Content provided in partnership with
Plugged in and caffeinated: Seattle's vibrant economy fosters an arts scene marked by museum growth, a noted sculpture park, and lively alternative and commercial venues
Art in America, Sept, 2005 by Janet Koplos
Since Seattle was last the focus of feature articles in this magazine--Bill Berkson's 1986 consideration of the city's notable public art program and his chronicle of its artists--Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon and Washington Mutual have become household words, even as Boeing has begun to shrink its local presence. Seattle's grunge music scene claimed national attention, and its literary, classical-music and theater activity has identified the city as a cultural producer. Seattle has its notable art from recent decades--Buster Simpson's environmental work, for example--and serves as hideaway for present-day art star Gary Hill.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The city hasn't had a characteristic art style since the "mystic" school of Tobey, Graves, etc.--one recently rethought in an exhibition and book, Northwest Mythologies: The Interactions of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson [see "Talk of Tacoma"]. But the infrastructure has grown markedly since Berkson's report, and the art-making, even if not always of high visibility nationally, is quite healthy. The city's relative youth, its outdoor orientation and maybe even its distance from New York contribute to an intensity in work and an energy in the air.
The Museums
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) dates to 1933. It occupied a Beaux-Arts structure in a park in a residential neighborhood until 1991, when a Robert Venturi building was completed downtown. The older building reopened as the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 1994; it's an arm of SAM, and a particular interest of the institution's director, Asian specialist Mary Gardner Neill (Mimi) Gates (who married the father of the Microsoft magnate a few years ago). SAM's move led to a revitalization of a skid row area toward the northern end of the long and scenic downtown, which fronts on Elliott Bay, an arm of Puget Sound. Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony, became a neighbor in 1998 with a design by Seattle's LMN Architects that won an American Institute of Architects honor award. The area now includes residential condominiums offering views of the harbor.
SAM's deputy director of art, Lisa Corrin, who arrived in the city four years ago from the Serpentine Gallery in London (and before that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore) will be leaving this fall to become director of the Williams College Museum of Art. While at SAM, she was part of the team of five responsible for "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art," which appeared in Seattle, San Diego, Vancouver and San Francisco between October 2003 and January 2005. (1) Representing 31 artists or groups from five West Coast metropolitan regions, it was a first-of-its-kind collaboration meant to reflect on "the shared social, historical, and topographical conditions that set this area apart from the rest of North America"--although that turned out to be something more easily grasped in catalogue texts than in artworks.
The focus of Corrin's prodigious energy has been two huge construction projects, both of which have already broken ground. SAM has dominated the local headlines with the announcement not only of an 8.5-acre sculpture park in another downscale neighborhood along the waterfront, but also of an expansion of the Venturi building. The latter project is an interesting case of community cooperation: the museum will put up a nine-story building that it will share with Washington Mutual Bank. The arrangement is an unusual one in that the bank will gradually relinquish floors as the museum's needs grow. (2) The new structure and adjustments to the existing building are the work of Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Ore., who recently completed the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and will renovate new premises for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
The Olympic Sculpture Park faces the spectacular Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound. (Rather unusually, the primary donors, Jon and Mary Shirley, were not seeking a naming opportunity.) Spanning a roadway and railroad tracks, the park will be divided into various landscapes--valley, grove, meadow and shore--following a plan by Weiss/Manfredi Architects of New York; it will display sculptures from SAM's collection, along with outdoor video projections, temporary installations and loaned works. In the first group of works announced by the museum is Richard Serra's 75-foot-long Wake, plus a variety of commissions: a glass bridge by Teresita Fernandez, an ecological project by Mark Dion and a sculpture by Cai Guo-Qiang, as well as seating by Roy McMakin and photographic documentation of the project by Glenn Rudolph (the latter two are Seattle artists).
Another major Seattle venue, the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery, founded in 1927, was quadrupled in size by Charles Gwathmey in 1997. Richard Andrews has been the Henry's director since 1987; chief curator Elizabeth Brown arrived in 2000. The gallery has an educational mission but receives less than 20 percent of its operating budget from the university; it has accumulated a $6-million endowment and has balanced its budget for the last several years--a notable achievement, given the dot-com meltdown a few years back. Andrews says the biggest change in Seattle in recent years is a broadening of support; no longer does the same small group support all the cultural institutions. He extols the Henry's active board and notes that while the gallery is the city's oldest art institution, it shows the newest art.
