When an out-of-town art geek drops in and says, Take me to the works of Tobey, Callahan, Anderson and the other usual Northwest School suspects - what to do?
The Seattle Art Museum has never been a go-to place for the Northwest masters. The 90-minute drive to La Conner and its estimable Museum of Northwest Art, on any given day, will yield a better shot at looking at their works than SAM.
You can stay in the city though and get the job done. Just check out Swedish Medical Center on First Hill at 747 Broadway. You don't have to check in.
A self-guided tour brochure is available at the front desk.
The hospital corridors are lined with the works of George Tsutakawa, Guy Anderson, Paul Horiuchi, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, Mark Tobey, Helmi Juvonen (kept at a polite distance from Tobey - she was overly-obsessed with him), Carl and Hilda Morris, Ambrose and Viola Patterson, Paul Havas, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Gilkey.
Not bad. It's not all about the bankable names, however. Emerging artists get their due.
There are 81 paintings, sculptures and installations on the tour. In all, the hospital has about 1200 works in its collection. A 15-member art committee keeps it going.
Dr. Allan Lobb, a former Swedish director and surgeon, started the collection in the 1960s. That's Lobb's steel sculpture in the lobby - three figures resembling the personages emerging from the flying saucer in "Close Encounters."
Hospital art gazing won't appeal to everybody, especially museum-lovers. There are no earphones to tell you how to see. And there's a dearth of art-house pronouncements meant to be overheard. This is a hospital, after all - a place of entrances and exits and everything in between.
This is art viewing for mortal stakes, you might say. The juxtaposition with the little dramas swirling around you makes concentration harder, but the point of art, and the artworks themselves, more vivid.
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