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

Three younger dealers also pursue contemporary programs. In 1997 Billy Howard's Howard House started (as its name implies) in his residence. Last fall the gallery relocated from the far side of downtown to the Pioneer Square area. The new space opened with cutout imagery and wall installations by Seattle artist Victoria Haven. Her ephemeral, labor-intensive pieces included small oval rings of paper pinned to the walls across an expanse of perhaps 20 feet, real shadows mixing with painted, ethereal blue ones. Geometric patterns made of inked archival adhesive tape occupied other walls of the gallery's front room. In the larger second room she presented a half dozen representations of a mountain peak with an arcaded passage at its base, perhaps for a highway, executed in reflective materials and in wood-grained adhesive paper. She typically uses office materials rather than conventional art supplies.

James Harris's eponymous gallery draws heavily on Northwest artists, but also some Californians. He shows Roy McMakin, who was recently featured in a survey show organized by L.A. MOCA, "A Door Meant as Adornment," which traveled to Seattle last winter. Last fall Harris showed Shaun O'Dell, a young Bay Area artist, with coded ink and gouache drawings on paper. They employ symbols such as the Liberty Bell or a wolf silhouette, rhythmic decorative lines, and fine outlines that suggest complex buildings or urban schemes. In the following show, Seattle artist Jeffry Mitchell presented watercolor-and-carbon flower drawings inspired by Chinese embroidery, along with a variety of figurative ceramic tableaux involving pairs of men. The settings range from a stormy sea to a bus stop; all verge on dizzying unreadability due to ornate decorative patterning.

The young dealer Bryan Ohno ran a gallery for a few years in Tokyo; after that he was business manager in Seattle for Dale Chihuly before establishing his own space in 1996. The gallery began with an emphasis on sculpture, and Ohno was named to the board of the International Sculpture Center in 2002. He also shows a number of painters, including, in fall '03, Mary Henry, a magisterial modernist born in 1913, based in Seattle and still active [see review, June/July '05]. Her recent acrylic abstractions are boldly graphic with radiant colors in dynamic geometric compositions. In several two-panel paintings called Language Barrier (2003, 48 by 84 inches), the larger, left panel is white with a black design that's somewhere between a Northwest Coast indigenous motif, a freeway plan and an alphabet glyph; the smaller, right section holds its own with a pure, flat color.

Also in the Pioneer Square area are Linda Hodges, Davidson, Foster-White and Grover-Thurston, among others. One of the Seattle-based artists Hodges shows is Alfredo Arreguin, a native of Mexico whose prints and paintings combine a remarkable luminosity with a case of horror vacui. His works draw on Mexican folk paintings as well as Japanese prints and textiles. In fall 2003, he showed a canvas in which dense vegetation is punctuated by eyes, all rendered in intense, tropical colors, and another depicting a horse running on a millefiori plain before a polychrome mesa that devolves into Toltec figures. Davidson at that time was showing Seattle artist John Grade, who last fall had his first museum solo at the Boise Art Museum. In the fall Foster-White (which also has a gallery at Rainier Square) showed recent works by Seattle painter Alden Mason (b. 1019). Mason's acrylics and his ink-on-paper drawings are high-spirited, showing his attraction to tribal and children's 'art. In Dance with Me, a 2004 watercolor on paper, one finds ink outlines of figures lost in a fluid yet "rocky" landscape heavy on grays, flecked with bits of red, turquoise, purple, blue and yellow. Waltzing Elephant Blues (2003) displays pooling acrylic in soft mixes of color pervaded by an overall effect of light. Other works look like aerial maps or petroglyphs.