held forth on the Artist Trust stage demanding donations for local artists earlier this month, a gold bar was stolen from an installation of his at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Or was it a gold bar? Artforum.com reports:

A solid gold bar weighing twelve kilograms (26.5 pounds)—part of an artwork by Gary Hill—was stolen from Paris's Fondation Cartier last week. As Le Monde's Nathaniel Herzberg reports, two or three masked thieves entered the foundation during the night, tied up the security guard, and made away with the gold bar, as well as the cashbox. According to the Parisian police, the thieves are "art lovers and well informed." The going market value for twelve kilos of pure gold is approximately €210,000 ($271,480).

The gold bar is part of the installation work Frustrum, 2006, which has been on display at the foundation since October 25. Hill, hoping to create a critical image of empire, placed the bar in a tank of industrial oil and added a projection of a trapped eagle and the sound of a cracking whip. For reasons of security, the artist had to use nonflammable oil instead of petroleum, but he insisted that the gold bar be real.

Herzberg wonders about the replacement fake gold bar, which can now be seen in Hill's work. Was the real gold bar stolen directly from the installation or from a security case? Or did the Fondation Cartier, fearing robbery, have a fake gold bar made without telling the artist? The original, if it has not been melted down, still bears a suggestive mark, the engraving "FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS VISIBLE IS A COPY OF THAT WHICH IS HIDDEN."

New York had this to say about Frustrum:

By accident or design, the digitally animated eagle at the center of Gary Hill’s new installation is a wimpier version of the squawking bird that opens The Colbert Report. Here, the veteran sound-and-image artist’s political symbols of the most obvious kind (gold bullion, a broadcast tower) upstage an unsettling soundtrack of cracking whips. Guilt, an installation of gold coins printed with torture scenes and viewed through telescopes, combines a bad pun with a weary metaphor. Turning the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo into genuinely affecting work is more difficult than it looks; Thomas Hirschhorn and Fernando Botero are among the few who have pulled it off. And in art, unlike TV satire, the blowhard act wears thin fast. — Karen Rosenberg

Under the heading "very discreet art opening," I received this email from an unfamiliar address with no name attached:

"The History of Art" (the War Against Lebanon), by Marc Samuelsson. A photo study in natural couplings of lawn chairs taken over the course of Israels war against Lebanon. At: Residential Treatment Facility in downtown on a filing cabinet (due to confidentiality, cannot give address). Opening reception: Fri 3/2 (due to cofidentiality, no one can come) Through 08' (due to confidentiality, cannot provide contact info)

I like to imagine this show, sitting there, just waiting for nobody.

Modern Art Notes's Tyler Green is the tough-guy art blogger who can pass a judgment with puritanical speed, who seems to have sources tucked inside every museum in the country, who makes a point of calling bullshit wherever he spots it, and who scolded me, when I first met him because I was chewing gum in an upscale hotel bar. (He also identified me, before we'd ever met, and called me out by name while I was looking at art in Miami; I have no idea how he knew what I looked like.) He is the CIA, the NSA, and the NEA--of the individual-grants years, that is--rolled into one.

At said upscale hotel bar, which was entirely draped in the sort of bright, pure white that my mother, an Ohio farmgirl whose hands were never far from real dirt, told me to stay away from, I asked Tyler about his background. He said he had been a sportswriter (as my father was), and then gone into some kind of political work, and then gotten back into art. At the time, I nodded at the slender, young blogger and his slender, young girlfriend, as though, of course, he'd want to get back into art. Except that later, I realized, when had this sportswriter been in art in the first place?

Today, in an extended entry on his blog, he at least partly explains his love for art. The piece unfolds like a personal essay, building quietly and beautifully to the final paragraphs, and it is really quite understated considering all that is behind it. Those who reduce Tyler to a snark machine might take note of what I'm beginning to believe is a certain amount of innate, almost patrician, restraint on his part. (It would explain the gumphobia.)

By offsetting serenity with ranting, he is also, paradoxically for a New Media exemplar, establishing himself as what newspaper editors see these days as the ideal job candidate: a jack of all trades. A critic. A reporter. An essayist. A columnist. A blogger. A pundit. I've often wondered: where is Tyler Green headed? Of all the jobs in the art world, which one does he really want? Is he subtly gunning for something?

In any case, happy Valentine's Day, MAN. Thank you for the memories.

Seattle artist Roy McMakin makes architecture, furniture, and playful and cerebral sculptures and photographs. He is known for order.

And yet when Seattle Art Museum asked McMakin to do an artist talk about his sculpture Love & Loss in the Olympic Sculpture Park, he called his old friend Jeffry Mitchell, the Seattle artist, and New York performer Suzzy Roche (of The Roches and the Wooster Group)--two artists whose every gesture is infused with emotion.

What the hell will they do out there on this romantic night? Well, she says she'll dance naked as well as making music, and the other two, they dodge the question in the latest edition of the In/Visible podcast here, taped yesterday morning at the park.

Art rarely scares me. The lights, for the most part, are up. The special effects are not so good. There's no music jumping out of the narrative bush to attack me.

But Saturday I ran into something decidedly nasty in the Henry Art Gallery's woodshed. It is Bruce Nauman's Pulling Mouth, a 1969 video on view from the Henry's permanent collection (in conjunction with the Nauman neon traveling show that opened Saturday).

Pulling Mouth is one of the artist's slo-mo videos. It is a black-and-white view of the artist's face, upside-down. His hands hold his mouth open. You get occasional glimpses of his eyes, squeezed closed, and it looks at first as though nothing is happening, except that he is going to have some sore cheeks.

Then you realize that the bottom teeth, at the top of the screen, are fading from view, and something dark and wet is appearing in their place. It isn't at all clear what's going to happen, and then--Nauman pushes out his thick, glistening, terrifying tongue, slowwwwwly, and then he retracts it, and the teeth gradually come back into view. He does this repeatedly, and it never ceases to be anything less than horrible. At one point, he opens his eyes to a sliver width, and they gleam, too.

This may be the most frightening artwork I've ever seen, and it's nothing more than a man sticking his tongue out. That's maybe the worst part of it, that, unlike a horror video by, say, the artist Chloe Piene, we don't have to try to terrify each other. We do it naturally.

The refusal to numb his subject with deference, the relevant self-revelation, the last line. All reasons to read.

Here's a sample from The New Yorker critic's latest, on Tintoretto:

But he and his populous workshop also perpetrated some of the grimmest daubs—murky and slack—that you ever rushed past with a shudder. I realized, too late, that my puzzlement was a warning. Now I feel that I have acquired a brilliant, neurotic, exhausting friend who enjoins me to undertake on his behalf campaigns that he bungled when their conduct was up to him.

Tonight the Tacoma Art Museum opens its Northwest biennial. The show is a mixed bag with definite highlights and lowlights. (What else is new about a biennial?) Alex Schweder recreates—in a heap this time—his spit-and-packing-peanuts casting of his bathroom in Rome for the entry of the museum. SuttonBeresCuller put a boat in the middle of the museum, for what appears to be no reason other than to uphold their title as the Northwest masters of the big Koonsish gesture (yes, I realize there is a "stone wave" under the boat: so? somebody help me here?).

But one of my favorite pieces in the show (vying for that title with Jeffry Mitchell's Turtle Wedding and Daniel Attoe's Twin Peaks-inspired paintings-within-a-painting) is Victoria Haven's wall drawing made for the show, from her new Rabbit Hole series. The mysteriously oriented shape is made with colored tape offset by the barest hint of paint, raising the possibility of shadows. This is an object existing in some realm ungoverned by three-point perspective.

^{An installation view of Rabbit Hole #4 (2007) by Victoria Haven}

Today at the Henry Art Gallery, another notable traveling show opens, Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works With Light.

For Nauman's influence alone, he is a figure whose work is always worth seeing. This exhibition, organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, is not comprehensive in tracking his body-based, task-oriented, studio-centric, playful career thus far: instead it focuses entirely on neon. This decision makes it a more pointed, political, and aggressive show than a full retrospective would be, especially tucked away as it is like a beautiful, dangerous captive in the subterranean galleries of the Henry.

I'll write more about the show later, but in the meantime, I'm going to be posting occasional images. Part of the reason is that they won't get out otherwise, and they're striking. The Henry can't use them for advertising because they're licensed through Artists Rights Society, which charges exorbitantly. But editorial use is unlimited, so we'll start here.

^{My Name As Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968)}
At the Henry, this hangs on a white wall, and the effect is much more innocent (the letters look much more white), which seems apt, since it was one of Nauman's first-ever video works. (The Henry is also showing an early video of Nauman manipulating a neon tube, which wasn't ready at the press preview, but which should stop the gap felt in this show of Nauman's actual presence, which is so often a part of his work.)

He started working with neon partly because it was cheap and he was poor, and he became attracted by the neon beer signs in the windows across from his San Francisco storefront studio. This piece, according to Liz Brown, Henry curator, has not been seen in a window (instead of on a wall) since it was in Nauman's studio storefront, glowing out toward the beer signs.

^{The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967)}

My ridiculously talented brother—and former Stranger cover artist (here and here)—Michael Paulus has a piece in a show called Modern Home #3405, opening tonight at No Space Gallery.

Here is the blurb he sent me:
Ian Butcher of Roy McMackin’s Domestic Architecture, who helped design Western Bridge in Seattle, is curating a small group show based on traditional architectural models. Each of the nine artist/teams was given the same plan views of a modest factory home (from the '30s?) called "The Franklin." Other than that, it's a free for all.

His piece he described simply as "a house within a house."

Opening is from 7-10 at No Space Gallery, 507 E. Mercer St. (corner of Summit and Mercer).

Michael will be the guy who looks like a white, retro Ben Kingsley. Here's a shot of him with his barometer collection.

More of his multidisciplinary work can be seen here.

I haven't started drinking early this Friday, but is it just me or are the Slog's blues bluer and blacks blacker? It just looks, I don't know, more vibrant and shimmery to me right now.

^{Bovine, The Oregon Trail Reversed (2006) by Whiting Tennis}

The latest Artnews is out today, and in it, the UW scholar Patricia Failing reviews Whiting Tennis's show at Greg Kucera Gallery last year. She very much likes Bovine. I'll type in the relevant parts of her piece, because there's no way to link to the story on the web site of Artnews (grr):

Tennis finds a range of cues in used plywood. In Bovine (2006), a 14-foot-long crossbreed of a cow and an Airstream trailer, he refers to the saga of westward migration as depicted in B movies. The back of the wood trailer/cow is studded with an array of anecdotal, scene-setting objects--paint bucket, hammer, watering can, croquet mallet, harmonica, and books--often used in cinema to induce bonding with unseen characters. Bovine trumped the experience of cinema, however, with its olfactory addition: the sculpture infused the gallery with the musty smell of decaying wood.

Seattle Art Museum acquired this work, led by new contemporary curator Michael Darling. P-I critic Regina Hackett took this as a strike against Darling in her blog post on January 25. She dismisses Bovine this way:

It reeks of frontier nostalgia and trades in wild West stereotypes. It's shabby chic without the chic.

I wasn't convinced by Bovine, either, but I couldn't enjoy my disconnection from it.

I simply felt disappointed that the artist's very genuine expressive gesture did not reach me. Tennis spent an hour in the gallery with me before the show opened, and he declared that Bovine, The Oregon Trail Reversed (that surtitle often gets left off in reviews, but it's relevant) was his line in the sand. "I don't want any more change," he told me.

As a 47-year-old single man, he had just bought his own first house, and many of these works were created using the objects he found in the garage, left there by the former owner, an elderly man. I was touched by what was clearly an homage to him staking a claim of sorts in his own life, but many of his other works seemed to be doing the same thing, only in a way that was more sly, more oblique--just more. That's why I described those and left Bovine more or less alone in my original writing about the show back in October. I shouldn't have done that.

Bovine is what Tennis intended as the centerpiece of his show, and now, thanks to SAM, we will be seeing it again. Will it work?

I am curious to see it up against the permanent collection, in a lineage that is going to, if I'm remembering correctly, push Morris Graves into fairly close proximity to the abstract expressionists. These seem to be salient touchstones for Bovine, which has a kind of softness, but also the brawn of a Di Suvero, the immense, brooding spirituality of a Kline, and, as Failing so aptly writes, the treacle and predictability of B movies. Is Tennis cutting off the grand gesture with an ironic slash? I don't think so. Though I might change my mind about that if he makes smoke come out of the chimney, which he planned to do but couldn't rig together for the opening at Kucera.

The funny thing is, Bovine is the piece Tennis worked hardest to make. Some of his other objects were very simple adaptations of found materials, extremely unprecious and grouped together in a family sort of way, instead of exhibited sparsely in the modernist vein.

Despite their simplicity--because of it? I'm really not sure--many of these resonated deeply. Throughout the show, Tennis complicated things with simple touches, simple actions. Even his paintings and collages made much of little. His marks didn't feel overly plotted, or like he was opening a vein. But they way they came together was downright poignant. There was something I truly loved about that show.

^{Drawing (2006) by Whiting Tennis (plaster and plywood)}

^{Elizabethan (2005) by Whiting Tennis (acrylic and collage on canvas)}

^{The First Thing (2006) by Whiting Tennis (acrylic on canvas)}

No need to wonder about whether Seattle has an art scene. It's HOT and HIP!

Inn at El Gaucho Sculpts Art Package in Celebration of Seattle’s Sizzling Art Scene

Conveniently Located by New Olympic Sculpture Park

Seattle, Wash. — (February 7, 2007) — Located in Seattle’s hip Belltown district, just minutes away from the new sculpture park and the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) opening in May, the Inn at El Gaucho is the perfect base to explore the city’s growing art scene.

The Inn has announced its new arts package in conjunction with Waterfront Seafood Grill, known for its stunning views of Elliott Bay, the Olympic Mountains, and now, with the opening of the Olympic Sculpture Park, world-class art.

The arts package, priced at $500, includes:

One night at the Inn
$200 gift certificate to the Waterfront Seafood Grill
Two signature SAM cocktails at Waterfront Seafood Grill, aptly named The Sculptor
A commemorative bottle of SAM sparkling Brut from Northwest Cellars
A commemorative SAM book
A Sculpture Park Continental Breakfast for Two, featuring fresh fruit, pastries and juice, coffee, tea and a morning paper.
Overnight valet parking at the hotel

Guests who purchase the package (valued at $650) can unwind after a day of art exploration and fine dining in one of the Inn’s relaxing rooms. The suites feature fine Anichini linens, pillow top beds, and handcrafted furniture as well as bathrobes, slippers, and pajamas. A plasma screen television and Bose Wave music system completes the luxurious offerings.