When the art history of our city is written, 2007 will stand out as a banner year for the visual arts.
Citywide, two major events occurred, both involving the Seattle Art Museum. The opening of the Olympic Sculpture Park brought back Alexander Calder's "Eagle" into the public eye as the iconic symbol of the new park. The expansion of SAM downtown added new luster to the older Robert Venturi building, and local arts patrons stepped up to pledge $1 billion worth of artwork to the new facility.
Within all of this activity, Capitol Hill and First Hill continued to serve as a great incubator for artists of all stripes.
In profiling the Hideout last January, Seattle's premier art bar, I discovered that owner Greg Lundgren had a mountain of documentary material from his ongoing project Vital 5 Productions. This lead to a very successful 10-year retrospective at 911 Media Arts Center which ran last June and July at the last arts center in South Lake Union.
Throughout the year, Capitol Hill artists made considerable progress in their careers. Sutton Beres Culler was profiled in Dec. 2 issue of the Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest Magazine. The group's "Ship in a Bottle" sculpture was a major feature at the eighth Northwest Biannual at the Tacoma Art Museum. The trio has just returned from a star turn at the Art Basel Miami earlier this month and have many active projects planned for next year.
Another Hill artist featured in the Tacoma show was Keith Tilford, who is represented by the James Harris Gallery. The museum liked his drawing in the show so much that it bought it for it permanent collection. With six pieces already placed in the Microsoft collection, this achievement is even more remarkable considering that the artist is not even 30 yet.
Video sculptor Joseph Gray exhibited a new work at Unit B in San Antonio. He also created a new work for exhibition at First Thursday in October in the Tashiro Kaplan building downtown.
The museums on the Hill enticed viewers with exceptionally strong programming. The current exhibition Dreaming the Emerald City at the Frye Art Museum is a masterful look at the founding collections of both the Frye and the Henry Art Gallery. Curator Robin Held deserves kudos for taking on a rarified exercise in art history and making it into a vital exhibition, which speaks to the beginnings of the visual arts in Seattle.
The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) hosted the most seminal exhibition of contemporary Chinese art seen in the last 10 years. Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art featured the fabled "A book from the Sky," by art superstar Xu Bing, who also came to our city last month to deliver a well-attended lecture.
It also served as a debut for Josh Yiu, Foster Foundation assistant curator of Chinese art as the coordinating curator for SAAM.
He also brought "Ink in Motion," a five-minute video installation by Sio Ieng Ng, to emphasize the commitment that SAAM has to exhibit contemporary new media Asian art.
Crawl Space earned a place in the sun in 2007 as Capitol Hill's best alternative gallery space. A stellar solo show by Brad Biancardi, along with exhibitions featuring guest curators like Liz Brown from the Henry and the members themselves, made for exciting adventures in contemporary art. Look for greater programming here in the future.
The café as exhibition space is something that Capitol Hill does better than any place in the city. Faire Gallery Café gives many artists its first chance at a solo exhibition while serving up weekly jam sessions featuring the Jazz students from Cornish College of the Arts. The Joe Bar Café, under the direction of curator Chris Crites, continues to please with high-quality works by notable artists like Sara Lanzillotta and her "Dolls of the Silver Screen" exhibit last May.
So 2008 looks very promising for the visual arts on Capitol Hill. First up will be Tide Ornaments - New Paintings by Benjamin Hanawalt at the Joe Bar, with an opening reception on Jan. 11. Hanawalt is another Hill artist who had a successful solo exhibition in Portland last summer. The paintings are all done in his unique signature style and will sparkle and dazzle the viewer with their quiet excellence.
As we close the books on 2007, we can confidently predict that the visual art created and exhibited on Capitol Hill will continue to drive the art scene in an independent, quirky direction from which Seattle takes notice. The art on the Hill is part of our story as a community and we can take considerable pride in the fact that we are being heard.
Steven Vroom writes about the visual arts monthly for the Capitol Hill Times. He is the host of the visual art podcast "Art Radio Seattle" at www.VroomJournal.com. He can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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