Its owner, a nurse living on the Upper West Side, flagged a worker at the Metropolitan Museum’s information desk. “Listen, nobody calls me back. I have this painting. Who do I need to talk to?”
Painter Jacob Lawrence’s epic 30-panel series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” was exhibited twice after its creation in the 1950s, then never again. Now it’s back on view in Seattle, one of the cities Lawrence called home.
William Cumming’s “Lost and Found: Skagit Valley Mural” is on loan from the Museum of Northwest Art to the Woodside/Braseth Gallery through Sept. 20. The 28-by-7-foot mural is featured in the gallery’s “Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair” exhibition, which includes a retrospective of Cumming’s work.
Will there be another Seattle Art Fair? We don’t know.
In April, Vulcan, Inc. — the late Paul Allen’s many-tentacled investment and philanthropic conglomerate — canceled the 2020 fair per the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, in May, Vulcan announced it was shutting down its Arts + Entertainment division, but that the future of Seattle Art Fair (Allen’s brainchild, which premiered in 2015) was a question mark.
It’s still a question mark. But 40 local galleries, 18 of them in Pioneer Square, have banded together to create the Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair, a DIY version of the summer’s major art event, which reported drawing between 15,000 and 22,500 people each year.
The idea is simple and barely a week old: galleries announce their own decentralized fair (each gallery hosting its own show in its own space for the month of August), build a group website, then do whatever they like.
William Cumming painted a mural in 1941 for Burlington High School’s new farm shop. The painting depicts dairy farming, berry picking, logging and building railroads, a celebration of agriculture and industry in Skagit County.
American University graduate student Michael Quituisaca didn’t know what to expect when he began rooting through the paintings, prints and photographs newly arrived at the university museum’s storage facility, the first of 9,000 works given to American by the now-defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Kenneth Callahan, The Waiters, 1964. Oil on canvas, 50 15/16 x 33 3/8 in. Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art to the American University Museum, 2018
The Blue Angels roared into Seattle this week, ushering in the 70th annual Seafair weekend. But for the past four years Seafair has shared the civic celebration spotlight with the shiny new kid on the block: the Seattle Art Fair, the brainchild of the late philanthropist, Paul Allen.
Seattle Art Fair, back for its fourth year, has become a major event, attracting tens of thousands of people from around the world and setting the Seattle arts scene ablaze with gossip, speculation and satellite events.
Purportedly three years in the planning, the three-gallery survey of veteran Pacific Northwest painter Michael C. Spafford brings together dozens of paintings and prints, a hardbound catalogue, beautiful installations and lighting.
Think of Michael Spafford’s “Epic Works” exhibition as a museum-scale retrospective distributed among three art galleries.