Find Posts By Topic

What we’re reading this week

Our weekly round-up of arts and culture news in the greater Seattle area.

Arts in the News

Art Space and Race: How did affordable artist housing in Seattle’s least-white neighborhoods end up more than 80 percent white?

“Demand for artist housing in Seattle is incredible.There are a thousand artists on the waiting list for Hiawatha and Tashiro-Kaplan. The TK opened in 2004 in Pioneer Square. Hiawatha opened in 2008. Both were built and are owned and operated by Artspace, the go-to nonprofit developer of artist space across the country.” – Jen Graves, The Stranger | October 16th, 2013

Seattle’s Disappearing Bookstores: A recovering used book clerk laments the steady disappearance of a last great place for meandering 

“In the last year and a half, the steady disappearance of used bookstores accelerated with at least eight prominent closures—the Book Kennel, Renaissance Books, Inner Chapters, the Capitol Hill Half Price Books, Bookworm Exchange, Once Sold Tales, Balderdash Books and now, thanks to the purchase of the Melrose Building, Minta’s Spine and Crown—with no stores taking their places.” – Charles Fischer, Seattle Magazine | October 2013

Parklet versus Parking

PARKLET-2“Off the corner of East Olive Way and East Howell Street, situated directly in front of Montana, sits an oddity for both Capitol Hill and Seattle. Where there was once a single parking space, there is now a wooden, open-air construct, built upon a slight ramp that’s lined with seating and small plants. At first glance, the space looks like a new porch for Montana, but upon closer inspection, it’s clear that this is something different. The small wooden space is, in fact, Seattle’s first “parklet,” a small public area that, as the name suggests, acts as mini-park extending from the sidewalk.” – Tyler Mangrum, Capitol Hill Times | October 10, 2013
(Photo by Gina Luna)

Art Event Reviews around Seattle

SAM’s Peru show looks beyond Inca treasure to whole culture | Seattle Art Museum

“In the new show at the Seattle Art Museum, “Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon,” these older indigenous societies dominate half the space in an exhibit that covers 3,000 years of art and cultural history in 300-plus artifacts. And that makes the exhibition something never seen in Seattle before.” – Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times | October 17th, 2013

‘Moms’ Mabley tribute show deftly blends humor, history | Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center

“It’s a reincarnation! When Josephine Howell steps on the stage, she is Jackie “Moms” Mabley. She wears Moms’ habitual house dresses, patterned shirt-jackets, floppy hats, bedroom slippers and socks. And she’s here to tell it like it is, in one funny story after another.” — Nancy Worssam, Seattle Times | October 18th, 2013

Lamps Meninas — an installation inside an installation — on 15th Ave E 

IMG_2488-400x266The second component of a long-running project to keep an empty Capitol Hill restaurant space active and interesting until the development that will replace it is ready to dig in, the Lamps Meninas installation is now illuminating its corner of 15th Ave E and E Mercer following its art-walk unveiling last week… Artist Jennifer Zwick — and son — were on hand to flip the switch on the latest phase in the project that started with the Boxed Up Installation transforming the former Chutney’s restaurant.” – jseattle, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog | October 17th, 2013

(Photo by Alex Garland)

Visual Arts: Tales From the City / Two photographers put a different frame on our built environment  | Henry Art Gallery

“When two separate shows open at the same time, both centered on photography and running in the same museum, one wants to make connections. However, the Henry is currently featuring a pair of very different artists. David Hartt is in mid-career, while Ray K. Metzker has almost retired his camera at age 82.”- Brian Miller, Seattle Weekly | October 15, 2013

Opening Nights: Broke-ology  | Seattle Public Theater at the Bathhouse

“An ill, aging parent determined to stay in the old family home. Two grown sons pulled in opposite directions—one to stay close (with a pregnant girlfriend), the other hoping to stay away. The King household happens to be black in Nathan Louis Jackson’s ghost-haunted 2008 family drama, set in Kansas City, Kansas, though the pressures felt inside are universal.” – Brian Miller, Seattle Weekly | October 8, 2013

The Walworth Farce’: Perplexing, twisted perfection | New Century Theatre

“Talk about a repetition compulsion: For the first half of “The Walworth Farce,” New Century Theatre’s latest adventure, a father and his two grown sons run through the lines of the play they reenact day after day – an absurd, antic ritual involving a mock procession with a cardboard coffin, constant prop swaps, dizzying identity changes and a hidden “fortune” of shredded Monopoly money.” – Thomas May, Crosscut | October 17, 2013

Visceral Video: Interstitial Theatre Rejects the Screen-Saver Stuff  | Interstitial Theatre

art2-570“It started in a closet. The closet was at the bottom of a flight of stairs leading down from a lobby in Belltown. In this lobby is a tiny but energetic art gallery called Form/Space Atelier. In 2010, Kira Burge had just moved to Seattle after finishing a degree in fibers and textiles at the University of Oregon, and she was gallery-sitting at Form/Space when she complained to owner Paul Pauper, “There’s no place for video art in Seattle.” “Well, you could show in my closet,” Pauper said.” – Jen Graves, The Stranger | October 16th, 2013

(Photo courtesy of Interstitial Theatre)