The Seattle Art Museum, with Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man. Seattle Art Museum curator Trevor Fairbrother. Henry Art Gallery curator Sheryl Conkleton. Photo Raymond Gendreau. The Henry Art Gallery, under construction. Photo John Stamets. PICA executive director Kristy Edmunds.

seattle: breaking ground zero by Marilu Knode I recently relocated to Seattle, leaving Los Angeles (where I worked at a museum) and its vibrant, sometimes frenetic art scene. What I knew about Seattle was general enough--the inescapable beacon of Northwest mystics Morris Graves and Mark Tobey; Dale Chihuly's glass world and the Pilchuck school he founded (Tina Oldknow's book on Pilchuck is due this fall); a plethora of public art; and independents Jacob Lawrence, Gary Hill and others who aren't necessarily identified with the region. Pop culture paints the city's image with a veneer of grunge, heroin use and teen runaways. Seattle is also a corporate town, with technology-titan Microsoft poised on the east side of Lake Washington, waiting to take over the world (more on that later). And I have to ask, what's with the tattoos and piercings everyone seems to have? A vibrant renewal of Native American culture? Where do they fit in a town known for coffee, rain and teen angst? When Donald Young moved his gallery from Chicago to Seattle several years ago, people were shocked. Was it a vote of confidence in the Seattle art world or the city's restaurants? (Who would have thought that quality of life would become an issue in the arts in the 1990s?) Perhaps most importantly, from my perspective as a curator and art writer, is the Seattle scene self-conscious enough to critically define what is both specific and relative about this local community? What about the long-term resident artists, dealers and collectors in the established scene--are they committed to a contemporary art that defines something specific about our contemporary world? I wanted to jump into the "there" in Seattle, and as luck would have it, a panel was scheduled debuting the area's six--yes, six--new curators. Organized by Seafirst Gallery director Peggy Weiss and moderated by Regina Hackett, a long-time Seattle Times critic, the panel drew a 300+ crowd of largely thirtysomethings--polite, wedged into the warm, maze-like space, grabbing seats on chairs or on top of some of the sculpture in the space--models for public art, as it happened. The overflow crowd, myself included, opted for the back room with a clear view of a monitor with good sound. I got the sense that everyone was looking for that spark that would signal critical mass had been reached, and hear the blueprint for our visual life in the coming year. First to speak was former Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Trevor Fairbrother, now deputy director and modern art curator at the Seattle Art Museum (succeeding Patterson Sims, who is back in New York as education curator at the Museum of Modern Art), who promised that he would buy as much art as possible! Describing his tastes as catholic, Fairbrother said his "number one priority" is to curate shows of local and international import--good luck!--and to begin a "Focus" series to spotlight local artists. Sheryl Conkelton, a former photo curator at MOMA and the L.A. County Museum, is new senior curator at the Henry Art Gallery. Her past credits include LACMA's recent Annette Messager survey, and the tuned-in "Deliberate Investigations" group show there in 1989. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Conkelton defined the parameters of the curator's responsibilities--to be everything to everyone at all times. She succeeds Chris Bruce, who has become director of the new Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates gallery near Pioneer Square. Bruce will be a hard act to follow; he organized many of Seattle's high-profile shows, including the Gary Hill retrospective and the Ann Hamilton installation that represented the U.S. at the 1991 São Paulo Bienal. M & N, by the way, is certain to be an important addition to the local scene; so far it has shown work by Nicholas Africano, Hannelore Baron and L.A. painter Dennis Hollingsworth, among others. The third member of the panel was Kristy Edmunds, curator at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum during 1990-95 and now founding director and curator of the new Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA). Edmunds has managed to raise a budget of $165,000 a year, with no money from government sources and with no permanent exhibition facility, to present shows and performances at various spaces around town. PICA's next project, "Traversing Territory," will feature four sections by four area curators (to be announced) examining contemporary art in the Northwest, a region that for this purpose includes Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. Edmunds' remarks made a significant impression because of her clear advocacy of art and artists--PICA has become a significant voice in the alternative community scene. Cece Noll, the new permanent collections curator at the Tacoma Art Museum, expressed a commitment to adding the works of Northwest artists to her collection, and noted that it is the recommendation of other artists that helps drive her thinking. When someone asked what she thought of Bill Gates's extensive purchases of reproduction rights of art works, Noll replied, tellingly, that she wished he would spend more money buying real art. Speaking of Gates, you'll all remember how in the '80s in L.A., the Getty Trust's huge fortune was frequently mentioned, hopefully, as the solution to the financial problems of various local arts groups. Up here in Seattle, it's the M-word that's on everyone's lips--Microsoft. Microsoft did recently donate money to the Seattle Art Museum (for education), and has a corporate collection that contains around 2,000 works spread around 45 buildings on its corporate campus. But clearly, such efforts clearly failed to sate their constituency. Someone even remarked that Microsoft should sponsor a computer-art festival. The Seattle Times recently ran an article speculating on the long-term philanthropic impact of Microsoft stockholders and staff--but none of the charities mentioned were visual arts organizations. The Tacoma Art Museum has been hyping its hip-quotient with music-world input, hosting the touring "It's Only Rock 'N Roll" show as well as the promising "Strats, Studios and the Seattle Sound: An Experimental Music Project," the first outing of the Experimental Music Project (which was to have been a Seattle-based Jimi Hendrix Museum but broadened its scope--I would assume to broaden its audience) . Although located outside of Seattle proper, the Tacoma Art Museum seems able to scoop larger institutions with some of its curatorial choices. The Portland Art Museum's new curator of contemporary art, Kathryn Kanjo, spoke of her experience at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, where as curator she found herself part of the celebrated 1993 "Art Rebate" controversy. For a multisite exhibition examining the San Diego-Tijuana border community, artists David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco handed out $10 bills to undocumented workers as a reward for their role as taxpayers and for doing the low-wage jobs that keep prices down. Needless to say, the resulting howls of outrage from opportune politicians caused the National Endowment for the Arts to ban the use of any of its grant funds for the work. Kanjo insisted that institutions have an obligation to take risks to keep themselves honest despite the potential for censorship at either a local or federal level. Last but not least was Michael Crane, senior curator at the Bellevue Art Museum (BAM). BAM is housed in a small, carpeted space on the third floor of a mall in Bellevue, and has a lively exhibition history, including a Joseph Beuys multiples show and an exhibition of Edward Kienholz's merry-go-round. Drop-in traffic is virtually nonexistent, though, and the museum is planning to move to a new, stand- alone building. Crane gave slight pause to the audience when he confirmed that the museum would probably deaccession its entire collection of 250 works upon its eventual move. My own curiosity about the local community was partially answered when I visited Crane's juried Northwest Annual, which started as a crafts fair 50 years ago. The show included some beautiful if strictly formal photography, some nice furniture and not much glass (surprising--is that because the curator juried them out or because glass artists aren't in need of this opportunity?) The most interesting work was by a collective of artists called Soil, recent art-school graduates who have opened their own cooperative gallery. Their frenetic installation was a group effort of some 24 individual artists. Over-all, few if any specific exhibition ideas were mentioned by panelists mainly because no one asked. This, to me, would have been critical to learning each curator's predilections and how they understand this community and context. So, this is what we can expect: Conkelton, Noll, and Fairbrother's first shows will be from their respective permanent collections, with Conkelton also programming a new Media Gallery and "a dramatic two-story space" in the Charles Gwathmey-designed, expanded Henry Art Gallery, which opens in April 1997. Kanjo's fall show is of L.A.-based artist Diana Thater and Michael Crane's is of Roger Shimomura. As curators for the two most visible Seattle institutions, Fairbrother and Conkelton can be expected to suffer considerable pressure to balance national and international artists with local talent, the bane of curators everywhere. In this community where "Northwest" is applied liberally as an artist description, I have to wonder how it will turn out. Some have mentioned to me their sense of a lull in the arts here--alternately ascribed to leadership changes at the museums, the Henry Art Gallery's being closed for the last year or even the lay-offs at Boeing, an important regional employer. Or is Seattle is reaching for the next visible plateau? I personally am banking on the hope that Seattle is poised, as was Los Angeles two decades ago, to make a big splash in the arts. Join us next time for answers to the questions: What's in Seattle's water that produces Bill Gates and Peter Norton? Who's writing about art in Seattle, and what's being said? Despite NAFTA, how many ideas and artists flow between Vancouver and Seattle? And my final query: is bad painting worse than bad glass art? MARILU KNODE is a curator reinventing her life in Seattle at bennknode@earthlink.net.