Culture Fiend

Art After-Hours: Where to Go This First Thursday

Museums are free, galleries stay open late. So…many…choices…

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Feb 03, 2011 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

At Wing Luke: Gene Tagaban, Henare Tahuri and Tawera Tahuri, Ritual of Encounter, 2010, acrylic on wood, 8’ x 15’. Photo and art courtesy of the Evergreen State College Longhouse.

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At Wing Luke: Gene Tagaban, Henare Tahuri and Tawera Tahuri, Ritual of Encounter, 2010, acrylic on wood, 8’ x 15’. Photo and art courtesy of the Evergreen State College Longhouse.

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In this installation, Letters home by Asian immigrants hang in the Welcome Hall of the Wing Luke Museum.

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Decades ago, Chinese elders met around the table in this Family Association Room at the East Kong Yick building.

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Designed by Ming Wong and hand-painted by Neo Chon Tech, Four Malay Stories, 2009. Acrylic emulsion on canvas. 96 × 120 in. Image courtesy Singapore Art Museum Collection/Frye Art Museum.

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Ming Wong, In Love for the Mood, 2009. Three-channel video installation. Image courtesy Singapore Art Museum Collection/Frye Art Museum.

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Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009. Two-channel video installation. Image courtesy Singapore Art Museum Collection/Frye Art Museum.

This First Thursday, we’re celebrating Lunar New Year by starting at the Wing Luke Museum. Their latest exhibit, Cultural Confluence, tells the story of urbanites of mixed Asian-Native American descent and what it means to be “native” when so many live off the reservation. Stop in for the video tribute to woodcarver John T. Williams.

But it’s the historic hotel tour that’s the hidden gem here. Even if you’re a local, you might have missed the rickety staircase just to the left of the Wing Luke entrance in the same East Kong Yick building. Those creaky boards lead up to the remnants of a 100-year-old migrant hotel that used to be a second home for Chinese laborers. It’s like the set of an old western: hardwood everything, narrow hallways, low tin ceilings, rooms with the kind of metal-frame beds suited for military barracks and college dorm rooms. You almost feel like the tenants just stepped out for a minute, considering the wealth of abandoned photos, hairbrushes, steamer trunks, and a too-tiny faded vest and suit jacket, hanging neatly on the back of a chair. It’s a time warp in here.

There’s one room dedicated to Family Association meetings, with an long oaken table fit for a banquet hall, another room just for mahjong. And though we didn’t get to experience this, we hear that a couple in their eighties leads the tour and has lots of great slow-cooking stories to tell. For fans of the Underground Tour, this is a nerdy slice of paradise.

The tours are $8.95-$12.95 for 45 minutes, and you have to step out earlier in the day to catch them (they only run 10:30-3:30). But now that you’re out, you might as well swing by the Frye Art Museum on First Hill, where Singaporean artist Ming Wong has put together a very impressive collection of Southeast Asian movie memorabilia and new work exploring identity in its many forms—language, race, gender, nationality—through the lens of Singaporean cinema of the 1950s and ’60s. “The glory days of national cinema,” as he calls it. Though it’s easy to miss, check the hallway to the right of the exhibit for a five-minute documentary on the making of the exhibit’s vibrant billboards by Singapore’s last remaining billboard artist, Neo Chon Teck.

View the slideshow above for a glimpse of everything.

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Tags: Visual Art, frye art museum, First Thursday, Wing Luke Museum, Wing Luke Museum, Free Stuff, Chinese New Year

First Thursday: November

Free is the word at downtown galleries and museums.

Posted by: Olivia Margoshes on Nov 04, 2010 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Harry Shearer, Sean Hannity, Fox: The Silent Echo Chamber, still.

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Harry Shearer, Sean Hannity, Fox: The Silent Echo Chamber, still.

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Kelly Mark, Meek, Letraset on archival mat board, 19 × 24 inches, 2010.

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Annie Bissett, Honey, I’m Worried About the Kids, Japanese woodblock print with spray paint, 10.25 × 14.5 in., 2009.

Where will we be this First Thursday?

At the Henry Art Gallery, where Harry Shearer: The Silent Echo Chamber gives us a glimpse of talking heads and politicos in those unscripted moments before they go on air. You may know Shearer as the voices of Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, and Smithers on The Simpsons, but after this exhibit you’ll know him as the artist who curated 15 looped DVD segments of John McCain drinking coffee or FOX’s Sean Hannity massaging his brow as though he’s watching President Obama be elected to a life term. We promise you won’t be as bored as some of them look. Thru Jan 16.

We’ll also be at the Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square to check out Kelly Mark’s current exhibit (titled, simply, !@#$%^&*k) featuring over 20 Letrasets. This now-retro graphic design involves the transferring of letters and patterns from vinyl sheets onto paper, which produces a series of intricate, layered black-and-white images—some resembling a table full of poker chips, others a a complicated mathematical function on a graphing calculator. It’s the kind of exhibit you need to examine up close; luckily, it’s on display through November 27.

Woodblock artist Annie Bissett shows her latest collection, We Are Pilgrims, at the Cullom Gallery in Japantown. Bissett’s works chronicle the lives of early New England settlers and the impact they had on Native Americans. It’s not a diatribe by any means—though one darkly sardonic image shows the first two Native American students to enroll at Harvard (one died in a shipwreck, the other of tuberculosis). The prints also allude to what settlers left behind. One in particular, No Friends to Greet Them, depicts a recently arrived family of Pilgrims, lost and alone in a barren winter forest. Thru Nov 27.

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Tags: Visual Art, First Thursday

First Thursday: July

Free is the word at downtown galleries and museums.

Posted by: Douglas Bair on Jul 01, 2010 at 09:30AM 0 Comments

Detain (detail) in pen, ink, and colored pencil. © 2010 Eroyn Franklin will be showing at Gallery4Culture.

A panoramic graphic novel is no small feat, yet Eroyn Franklin’s Detained exhibition at Gallery4Culture showcases not one, but two 50-foot-long scrolls depicting the story of illegal immigrants stuck in local detention facilities. Blue pencil alterations to the pen and ink drawings show the work in progress, while also suggesting a blurriness about today’s citizenship qualifications. The narrative thread throughout the pieces depicts journalists’ findings on illegal immigration. A particularly somber cafeteria scene tells the story of a pregnant inmate whose shackles were never removed—even during her hospital visit.

Recycling has never looked so good. Envelopes are the canvas of choice in Carolyn Cole’s exhibition Recent Paintings opening Thursday, July 1, at Gallery IMA. As a painter, Cole may rely on elementary foundations—primary colors, basic shapes—but she avoids kindergarten comparisons by thoughtfully manipulating textures, one chunky layer of paint after another. Her style has Oregon Public Broadcasting praising her as ‘one of the most successful abstract painters in Oregon’.

RISD grad and MoMA featured sculptor Peter Millett explores the relationship of positive and negative space through the use of geometry in his exhibition Skyscrapers at the Greg Kucera Gallery. His steel work uses simple lines to depict the human form—a long, lean, red painted wedge, or a teetering tower of isosceles triangles. Painted wood work like Hipster has a distinctly worn feeling, with careful attention paid to the cracks in the bark. The clean design of both transforms the gallery into a serene environment.

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Tags: Visual Art, First Thursday

First Thursday: May

Free is the word at downtown galleries and museums.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on May 06, 2010 at 09:30AM 0 Comments

Adam Satushek, Fence, archival pigment print, 40 × 50 inches, 2010.

Where will we be this First Thursday? Checking out area art shows in their closing weekend…

Closing May 9 Isabelle Pauwels’s Incredibly, unbelievably/The complete ordered field, an exhibit of the Vancouver artist’s smart, edgy video projections that deconstruct reality TV and take on social issues such as gentrification. Pauwels was the first recipient of Henry Art Gallery’s Brink Award in 2009: in other words, she’s an artist who’s on the brink of something really big. Check out her work before she crosses the border, and find out more about the exhibit in Chris Werner’s interview of Pauwels.

Closing May 8 Eli Hansen’s glass-and sculpture exhibit, We Used to Get So High, at Lawrimore Project. That title is actually a bit tamer than previous Hansen shows (like It Was One of My Best Comes, and Kulture der Angst). But there’s a melancholy to the glassblower’s latest collection, which is less like a gallery exhibit and more like a laboratory experiment gone awry. He finds uses for buckets, broken beakers and found objects, and incorporates his own hand-blown glass (which gives Chihuly’s a run, by the way) to remember a time when, yes, we used to get so high. —Kaitlin Nunn

Closing May 8 Adam Satushek’s photography exhibit Annex at Platform Gallery. The UW grad’s photos distort reality by layering fantasy over the familiar, like a serene lake scene over a suburban plot of land, or bushes in the middle of a driveway. They explore our oft-hilarious, often tenuous relationship with our environment in order to help us understand our place in the world.

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Tags: Visual Art, Last Chance, First Thursday

First Thursday: April

Free is the word at downtown galleries and museums.

Posted by: Kaitlin Nunn on Apr 01, 2010 at 09:30AM 0 Comments

Michael Kenna, Giza Pyramid, Study 6, Cairo, 2009, gelatin silver print, edition of 45. Courtesy G. Gibson Gallery.

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Michael Kenna, Giza Pyramid, Study 6, Cairo, 2009, gelatin silver print, edition of 45. Courtesy G. Gibson Gallery.

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Katsushika Hokusai, _In the Well of the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa-oki namiura) _from the series: Fugaku sanjûrokkei (Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji) (detail), ca. 1830–32. Courtesy Seattle Asian Art Museum.

At G. Gibson Gallery, local photographer Michael Kenna shows new works from Italy and Egypt. The British-born transplant has traveled widely—from Hong Kong to the Pyramids of Giza—and captures landscapes in exquisite black-and-white photos. His images are incandescent—and not just because he’s working with gelatin silver prints. He’s after the quality of light that often requires nighttime exposures of up to 10 hours. Of particular note are Kenna’s moody twilight scenes from Venice, with gondolas that arch out over the water like crooked necks. Reception from 6–8pm. Kenna will be at G. Gibson on Saturday, April 3, for a talk and signing of his new book Venezia (2010) and Michael Kenna Retrospective (2009).

Starting today, a long-awaited exhibit opens at Seattle Asian Art Museum: Fleeting Beauty: Japanese Woodblock Prints, featuring more than 60 ukiyo-e prints by artists from the 18th and 19th centuries, including Harunobu, Utamaro, and Hokusai. There’s Hokusai’s famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of a handful of pieces from the Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji series; here, the mountain appears as a small triangle in the background, a seeming afterthought dwarfed by the wave. Prints of silent and snowy landscapes, “castle-toppler” beauties—women whose beauty was so great it could bring down empires—and kabuki actors with dramatic grimaces were so common at the height of the Edo (Tokyo) period, they were used as wrapping paper and kites. Now they make up a truly impressive collection. Free public tour at noon.

As part of Western Bridge gallery’s New Year series of weeklong solo exhibitions, Corin Hewitt —who recently showed at SAM—dissects the materials of three walls surrounding his workspace in three separate videos. More literally, he rips out sections of the wall and rebuilds them with new materials in an effort to take the tidy, tucked-in appearance of the art gallery experience and gut it. This meta-studio commentary should be interesting enough, but if only these walls could talk . . .

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Tags: Visual Art, First Thursday

First Thursday: March

Free is the word at downtown galleries and museums.

Posted by: Kaitlin Nunn on Mar 04, 2010 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Dave MacDowell, Bad Mutha’ Wizard, acrylic on canvas, 16″ × 20″, 2010.

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Dave MacDowell, Bad Mutha’ Wizard, acrylic on canvas, 16″ × 20″, 2010.

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Augie Pagan, Never Eat the Worm, acrylic on panel, 10″ × 10″, 2010.

Where will we be this First Thursday?

At the Henry Art Gallery, where Milton Rogovin’s stark, socially aware photography is on display through April 25. The 100-year-old optometrist has a keen eye for what he calls the “forgotten ones,” or the blue-collar poor: everyone from Appalachian coal miners to families in Chile. During the peak of McCarthyism Rogovin was suspected of being “the top red” in his hometown of Buffalo, NY, so he turned to photography as an outlet for his social criticism. His portraits lack pretension, with the subjects showing great poise as he documents their lives. In one frame from his Lower West Side series, Seymour dangles his hands over his knees and tilts his head like he’s posing for the cover of GQ, but his bandaged finger and floppy hat tell a different story.

We’re also heading to Platform Gallery, where now through March 27 you can see Michael Schall’s incredibly detailed pencil drawings. Get up close to examine Battle at Sea—a 70×94-inch drawing dominating one wall—in which barges and cruise ships stranded among ice flows seem to be engaged in an epic, endless game of battleship. Schall will be at Platform tonight after 5, so you can ask him yourself how he manages to avoid smudging.

We’ll finish the night at Flatcolor Gallery, where black-and-whites and graphite are sacrilege and color is king. Now through March 28, Dave MacDowell’s acerbic acrylics juxtapose elements of pop culture for comic effect (see Bad Mutha Wizard above, with Samuel L. Jackson as the Wizard of Oz). Also at Flatcolor is Augie Pagan, who brings his background in comic book illustration and video game art design to his “Mexican Pulp” paintings (see Never Eat the Worm in the slideshow above). Don’t miss the loft exhibit Sidekicks and Henchmen, the shrine to lesser-known comic book heroes, and the Emerald City Comic Con reception with artists next weekend (March 13, 6-10pm).

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Tags: Visual Art, First Thursday