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I cannot believe it took me five years to finally visit the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. The park opened to great fanfare in 2007. I wanted to see it from the day it opened but somehow never got around to it, and then I put it off year after
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Strange creatures both human and animal lurk in the front rooms of Fulcrum Gallery. The show is called Visions from the Other Side Surrealistic Portraits, a Group Show. Featured are works by Larkin Cypher, Kelsi Finney, Jeremy Gregory and Keith Carter. The work is inventive. Each artist has a personal, sometimes
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Late blooming artist Becky Knold has landed on the scene, and I suspect we can look forward to seeing much more of her. On July 19, 2011, I wrote about her in an article for the Spew blog called "Becky Knold: The Great Unknown." The opening sentence was: "Attention area
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With names like Matt Groening and Lynda Barry on the alumni roster, The Evergreen State College is known for fostering big time cartoonists and animators. A bunch of them will visit Evergreen tomorrow for what's called the Fishbowl Seminar facilitated by faculty member Ruth Hayes. PR for the event states: "Animation, comics,
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Fulcrum Gallery is getting weird. OK, they've mostly been weird for as long as they've resided in the little shop on Martin Luther King Way. Or if not exactly weird, at least more willing than most galleries to show works that are not exactly Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade. But
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The latest show at Childhood's End Gallery features two old-timers, both well-known and well-liked in Olympia. Susan Aurand and Betty Jo Fitzgerald. If you've been paying attention, I've reviewed each of them multiple times over the years. This will probably be Fitzgerald's last show. She is elderly and living with severe
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Photographer Peter Serko has had a lot more on his mind lately than his art. His brother David died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 32. "For 20 years I have wanted to do a project of some sort about my brother's life and death. I finally found
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Siblings Laura de Santillana and Alessandro Diaz de Santillana continue a long line of Venetian glass artists from Murano, Italy. They are the grandchildren of Paolo Venini, founder of Venini & Co. in Murano, and their father, Ludovico Diaz de Santillana, was director of Venini from 1959 to 1985 and
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B2 Gallery has extended the exhibition "Sweet Freedom's Jubilee" through June 9. The show features fiber artist Mary Johnson and sculptor Mar'zil Davis with works celebrating the 99th Anniversary of the death of Harriett Tubman. Johnson's woven tapestries are breathtaking. Her depictions of the lives of slaves, it almost goes without
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Fulcrum Gallery has joined other area galleries in celebration of the 46th annual NCECA ceramic conference by presenting the show Creatures of Habit: Contemporary Ceramics - On the Edge with ceramic artists Heather Cornelius and Spencer Ebbinga. Each artist explores human and animal consciousness through the creation of anthropomorphized animals (or, in the
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"Reconfigured - a Collaboration" is an awesome little show featuring the artwork of Becky Frehse and Jane Kelsey-Mapel. Frehse, a longtime Tacoma artist, is well known in the South Sound area. Kelsey-Mapel, from Phoenix, Ariz., is not familiar to area gallery-goers. The two worked together on this show - winters
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It's a nice little show - paintings by Angela Wales Rockett and pastels by Karen Utter at the Handforth Gallery in the Tacoma Main Library. Rockett and Utter share a studio and share sensibilities about art. Both create works that are pleasant to look at. They are solidly designed and
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The big gay history/portrait show at Tacoma Art Museum is overwhelming. I came away exhausted but wanting more. It would take at least three columns the size of this one to adequately review this show. So don't be surprised if I follow up with one or two or more articles on
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In October of this year a team of British researchers is scheduled to dig down through three-kilometer-thick ice to explore Lake Ellsworth in the Antarctic, in hopes of finding new species and clues about the future impact of climate change. But Tacoma artist Lynn Di Nino and her team of stalwart
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Chuck Gumpert and Tom Anderson are the featured artists at Childhood's End Gallery this month. Both are painters in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. It seems like I've been seeing invitations to Chuck Gumpert's shows for as long as I've been reviewing art; but unless my memory has failed me - which
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The internationally-acclaimed exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture caused a ruckus when it debuted at The Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in 2010. David Wojnarowicz's unfinished film, A Fire in My Belly, was removed from the exhibition, sparking a national controversy, demonstrations and renewed discussions about censorship and artists' rights.
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The art of Danielle Bodine, Adriene Cruz and Alonzo Davis at The Evergreen State College - exhibited under the name Gathering Together - is a montage of many different styles and materials that contrast and complement one another. I could almost hear rattles and drums and the chirping of birds upon
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It's the biggest thing since the Picasso show. It's Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise at Seattle Art Museum. If that can't make Tacomans head north for an afternoon nothing can. Paul Gauguin is one of the greatest and most romanticized artists of the modern era. His story - abandoning family
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There's a really big show at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, and it's not on the stage. It's called Gold we have Spun from Straw! and it stretches throughout the Washington Center lobby, mezzanine and the upper balcony. The place is full of art. Really big art. Especially big
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There's quite a range of imagery and styles in the new show at Fulcrum Gallery, Dawn of 2012. The show features emerging artists - a loosely defined and often over-used term that generally means artists who have not yet received the recognition they deserve. Some of us are emerging all