Saturday night, Dec. 3, was an unusually busy night for the Joe Bar, the popular coffee house, gallery and living room to the Cornish/North Broadway area of Capitol Hill. It was another art opening, but it was also a book party celebrating the last three years of monthly art exhibitions.
The new show is also an old show, a retrospective of the past three years of shows curated by Jess Van Nostrand. It is her last show at the gallery/café and a full-color book celebrating the 20 shows she has mounted at the café over the past three years was unveiled and available to the public.
Since he took over Joe Bar, at 810 E. Roy, Wylie Bush has encouraged local artists to hang their work, and tried to curate the shows himself. It proved to be a big task forming an idea for a show, finding the artists and art, getting everything together and getting the show hung in the café's quarters in the historic Loveless Building, a block west of Broadway opposite the Harvard Exit theater.
Bush said he wanted the art to be more than an after-thought way of decorating his café. It worked.
"It was a real easy, logical step from my customers, who are the artists," Bush said. The café is just a half block from the Cornish College of the Arts Capitol Hill campus. "As a curator, I didn't think I could cut it."
Help was at hand, and after three years of winging it, Van Nostrand appeared on the scene.
Van Nostrand, 32, mounted her first show at the Joe Bar in January 2004 with "Hi, Resolution: The Art of Broken Promises." That show involved 10 different artists, but it did not take Van Nostrand long to realize doing shows with so many artists was way too much work, and did not give the individual artists enough room in the café's limited space to show the depth of their art.
"That's when it became solo shows," she said.
The major thrust of her intent with the Joe Bar has been to present Seattle-area artists who were (mostly) not represented by agents and had not had much opportunity to show their work. A solo gallery show is an unusual, almost impossible, opportunity for unrecognized artists, and a way that Van Nostrand thought she could both exercise her curating skills and give something unusual and important to Seattle.
People began to notice. Seattle's daily newspapers began to review shows in their arts pages. In August 2005, The Seattle Weekly, named the Joe Bar "Seattle's Best Gallery/Coffee Shop."
"[The Joe Bar] already had a great atmosphere," Van Nostrand said. "I was drawn to contribute to what was already a strong space." She approached Bush while she was working for the Bellevue Art Museum. He welcomed her with enthusiasm and appreciation and gave her his unstinting support.
"I was trying to provide an opportunity for local artists to show their work," Van Nostrand said. "I pretended like this was my gallery."
Chris Crites, a Seattle graphic artist, will take over as gallery curator as Van Nostrand moves on to new projects.
"I think it's really important and I want it to continue," Van Nostrand said. "[Crites] is a really good curator of emerging artists, but he didn't have a venue."
Steven Vroom, an experienced art historian, is host of Art Radio Seattle, publisher of the Vroom Journal of the Seattle arts scene and himself a curator of two of the Joe Bar's earlier shows. (He also writes about visual arts for the Capitol Hill Times.)
"It used to be that the Joe Bar shows were kind of haphazard because Wylie (Bush) was doing the shows and running the business," Vroom said. "That changed when Jess came. It made things more stable - there was a go-to person."
He said that curating shows is much more involved and difficult than it looks. Besides bringing all the elements together to form a single concept, it also involves staying current with the arts scene and community and "look at art - a lot."
"Then you show up at the opening and give lots of hugs to artists," he said with a big grin.
"Jess has taken a haphazard situation and really put it on the (arts) map in Seattle," Vroom said. "In the three years she has curated at the Joe Bar, the café has come into its own, so [art] critics now review cafes as shows. Joe Bar has been in the forefront of turning cafes into art destinations. The fact that you can get a cup of coffee and delicious crepes is just bonus.
"(Van Nostrand) set a standard for other cafes to follow," said Vroom.
"I'm just always grateful to the artists for being so talented. I think I have the most fun job ever," Van Nostrand concluded.
Copies of the book "Joe Bar as Curated by Jess Van Nostrand" are available at the Joe Bar for less than $10. The café is open from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
Freelance writer Korte Brueckmann lives on Capitol Hill and can be reached at editor@capitol hilltimes.com
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