Finalist: The Stranger, by Jen Graves
For her visual arts criticism that, with elegant and vivid description, informs readers about how to look at the complexities of contemporary art and the world in which it's made.
Nominated Work
February 13, 2013
What Will Happen to One of the Northwest’s Preeminent Artists—Whose Nazi Imagery Has Always Been Considered Ironic—Now That His Views Are Not a Secret?
By Jen Graves
The question is hard to get your head around: If Charles Krafftis a Holocaust denier, what does that say about his revered artwork? What exactly does he believe happened, and didn't happen, during the Holocaust? How should collectors and curators-or anyone who sees his work-reassess his art in light of what he's been saying lately?
Krafft, a evered elder of Seattle art, is a provocateur. He makes ceramics out of human cremains, perfume bottles with swastika stoppers, wedding cakes frosted with Third Reich insignias. Up-and-coming artists continue to admire him. Leading curators include him in group shows from Bumbershoot to City Arts Fest. His work is in the permanent collections of Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, and the Museum of Northwest Art, and it's been written about in the New Yorker, Harper's, Artforum, Juxtapoz. It's also appeared on the cover of The Stranger.
In 2009, I included his daintily painted ceramic AK 47 on a list of the 25 best works of art ever made in Seattle, and called him "the Northwest's best iconoclast." AK 47 is part of Krafft's Disasterware series, injecting the homey crafts of European ceramic painting with violence and catastrophic events. At the time of its creation, pretty much everyone thought Krafftwas being ironic-poking holes in the fascist and totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. He said as much in an interview in Salon in 2002. "For some reason, art has to be this earnest, serious, even Freudian, exploration," he told Salon. "But it doesn't necessarily have to be that at all. Art that's funny seems to get dismissed just because it is funny. But I've always had a knack and a penchant for going toward humorous irony."
Now, a decade later, some of Krafft's more than 2,000 Facebook friends would be hardpressed to detect humor in his increasingly sinister posts. On January 14, for instance, Krafft posted, "Why amongst the monuments glorifying the history of this nation in Wash DC is there a museum of horrors dedicated to people who never lived, fought, or died here? The USHMM [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] was erected before there was ever a monument to the 465,000 Americans who died in WWII. And no one did enough to save the Jews of Europe?"
When I wrote to Krafftback in May, letting him know that a reader had asked whether he was a Holocaust denier, I added, "I suppose you don't have to answer that, but I guess I'd like to know." This wasn't the first time I'd heard the rumor, but I found it impossible to imagine that the swastikas on Krafft's work might reflect genuine spite toward Jews-i.e., that there might not be so much difference between Krafft's swastikas and Hitler's. After all, that could mean this self-taught, former Skagit Valley hippie artist was using the guise of art and irony to smuggle far-right symbols into museums, galleries, collectors' homes, and upscale decor shops like Far4 on First Avenue.
That first time I asked Krafftwhether he was a Holocaust denier, he refused to answer. "Unless it has some relevance to art that I'm currently exhibiting which you would like extra information about to review or comment on in The Stranger I see no reason to answer the loaded question 'Are you a Holocaust denier?'" he wrote.
But you can find Krafft narrating his philosophy in his own voice just by doing a little googling. On July 28, 2012, he participated (not for the first time) in a podcast produced by the white nationalist website The White Network, whose tagline is "Whites Talking to Whites About White Interests." According to The White Network's "about" page, "We recognize that different races and ethnic groups cannot live together in peace on the same soil, that Whites cannot and should not tolerate being governed by non-Whites." The description goes on to say: "Jews are not White. They are obsessed with their own group's best interests, not ours. Our network is and will always remain by, for, and about the best interests of Whites, and only Whites. We are uncompromising on this point. We do not hesitate to identify and criticize Jews and will not allow them to hide amongst us."
On the podcast, Krafft says, "I believe the Holocaust is a myth," and that the myth is "being used to promote multiculturalism and globalism." He says he believes the Christian story of the sacrifice of one man (Jesus) is being trumped "by this new secular religion of the sacrifice of six million Jews. And the museums, memorials, monuments, study centers, Holocaust chairs at the universities-it's all part of the promotion of a new kind of, like I said, civil religion maybe... We're the heretics in a new religion that's being promoted and built up and being embraced by governments throughout the United States and Europe."
Krafft mentions people "sitting in prison because they dared to go up against this thing," and says, "It's not just the Jews that are promoting this thing. Yeah, it's their little myth. But we're going to be rounded up not by Jews, we're going to be rounded up, if it comes to this, by people just like ourselves." He says, "The Jews have gotten white people to turn against themselves," and that Holocaust revisionism is "a good weapon to use against the people who are trying to replace us."
Krafft, who is now in his 60s, has always had an edge to him, and it's been sharpening in recent years. "I drifted into white nationalism as a result of reading a book about a Romanian archbishop who was charged with crimes against humanity and subsequently deported from the United States," Krafft explains on the podcast. (According to the New York Times, the archbishop's past "included membership in a group called the Iron Guard, a fascist movement that was the Romanian parallel of the Nazi storm troopers in Germany.") The archbishop's story "intrigued me and I started investigating this case," Krafft says on the podcast, "and the deeper I got into it, the more I realized that the charges were trumped up. That led me to investigating the Holocaust, and I went through that into becoming aware of the writings of Kevin MacDonald and some of the intellectual leaders of what we call the white nationalist movement."
The particular topic of the podcast was whether white nationalists could be more successful as a movement if they hid their beliefs on the Holocaust or homosexuals. Krafft said he didn't think a person's sexuality should matter to white nationalists (the two others on the show disagreed), but said that the truth is more important than white nationalist strategy, and therefore he and his fellow white nationalists should not hide their beliefs about the Holocaust.
Krafft's website, from which he sells most of his artwork, does not contain any of his copious commentary about the Holocaust.
To clarify his views, last week I asked Krafft over e-mail, "Do you believe Hitler's regime systematically murdered millions of Jews?"
Krafft wrote back, "I don't doubt that Hitler's regime killed a lot of Jews in WWII, but I don't believe they were ever frog marched into homicidal gas chambers and dispatched. I think between 700,000-1.2 million Jews died of disease, starvation, overwork, reprisals for partisan attacks, allied bombing, and natural causes during the war."
That was the entire e-mail. I followed up: "The number I've always read is 6 million Jews killed. I just want to clarify that it's your belief that 700,000 to 1.2 million Jews died total."
Krafft did not answer the question. He only sent a link to a story about exaggerations in the original numbers of Jews reported killed at Auschwitz. That story, called "New 'Official' Changes in the Auschwitz Story," appears on a website called Institute for Historical Review.
Wanting to understand more, I asked Krafft over e-mail to explain the development of his beliefs. He reiterated that he didn't get interested in World War II until he read about the Romanian archbishop in 2000, and said he continues to research the case, including a trip this December to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He wrote:
Understanding the nuts and bolts of this complex civil case, the Romanian history behind it and its geopolitical ramifications ultimately served to awaken my racial self-awareness as a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Most people don't understand the difference between White Nationalism and White Supremacism. White Nationalists don't want to reign supreme over any other race. Symbols associated with White Supremacism like swastikas, shamrocks, the Celtic cross etc. aren't embraced by White Nationalists. White Nationalism doesn't have a symbol.
On Facebook, Krafft has posted links to claims that death-camp photography was doctored and that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum fraudulently displayed a gas chamber door. "Holocaust studies is an academic echo chamber," he has written.
Krafft's Facebook posts got the attention of Tim Detweiler, who showed Krafft's work several times during his tenure as director of the Museum of Northwest Art. He's not sure how to feel. "If you were a Nazi sympathizer and selling Hitler paraphernalia by the side of the road, you'd be killed," Detweiler said. "But he's selling it at the highest-priced stores and at galleries all over the country... It would be like if Kara Walker came out after doing all these years of pickaninnies"-Walker is an African American artist who makes cartoonish silhouettes of horrible scenes from slavery-"and said, 'Oh, through my research, I've found that the slave trade was not as bad as we thought-the numbers were exaggerated and the slaves had more choice than we thought.' What would you think of her work then? I mean, I don't know. My head's spinning, to be honest."
According to old friends of Krafft's interviewed for this story, Kraffthas laughed in private at the liberal-leaning art establishment he's fooled with his art. In response to that accusation, Krafft said, "I would ask the person who told you they have seen me laugh about 'fooling' curators to be more specific and tell you which curators they saw me laughing at." More than one person tells the story of Krafftprivately laughing at curator Timothy Burgard, who is in charge of American art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF).
In 2003, Krafft made a ceramic teapot in the shape of a bust of Hitler, with eerie holes for eyes. A Jewish collector named Sandy Besser, now dead, bought the Hitler teapot and added it to his overtly politically themed collection, which he later donated to FAMSF, where it went on display in 2007. Burgard wrote about it in a catalog as explicitly and clearly antifascist. "These blind-looking eyes also evoke associations with... the world turning a blind eye to the horrors of the Holocaust."
Reached by phone last week, Burgard said Krafft's change of heart on World War II raises larger issues about artists' intentions, "both expressed and concealed... and how those do or don't dovetail with their public reception and interpretation." As an experiment, Burgard showed the Hitler teapot to a colleague who had never seen it before and the colleague agreed with Burgard's original interpretation. What does it mean that when Krafftmade this portrait of a demonized Hitler, he was actually beginning to spread the word that the demonization of Hitler has been greatly exaggerated?
Another question: Will the museum get rid of the Krafft? That's unlikely, Burgard said, explaining that he values the perspectives brought by artworks, maybe even more so when they're reminders of attitudes we'd forget at our own risk of repeating them. The label on the wall will probably have to change. Burgard said that if Besser-the original collector of the Hitler teapot-had thought the sculpture rehabilitated Hitler's regime, he'd probably have smashed it.
Burgard was able to find a note he received from Krafftin 2008. "I enjoyed your essay on 'The Content of Teapots' in the Besser Collection catalogue," Krafftwrote. "You certainly did your homework on the context of my 'Hitler Idaho' teapot."
The open question of how to treat the teapot in the future "deserves to be examined fully and critically in the public domain," Burgard said.
Later, I asked Krafftwhat he thought of Tim Detweiler's comparison to Kara Walker. "The difference between me and Kara Williams [sic] is that she gets to play the race card and I don't because I'm an unregenerate white heterosexual male," Krafftprotested. "Has Kara Williams [sic] ever not cut a race based silhouette? Does she even know that the first person on record as a slave owner in America, Anthony Johnson, was black?!"
This is a case of trying to use one detail to discredit an entire history. I don't care whether the first slave owner in America was black. I'm not falling for it.
Krafft's friends say it's exhausting to argue with him because of his ability to cite everything he's read. He's been a poet and an artist since the 1960s and a proven rabble-rouser since high school, when he was expelled by a headmaster who said, according to a story Krafft delights in repeating, "Charlie puts people on edge and keeps them there." But lately he's taken his experiment in putting people on edge further than ever before, and his friends, other artists, and even people who sell his work are hitting their limits.
"We're all scratching our heads, and there are lots of us. We always said he'll do anything to provoke attention, but no-that's not it. It's real. It's an ideology now," said Hans Nelsen. Nelsen is a woodworker on Vashon Island who's known Krafft since the 1960s and feels extremely torn on the subject, because he loves Krafft as a friend but is horrified by some of his beliefs. The two men agree, Nelsen said, that global greed is out of control and linked to a corrupt banking system, but they diverge in that Nelsen does not see that system as a Jewish cabal.
When I asked Krafftabout this, he scoffed. "The idea of 'friends' wringing their hands over what I think about anything strikes me as comical. I think Jewish overrepresentation in national and international finance is uncontrovertible. I would call this a fact not a 'cabal.'"
Another old friend, Tacoma writer Peggy Andersen, said she had to stop socializing with Krafft. "I told him, 'When I hang out with you, I feel like I'm endorsing something.'... His main thing is that the Holocaust is an exaggeration. I say, if they only killed 10,000 people because they were Jewish, it would still be a holocaust, jackass." As Andersen and I ended our interview, she said, "Be sure to say I love Charlie."
A longtime friend who insisted on anonymity said, "It's not only anti-Semitic stuff, it's also racism-you know, blacks and women and anything that is held dear by the liberal establishment. And I can see a reaction against holier-than-thou attitudes, I mean, yeah, of course. But..."
Other friends, like Larry Reid, coauthor of the 2002 monograph on Krafft, Villa Delirium, just sort of look away. "I try not to pay too much attention," Reid said.
On Facebook earlier this month, when a friend named Fred Owens unfriended Krafft and called him a bigot, a discussion arose in which Krafft told his critics they could sell offtheir works by him at Seattle ArtResource on First Avenue if they didn't want them anymore. But Jena Scott at Seattle ArtResource recently stopped accepting any Krafft works for consignment, because she found his e-mails increasingly upsetting. "I'm just sad about it," Scott said. "He's an intelligent, articulate guy who I respected throughout the years, and it just makes me sad. Everybody's sad, and you can't talk to him about it because it's not going to make a damn bit of difference."
Owens was motivated to speak on Facebook after playing online chess with a close Jewish friend from Boston, who simply asked Owens why he had a friend like that. "I realized that I could not continue playing chess with Harvey unless I did something about Charlie-it became simple for me," Owens wrote to me in an e-mail. Owens made another, broader, important point, too: We should "not just blame Charlie for this but the entire arts community of Seattle which has proven to be soft-headed. As I said when I wrote about this, it would never happen in Brooklyn or Boston-people would just kick his ass down the block. But Seattle has a misguided kind of false tolerance going on here, so there is a lesson for all of us in this."
Krafft is not a simple case, and nobody who knows him seems to be enjoying this moment. His personal kindness and generosity to friends and other artists is well-known. He's a Buddhist; I had to interview him by e-mail for this story because he's on a long pilgrimage in India.
Maybe what's hardest to accept is that a man so totally, radically, fist-pumpingly opposed to ideology-a guy you wanted to root for at the end of a bloody, painfully ideological century-himself seems to have succumbed to an ideology.
Yoko Ott, the curator who invited Krafft to be in the Softly Threatening exhibition at Bumbershoot in 2006-where he contributed the swastika wedding cake-remembers visiting him in his studio and wondering what to think.
"I did confront him, like, 'Do you consider yourself a neo-Nazi or sympathetic to that?' And he said no, that he didn't," Ott said. "And then he laughed and said, 'But would that frighten you if I were?'"
September 11, 2013
By Jen Graves
Sometime in the spring, I got an e-mail from an artist I'd never heard of. It began, "I have always appreciated your arts coverage and wanted to tell you about my first Seattle art show ever... I am new at this so forgive me if this isn't the right way to contact a reporter, but I'm excited and want to share!!" I clicked to her website.
The people in the paintings seemed to have all gone crazy, like they had been irradiated or poisoned or drugged. The works looked like classic vernacular art: obsessively patterned, highly irregular, and patently handmade. I made a mental note to go to the show when it came around, and I moved on to the next two dozen press releases I got that day.
A few weeks later, this artist—whose name I'm withholding for a reason—sent an equally enthusiastic letter in the mail that said she had a gallery show coming up and "I really really really really really hope you'd like to write about it." The same day I got that letter, the artist's name appeared on the short list for a high-profile local art award. It seemed like she'd come out of nowhere and was everywhere I looked. I had an opening right then for a story: If the timing could work out to visit her studio, see the works in person, and interview her, and if the results were interesting enough, then maybe I would write a profile prior to her show opening. If I was curious, other people probably were, too.
She lived 80 miles outside of Seattle on a horse farm. I drove. When I got there, she told me she had never had a studio visit before and wasn't sure what to do. She said she had first picked up a paintbrush less than a year before that and had always "been artistic" but never made any "art," just a few screen prints. Then, in 2012, she got depressed, she said. She began painting. After seeing these paintings, her husband told her she might want to google "outsider art," she said. So she did, and found galleries that showed things that looked similar to what she'd made, set up her own website, and sent those galleries links and pitches. Immediately she found herself with at least two dealers, one in Texas and one on the East Coast. Soon she found one in Seattle.
As we looked at her paintings spread on the bed and the floor of her bedroom, she mentioned the East Coast dealer by name and said, "He's—is he my dealer?" I wrote that quote down because I thought: My God, she's so new to this. I might use that in my story.
I left refreshed. A conversation about art without any tired jargon! Earlier that day, on my way out of town, I had stopped for a brief interview with a more pedigreed young artist who was in the process of constructing a large installation. She had previously shown at a prestigious East Coast museum. Inside of 30 seconds, she'd slung at me the ubiquitous art buzzwords "relational aesthetics" and "social practice." At this point, when I hear those overused words, I hear the Charlie Brown teacher voice. I pulled out of there like I was burning rubber. Up at the horse farm, it was like this: Here is what I made. I was depressed and it seemed to help. Some sad and dramatic stuff happened when I was a kid, and it relates to why everyone in the paintings has lost their minds. I'm new to all this.
The next morning, preparing to write, I did what I always do: Google. I typed in the horse-farm artist's name to find any last bits that might be useful. The story was mostly written in my head.
Google scrambled everything. I kept seeing references to earlier shows she'd had. She had shown lots of times. She had shown in Seattle. She had shown in spots whose names I knew. Her work from the past looked nothing like these vernacular paintings. It was neo-pop. It was Warholian with bright streaks. She'd exhibited text paintings on canvas, silk screens with acrylic on canvas, and pen-and-ink drawings on paper. Multiple writers had interviewed her. In 2008, she name-checked Henry Darger, the legendary late outsider artist, whose traveling exhibition she'd seen—and loved—at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2006.
Contrary to her statement "I am new at this so forgive me if this isn't the right way to contact a reporter," she had been a freelance arts reporter herself.
Her other words came back to me, too: "My first Seattle art show ever." "I'm new at this." "Is he my dealer?"
Regardless of what you might imagine about the ugly inner workings of the art world, there's a basic code when it comes to PR: Anything's fair game in interpreting work, but artists don't get to answer direct factual questions with bald-faced lies.
I confronted her. She didn't agree that she'd lied. She said it was no big deal, that I was overreacting, and that she was sticking to her story—so what if she'd omitted things? Surely I understood.
I asked her East Coast and Seattle dealers whether they knew about earlier shows. They didn't. "We're framing it as her introduction to Seattle, which I guess isn't true," an employee of the Seattle gallery told me. They were displeased to be learning this from me instead of from the artist. But it's not a career-killing deception—just strange and unnecessary. After I talked to the dealers, her innocent tone toward me changed. She sent me and her Seattle dealer an unsolicited résumé dotted with irrelevant minutiae and sarcastic footnotes, like a Kmart coloring contest she'd won as a child. She included, "FOR SELECT SUPER SLEUTHS," the home phone number of her parents. I stopped engaging. I didn't write about her.
The dealers kept representing her. She kept selling well. At press time, the front page of her website featured 40 paintings, and 20 of them were marked "SOLD." She does good business.
One last thing about the horse-farm artist: The reason I'm withholding her name now is the same reason I didn't write about her then—to avoid handing a pile of free PR to somebody who was blatantly lying to get it. Every artist wants distance from her early work. There wasn't any reason to lie. Except if one wants a sexier story. There are plenty of artists out there who don't lie to get publicity, and plenty who would sell better if they were better con artists. That's nothing new, nothing interesting, and nothing worth getting a spotlight for.
On the other hand, it wasn't exactly a big con. It was a fabrication, and art is all about fabrication. So when I started talking to other artists, curators, writers, and historians about the horse-farm artist, the thing I wanted to write became less a story about one dumb little con and more about the bigger, darker issues that tickle around its edges. For instance, how are artists pressured to massage their biographies? What are the lies artists are most tempted to tell? Does anyone think they can get away with pure reinvention in the internet age? Is having such a permanent trail a loss or a gain for an artist?
"Yeahhhh," Susie Lee moaned when she heard the story, because she immediately thought of work of hers that she would love to pretend never happened. "I wish I hadn't made that Pig on Parade. But I did."
Lee's résumé is pretty impressive all the way until the line that says, "Pigs on Parade: Pike Place Market Public Art, Seattle WA, 2001."
Why be so thorough?
"There is a code," said Greg Kucera. He's the elder statesman among Seattle dealers representing contemporary artists. "Creepy things happen from time to time, but no, if I was going to show an artist and I found out that a self-taught artist wasn't self-taught, or a never-exposed artist had shown several times, I'd say, 'Look, we're not meant to work together.' I would know, basically, that's just the tip of the iceberg. I would absolutely just walk away."
Kucera told me a story. He once had two clients who fell in love with a gleaming stainless-steel sculpture at an art fair in California. They both were high-powered attorneys. They'd bought a little art before, not too much, just a couple of Guy Andersons and a Helen Frankenthaler, keeping to the established art of the recent past. But when they ran into this shiny piece of stainless steel, they had to have it. They talked to the artist, looked at his materials, and signed on the spot to buy it for $20,000.
Back at home, they called Kucera and told him about their purchase of a major work by an important artist. They wanted to know what he thought of the artist, but Kucera had to say he'd never heard of him. But he recently had a one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, they said. Kucera looked at an image, but it didn't ring any bells, so he called the registrar at the Whitney, who was very nice. She didn't remember that name, so she checked their records going all the way back in the museum's history. Nothing. "I had to go back to my clients and say, 'The Whitney has never heard of this person, ever.'
"So upon quizzing further, they were told, 'Well, I mean, it was a one-person exhibition.' Here's what happened. The artist was really close friends with the person who owns the Killington Ski Resort in Vermont. Mr. Killington, at a charity auction, bought an evening cocktail party in the lobby at the Whitney Museum. For the party, they brought down one of the ski gondolas from Killington. 'And one of my sculptures was positioned inside that gondola,' the artist said. For this cocktail party one evening for two hours—and this becomes the top line of the artist's résumé, probably never to be dislodged.
"And even though that perfect little bit of fraud had occurred, these top-notch litigators could not get out of that contract. So they bring it to their house and they make themselves believe they love it. And it's hideous. It's just so much shiny bad art."
There have to be stories like this all over the place. Once, about a decade ago, I interviewed an artist whose website and résumé heavily relied on the fact that his work was in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I went a long distance to visit him, too, at his sculpture park of a home near La Conner. When I contacted MoMA, they'd never heard of him. His work wasn't even Trojan-horsed in by gondola.
The money-and-status-obsessed art world often has only itself to blame. I was once interviewing a museum director in her office, which was tastefully outfitted with cleverly designed objects and contained by just- daring-enough bright walls, perfectly painted, not a smudge out of place. She was telling me about some artists she was excited to be showing the following year. She mentioned one I didn't know, so I asked who she was. The museum director's face tightened, as if to say that she now believed she was speaking to someone who no longer deserved her time. "She's very well-known," was her entire answer. Her entire answer. I sat there blinking, and then I was sent off into the night. It had been deemed more important to deliver haughtiness than information. Actual substance was not a priority.
Maybe the horse-farm artist was onto something positioning herself as an "outsider artist." This year's Venice Biennale, coincidentally enough, is deliberately outsiderish. There are several artists included who are complete unknowns, and some who never thought of themselves as artists at all. There are even a bunch of rocks on display. In talking to Seattle Art Museum curator Chiyo Ishikawa about the biennale recently, she mentioned a conversation she had with a couple of Seattle collectors who'd gone to Venice to see the show. They didn't like it, they told her. Why? Because they didn't know any of the artists. In other words: They'd traveled all that way, and all they really wanted was to have their insider status validated by seeing names they recognized, by being in-the-know. In my experience, this is far from the exception.
So if artists are running around pretending to be naïfs or, frankly, anything other than whatever unclassifiable thing it is that human beings actually are—and that art usually is—well, they have cause. Michelangelo is beloved by history for his authenticity. For making marble into real flesh, not godlike and remote, but real. Yet one of the ways he made his name as a young man was by forging antiquities. Old, Roman, grand "treasures" were all the rage. So he did like Restoration Hardware and artificially aged things to look antique, and to convince people he had skills. The market has its demands. Until you get to a certain level, how else can you make it except to turn them to your advantage?
Then, once you establish yourself as an artist, heaven forbid you change the formula too much. Paradoxically, this goes even for artists who "broke molds" on the way up. The German powerhouse painter Gerhard Richter has gotten away with working in many different styles. But the case of 20th-century French chameleon Francis Picabia is a warning. He's been dead since 1953, and he's still paying for the fact that his art didn't look the same from decade to decade. He was widely accused of opportunism, and his work did seem to be the product of a roving, detached sensibility at best. Sometimes he was an avant-gardist, and other times a classicist. Writing in 2011 on GalleristNY.com, critic Andrew Russeth quotes a dealer promoting a show by saying that Picabia was "absolutely tireless in experimentation in ways that few artists are." But, Russeth continues, Picabia's "rapid evolution through styles, and his willingness to work in many at once in his late years, has also historically opened Picabia to charges of dilettantism, or a willingness to chase notoriety by any means necessary—which are also, of course, key aspects of today's contemporary art world. One is tempted, in short, to question his sincerity."
In order to be seen as sincere, authentic, meaning it, artists destroy works all the time. They also just don't want to look bad, or to have to explain some wrong turn or another. The American artist Chuck Close is known for his hyperrealistic pointillist portraits, but he is reputed to have made some early abstract expressionists that only a Motherwell could love. (Kucera says Tacoma Art Museum has one of them.) Close has disposed of many of them. But knowing he doesn't necessarily want them out there, dealers who handle his work—like Kucera—look out for those early paintings, and report back to Close when they see one.
"We, from time to time, get offered abstract expressionist things by Chuck [for resale]," Kucera said. "I've been sending him images of them to say, 'Do you want to buy this to have control of what happens to it?' He's consistently said in response to us, 'No, I don't want this one, but keep me posted.' They're either not good enough or not bad enough, I'm not sure."
Who knows the real reasons behind all the edits? The artists themselves might not even know why they despise something they've made or done, or it won't be revealed until much later. Agnes Martin, the notoriously reclusive American painter of stripped-down lines and grids, destroyed many of her early figurative paintings. So it was shocking to come across one, a garish female nude—it was so bad!—in the traveling National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek, which featured depictions of same-sex desire and longing. "Maybe," during her lifetime, Kucera said, "those paintings told too much about her as a woman, and as a lover."
Artists feel the same social pressures as anybody, from homophobia or fat bias to the basic cool/uncool divide. But here's another weird one: Do they look like they make the work they make? Do they wear the right pants and glasses and shirts and jewelry?
"Everybody wants an authentic story in the public eye," said Victoria Haven, the only local female artist featured alongside the all-women Elles exhibition at Seattle Art Museum this year. (She also has a Stranger Genius Award.) "This is an ongoing conversation I've had with many other artists many times."
Haven's drawings, paintings, and sculptures are stripped-back, refined, and geometric. In recent years, she's gone in a new direction by beginning to include text that refers to her own life, referencing music she's listened to or mountains or trails she's explored. People still refer to her as a "geometric abstractionist," even though she says she's unsure whether anything can be abstract. Her work was always about her life; it just didn't look like it was.
"I even had one of my dealers at one point say to me, 'Can you give me a story? I don't really know how to talk about this work,'" Haven recalled. "I was like, 'No, I don't have a story. I just made this abstract work, deal with it or don't.' A story is often a sales pitch, right? Or maybe it's always a sales pitch? I don't think so, actually. I think it can become a sales pitch."
Applying for grants, writing artist statements, showing up to openings—artists have to do far more than just make art if they want to find an audience for it. They have to write and rewrite their biographies constantly. When it comes to writing grants, "we talk about, 'Oh, god, it would be so great to apply under, say, two different bodies of work, like just my text stuff or just my abstraction," hiding one or the other to present a more coherent front, Haven said. "Or apply under a different name. Apply as a man. Apply as a 25-year-old. Apply as somebody fresh out of grad school. Or maybe I'm 80. Is that better? Everybody wants to imagine what kind of scam we could pull."
And that pressure to look like your work, almost like wearing it as a costume? Haven has that. People who see her art before meeting her say she's not what they expected, and vice versa. "They think I'm going to be like an archetypal architect, like, 'I would think you'd be really severe and austere and only wear a geometric dress or something.'" Same scenario in reverse, too: Her neighbor who only sees her digging up plants and having beers on the patio did not expect to discover there were tight linear web matrixes on the walls of her mind.
But take a closer look at Haven's art and you see immediately that the geometry is all slightly off. Her pieces are handmade, and the imperfections in the midst of the ideals are the point. It's only the surface appearance of her art that makes it seem so different from the rest of her. That's a problem bedeviling artists, too—basic shallowness, most people focusing on anything but art itself. At a dinner party years ago, a group of local collectors discussed their recent visit with Seattle dealer Linda Farris to the studio of hot New York artist John Currin. (Currin paints super-sexualized naked ladies in a style that may or may not be okay, which of course is why people like him.) Haven was at the dinner.
"They were describing their trip, and all they could talk about was that he had a mistress. That he had a wife and a mistress. And I was like, 'What was his work like?'" she said. "It was all about personality. I can't compete with that. And then you get demoralized about the whole structure you're in. I never came up with a solution of how to deal with it. I just don't have the energy to create a persona that's not just actually who I am."
Wealth and comfort can be problems for artists. Some commit their low-level fraud by hiding that they have a trust fund or they're married to money. Ruthie V. is a painter who recently moved out of a raggedy trailer in the unincorporated wilds of Bow, in Skagit County, to live with her new fiancé in Shoreline. While her happiness just went way up, her biography just got seriously downgraded.
"People love the trailer in Bow," she said. "It's a romantic story. Everybody my whole life has encouraged me to be an artist, and they know it's a financially difficult thing to do. But they love it. They love that I'm living the dream, they love watching me blossom, they love sharing it with me. But nobody's paying for it. It's really complicated to have people living vicariously through you. It's like, you're really happy that I'm an artist, but I have no running water, and I just lost my house again, and I'm exhausted because the rats kept me up all night chewing the wires."
She emphasizes how easy it is, as an artist, to fall into bitterness. And that she's grateful and lucky—that this is no dis to her supporters. But the romantic life isn't what she was after when she decided to become a painter: She just wanted to paint.
The lies, exaggerations, and myths we tell about artists were written right into the origins of European art.
"If you go way back to Vasari, he modeled The Lives of the Artists after The Lives of the Saints," said Naomi Hume, an art historian at Seattle University.
The Lives of the Artists, written in the 16th century, essentially invents written art history and specifically the genre of artist biography. And it's full of tall tales and unverifiable, unbelievable "observations," stories too good to be true. This is the beginning of artists themselves being talked about—not just their art. And "since he's modeling it after The Lives of the Saints, there's a certain sense in which the miraculous has to come into play," Hume pointed out. "There are all these origin stories for artists that talk about them not having any training, or having these natural talents, or having something innate. But in the Renaissance, being an artist is all about being trained."
No wonder an artist looking for a way into the market wants to come across as either a magical unicorn emerging out of a deep fog or a veteran of the Whitney who'd never have to stoop to showing his art inside a ski gondola. Here's a classic story from The Lives of the Artists, about the plucking of the untrained artist Giotto from out of the middle of a herd of animals by the older artist Cimabue:
One day Cimabue, going on business from Florence to Vespignano, found Giotto, while his sheep were feeding, drawing a sheep from nature upon a smooth and solid rock with a pointed stone, having never learnt from any one but nature. Cimabue, marveling at him, stopped and asked him if he would go and be with him...
The boy went to Florence and, sure enough, "brought back to life the true art of painting." Just like that!
Artist Trust, a wonderful organization in Seattle that supports individual artists and provides a great network, a place where artists don't have to feel so alone, is also, quite naturally, part of the insane Alex P. Keaton–ization of art that's taken place in the last 40 years. The professionalization of art has meant that a ton of an artist's energy now has to be spent on marketing. Go to the Artist Trust homepage and you'll find a link to EDGE, a "professional development program" that boasts of having trained 512 literary, film, and visual artists in "the relevant and necessary entrepreneurial skills to achieve their personal career goals." There are links to articles with titles including "Does Your Message POP?" and "Sports and the Arts: Joined at the Marketing Hip."
Being lied to by the horse-farm artist felt gross. But so does this marketing advice. And why do we put so much emphasis on the stories artists tell about themselves? Doesn't that invite them to lie at least a little? A little self-invention might make all the difference in paying the bills. Let's say this may even be an exaggerated tendency in the American character. Wouldn't we lead the world medal count in bald-faced self-inventors? Gatsbys and Blanche DuBoises and the "self-made men" of American individualism and all the rest of them/us?
Where I Was From by the eminent American antifabulist Joan Didion—she's always slyly unraveling fictions as much as detailing facts—presents a highly sympathetic reason for why certain forms of American self-invention happen. She starts with the premise that every non-native American is tied to the story of immigration, and all immigrants are in need of a story that justifies having left the place where they were from. Her ancestors made the treacherous trek to the "pioneer" West, and they left out certain parts of their own stories out of need, out of survival. "Children who died of cholera got buried on the trail," Didion writes. "Women who believed they could keep some token of their mother's house (the rosewood chest, the flat silver) learned to jettison memory and keep moving. Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time. A hesitation, a moment spent looking back, and the grail was forfeited."
There's a certain way of relating to history—erasing parts of it in the hopes of a brighter future, making it so that you're a brand-new artist who has never painted before and doesn't know anything about anything—that replays again and again in American history. Anyone who's ever signed a lease on a studio apartment has brushed up against this strain of myth-making. As Caroline A. Jones points out in Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, the real-estate term was inspired by the mythical, private, solo artist's studio of New York in the 1940s and '50s—the place where the magic of art happens, a place that's pure and lonely and not located anywhere specific or with any specific history except the one that gets created there. In New York in the middle of the 20th century, the only way to be modern was to work alone in your studio, in that place where everything is born again. (Hence, the much-decried/tittered-about shock of Warhol's Factory in the 1960s, despite that an art factory was nothing new.)
But if artists are supposed to be so free—if creativity means freedom to create anew—then can we let them be a little freer, please? Rather than asking them to be myths?
Because this whole lying thing demeans artists. And art.
I caught Chiyo Ishikawa and Nicholas Dorman, Seattle Art Museum's chief curator and conservator, by phone to tell them the horse-farm story. They were on their way to a meeting at the Getty Center, a Valhalla-like place high on a hill overlooking Los Angeles, white and shining and removed. Located in the relative outpost of Seattle but working in a vast realm of money, prestige, creative people, stylish people, and the bare facts of the art objects that few people in the world get to actually touch with their hands, Ishikawa and Dorman know that art is a funny place. About the horse-farm artist, they felt that her defensiveness was awkward. If she hadn't wanted to talk about her earlier work, well, she'd be just like every other artist. Or if her work were positioned in a certain way by a dealer, critic, or writer—that happens all the time. "But outright prevarication or invention, that's kind of hard in this age of the internet, isn't it?" Ishikawa said. "You can't hide anything anymore." Maybe that's the only lesson to be found here.
There's one last detail that's too good not to share. The horse-farm artist plays in a band, and in this band, she performs with what looks like an electric guitar, but is actually a hollowed-out instrument with an MP3 player inside. She's a karaoke instrumentalist. That's not lying, it's a performance of fakeness. The thought of it makes me smile. It's hard out here for an artist.
December 4, 2013
Matika Wilbur's fight against a hundred years of Native American photography
By Jen Graves
Matika Wilbur is the kind of photographer who calls ahead. She laughs loud and makes friends easily and sleeps on the couches and floors of her subjects. If she gets sick, like she did this past August, after too many nights with no sleep, driving through the American West with her camera, she is offered an actual bed, and actually takes it. In August, it was Steven Yellowtail who insisted she take his bedroom and he would sleep on the family couch. He'd never met her before. He only knew she was a friend of his older sister's and that she was doing something she wouldn't be able to do unless she had couches and beds and floors to sleep on. What she's doing is spending several years—as long as it takes, and as long as the grant money and Kickstarter funds last—visiting and taking pictures of every Native American tribe in the United States.
She's been traveling a year so far, at the wheel of her improbable black sports car, one woman following her own grand vision. But she's also fulfilling what really is a communal mission: picturing Native America from the inside, for the first time. She's trying to bring "image justice," as one museum curator calls it, to the world of social justice. She is traveling long distances, sometimes to remote locations, but as a Native woman—she is of Swinomish and Tulalip descent, tribes near Seattle—each place is a version of her own home, and these are family portraits. She's trying to find methods of shooting and capturing that don't repeat her extended family's history in real life of being shot and captured, restricted and suffocated within artificial borders and frames.
By the end of the first year, she has thousands of pictures and has visited almost 200 tribes, but she also has more than 300 tribes to go and much more money to raise. If anyone can do this—and it's a fair question to ask whether anyone can—Wilbur is the one. From her childhood of being bused from Swinomish across a tiny channel to attend a white school in La Conner, to her teenage years of addiction and recovery, to her early training and career as a fashion photographer who finally dropped out when she found herself on a meaningless and exorbitantly expensive shoot in Malibu, she's had more struggle and adventure than many 80-year-olds. Next year, she's turning 30.
There's another photographer Wilbur is always compared to: Edward Curtis. Wilbur's first exhibition at Seattle Art Museum paired them, and, frankly, everybody gets compared to him if they take pictures of indigenous Americans. Curtis was based in Seattle and undertook exactly what Wilbur is doing, a national survey of Native Americans, except that he was a white guy who brought his own props and sprinkled them where he wanted them, never knew even the names of most of his subjects, and, whether knowingly or not, became one diplomatic arm of the regime laboring so hard at disappearing the Native people on this land. His famous 1904 photograph Vanishing Race is a diaphanous, arty portrayal of faceless Navajo on horseback, casting long shadows and kicking up romantic dust as they march toward their inexorable extinction. It's a white-supremacist fantasy.
This is the history Wilbur photographs against, full of stories that would be unbelievable if they weren't true—and supported by visual representations in photography, painting, and prints you can still find sometimes, lingering over a bar somewhere, or displayed in museums, maybe described in embarrassed terms, maybe not.
Another common visual from around Curtis's time: depictions of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which happened in 1876. George Armstrong Custer died ignominiously—even the mainstream news of the day in the New York Times called him "imprudent"—but in the art of the time, he appears as a hero. That art was also used as propaganda for the acceleration of the American government's attack on the people of the region during the Curtis years. This is also the history Wilbur makes art against, the history of art as propaganda for killing. Her project—Project 562, referring to the number of federally recognized tribes, give or take a few as administrative moods change—is propaganda for living. Each image contains only two parts: person, land. They are here.
Reenactors of Custer's defeat dress up and redo the events every June, and then two months later is Crow Fair, a whole insta-village of tepees that rises on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, in the shade of green puffy cottonwood trees. Bethany Yellowtail—a fashion designer in Los Angeles, an old friend of Wilbur's, and the sister of Steven Yellowtail—brought Wilbur to her first Crow Fair this past August. Established in 1904, Crow Fair is made for photography. All week long, there are giant celebrations: horseback parades, thousands of Crow members streaming by in full-body regalia, powwows, all-Indian rodeos. After Crow Fair, when Wilbur was recuperating at the Yellowtail ranch, Bethany had to return to LA, so Steven gave Wilbur a tour of the ranch and they got to talking. He was barely 20 years old, home from college on break, and arose every morning at 5 to help his father with the horses.
The Crow people have a long history of ranching—more than a hundred years now, ever since European Americans hunted the bison almost into extinction to starve the Crow of their food source and push them onto fixed lands. (Crow Fair was the brainchild of a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent who modeled it after Midwestern county fairs to encourage agricultural lifestyles; eventually, Crow people cut the 4-H and tailored the fair for themselves.)
Steven Yellowtail is a proud rancher, the son of a proud rancher, and has a future beyond ranching if he wants it. He exemplifies not only Native survival but continuing adaptation. It turns out that this is what Wilbur is looking for when she's searching for subjects. It's a quality that applies to all sorts of people all over the country, of all ages, doing all sorts of jobs, wearing all sorts of different clothing. Wilbur thinks of the quality simply as leadership. These are her tribal leaders; she appoints them in her pictures. They are "positive" and "getting well" is how she puts it. What she means is that they might be, like her, forever in active recovery from specific addictions, or they might be, also like her, forever in recovery more generally from the condition of their shared violent history. They face forward but don't turn their backs on their past. They are not all happy-go-lucky. They do not all agree on specific political matters like the meaning of sovereignty or blood quantum (the government's measure of your blood to determine whether you qualify as a tribal member). But these are all issues that she brings up in their interviews. When Wilbur uses the word "recovering," you might think of its old meaning, "regaining consciousness."
Subjects pick where they want to be photographed. Wilbur's only request is that the location be within their indigenous lands. This can mean extreme circumstances, and Wilbur sometimes longs to return to the stability of studio photography. But for Project 562, she'll take the picture anywhere, regardless of conditions. To get one shot, she rode a Natives-only helicopter down into the interior of the Grand Canyon. She followed another subject to the rim of Hawaii. At the ocean edge of Washington State, she waded with her camera, following twin brothers, into the frigid water on the sacred, private beach of the Quinault Tribe. On that freezing errand, she was assisted by a young volunteer named Coup Trudell, who held the portable light stand and its umbrella aloft as the waves crashed closer, the tide moved in, and the sun went down. Trudell's father is John Trudell, the spokesman for the United Indians of All Tribes' takeover of Alcatraz in 1969. This past summer, Wilbur photographed the Trudells on the street in the Mission District in San Francisco, where they live.
As for Steven Yellowtail, he wanted his photograph made on the ranch. He wanted to stand with his prize horse. He wanted to wear chaps and cowboy hat, not buckskins, beads, feathers, warbonnet—not Crow Fair stuff. When he talks about ranching, he calls it "cowboying," Wilbur notes. He shared with her that he's been alternatively accused of not being Indian enough or being too Indian, which she can relate to; it's a phenomenon she terms the "lateral racism of the younger generation," the latest set of judgments placed on an adapting people with an oppressive past.
Out on the shoot, Wilbur begins with a digital camera. She shoots a hundred frames or so, while Yellowtail gets used to the general presence of her and the lens. When they're both relaxed, and she can feel what she calls "the connection," she takes out her Mamiya RZ67.
The Mamiya RZ67 is a box-shaped 6x7 cm. camera with a back that rotates 90 degrees for vertical or horizontal composition. Sam Ameen, the legendary South African black-and-white printer based in Santa Barbara, is Wilbur's chosen printer. Taking into account the price of film and silver gelatin print development, Wilbur estimates that every frame costs her $1.75—one reason she sleeps on people's couches rather than hotel beds.
In Montana that summer day, she uses a wide-angle lens. The streaky sky, blazingly bright to the eye, will appear in her photograph of Steven Yellowtail as shades of gray. His cowboy hat will be purest black. It dips down over his eyes. The head of the horse—dark, shiny, proud—is cradled in the crook of his arm. The horse is nuzzled, contrastingly, against the man's crisp white button-up shirt, tucked and belted neatly with a glinting buckle. At the bottom right corner of the photograph, fluffy stalks of grass jut up into the frame, struck by light and blurred from swaying. The cluster of grass points toward the horse and the man, like the wind is giving a little blessing to the portrait.
Wilbur, after the photograph is printed, hand-colors sections of it with oil paint on the fiber-based paper. She highlights the horse's saddle, Yellowtail's chaps, and his only visible skin—hands, neck, face—in rich brown, which stands out only subtly in the field of printed grays, blacks, and whites. Legs rooted so strongly they're like extensions of the land, his body appearing to lean on the horizon itself, Yellowtail appears fairly epic. He looks great.
"But that's not how you photograph a horse!" he tells Wilbur.
The horse's ass, it turns out, is too small from this perspective. More of the horse's body should have been turned toward the wide-angle lens, he says. The horse looks like a mule, Yellowtail thinks.
Wilbur laughs. She has two reasons. One, the Crow are horse people. Before they were ranchers, they hunted bison, which you do on a horse. At Crow Fair, they made fun of Wilbur for being spooked around horses. Meanwhile, she made fun of the Crows for wearing life jackets while swimming by the Yellowtail Dam on the Bighorn River.
Of course she would take a photograph that made a prize horse look like a humble mule.
Then she laughs again, because "I always want my ass to look smaller."
This is how a picture from Wilbur's Project 562 gets made. Each one is an exercise in collaboration. Because of that, each is unpredictable. While outlining the fact of indigenousness, the series explodes what's inside those lines. Wilbur talks about The Exhibit—the final showing of all the pictures once she has visited all 562 tribes and made every image perfect—as the construction of an alternative universe: a Native America you can walk around inside of, unlike anywhere that has ever existed.
"When people walk through The Exhibit, they will see the canoe culture, the horse culture, the Swinomish, the Cheyenne, the Lummi, the regalia, the young, the old, the women with master's degrees from Stanford, the twins, the tattoos, the business suits... Then, then, finally, in that moment, there will be no denying that there is no such thing as an Indian," she says.
There will be infinity Indians, doing every last thing but vanishing.
Wilbur's home, the Swinomish Reservation, is immediately across the water from lily-white La Conner, Washington, a little town known for its quaint charm. Visitors go to La Conner to browse antiques and brunch in cute cafes with floral tablecloths. It is best suited for visitors not overly dismayed by the occasional appearance of mammy dolls in a display case.
Approximately zero-point-zero-zero percent of visitors to La Conner ever seem to find a reason to cross the channel to Swinomish, pronounced "SWIN-a-mish" (you rush to the end of the word). It would be surprising if many even knew Swinomish is there, despite these two places being the two naked, deforested banks of the same rivulet. The village and the reservation are connected by a bucolic two-lane bridge out of a movie. It's called the Rainbow Bridge, and its span is shorter than two football fields end-to-end. On the La Conner side are cottages, trimmed lawns, vanity mailboxes, and about 900 people.
That's about how many members are in the Swinomish Tribe, but the population on the rez—only 15 square miles—is larger because of all the white renters who live there, too, most of them in big houses on the water. Though small, the reservation contains multiple worlds. Wilbur points out the administration building, the health center, the longhouse, the Shaker church, the Indian college, the cannery, the tall and imposing home of the tribal manager, and the tracts of subsidized housing all around it, whose yards are crowded with nets thrown over piles of bright buoys. The Swinomish fish; Wilbur's brother is a commercial treaty-rights fisherman, and what he brings back, Wilbur takes as gifts for the people she meets on the road.
Wilbur has to drive quickly because she knows too many people and would otherwise be stopped to talk. "That's Albert Dan's house there, and my first boyfriend's house was there, and this is my aunt Lisa's house, and..." —she would be there for hours. A little boy in a driveway stares as we pass, pointing a toy gun right at Wilbur's car. Maybe another photographer would take a picture of something like him. "I am not shocked by poverty," Wilbur says later. "I don't think it's the only thing worth photographing. These are the pictures that come out about our people. It's always the same thing. It's like all they can see is the three-legged dog."
She's talking specifically about another Seattle-based photographer, Aaron Huey, who has a coffee-table book out of photographs taken at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which in a TED talk he equated to a prisoner of war camp. Those photos have been adapted by street artist Shepard Fairey for billboards and have appeared in Harper's and National Geographic. But Huey will always be a white photographer on the rez, as he acknowledges. He told me recently that his pictures are bleak in part because so much is kept away from him: He's forbidden, most importantly, to photograph Native spirituality. Usually if something is hidden from a photographer, it's something ugly; in this case, it's something beautiful that's missing from his pictures.
Wilbur's home on the reservation is not among the subsidized houses, and it's not prime waterfront real estate. To get to it, you drive through the forest. The fastest way from Interstate 5 is to connect over to country Highway 20, where after you drive past the Swinomish Casino on the right, you see a sign that says, "Entering Swinomish Reservation," and then you blink, and then you see another sign that says, "Leaving Swinomish Reservation," as if it were a joke, as if the land itself were announcing having been absurdly sliced up. After that exit sign, you hit Reservation Road and take a left onto it. You soon find yourself on Wilbur Road.
Matika's mother's name is Nancy, and she's Swinomish. Matika's father, Kenny Joseph, is Tulalip, and he doesn't figure very large in Matika's telling of her stories. The two are not together. Nancy's home is perched at the end of the winding forested road, on the edge of Swinomish Channel, a narrow saltwater pass 11 miles long that leads in one direction toward Deception Pass and the other toward the San Juan Islands. To keep the commercial fishing boats moving through it, Swinomish Channel has to be dredged about every three years, which sometimes seems like it's not going to happen depending on funding from the Army Corps of Engineers. It's a happy place to be for Matika. "After living here, it's hard to think of anywhere else as good," she says, waving her hands around her mother's cozy kitchen. This is not the reservation Sherman Alexie talks about needing to leave lest you be stuck inside the "reservation in your mind." Growing up, Wilbur's friends on the rez thought her family had money, because they lived out here in the middle of nothing. Her mother always had several modestly paying jobs at once, actually—teaching Native history at the college level, advocating for Native issues in Olympia, running a cafe in La Conner. They didn't have much. But the Swinomish Wilburs are endowed with an illustrious past.
Laura Wilbur was born—she was emerging—right when Edward Curtis was hunting Vanishing Race. 1904. Laura lived to be 93 years old. She was a tribal senator for half a century. She became known for advocating for the tribe in Washington, DC, becoming friends with Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. "But when visiting Washington, DC, she would always sit with her tribal members," her 1997 obituary in the tribal newsletter read. Matika was born eight decades after Laura, on April 28, 1984. Laura is the reason Matika is doing Project 562, in some ways.
"That house will become my house," Matika says outside an empty A-frame house, Laura's old house, tucked into the trees like a grandmother's house in a fairy tale.
Will Matika come back to live here after she's done with Project 562, when she gets finished with the road? "I'm still trying to figure that out," she says. Before the project, she'd been teaching at Tulalip Heritage High School and living in Seattle. She doesn't say anything else for a little while, which is unusual. She just drives.
Laura Wilbur is buried in the bumpy earth of the Swinomish cemetery, which is the first part of the reservation you encounter on the Swinomish side of the Rainbow Bridge. The bridge is how reservation kids get to school in La Conner every day. Wilbur rode the Rainbow Bridge.
"My family expected that I would become versed in Western education so that I could help my people," she says, adding that her name means "messenger." "I was always told that I would be a leader, that I would do great things, that I was important. The poverty porn that Sherman [Alexie] speaks of was not my reality. That doesn't mean that hopelessness isn't real for several young American Indians. It just wasn't my reality."
Wilbur has been written about enough times that she has a bit of a mythology. It usually centers on the narrative that leads up to her great-grandmother appearing to her in a dream and urging her to go home and photograph her people, and it starts with her addiction to alcohol and drugs beginning around the time her great-grandmother died, when she was 13, and ending in rehab at 17, where she was dragged by her mother with a bribe of a bottle of vodka. The rehab stuck. She's been sober for more than a dozen years.
While her family positioned her to be skilled in Western education, she was sometimes humiliated by the trips across the Rainbow Bridge. She was sent to special-ed accidentally, even though her grades were high, because that was just where the rez kids went, her teacher told her. At age 9, after having been turned down at ballet class for being different from the other girls, her school took a cultural enrichment trip to the reservation, where she was dancing powwow. She loved dancing powwow. Her father was a powwow dancer. But not like this, on display. Real learning of cultures only happened in one direction across the bridge; in the other direction went indifference punctuated by occasional voyeurism.
In high school, she channeled her energy into softball, volleyball, and basketball. She was popular. After graduation, she split, moved to Santa Barbara, and enrolled in photography school at the technically oriented Brooks Institute. At some point, she had attended a lecture on photography and decided that's what she wanted to do. When she found herself in Malibu at that vapid photo shoot, she decamped to the nonprofit world and to shooting in South America. When Wilbur moved back to Seattle, she started making pictures of Swinomish elders in a series she called We Are One People, which she exhibited first in La Conner in 2006. Her next series was We Emerge, another series of portraits, this one more arty.
One day, her mother drove her straight to Seattle Art Museum to make a cold call.
Matika did not want to get out of the car.
"We're here to see the curator of Native American art," Nancy told the receptionist.
"Do you have an appointment?"
Nancy said, "We do not need an appointment."
Hearing this exchange from the other end of the receptionist's phone, Barbara Brotherton, the museum's curator of Native American art, decided that anyone with this much pluck should get a hearing. She found an open conference room. She listened while Matika talked, not Nancy now.
"She was pretty forceful, and you know, I think she was like 23 years old then," Brotherton remembers.
By the end of the meeting, Wilbur had talked her way into becoming included in the large Salish exhibition Brotherton was organizing for SAM in 2008. "No," Brotherton laughs, "no other artist has ever gotten a show from me that way before."
In the exhibition, which headlined the museum that season, Brotherton contrasted Curtis's outsider gaze with Wilbur's view from within indigenous experience.
"What Matika's doing—it's such a simple thing," says Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the SAM education director who formerly worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution that was formed in the late 1960s as part of the civil rights movement. "This is social justice. It's image justice. It's people having the right to participate in their own image construction. There's a whole group of photographers out there right now who are going back to people and giving them agency, saying, 'Work with me, and we can create an image that reflects you.'"
Photography, Jackson-Dumont points out, once was in the hands of the few: those few who could afford a camera, or afford to go to a studio to have a portrait done. Or it was used by scientists and anthropologists voyeuristically studying the Other, researchers driving across bridges but never really knowing where they were once they got there, just like Wilbur's elementary-school class. Today, people have cameras in their hands. The word "selfie" has just been inaugurated into the OED. The predatory language of photography has been under suspicion at least since Susan Sontag wrote about it in the 1970s, and the technology caught up and then some.
"It's this really interesting shift in agency and the gaze," Jackson-Dumont says. "Now, it's like, 'I finally have control. I'm gonna stand here for hours just to get this photo exactly the way I want it.' You have the camera in your hand, and you are immediately able to publish it to the world."
Jackson-Dumont mentions another artist, Dawoud Bey, whose first solo show back in the 1970s at the Studio Museum was a survey of photographs he'd taken in Harlem—and who recently unveiled a permanent installation of photographs in the library at the University of Washington Tacoma. Bey's career began because of an exhibition that was offensively wrong in the same ways Curtis's images were. It was called Harlem on My Mind, held at the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, organized by a white curator at a white institution, and it didn't even include any artists. It was a history and anthropology show, with news footage and photographs and archival documentation of Harlem, just blocks north of the museum. At 16, Bey went to visit, mostly to see the protesters. But no protesters showed up that day, so he went in. He was taken by the photographs by neighborhood studio portraitist James Van Der Zee—later enshrined as a fine-art photographer by the mainstream art world—but overall, Harlem on My Mind mainly left Bey with the impression that Harlem was not represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And that if he wanted to find Harlem, he'd have to do it himself.
Bey was an insider and an outsider in Harlem, like Wilbur is when she travels through Native America. Just as Wilbur always calls ahead, writing letters to tribal leaders to ask permission and access weeks before she arrives in a place, nobody in Bey's pictures is caught unawares. At Bey's opening in Tacoma in November, the people in the photographs were there in the room. Tasha Ina Church looked determined in her picture, unsmiling, her arms folded, but at the reception, she was all smiles. In an interview, she described appreciating Bey's way of collaborating with subjects rather than capturing their images as he saw them. She's part Nez Perce, and when people photograph her, especially for public uses—she's the director of a coalition called Vibrant Schools in Tacoma—they pressure her to wear beaded jewelry and braids. "But I think of myself as multicultural," she explains. "People always want me to be the version of them that they think I am."
Caleb Dunlap—one of the twins Wilbur followed into the freezing water at Quinault this summer, program manager at Chief Seattle Club—echoes the idea in an interview about what it was like to be photographed by Wilbur: "Her work is about changing how people perceive us by demonstrating how we perceive ourselves."
Wilbur herself is unpleasantly intimate with the unspoken edict that You should look like my idea of who you are. It penetrates even places where she might not expect it. Up on the cliffs of the Quinault Reservation above the sacred beach, during the days of the Tribal Canoe Journey, she was sitting outside her mother's tent, near her mother's pickup truck, in a circle of tents inhabited by her close family. She was home. Two journalists arrived from a newspaper that has written about her before, asking for an interview. The news has spread quickly that Project 562 was rewarded with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, and the reporters wanted to talk about that. The interview took a half hour. Afterward, she slumped her shoulders. "First, he asked, 'What are the values of Indian Country?' as if I could describe that," she says. She tried to deflect the question. "He asked three times. 'No, but what are the values of Indian Country?' It's always dumb questions. Always."
On the other hand, she relates a story about arguing with the editor of Native Peoples magazine when they put her on the cover of their September/October edition. First, the editor wanted a photograph of one of her subjects who'd appeared in regalia. Traditional sells. Wilbur countered that if the story was about her, she should be the subject of the cover photograph. "He said, 'Okay, can you wear regalia?'" In the end, Wilbur appeared wearing what you might see her wearing any day—her black leather jacket. "I told him, 'We're on the same team!' I won, but only because I shamed him, I think," she says.
She knows, meanwhile, that she's on the other side of image-making, too, controlling the means of production for her subjects. Like Bey, she is present in the final image: She's not pretending at documentary photography, and hand-coloring the prints is part of that. "When you add color to a project, it's very clear that this is what I want you to see," she says.
Yet she defers, to keep the collaborations honest. When she was on Kauai, Josh Mori—a master's-degreed activist and founder of two nonprofits—wanted Wilbur to photograph him displaying his tribal tattoos. "I would choose to depict him in a really different way," she says. "But then, would I be any different from Curtis? Doing this work really fucks with your perceptions."
In the photograph, Mori is shirtless and exuberant-looking. The word "MAKANA" appears in ink below his collarbone. If you look up "makana," you easily discover that it refers to a mountain located on the northern shore of Kauai and translates from Hawaiian to mean "gift" or "reward." Then again, if you don't need to look up "makana," it's yet another photograph entirely, like all of Wilbur's pictures, which split the subjectivity of the audience rather than the subjectivity of the pictured subject.
There is no Native America. There is no place to go to find all the tribes, no territory they own and inhabit besides the imaginary one, made of history and projection at best. Except, eventually, in the photography of Matika Wilbur. And just as Bey didn't want to take pictures of Harlem for the purpose of showing them at the white Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wilbur knows that a single mainstream institution is not the true home for Project 562. She pictures something more like a big-tent roadside attraction that can move, combined with a book, plus an app that Native kids can hold in their hands for the instant queuing-up of potential heroes they can't find on television and in movies. But institutional imprimatur will help her finish, which ultimately matters to her more than anything else. She does have an institutional exhibition scheduled: About 50 of her pictures, with audio of the interviews, will open in May 2014 at Tacoma Art Museum.
"Rock could not have been more supportive," Wilbur says, referring to Rock Hushka, the curator at Tacoma Art Museum. "When we first sat down, he said, 'How can we help?'"
Hushka is a fascinating character. An insider/outsider himself, he has taken on some of the region's most complicated exhibition projects, establishing Tacoma Art Museum as a home for socially engaged art even while the museum works to open a new wing devoted to a German couple's Western art collection. "Western art" usually means bronze sculptures of cowboys and is inevitably politically inconvenient.
But Hushka's commitment to the politically inconvenient is a hallmark of his curating. A few years ago, he opened an exhibition empty. It was supposed to feature a Puyallup carver named Shaun Peterson carving a log live and in person. But Peterson had determined that every log the museum found for his use was insufficient. Eventually, Peterson found a log, carved it in the gallery, and it now stands outside the museum, across the street, in the permanent collection of the City of Tacoma as a Puyallup welcome figure. Hushka did what Wilbur describes as a requirement in Indian Country: He went with the flow. "What I learned," Hushka says, "is to trust the artist, to believe in their vision, and when they change directions, to just take a deep breath and be confident that they're doing the right thing, and then also to learn to ask questions—to be willing to acknowledge all the things that you don't know and to accept responsibility for what you ask and how you ask it."
It's entirely believable that Hushka wants to feature Project 562 as more than a token of the Native American presence so lacking in the Western art collection the museum will soon highlight.
"If you look at the fact that Curtis's project took 30 years and bankrupted him, we certainly don't want that to happen," says Hushka, noting that Curtis's 700-some photographs have never, to his knowledge, been exhibited all in one place. "What she's proposing is so monumental that it's inevitably going to go through several iterations. I'm just thrilled that Matika is willing to include us as part of it."
Wilbur has an assistant—a woman named Jessica Haljo, based in Los Angeles, who is Native herself and has a day job, but who heard about Project 562 and simply wanted to help. She helps coordinate Wilbur's travels and speaking engagements, assembles maps marked with the tribes in each state, prepares the preliminary letters to the tribe asking, "humbly," for Wilbur to come and visit.
"She's the leading female Native American photographer in Indian Country today," Haljo says. "I'm happy to get to work with her."
The logistics are unthinkably byzantine, because tribes of people are not corporations with schedulers. What's most difficult is not the weather on any given location, but the weather within the schedule of the individuals involved, the way things constantly change. Somebody five miles away might be ready in a week, while somebody a thousand miles away is ready now. If Wilbur's movements were mapped, they would not look reasonable.
But that's just something she has learned to accept. It keeps her on her toes, and it keeps her in true collaboration with others. There are things that keep her up at night, though. One has to do with a scholar who, at a talk she was giving on the road recently, accused her of sugarcoating by making pictures of the "positive," "getting well" parts of Native life. "I'm not an optimist," Wilbur counters. "I just explained to [the scholar] that this is me, this is who I am, this is how I approach being Native. I told her my story." The scholar apologized. But Wilbur still thinks about it. She wants to be honest while being an advocate.
The second thing that keeps her up at night is money. "I go back and forth between feeling good about it and feeling really defeated," she says, "feeling overwhelmed and terrified and alone and then excited and grateful and humbled and honored. Honestly, I didn't think I would ever raise the money in the first place. I was like, 'I raised the money, now I gotta go.' I cry every time I leave someone's house. They feed me, and they are kind to me, and they show me all their cool places, and I nestle into a couch or a room. And then eventually, I gotta go, and it breaks my heart."
In 2011, Wilbur had a follow-up exhibition to her outing at SAM in 2008. This time it was a solo, of 12 pictures, of a series she titled Save the Indian and Kill the Man. It included portraits like one called City of Dreams and Mr. Runningwater, a black-and-white photograph of a cool-looking thirtysomething man in sunglasses and cowboy boots relaxing under palm trees in a plastic inflatable, like one you'd stock with a beer while floating in a pool. The photograph seemed implicitly to ask: Can you tell he's Native? How? If not, what did you expect to see instead? What's not there is as suggestive as what is. The title of the series, Save the Indian and Kill the Man, refers to a quote from the late-19th-century architect of the boarding-school system that stole Indian kids from their parents and sent them away so they wouldn't learn tribal language or customs. Its creator famously said he disagreed with outright genocide; he preferred to see Indianness killed culturally, "saving the man" while "killing the Indian" in him. Save the Indian and Kill the Man seemed to be a thought experiment that would be different for white and Native audiences. But probably each image would also be different between tribes.
It's important to remember that Wilbur doesn't know what she's going to find out there on the road. She doesn't set out with a fixed idea of what the Crow are like, or the Havasupai, or even the Lummi closer to home. You can't sit in Swinomish and know those things. Even as a member of a tribe, you can't guess in advance how to represent people, or what it's going to mean to represent people, that how someone feels about his representation is going to be associated with the size of his horse's ass. There are multiple interiors and exteriors to the project of Project 562.
And Wilbur knows how to work multiple audiences at once. Every summer, she works the family fireworks stand off Highway 20 in Swinomish. The sign on Matika and Nancy's booth reads, "Sonic Boom Babes. Unsafe and Insane." She's been doing this for a long time. She knows repeat customers by name, and she knows how many boxes of backyard-sky-decorating Acid Rain they want, what kind of sparklers. She knows the new products they haven't seen yet—rockets and missiles, poppers and snaps, parachutes, Roman candles, mines, ground spinners and flying spinners, fountains, and snakes and strobes.
For new people, she comes out from behind the booth and invites the kids to follow her behind the stands. Once she's back there, she performs like a wizard. One night last July, she set off something crazy, something a little frightful, and it made expressions of awe and terror appear on the faces of the white kids while the Native kids laughed and ran around on the tidal flats.
This watery landscape, over which the sun was setting just exactly so shortly before American Independence Day, is the most gorgeous, unexpected backdrop for the uninitiated fireworks shopper. This is the land where the Swinomish Tribe meets their customers for the business of purchasing explosive expressions of American pride. Wilbur has many friends there where she is sovereign. She has many friends in places where she submits, willingly or not, to someone else's sovereignty, too.
At Seattle Center in the spring of 2013, Wilbur gave a TED talk of her own about the people she's met so far in Project 562; it's posted online and titled "Surviving Disappearance." Afterward, the sky was watery gray, but Wilbur looked triumphant and vibrant in her leather jacket and red dress. An older white man approached to compliment her. "I loved your talk!" he told her. "Have you ever heard of Edward Curtis? You might like him."
October 9, 2013
The Horizontal and the Vertical of Mark Mitchell’s Burial Clothing
By Jen Graves
It started out as a funeral procession at the museum on a blustery September night. There was a hush in the gallery, even as a thousand people streamed through. No one had died, but people were still crying, and, exiting through the same door they'd gone in, acting like they'd seen ghosts.
In the final room at the end of the line were nine models laid out on coffin-length mirrors on the floor, surrounded by walls crowded with old paintings reflected in the mirrors. The models had their eyes closed and tried to lie still. In their discomfort, they would occasionally jerk and twist like they were having nightmares. One or two of the models never moved an inch—they seemed even further from this realm.
Ostensibly, the subject of the exhibition was the clothing they wore. Mark Mitchell created the clothes specifically for burial. His gowns and jackets and pants were every shade of soft, creamy cream, with macabre details. Ivory flowers of silk sprouted from the bottoms of slippers that would never be walked on. Every material used was chosen for its beauty, and its ability to decompose along with the body it adorns. All this rococo cream is for the worms.
But first, the museum. Besieged by paintings and staged by live models on mirror biers, Mitchell's Burial line became a full-fledged art installation. True, it's an installation that blends the concerns of art, a realm always once removed, with fashion, which can come so close to the everyday body. Does fashion have to pass through death to become art? Does everything have to pass through some kind of death to become art?
Mitchell does not have time for such questions. In the few weeks since the opening of the museum show, the Seattle designer has already received his first commission from someone planning for death. He will undertake (ba-dum-bum) that work in addition to all the sewing he does for the special occasions of the living, from custom-designed wedding dresses to stage costumes for performers whose identities are staked on their appearance, such as Seattle's brilliant, Juilliard-trained, queer burlesque dancer/actor Waxie Moon.
But back to the museum, where the living death of Burial caused the past and present to switch places. Visitors couldn't stop remarking that the old paintings on the walls—the Frye's always-on-view founding collection—have never felt more alive.
"This is life," an older woman exclaimed. She was pointing at the paintings. "This is the good-bye," she continued, pointing to Mitchell's clothing. She had not been there during the funeral procession—she came later. For all the power of that rainy night, Burial did not end there.
That night, after the mourners were gone, and after the stiff models reversed their death trance and lumbered up and out, the museum locked the doors and transferred the clothing onto standing mannequins. They'd been built expressly to match the models' bodies, since Mitchell had created each ensemble specifically for that model's personality and dimensions. Death may be universal, but each dead body was just one person, after all. So in a ghoulish twist on the story of the velveteen rabbit that longs to be real, these mannequins had undergone surgery to become real, rather than ideal, shapes. There were mastectomies and butt augmentations and all kinds of alterations made to proportions in order to emulate the dramatically curved, utterly nonuniform, in some cases transgender bodies of Mitchell's models, an assortment of his closest and dearest.
(I ask, indelicately: "What if one of them were to die today?" "God forbid," Mitchell says, adding that there are no arrangements in place, but that he'd be inclined to offer the ensembles regardless of the fact that none of his poor artist friends could ever afford them.)
This is not the first time death has been the life of the Frye. In 2008, visiting artist Dario Robleto, haunted by the collection and imagery of founders Charles and Emma Frye, created post-Victorian arrangements and creations including wreaths of human hair, tumbles and tumbles of black paper flowers, groupings of paintings owned by the Fryes of dead children—they never had children—and even death gowns. Those dresses were made for mourners, those living in shade. Not the dead.
Great black curtains like waiting graves hang on either end of the gallery containing Burial. Curator Scott Lawrimore installed the curtains as a tribute to the Fryes' old habit of using large curtains to hide and unveil acquisitions in their gallery/home on First Hill. Archival photographs of the Seattle meatpacking couple—she died in 1934, he died in 1940—lurk all over the museum grounds, in offices, meeting rooms, and hallways, not to mention in large, imposing oil portraits. Every curator at the Frye gets a little haunted.
None of the models in Burial was elderly. They were all too young to die, and one of them, smack in the middle of the three rows of three like the final move in a tic-tac-toe game, was a child. Not so many years ago, Mitchell was a young man surrounded by young people dying of AIDS.
But the truth of Mitchell's Burial collection is that it's a protest by someone who feels most alive—a protest against being pulled away from this place forever. If Mitchell, like so many others, was ever so haunted that he shambled carelessly on the edge of being here, that time is over.
On the insides of his garments, he embroidered patterns and messages, final tattoos that will continue to speak to the wearers—but may never be seen by anyone else—after all else is silent, six feet under. One imagines the embellishments there in the dark, coaxing out life after death, a kind of heaven, as the long rows of Mitchell's hand-built wooden, silk-covered buttons stay firmly, obsessively, buttoned: holding on until they actually disintegrate.
Each mannequin stands in a different place on its mirror. They're individual but unified, upright but stiffly posed. The child mannequin at the center is the first thing you see, turned to face you dead-on when you walk in, while the others face other ways.
Now vertical, the clothes interact newly and complexly with the paintings. The mannequin double of the model Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, an artist and a black man whose body was once brutalized by Seattle police, whose bruises were once splashed in photo-mural form on city streets, now stands facing the Frye's paintings of soft, molting ducks and hard, crashing waves. The mannequin is draped, voluminously, in Mitchell's defiant but buttery death jacket and pants. The mannequin's chest is protected by knitting in place of chain mail. His hood is up. An entire chain of associations begins, which may be the real embroidery here.
Before Burial, Mitchell already was known for making exquisite clothing. The installation is more than that. "To live is to defend a form," claimed poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Burial is for survivors surviving even that one last time. Being able to afford it, as usual, has nothing to do with the art.
July 10, 2013
How Buster Simpson Turned His Righteous Anger About Development, the Environment, and Seattle’s Economic Disparity into Art
By Jen Graves
The laundry hanging over the alley is pure white. That's the first suspicious thing about it. Nobody has this much white laundry. Maybe that's why people are stopping to take pictures. Or maybe it's because you never see laundry lines downtown. They've mostly been banned as unsightly.
This particular alley is a stretch of Post Alley on the Belltown side of Pike Place Market, between Stewart and Virginia streets. One side of the alley is a building of fixed-income housing with a health clinic at street level. The other side is a condo tower. The clotheslines crisscross between the two. Do the people who share this alley share anything else, let alone joint clotheslines?
A posted sign at street level clears things up a little: This is a temporary installation by the artist Buster Simpson, a re-creation of a work of art he made, in the exact same alley, in 1978. The clothes themselves are recycled from a thrift shop and a cleaners where they'd gone unclaimed. The first time Simpson strung clotheslines between these parallel four floors was the start of the redevelopment of Belltown, when the condo tower was brand-new. Back then, most residents appreciated the clothesline, the sign says, but not everyone. "One gentleman from the fixed-income residence took offense to what he considered a reminder of his unpleasant past of being forced to hang his laundry out to dry," Simpson writes. "Eventually, he cut down all the lines. I learned from this the humility of working in shared space, and the patience such work requires."
For the current remake, Simpson got permission from private residents on both sides of the alley. Before the sign went up and while he was still finishing hanging the lines, people walking by would ask him what he was doing. Simpson, 71, is a highly approachable guy, built and tall like a hero but with the attitude of an imp. He has a square jaw and a torn-apart cotton-puff of white hair, his glasses are always falling down his nose a little so he can glance roguishly over them, and he slouches. He loves talking to people when he's installing his art out in public. All he has ever wanted to do is work in public.
"To one person, I'd say, 'It's a protest against condos that have ordinances against laundry lines!' But to the next person, I'll say something else. Another line, you know? It's my chance to be a kind of public performer," he said, mischievously.
Every version of the story he tells is true. The art is a protest. It's a decorative banner of simple human activity. It's an experiment in tying together the rich and the poor. It's a revelation of the context, of economic disparity at close range. There are many Buster Simpsons all at once.
Sometimes you don't even notice his works. And sometimes when they're most successful, they disappear entirely. Another work he made in 1978 involved a stretch of street in Belltown that stank of shit because there were no public accommodations. All along the street, he wanted to dig holes in the ground for pooping in. His idea was that after a sufficient accumulation of human waste at each hole, a tree could be planted on the compost. He had no permits, so he bought a Porta Potty case to camouflage the holes. The piece had two different locations—he successfully installed two different pooping holes—before he was shut down by the authorities, who agreed to institute public restrooms. Simpson considered it a win. The ultimate expression of the piece was it vanishing altogether, no longer having a reason to exist.
"See that hand railing?" he said while we were standing under the clotheslines in Post Alley a few weeks ago. He pointed to an unadorned metal bar on a building, the building with the low-income clinic. It's not marked as art or as anything else, even though he put it there. The long hill to the water is perilously steep, Seattle-steep, and he set out to make a handrail all the way down the hill, in a basic effort to steady people in their environment. But "the property owners at the condos said no," Simpson said, so the railing spans only one block. "But that's just what public artists do. Little stuff. God's work."
It's a common stereotype—and often a total falsehood—that artists are rebels; plenty of them are as rule-bound as anyone else. But Simpson really is counterculture to the core. His work is reactive. It has goals in mind. Very few artists these days openly call their work agitprop, but Simpson does—at least some of it.
Agitprop gets attention. In the 1980s, when Simpson threw large, soft limestone disks in the Hudson and Nisqually Rivers to neutralize acid rain, he created a media spectacle, with commentators dubbing it "River Rolaids." You can see video of him dumping the disks in the river at the first full retrospective of his work, now up at the Frye Art Museum, which frames his career through his sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, and installations, some new, some just newly framed. Seen splashing around in videos with the limestone disks—see page 19—Simpson looks like he's having a blast. The video is projected in split-screen style with a video from another performance, for which he stripped naked and played David to the Goliath of the World Trade Center. With a sling, he flung little chunks of limestone toward the towering symbols of American greed. He was located at an enfeebling distance, but the gesture carried its own power even if no stone hit its target. Each chunk of stone was blasted with the word "PURGE."
"I think of my work as political, yeah, but it's like in the '60s, we said, 'If there's no dancing in your revolution, we don't want any part of it," he reflected the other day, sitting across a worktable in the Leschi neighborhood grocery store that he converted into a studio and home. His wife is artist Laura Sindell, and they have a grown daughter, Hillela. "There were a lot of dogmatic communists running around in those days, and they didn't have parties or know how to dance. I love to dance. Shit, I mean there has to be joy to this."
Art wasn't on his mind early in life. Like the Johnny Horton song says, Simpson was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He was a slow reader and an unremarkable student, probably an undiagnosed dyslexic, he thinks. Didn't think he'd go to college, but when he went to sign up for the army, a recruiter was unfriendly, so he changed course. He took a job at a sign-painting company to pay for school and spent three years commuting to the junior college in Flint. Only the art department saw him as special and encouraged him, or that's how he remembers the way he officially became an artist. He transferred to the University of Michigan to study art.
He continued to be chased by Vietnam, nearly getting drafted several times—enrolling in grad school when being an undergrad was no longer an exemption, and finally just barely aging out. At art school in Michigan, Simpson became friends with a guy who went on to be one of the organizers of "An Aquarian Exposition in White Lake, N.Y.," also known as Woodstock. Yes, that Woodstock. Woodstock became famous for the music, of course, but it was called the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, and Simpson—back in that postschool period when he was still alternating living out of his van and crisscrossing the United States on his motorcycle —was invited to be codirector of Woodstock Art.
Simpson's original idea for the festival was to wrap Dutch elm trees in a covering like foil. By 1969, Dutch elm disease was well-known to be infesting the area, and in fact causing the great elm decline of Europe and North America, devastating many species. Simpson's reflective coverings would not have actually protected the trees, just suggested protection. They were intended to alert people to the fact that there was a major problem deep in these woods. But the organizers wanted something "that smelled like patchouli oil, that was back-to-nature"—so foil was out. They wanted nostalgia. He would have preferred what he would later come to call "poetic utility."
He tried to keep as much poetry, and as much utility, as he could in his second idea for Woodstock. Because the festival was at a dairy farm, he decided to design and build a mini-farm there. It had 200 little chicks, kept in an enclosure with heat lamps, and a playpen for people, including a jungle gym and a labyrinth. The whole thing was intended as an escape from the wildness of the music stage, a place where people could go to recharge and maybe bring the kids, see the animals and plants, and notice how far they had come from the city.
But then Woodstock went aggro in the other sense. The art was forcibly overcome by the hordes, and Simpson was briefly stunned. He had to adjust quickly. He dismantled the art and distributed its components as firewood and sleeping mats. He got the animals out of harm's way and went to serve as security at the harrowing front of the stage. After the crowds left, he stayed to clean up, which included literally mending farmers' fences.
As an artist, he never had a white-cube phase.
Another of the Super 8 videos at the Frye is unlike most video you'll ever see in an art exhibition. It shows a bunch of people sitting around a table, tucking in for a long meeting in the sort of drab, cramped conference room that could kill even a born middle manager. There isn't a hint of irony. The video is pure boredom.
The point is that behind Buster Simpson's art, there are meetings. And more meetings. But it's not just that. He filmed the meetings. He is proud of surviving the meetings.
As counterculture as Simpson is, to get his work done, he bends to pressures that most artists find completely distasteful, toiling alongside powerful people who want him to be their decorator, or who have essentially no real interest in art. And yet it would be hard to say which he despises more: merely decorative public art or esoteric private art.
Simpson's coming-of-age and the invention of American public art coincided exactly. Simpson, Sherry Markovitz, and Andrew Keating were the first-ever team of artists to be included at the start and throughout all phases of a public construction project—a process that was nationally heralded and widely adopted after Seattle's example in 1979. The revolutionary idea was that art should be more than a plopped-down afterthought, and like most revolutionary ideas, it created new conflicts while solving old ones.
Not every one of Simpson's more than three dozen public pieces quite survived the meetings. "There are a lot of projects, and they all have their varying degrees of it," he said, it meaning what he wanted, without compromise.
His greatest disappointment—aside from the pieces that were never built—can be found at the University of Washington Tacoma. A pretty neat piece of his there rings the top of an 1891 brick building in the center of campus. It's called Parapet Relay because the words that appear on it change depending on your viewing angle; they seem to hand off to each other. They alternate between "GATHER," "LABOR," "IDEA," "WISDOM," "STORAGE," "TACOMA," and "UW." It's subtle but cool, and it references the ghostly historical signage in that part of downtown. But Simpson had envisioned far more than a skin-deep intervention when he was commissioned by UWT. He'd wanted to help shape the way the entire campus relates to history, and to the steep grade of the hillside. "I'd wanted acknowledgements of the new overlays on these historical buildings, to be obvious about it, to let accretion happen," he said. "They wanted to make it look like a campus. You do what you can do, and you move on."
Then there are the pieces that just have no budget for maintenance. At Seattle's convention center downtown, there's a wind-powered topiary that's nothing but rusted metal now. (It was installed in 1989.) The vines are supposed to grow on a structure shaped like the profile of Chief Sealth, then be cut by a wind vane shaped like the profile of George Washington. It's a great idea. Even the gardener there, an immigrant himself—reimagining Washington as an immigrant is one of the thoughts in the piece—said when I visited on a recent afternoon that he hopes it gets fixed soon.
Simpson's latest public commission is a massive curtain of steel mesh wrapped around a helical parking-lot ramp at Sea-Tac Airport, flashlit by colored LEDs. The twisted wire mesh is the hexagonal kind used in road building, referencing both highways and the chemical structure of carbon. With its lights, the piece is visible from the street, from a car, and from the air, drawing together the three systems already at play in the airport environment.
But he doesn't just make local work: Around the world, Simpson is still trying to convince various decision makers—a college dean in Maine, the leaders of Qatar—to implement crazy ideas he cooked up years ago. Since 1996, for instance, he's been laboring on something having to do with the Magna Carta and a yew tree.
"The whole public art movement, it's been our movement and it's been our patronage," he said. Sometimes he uses the royal "we," and when I asked him about it, he earnestly spoke about how much collaboration it takes to make his art, and he made a convincing case, so it sounded less pompous.
In this case, he was also referring to public artists in general.
"It's made us more responsive to communicating," he continued. "We have to communicate on a lower discourse, or maybe not lower, it's a populist discourse. When you talk to a developer, they can just shut you out, even though there's public money. So we've had to develop our wit in another way. We're very political."
Another Super 8 video. It's grainy and it shows a street with Elliott Bay in the foggy background. In the center of the frame is a two-story building whose second story is off-kilter, as if it's about to fall. This is 1978, at 2001 First Avenue, where there are still old sailor bars with 6 a.m. happy hours in the neighborhood, but all that is about to change. Somebody is inside this building, up in the big bay window on this tilted second floor. Suddenly, the building crashes down. There's only a pile of rubble. With somebody inside.
The somebody was a silhouette that Simpson made. He cut it out of sheet metal just so he could film it, so he could capture the image of somebody standing while old Seattle fell.
Around this time, his silhouettes materialized again and again out on the streets of what was then referred to as the Denny Regrade neighborhood. They stood on the roof at the abandoned Pine Tavern, acting as weather vanes. Inside the tavern, where Simpson could rent a huge studio for peanuts because the building was about to be razed, he rigged an apparatus so that whenever the wind blew, the figures on the roof activated other metal figures down in the bar, and the wind swept rows of bottles off the bar and onto the floor. Broken glass was collected and sold for cash to donate to the clinic.
Photos from the time show that there were a lot of empty bottles, especially fortified wine bottles. The people, like the neighborhood, were wobbly, in transition. Many were indigenous people stranded on stolen land. Around this time, Simpson also set up gates around individual trees that he fashioned out of crutches and the headboards of beds salvaged from torn-down old hotels. He was trying to steady both people and plantings in the midst of Seattle's rapid change.
The name he gave his silhouetted figure was Woodman. At the Pine Tavern, Woodman turned wind into medicine. He became Simpson's most romantic alter ego. The other figure to appear repeatedly in his work is the crow, the urban adapter who takes whatever he can get and finds a way to use it.
In many ways, Simpson has lived the myths of his alter egos. His mark is still visible in northern downtown, where he was based from 1974 to 1987, moving from doomed location to doomed location and using the conditions of real estate as the basis for his work, just as Gordon Matta-Clark was doing in New York at the same time. Sometimes he was directly pragmatic. When a cherry tree was going to be removed to make way for a new condo, he tried to save it by building a nest in it and occupying the nest. When that failed to stop the tree's destruction, he managed to get his hands on the tree and carve its wood into a ladder that he'd use to climb into the next tree that needed saving in the demolitions.
It's worth pointing out that Simpson's early works in Belltown came long before the terms "relational aesthetics" and "social practice" were coined, terms that are now ubiquitous in artspeak. They refer to the belief that art should instigate connections in the real world, not just provoke gaping and gawking. Simpson's experiments also long predated the proliferation of farmers markets in cities, the spreading of the gospel of the locavores.
Coexisting with a willful environment that refuses to fade into the background is in Simpson's blood. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a storekeeper, and they lived along Michigan's Cass River. Every spring, the river flooded. The water would rise up into the basement and flood the coal stove. Filling the stove, in cold weather, was Simpson's job mornings and evenings. It was the kind of town where, when the river ran red, that meant the slaughterhouse was killing. Close to the land. Then came Silent Spring. He was situated to be part of a new Hudson River School of art, a polluted Hudson River School.
In the very early 1970s, it was Dale Chihuly—also known for his exuberant ways—who brought Simpson to Seattle. Chihuly heard Simpson give a talk at the Rhode Island School of Design and drafted Simpson into a plan for a dream school based on the model of the interdisciplinary Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina. In those early days of what became Pilchuck Glass School in the woodsy wilderness of Stanwood, Simpson was head of media, basically video and sound. When the school soon narrowed its focus to glass, Simpson dropped out. "It just didn't interest me." What did was the young, transforming city of Seattle.
In what's maybe his biggest project yet, the City of Seattle just recently chose Simpson as lead artist for the re-creation of the seawall that separates—and connects—the urban core and the whole underwater world of Elliott Bay. He's still in the idea phase, hasn't made drawings yet. But whatever he creates, it won't try to blend in, act natural. After Simpson is finished with the seawall, maybe people will notice, maybe for the first time, that there's a seawall there at all.
No vinyl letters were printed for wall labels in the Frye show. Instead, all of the wall text was handwritten on chunks of drywall salvaged from past exhibitions. In keeping with reusing, reducing, and recycling, some of the sculptures even sit on platforms created out of folded-down sections of the Frye's own walls, exposing beams behind the drywall and creating new views between galleries.
Museums typically keep Simpson outdoors—as at the New Museum in New York in 1983, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, in 1989, and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in 2000 (he doesn't have a dealer or a gallery)—but not the Frye.
He didn't adjust to go inside at the Frye—the Frye adjusted to him.
"We wanted to be Buster while doing Buster," said Frye curator Scott Lawrimore, who likes to call Simpson "the spiritual father of our city." A museum guard said, "We've been Busterized." "Bustified," Simpson interjected, his hands thrust deep inside the wire frame of what he calls his "Venus de Gabion," where he was engaged in a shape puzzle with some chunks of white limestone.
A "gabion" is one of those terms only an engineer or Buster Simpson knows: It refers to the rock-stuffed cages that keep hillsides in place along roads. Simpson has a whole borrowed vocabulary from the utilitarian built environment that he's just waiting to turn into art.
But Simpson's two sides—"poetry" and "utility," as he puts it—are rivals as often as partners. His work is, productively, torn between the two. Take what I see as the "readymade room" at the Frye, a gallery where several of Simpson's sculptures stand alone on pedestals in a clean modernist display befitting Brancusi or a hardware store—meaning they seriously resemble an exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's readymades from a century ago. The readymades were already-made utilitarian objects Duchamp placed in a gallery, rendering them useless, scrambling their meaning entirely, and infuriating everybody, all by doing nothing to "make" the art except adding an art context.
Simpson does make things, and what look like readymades from him are functioning tools. At the Frye, a honing wheel mounted on feet that loudly echoes Duchamp's bicycle wheel on a stool is an actual knife sharpener. His shovel is a shovel is a shovel: Simpson wanted to put one into the hands of each incoming freshman at a snowy college campus in Maine as a response to the college's call for a public commission. Simpson's idea of a monument is a shovel in use.
If Duchamp's readymades signaled that art environments aggressively remove function from objects, Simpson's insistence on functioning art signals the return of the repressed. It is no longer fashionable for a museum to be a rarefied environment, and it is not a coincidence that Simpson is appearing at the Frye in the moment during the museum's life when it's reaching out into the world the most. In recent years, the Frye has hosted performances and installations that have broken through its walls, taking place down the block or out in its reflecting pools. The Frye's Simpson exhibition is a tribute to the person in Seattle who most single-handedly—even if he was working collaboratively—started all this.
And just as those experiments have been thrilling in part for their awkwardness in a traditional museum setting, there's a necessarily awkward fit between Simpson and the Frye. Despite the fact that his installations spill out into streets and head all the way down to the shared clothesline in Post Alley, parts of Simpson can't be contained even in a deconstructed museum. Or they're in there, but you'd have to dig through hours of videos and documentary photographs and written histories and plans to find them.
The same can be said of many late-20th-century artists who don't fit cleanly into categories but attract institutional admiration, attention, and canonization—like Gordon Matta-Clark (sculptor of doomed buildings before they were demolished), Robert Smithson (creator of Spiral Jetty, a swirl of rocks deposited on a remote edge of the Great Salt Lake), and Robert Irwin (whose chaotic garden at the Getty Center in LA is designed to subvert Richard Meier's Valhallic architecture). Those names come up when Simpson talks about his heroes, as does Robert Rauschenberg, the late great pop artist who was an ardent recycler of materials. This spring, Simpson was selected as one of the pilot artists-in-residence at Rauschenberg's 20-acre estate on Captiva Island in Florida.
Simpson's aesthetics are essentially modernist and postmodernist; he speaks of "honesty," of using art to pull back curtains, tell truths. If there's one truth he's interested in, it's probably this: "No matter where you go, it's always turf," he said. "It's always somebody's turf."
Sounds basic, until you consider the difference between, say, Simpson's idea to wrap the Woodstock Dutch elms in silvery material, and the silvery tree made 40 years later by another artist, Roxy Paine, that stands prominently in downtown Seattle today, prettifying the manicured landscape of Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park overlooking Elliott Bay. It's a cool sight, but somewhat blank. Simpson was not included in the park, and he still bemoans its lack of "boogie-woogie," meaning flux, movement, life. The landscape he wants to change, anyway, is your mind.
In the hours leading up to the Frye opening three weeks ago, Simpson was not getting ready. He was running around putting up illegal art at a construction site near the museum. He tacked up a stretch of orange construction netting stamped with the words "POETICALLY CORRECT" in the same font as "DANGER DO NOT ENTER" tape. It was torn down almost immediately, as he later put it, by "some unknown level of authority with a lack of poetic appreciation."
Again, the man is 71 years old.
The same week, 175 miles south of the spot where this fleeting statement was thwarted on the eve of his museum show, something unknown was growing on a Simpson installation in Portland—an installation that's really an endurance project. It's a nurse log he put up in 1991. He had it trucked into downtown from the city's watershed and stationed outside the convention center, where it meets other visitors to the metropolis.
Years later, another nurse log appeared at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, with some significant differences. Still, plenty of people squawked that Simpson got there first. In Seattle, New York artist Mark Dion laid his own nurse log—lifted from another watershed and trucked into this city—inside a glass container. As time goes by, the house grows tight. "It's gonna be one hell of a bonsai project," Simpson said. His only wish to change the Dion log would be to situate it, rather than in the park, at the base of a high-rise tower, "near the citadels of capitalism and commodity, as a perversely nice complement" making its own subversive commentary.
Simpson's 1991 nurse log in Portland sits unencumbered outdoors. Its new growths are free to shoot up into the air as far as they want to go. The original log, meanwhile, gradually disintegrates to form new ground. Natives and invasives are so mixed up together that the habitat is like a new planet; forestry students keep an eye on it for their own research.
Simpson visits it, too. The way he talks, it's clear that he loves his nurse log sculpture, maybe more than any other single thing he's made.
"It continues to feed me," he said. "It's on its own logic. There's a work of art that won't be finished for a thousand years."
May 8, 2013
A 1969 Exhibition on Index Cards
By Jen Graves
When the exhibition 557,087 opened in 1969, John Voorhees, the Seattle Times reviewer, railed against it as "artistic pollution, every bit as annoying and dangerous as that in the air." Voorhees wrote of its curator, "It's hard to think of such a charming slip of a girl as Lucy Lippard as being a revolutionary." Voorhees was, perhaps, a charming slip of a critic.
Today, 557,087 looks like nothing much, just a few black-and-white photographs, a glass case containing rows of index cards with typing and handwriting on them, and a wall label. This may be the first time that SAM has memorialized one of its previous exhibitions by treating it as a work of art in its own right.
The exhibition in question was extraordinary, and is more so with time. This is the first time it's appearing in SAM's galleries since it happened, September 5 to October 5, 1969. It was called 557,087 and was created by New York–based writer and curator Lippard, about whom two books have been released in the last year. One, published by Afterall Books, focuses on Lippard's "numbers exhibitions," each taking the population of its host city as its title. The very first of those was Seattle's 557,087 (1960 US Census figure). The concept traveled to Vancouver, Buenos Aires, and Valencia (California), before touring the US and going to London.
557,087 did not leave behind paintings and sculptures—it left behind a "catalog" of these four-by-six-inch index cards filled out by artists whose names are now the canon from this period. Lippard invited more than 60 artists to submit their proposals on the cards. Volunteers executed most of them. Only a few pieces materialized in the conventional sense—including works by the late Eva Hesse and artist/writer John Perrault—in SAM's contemporary-art "Pavilion," a hall near the former amusement park at Seattle Center (where Chihuly has a showplace now). The rest of the art was scattered about the city or confined to the cards. It included: grease marks five feet long on a floor, one for each letter of the name of the man who engineered the regrade of downtown Seattle (artist: Rafael Ferrer). Paintings of a local landscape, Lake Washington, by local artists (artist: Bruce McLean of Scotland). A provocation: the story of a group of art students led by their professor to chew up, spit out, and ferment a copy of Clement Greenberg's modernist bible, Art and Culture, borrowed from their school's library, leading to the firing of this artist/professor (John Latham). Instructions to remove a chunk of earth 15 feet deep and 100 feet in diameter, making a subtraction from the world rather than adding a new object because "Art is only memory anyway" (artist: Michael Heizer).
"When computers provide artificial memories, our 'private collections' will be unlimited, and the mind will be freer to pursue its own expanding awareness," Lippard wrote in her prescient essay for 557,087, on display on the index cards at SAM. Earlier in the decade, Ernst Gombrich had written, "All art originates in the human mind, in our reaction to the world rather than in the visible world in itself," which Lippard quoted, and which sets the stage for the era of dematerialization, minimalism, and conceptualism.
All people fight when they hear a statement that begins, "All art." From the audience, the Times reported a mixed response, one still perfectly imaginable today. "If anybody else smeared some tar on the floor, they wouldn't get away with it," an unnamed man grunted, while a 26-year-old named Rocky Wilson was quoted to have said, "It puts art on another level, a more real level instead of just pictures hanging on the wall over a mantel." This debate is never-ending.
Some of the ideas and pieces in 557,087 were very good, some were tedious, and some were goofy, but overall, 557,087 was exceptionally of-the-moment and self-aware. Its concept was its largest work, in the same sense that a museum's building can be considered the largest work in its collection. 557,087 presaged what would become forefront cultural concerns of scale and geography, and a rising fascination with the origins of things, from art to people to food. Lippard described McLean's piece featuring local painters' landscapes as "a 'regional art' made by foreigners through remote control," raising associations with colonialism, corporate-style reach, and surveillance, all pressing issues still today.
For Seattle's historically redlined Central District—bankers literally drew red lines around an area and refused to give loans to the African Americans forced to live there—John Baldessari and George Nicolaidis adapted a piece they'd done in San Diego. Titled Boundary, it consisted of black and silver labels attached to telephone poles and street signs demarcating the CD. Seattle had only just voted to end racist housing discrimination in 1968.
Robert Morris's proposal was related to violence, Vietnam, and the way legends blow up. He ordered a shotgun blast at a gallery wall, using "heavy shot in the shells," then a photograph of the wound blown up to an 8-by-10-inch photograph. The exhibition's next venue would hang the photograph, shoot that, and make a larger blowup, enlargements coming at every venue. It makes me think of chauvinism, Niki de Saint Phalle's "shooting paintings" of the early 1960s (she wore a catsuit), Chris Burden's later piece (1971) in which he was shot in the arm as performance, and arena rock.
Should you spend a little time at 557,087, either dismissing this charming slip of an exhibition or turning over the art that's originating in your mind, maybe I could direct you to an additional pleasant surprise. 557,087 is embedded in an exhibition of SAM's permanent collection, a temporary minimalism-through-color-field-painting display full of virtues and curiosities, organized carefully like a book waiting to be read closely. It begins with these lightly described and sketched works, and it culminates in two giant, hot Frank Stellas from the 1960s. Right now, SAM is pushing exhibitions of old European paintings and a supposedly super-hot video display on the museum's facade, which acts more as a movie for the wealthy trustees living in the luxury apartments at the Four Seasons building across the street. Meanwhile, SAM's collection is rarely in this fine a form, and it hardly matters whether the museum thinks that will sell tickets.
March 6, 2013
A Museum, a Family, a Horrific History, and a Fight Right Now
By Jen Graves
Connie Young Yu had no more than $11,000 to buy back her late mother's favorite red robe. The robe came up early in the sale, rising like a flame at the front of a room at Bonhams auction house in San Francisco last December. Embroidered with sprays of peonies, patterned butterflies, and gold medallions, the robe dates back to the Qing dynasty, in the 19th century. Bidding started, and Connie jumped in, but buyers whizzed past Bonhams's low estimate of $8,000, then past Connie's budget. A Chinese businessman bid $15,000. Sold. Just like that, the robe was gone, a half-century after Connie's parents rescued it and sent it to the Tacoma Art Museum to be enshrined as a symbol of reconciliation in the city where the mayor once called Chinese people a "curse" and a "filthy horde."
Losing the robe was the last straw. The Young family—Connie, her brother Al, and her sister Janey—announced a lawsuit against TAM on February 28. The museum had sent the robe to auction along with 131 other robes and jades donated by the Youngs in the 1970s and '80s.
The strands of that single robe stretch from the waning days of imperial China through the American civil rights movements, ending in that San Francisco auction room with the triumph of 21st-century Chinese wealth. The characters are vivid: Al broke the Asian color barrier in race-car driving. Connie is the granddaughter of a widow with bound feet who got locked up under the federal Chinese Exclusion Act. She's also the mother of an Oscar winner and a historian who writes books about the Chinatowns where her great-grandfather once raised money to fund the fighters who tore down the Qing dynasty, scattering imperial cast-offs like the red robe all over the globe for Connie's parents to later find.
The size and scope of the story—even more than the objects themselves—is what TAM underestimated when it set out to sell the Young collection. TAM either didn't know the story's value or didn't carefully consider how to handle its specialness. While the Young material did extremely well at the December auction, yielding $229,466, and is expected to do well again when more of it goes on the block at Bonhams on March 12, that amount of money is not spectacular on the art market—and the one thing both sides agree on is that this isn't about the money anyway. TAM spent two years deciding that building "the premier collection of Northwest art" is the smartest thing it can do with limited resources. The Youngs' unrestricted gift of jades and robes had not even been on display since 1996. It is fair game to be "deaccessioned." The museum did its due diligence, weighing options and contacting heirs—a courtesy, not a requirement, since an unrestricted gift is, legally, exactly that. The museum and family members had three face-to-face meetings and pleasant e-mail exchanges. Only after the auction did Connie and Al raise hell.
TAM director Stephanie Stebich says she was taken by surprise. Legally, it's hard to imagine that the family has a leg to stand on in its quest to stop the next auction and force TAM to transfer what's left of the collection to the Wing Luke or some other Northwest institution. TAM did not violate industry standards. This is an art museum, not a history museum, Stebich pointed out. TAM assessed the aesthetic value of the objects, found them expendable, and decided to sell.
Connie Wolf, director of Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, to which the Youngs gave the other half of their collection, says, "A museum is not in the business of keeping [a work] just because it's worth money." Amen to that. It's also true that privileged donors often mistake public institutions for their own private storehouses.
But do art museums have room to value factors beyond aesthetics? And are the Youngs really that kind of privileged donors?
This was not your typical local-scions-bequeathing-art situation. Connie's parents never lived in Tacoma. They chose Tacoma, at the suggestion of a friend who happened to be affiliated with TAM, because it was the site of the single worst act of anti-Chinese persecution in American history. It was the place where their pride could defeat a legacy.
That legacy was "the Tacoma Method." That's the name other towns gave it afterward, towns that also dreamed of kicking out their entire Chinese populations on a single rainy night, 600 people marched at gunpoint onto outbound trains. It happened in Tacoma on November 3, 1885.
In 1977, when TAM first exhibited the Youngs' objects, Connie wrote her father: "When [Al and I] were milling among the many distinguished citizens of the Northwest at the exhibit, we exchanged comments on the irony of it all, descendants of the discriminatory communities who forced out the Chinese crowding in to see the collection of Imperial robes donated by descendants of long-suffering Chinese pioneers... From a historical overview, the exhibit was a triumph, a sort of sweet victory."
So when you're shipping a bunch of Chinese treasures out of Tacoma, you undervalue factors beyond aesthetics at your own peril.
TAM prides itself on standing up for historically abused communities—see the case of the LGBTQ exhibition Hide/Seek last year. Tacoma was its only West Coast venue. Again, amen. The Young collection, though, is a case of an art museum proceeding legitimately in the art world but stumbling in the wider world where cultural sensitivity matters. Stebich denies telling Connie and Al that the collection was not museum quality, but a screen grab of the museum's own website from late last year describes the material as "not of museum quality" and "mostly tourist keepsakes and mementos."
Stebich says TAM will use some of the money from the Young sales to fund purchases by contemporary artists telling the Chinese American story. Labels on the new pieces would mention the Youngs. But Connie and Al say that has only been proposed recently, and they no longer trust TAM.
Too little, too late is why there were 52 signatories, including prominent community leaders, on a February 26 letter that called for a public meeting at the Asia Pacific Cultural Center in Tacoma. Kathryn Van Wagenen, a signatory who was president of TAM when it moved into its high-profile new home in 2003, says she'd simply like the museum to try to be "gracious," whether they're legally bound or not.
Stebich, meanwhile, is giving statements that will almost certainly make things worse. She told the News Tribune in Tacoma, "We are selling these items to build a collection that helps tell the story about the Chinese in the Northwest through art. Help me understand how Chinese imperial robes do that." But it's easy to imagine how keeping a least a few of the objects donated by this remarkable family would indeed help "tell the story about the Chinese in the Northwest through art"—while honoring the reconciliation gesture.
Stebich said the planned Asia Pacific Cultural Center meeting "was scheduled not in consultation with my schedule, so I have to decline the meeting." She said TAM's board president didn't plan to attend, either. The next auction is set for March 12. The same Chinese collector who bought the red robe has told Connie he's coming back for more.
October 16, 2013
Documenting the Incredible Original Headquarters of Ebony
By Jen Graves
When David Hartt walked into the headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago in 2010 with his cameras, he was an archivist entering the lair of another archivist. He shot photos and videos of rows of encyclopedias of black history. Hardbound volumes of Jet, Ebony, Ebony Jr., Black World, Black Stars. Lovingly tended shelves of first-edition books about John Brown and the Civil War and by Booker T. Washington, individually tied with ribbon. The scenes are introverted, all those words and pictures hidden behind closed covers. But the nature of publishing is to project, and other scenes quickly establish that Johnson Publishing is not an introverted place. It was born ready for its close-up.
In 1971, John H. Johnson built a majestic headquarters. It was the first one on prestigious Michigan Avenue to be owned by black people. Its art and design was unparalleled. Readers got to see it in a 30-page Ebony spread that pictured the vast collection of black African and American art throughout the offices, the futuristic rooms in colors like mauve and tangerine and yellow with custom carpets, and the finishings made of no-expense-spared materials: suede, Hermes leather, marble slabs, hand-woven textiles, zebra wood, lacquer, curved glass, alligator skin dyed Zanzibar red. The wall panels in the elevators changed seasonally. On the 11th floor, the top, there was a sauna. A black florist tended the lobby garden.
Many people felt "not just that the magazines came out of there, but that race was being run there," said Elizabeth Alexander in a talk at the Studio Museum in Harlem last year.
Alexander is author of the book The Black Interior, which includes the essay "The World According to Jet, Or, Notes Toward a Notion of Race-Pride." She had been invited to talk with David Hartt at the Studio Museum because his pictures and video of the Johnson Publishing Company were there in an exhibition called Stray Light.
Stray Light originated in Chicago and now is at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Their hour-long Studio Museum exchange is on YouTube. Reading from her essay, Alexander explained she's a devoted reader of Jet despite that "the Johnsonian model of race-pride" troubles and alienates her in many ways. How, for instance, does "the Johnsonian model of race-pride" make room for difference? How would it accommodate for a black man like Hartt?
Hartt sat next to Alexander at the Studio Museum and explained his relationship to black American pride. "I didn't grow up with it as part of my cultural heritage. I grew up in Montreal with white Jewish parents." He comes across in conversation as the world's least histrionic person; I met him once when he lived in Seattle briefly and showed at Howard House in 2009, and I have virtually no memory of the meeting at all.
After going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hartt and his wife moved to New York, then Detroit, and he stopped making art entirely for almost a decade, feeling like he needed to find a subject that could sustain him over the course of an entire career. Finally, he found one: He would take pictures in places where people come together for an idea, or certain agreed-upon ideals. Utopian communes. Union headquarters. Newspaper offices. Shelters for abused women and children. Think tanks. The place "running" blackness in the US. He would take the ideas as they had been translated into three-dimensional concrete designs and environments, and he would translate those into two dimensions, framed.
For philosophical reasons as well as, one suspects, temperamental ones, Hartt adopts a stance of detachment, of approaching from a distance. He does lots of research, then tries to approach every site new, as if he knows nothing, brings nothing, imposes nothing except the in-the-moment desire to make images of what he sees.
None of his other sites are already as self-consciously visual as Johnson Publishing. This adds layers of meaning, and layers of pleasure. There was added urgency and interest, too—the day Hartt began shooting was the day that Johnson announced it had sold the proud building and was downsizing. The cool Hartt was thrust into the position of unwitting memorialist, which turned this particular project into an adventure story. (It was originally commissioned by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago curator Michael Darling, who also spent a few years in Seattle organizing such exhibitions as Target Practice and Kurt, as in Cobain. Darling connected Hartt to an MCA trustee who finally got Hartt access to the notoriously inaccessible Johnson Publishing headquarters.)
At the Henry Art Gallery, there are four photographs in one small gallery and a video installation in another. The four photographs are large and concerned with the usual two-dimensional variables: framing, focus, decisions about what's in the center versus on the margins. A map is implicitly drawn with crisscrossing roads between territories of oppression, prosperity, and the act of archiving, of saving something more than memory or story. Photography and video are flimsy substitutes for the things they depict.
Hartt says photographs are substantively different from videos. There aren't any people in his photos. Portraiture is for video, he claims. It doesn't feel like it much matters whether you agree. In Ebony's promo images from 1972, it's comically hard to find the people sometimes, they're so camouflaged in fashions that match the corporate vision. Was everyone, on all 11 floors, told what to wear on picture day? Or were their own closets at home already clones of this place? Were they that ideologically aligned with Johnson's project? Visualizing who you are is making pictures out of ideas every day, after all.
In the new footage of the video, present-day workers wear business casual. The environment is a relic; the workers no longer dress like it. We have the sense of getting close to them, poring over the pictures and notes on their desks, reading their full names printed on desk plates—we could google them, maybe, ask for an update since they moved to a new office building.
Yet it's not as if we know them any better than we knew the camouflaged 1972 subjects. Hartt never talks to the people at work around him, and he doesn't transmit the sounds they make. A soundtrack plays instead by Chicago's Nicole Mitchell, a pioneering black woman in jazz. Her music, written for the film, moves with the rhythm of what the camera sees, the agitated wallpaper, the slow, drawn-out meetings seen through layers of glass.
By being deliberately withdrawn and withdrawing, Hartt's pictures produce a nagging desire to know what the artist thinks. But to know what exactly? His opinions on "Johnsonian race-pride," the sheltering of women, and the model of hippie farms as utopias? It seems relevant that Hartt is a Canadian surveying American ideologies in his deadpan work, adopting and playing with the stance of an outsider in part because he is one. It's possible that he either isn't interested in his own opinions on his subjects, or is satisfied not knowing exactly what to think. Maybe he's more interested in questions like, does a photograph imply a commitment? And... commitment to what?
The whole floor of the gallery at the Henry where Hartt's video plays is covered in a custom-made carpet just like one from the old Johnson Publishing Company. Everything is soft underfoot as the movie and its music play, and sometimes the pattern of the carpet runs right up into the same pattern captured in the projected image. You just want to be taken there with it. Is that so much to ask?
September 4, 2013
The 55th Venice Biennale Is a High-Speed Train Very Focused on a Destination, and Prone to Crashing
By Jen Graves
You only get lost in Venice, Italy, if you have an idea of where you want to go. If you attempt focus. At this, Venice will rise up against you. Let's say your desired destination is this one restaurant named after assassins, or this other one where the politicians hang out and the fishes are prepared in the Venetian style. Or maybe your destination is this exhibition by Chinese artists that includes a full-scale replica of the high-speed commuter train that crashed and killed hundreds of people not long ago, with laundry lines of actual workers' clothes dangling above the train replica—not to be confused with that other exhibition by Chinese artists that includes so many artists that looking at it would be like trying to picture the whole of China at once inside your head, so why try.
Instead of whatever destination you have in mind, you will end up inside an old palace along a canal in which young Saudi artists are making jokes about passing for Mexicans while visiting the United States to avoid being apprehended as terrorists. Or you'll turn a corner, go up a flight of stairs decorated for a dead duke, and come upon Manet's sensational 1863 painting Olympia (hey, that is supposed to be in Paris, where it lives) hung next to Titian's sensational 1538 painting Venus d'Urbino (hey, that is supposed to be in Florence, where it lives). Is anything in the world not in Venice during biennale season? Being in Venice during biennale season is like being an infant convinced that what is not in view is gone forever and must be immediately mourned, and yet still not needing to mourn.
It's funny in an enjoyably doomed way, then, that this 55th edition of the Venice Biennale—lasting through November 24—is obsessed with focus, focused on obsession. There is one enormous central exhibition featuring artists from all over, this year organized by a curator named Massimiliano Gioni. He chose as his title The Encyclopedic Palace, which would suggest comprehensiveness, but rather his premise in selecting individual artists seems to be that they are people who have drilled very far down in their core sampling of whatever tiny piece of the universe they love. This involves artists who have cared more about their subject than about being artists.
They include Shakers and Haitian practitioners of voodoo, Catholics who make vows with objects rather than words, and mystic abstract philosopher painters who also happened to be women. Also, social outsiders drawing in soot and spit, or working in the medium of whatever obscenity means at that moment. Tantrics, eccentrics. Or they are artists with formal training who practice devotion to color and paint, or repetition, or YouTube. They are believers in something, all. The something is just not necessarily Art.
It's nice—sometimes nice-looking and sometimes good-feeling. It's both in art by Hilma af Klint, James Castle, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Robert Gober (dollhouses!), Jessica Jackson Hutchins (go, PDX!), Maria Lassnig, Sharon Hayes, Ron Nagle. Oh Ron Nagle, Ron Nagle, Ron Nagle, I have a crush on everything you make and want to cradle it. Seattle artists who would fit right in: Jeffry Mitchell, Matthew Offenbacher, Dawn Cerny, Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Sherry Markovitz, Matt Browning, Sol Hashemi. I've made my lists short, the better to google with.
One also feels, by turns, in The Encyclopedic Palace, that one more tantric repetitive quilted pile of obsessively arranged bits of aged found objects assembled into folksy vehicles or cosmic swirls or miniature houses, and someone might take a match to the whole damn thing. Maybe you. Sometimes one catches the rancid scent of "outsider-ish-looking inside art (there's more and more of this around)," as critic Holland Cotter put it.
Simple gestures mean more amid this noise, expense. Monument to a Monument is the exhibition sponsored by the Ukraine. It contains tiny portraits in matchboxes and sketches of one stray thought each by Gamlet Zinkovsky (one stray thought: "There is no dinner"). Actual big and heavy monuments appear only in flux, being demolished and rebuilt in video by Mykola Ridnyi or hovering spectrally in a holograph by Zhanna Kadyrova. An old man in a bunker—a former spy?—teaches a boy to load a weapon rapidly; to the man's dismay, the boy does not need the skill. The feeling is of a memorial being conducted underground.
Mary McCarthy starts her classic Venice travelogue by admitting that everything has already been said about Venice and yet no one can stop saying it. It's a place of gluttonous layering, a light-footed endless processional you see when new biennale art is shown in a place with old art already on its walls. The old art doesn't get taken down; it stays. Sometimes the lights on it are turned off, so it's there in shadow. Or the priceless Botticelli paintings and porcelain sculptures stay right where they are in the Palazzo Cini, the usual light fully on them, while they're joined by stacks of posters on the floors by the Angolan artist Edson Chagas. You can take a poster for two euros. Each poster is a photograph of debris arranged and shot on the streets of Angola's capital. You can see how popular each poster is by how low the stacks have gotten. Why is a single abandoned sneaker something people want to take home with them so much more than a wooden stool left in a mess of green vines like a barrette in a great head of hair? I took home the vines (plus two others, six euros total).
The last best thing I'll describe is the Romanian pavilion. (Other greats: Britain, Lebanon, and the Chinese show involving the commuter train, which is called Mind-Beating.) Nothing is inside the Romanian pavilion except five performers. They've picked a list of artworks from past Venice Biennales. They re-create these artworks by acting them out. I saw them perform Santiago Sierra's 2003 installation; Sierra blocked the entrance to his Spanish pavilion to anyone who didn't have a Spanish passport. The Romanians stood in a row across the entrance to their building. A man came by and wanted in. "Only if you have a Romanian passport," they said. He did not, and left. That bit of history reinterpreted, they disassembled the line and moved on to the next.
August 21, 2013
The Unmarketed Paintings of Ruthie V.
By Jen Graves
Ruthie V. has a cool name, but she is not a cool artist. First, the name: She says it's just what people have always called her (her full name is not a secret; it's Sarah Ruth Vergin). Now for the rest. Her website is forthcoming about her work as a "color consultant": She will be your home or office decorator if you would like that. Curators everywhere can be heard gasping.
On top of this, for anyone who visits her solo show this month at Shift Studio in Pioneer Square, she'll do an on-the-spot portrait painting, or snap a picture if you'd rather pick up your painting later: She'll be your caricaturist-on-the-fly, like a boothie at a street fair. Furthermore, she's giving them away for free. For free. Does she not value herself? My god!
And when you inquire about the inspiration for her collection of 30 new paintings—some depicting sophisticated scenes, others sentimental sap-fests like cats and dogs ("This was me trying to see: Can I do pet portraits? Yes. Yes, I can")—she'll name-check Vuillard. The name barely rises out of the great fog of French Painters of the Past, not because he is mediocre, but because his domestic interiors were never absolutely the thing either.
The fact remains that Ruthie V. has made some very good paintings, and you should know about her.
You might recall that a few years ago a group of Leipzig painters became the darlings of the art world, traveling the globe with their East-German-hermit-mythology intact. They were reinventing representational painting was the word. Some of their paintings, featured locally at the Frye Art Museum, were tremendously good, so satisfying on so many levels. But we must acknowledge that the seductive narrative that linked them together was part of their appeal, and this is what Ruthie V. does not have. It is okay. Ruthie V. provides an example of what an artist without much calculation is up to, and many artists are without calculation. Not as many are also this good.
Ruthie moved from Bellingham a year ago after meeting a man she's about to marry. This is relevant information because her new works appear under the title Domestic: Soul of an Interior, a phrase from her Vuillard readings that reflected her state of mind as she prepared for her second Seattle solo (her first was at Shift in 2011). Google this phrase and you find, on VictorianWeb.org, a link to a piece of writing about "Domestic interiors as extensions of the feminine soul." Now we're no longer a bunch of Victorians, but extending your feminine soul into the wide world is also not a great marketing strategy in the competitive, intellectualized realm of contemporary art. Ruthie rides again.
Domestic is, in fact, more sedate than Ruthie's past works, which have been larger and brighter. Here, in an enlarged, new Shift Studio space (still in the Tashiro Kaplan building), her two-room exhibition is roughly divided into two parts. One side is her portrait studio. An easel is set up, and pieces of paper bearing watercolor faces, proliferating constantly as more people visit and request them, are tacked onto the wall. What you will notice immediately is that these free takeaways are highly refined, though they were obviously made quickly. The shading and coloring are soft, detailed, and deft. In a few cases, you have the distinct feeling that this, here, is the minimum number of strokes possible to transfer this human onto this paper. It will come as no surprise to learn that Ruthie studied, in part, in Japan.
That sometimes breathtaking economy applies in the other half of the gallery, too, where the oils on linen and oils on canvas hang tidily on perfectly lightly toned gray-brown walls. Backdrop muting is no accident; again, Domestic conjures comfort, which sometimes feels unsurpassably pleasurable, and sometimes induces yawning, and Ruthie is representing both her experiences. Maybe the greatest painting here is Sunday, a dusky thing 24 inches tall and 18 inches wide. It dryly delivers a bedroom scene seen through an open doorway. A man is lying on the bed straight ahead, reading, but because the position of the open door obscures him partly, he is a headless man. A headless man enjoying an extremely relaxing late Sunday morning—what a thing. And the strangeness is contained entirely within the image, invented by visual means. (You also don't want to miss the simply great glass doorknob. Pure visual art is what.)
The other maybe-greatest painting here is almost, almost too close to Matisse. It's another man in bed, this one still asleep, buried in a comforter that's a red-orange sea of curving lines and a barely sketched white flower pattern. The painting is a little smaller than the other one, or maybe just seems it, is unframed, and its tension is between the tenderness and the riot of color. Again, perfectly keyed and entirely on the surface for anyone to see. Ruthie could probably sell this one in a minute for a bundle. It's the heart of the show, she admits. Its label is the only one that reads "NFS": not for sale.
January 24, 2014
Dear Pulitzer Prize Jurors,
The conventional wisdom is that important art stories happen in New York or Los Angeles. That’s true, but not the whole truth. Conventional wisdom also says print publications need to be ruthlessly lean and nimble these days, and that something like a full-time art critic at an alternative newsweekly in Seattle should be the first extravagance jettisoned. The Stranger disagrees. We have the only remaining full-time art critic on staff at any newsweekly in America, Jen Graves, and her exceptional work makes it obvious that art criticism, in the right hands, is essential, everywhere. Ms. Graves is a distinct and powerful force in this city, and has been instrumental in turning the region that gave the world Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing, and Macklemore into a site of conversations about fine art that ripple across the nation.
In 2013, for example, The Stranger’s art critic Jen Graves reported for the first time that Seattle artist Charles Krafft views the Holocaust as “a deliberately exaggerated myth,” which collectors, curators, and people familiar with his Nazi-themed ceramic works were surprised to learn. As you will see, Ms. Graves treaded lightly where sensationalism would have been easy, inviting a broad consideration of how artists’ personal lives enter assessments of their works. The New Yorker’s blog, WNYC’s Studio 360, the local NPR affiliate KUOW, and other outlets reported on Ms. Graves’ revelation and her examination of the issues it brought up. The article also went international, discussed in Toronto-based newspaper The Globe and Mail and on Rue 89, a news web site owned by the Paris-based weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. Later, Ms. Graves was invited to speak about Krafft and the surrounding controversy at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.
At many daily newspapers, the job of art critic is separate from the job of arts reporter, but The Stranger doesn’t have that luxury—and, luckily, has in Ms. Graves a critic who knows how to report, having spent six years as a reporter and critic at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington. The result is a strong and distinctive voice. Ms. Graves’s criticism often leans toward the investigative. Her features are hybrids of several kinds of journalistic writing: profiles that are also think pieces that are also calls to action. One such example is “Shooting and Capturing,” a profile of the artist Matika Wilbur, who’s undertaken to photograph every Native American tribe in the United States while righting some of the wrongs Edward Curtis perpetrated 100 years ago. Another example is “The Outside Artist,” about the celebrated career of a Seattle legend, Buster Simpson, who in the 1970s was one of the first artists to work on a new model for public art that prioritized site-specificity and integration into the environment—the idea that public art can be more than just decoration. As Ms. Graves writes in her critique of Simpson’s first museum retrospective, Simpson’s ideas have spread across the country and have expanded the notion of what public art can be. Simpson’s legacy of shaping downtown Seattle continues as he’s working on the largest public art project in the history of City of Seattle, a complex restoration and revitalization of the downtown waterfront.
Though Ms. Graves’ investigative talents are formidable, so is her instinct to understand. When an artist flagrantly lied to her to get publicity, Ms. Graves wrote a surprisingly sympathetic analysis of how artists are pressured to fabricate their lives and edit their works (“The Lies of the Artists”). The piece roamed from a ski gondola in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of Art to a studio on a horse farm in Washington State to the trashcans of Chuck Close and Agnes Martin. Ms. Graves chose not to name the duplicitous artist, thwarting the publicity-seeking and concentrating instead on the multitude of issues that such prevarication raised.
When designer and artist Mark Mitchell created a body of work of rococo funerary clothes and staged a museum art installation with live models acting as corpses, Ms. Graves reported on the tears of the attendees, the impact on the surrounding works in the museum’s existing collection, Mitchell’s own survival of the AIDS crisis, and the questions inherent in the exhibition itself. In that piece, “Don’t Die,” Ms. Graves eloquently investigates the very relationship between art and death, locating as she so often does the transformative ideas at the heart of the subject matter.
Part of the reason Ms. Graves’s reviews and essays spread so widely is that in reading them, art never seems like a niche luxury, a topic of interest only to those already initiated, wealthy, or powerful. She summons discussion about the broadest issues, even questioning accepted practices in the art world. When a local art museum planned to divest itself of an entire collection originally donated to redress the brutal history of Chinese people in Tacoma, Ms. Graves asked, “But do art museums have room to value factors beyond aesthetics?” She explored the dilemmas in the way permanent collections are shaped, and her writing helped persuade the Tacoma Art Museum to withdraw some of the textiles from auction.
With her unique blend of reportorial fearlessness and art-historical insight, Ms. Graves examines single works of art, massive public projects, and the conventions and behaviors of cultural institutions. Her writing is brave and amiable, reflecting strong but nuanced opinions. Readers trust her to provide context, conviction, and pleasure. In her hands, art criticism is living, breathing, unruly, majestic, activist; her writing is as powerful and surprising as the work it investigates.
We proudly nominate Jen Graves for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. If you have any questions, please feel free to call me at [redacted].
Christopher Frizzelle
Editor in Chief, The Stranger
Winners
Prize Winner in Criticism in 2014:
Inga Saffron
For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise.
Criticism
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2014:
Mary McNamara
For her trenchant and witty television criticism, engaging readers through essays and reviews that feature a conversational style and the force of fresh ideas.
The Jury
The Jury
Alisa Solomon(Chair )
professor, Graduate School of Journalism
Johanna Keller
director, Goldring Arts Journalism Program, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication
Debra Leithauser
publisher
Michael Phillips
film critic
Jeff Weinstein
critic
Winners in Criticism
Philip Kennicott
For his eloquent and passionate essays on art and the social forces that underlie it, a critic who always strives to make his topics and targets relevant to readers.
Wesley Morris
For his smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and the big-screen box office.
Sebastian Smee
For his vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation.
Sarah Kaufman
For her refreshingly imaginative approach to dance criticism, illuminating a range of issues and topics with provocative comments and original insights.
2014 Prize Winners
Donna Tartt
A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.
Annie Baker
A thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.
Alan Taylor
A meticulous and insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to the British side as potential liberators.
Megan Marshall
A richly researched book that tells the remarkable story of a 19th century author, journalist, critic and pioneering advocate of women's rights who died in a shipwreck.