The Pitmen Painters is less about the art than it is about society: specifically, the rise of socialist England. The play includes the major players of both the artistic and societal dynamics of the time. These include an artist, an artist/academic, a patron, and five eponymous artist-miners, known as The Ashington Group. Continue reading ACT’s The Pitmen Painters Joins Laughter with Meaty Intellectual Concerns
You have just a few days left to see the “Painting Seattle: Kamekichi Tokita and Kenjiro Nomura” exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. The exhibition closes February 19, and, accompanied by the adjacent exhibition, “Looking West, Finding East,” it offers visitors a potent vision, corrective and celebratory, of less-illuminated street corners in Seattle’s past. (I believe if you go to see SAM’s Gauguin exhibition, your ticket stub will also get you into SAAM for up to a week after.) Continue reading In the world, immigrants move to and fro / Trying to let their homelands go
No artist before or since, not even the enigmatic author Kurt Vonnegut, has ever had such a profound case of wanderlust. Now, a wonderful Gauguin exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, “Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise,” puts Gauguin’s travels and travails into wonderful focus, played out against the art of the people he painted. “Gauguin and Polynesia” is on view from February 9 through April 29, 2012. Continue reading SAM’s New Exhibit Reveals Gauguin’s Unrequited Wanderlust
Beauty and Bounty is the title of Seattle Art Museum’s summer exhibit, running through September 11. It’s art from an age of American exploration, when our early-warning artists twigged to the public interest in what sights the frontier held, and to the fragility of what feels like raw wilderness. SAM’s Derrick Cartwright mentioned the “enormous physical beauty” that drew artists out on endurance expeditions, hauling supplies out where there were no roads. Continue reading Exploring the Outdoors, Virtually, at SAM
It’s the second anniversary of the Blitz Capitol Hill Artwalk tonight, Thursday. Held from 5 to 8 p.m. (or later), the walk has some 40 participant venues. Whatever you do, make time to stop by Vermillion for their newest installation, “Flourishing Remnants.”
The most striking thing about “Flourishing Remnants” (at Vermillion through July 2) is its cohesion–from the large paintings of Matthew Olds to the delicate and deceptive photographs of Heather Joy and the perspective line drawing on one wall–the is a quiet and palpable weight to the installation. Continue reading On Blitz Capitol Hill Arts Walk, Catch “Flourishing Remnants”
