Hurry! You could be the winner of 2 tickets to tomorrow night’s season opening of the SAM Film Noir Series! Help SAM celebrate thirty-three years of presenting some of the world’s best films in this genre. Enjoy the feature film “Nightmare Alley” and immediately afterwards join in the special opening night festivities.
From a crochet party to Truckasaurus – dancing under the stars to cool new art – Sam Remix is tomorrow! It’s been a year since we’ve taken the party outside, and we can’t wait for the festivities at the Olympic Sculpture Park. Take a look at the line-up.
I’ve got your tickets, too – one pair to be exact. Wanna win them? Read More
An art museum is often fittingly described as “a collection of collectors,” for each is founded on the gifts of magnanimous individuals who loved art and built personal collections that became an invaluable public resource.
The same can be said about library book collections, too—they represent the personal interests of individual readers. This is especially the case with the American art book collection found within the other collections of the Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library at SAM downtown. The museum’s founding director, Dr. Richard Fuller, took a special interest in building a reference library to enhance public knowledge of the city’s art collection, and his tenure was marked by yearly growth of the book collection in all areas, through purchases, gifts, and exchanges with other libraries. Over the years, the library grew in relationship to the growth of individual curatorial departments, with American art thus little represented, since American art was not actively collected or exhibited at SAM.
Photo by JiaYing Grygiel
Photo by JiaYing Grygiel
Photo by JiaYing Grygiel
Photo by JiaYing Grygiel
— JiaYing Grygiel, admissions representative
July and August books are all about American artists.
August is American Indian Heritage Month. We are excited about the upcoming exhibition on native Quileute art and artists: Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves. This is an excellent opportunity to talk about a number of new additions to the library collections to support the works in this exhibition.
A small Native community, knit together by ancient beliefs, living in their ancestral homelands—a remote coastal village, ringed with primordial forests and in the shadow of Mt. Olympus—seems like a fitting scenario for a supernatural story line. Cast as shape-shifting werewolves in the Twilight saga books and films, opposite a band of sophisticated vampires, the Quileute really do have ties to wolves—but not werewolves! Quileute oral traditions trace their distinguished ancestry back to myth time when the powerful transformer, Kwa-ti, changed a pair of wolves into the first Quileute people. Thus began a long association with the wolf. I don’t know if Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, knew this but her mention of the mysterious Quileute tribe and an ancient treaty with vampires catapulted their small nation into notoriety.
As a special “thank you” to our Facebook fans and Twitter followers, we’d like to let you in on an advance opportunity, otherwise only available to museum members.
You can reserve your tickets for the Picasso exhibition NOW – one week before ticket sales open to the general public! Also, for a limited time, we will waive the $3 transaction fee when you buy Picasso tickets online.
I started volunteering with the McCaw Foundation Library at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in October of 2007. Since then I’ve applied to, attended, and graduated from, the University of Washington’s Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) program. These two experiences have been intertwined from the start.
Two weekends ago, on the gloomiest of Saturday afternoons, I had the pleasure of participating in Gretchen Bennett and D.W. Burnam’s “Unconventional Portraits” workshop on songwriting. Created in conjunction with the Kurt exhibition and Gretchen’s video installation I don’t blame you, the artists put together a day of vigorous writing exercises for those who participated.
I didn’t get an entry in for May, so you’re getting a double-whammy of book highlights this month!
June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month. Many artists acknowledge, raise awareness of or define their own sexuality through their artistic practice. We have a number of books in our libraries that address the art, intersections, relationships and crossroads of the LGBT community.
TASTE Events
And more!
And, put that wallet away! Food, beer and wine are all covered in your ticket price.
It’s not too late to buy tickets. Promo code GETOUT! gets our fans and followers 25% off.
William Dalrymple’s new book with this title just became available in the U.S. a couple of days ago. As intriguing, illuminating and playful as his previous books (The Last Mughal, White Mughals, City of Djinns and more), it is also a mix of historical storytelling, travel adventures, and deep insight.
We are lucky enough to have him coming to speak next Thursday, June 24, at 7 pm at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, thanks to Elliott Bay Books and Random House.
Mudhoney’s playing at Party in the Park at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park next Friday and we’re getting so excited!
I just sweet-talked the party organizers into giving me a pair of tickets to give away (that’s a $200 value, folks), and I’d like to use the opportunity to spread the love to our Twitter followers and Facebook fans.
They’re $75 today. They’ll be $100 on Wednesday.
Buy your tickets now!
You should be there. You really don’t want to miss it.
The SAM Next Heide Hinrichs installation Borrowed tails closes this Sunday. In conjunction with the closing we wanted to publish a conversation between the exhibition curator, Marisa Sanchez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and the artist Heide Hinrichs.
Mannequin: a form representing the human figure used esp. for displaying clothes
Mountmaker: An individual who conceives, fabricates and installs specialized hardware for the display, security, and earthquake mitigation of works of art for museums, galleries, and private collections.
The need to revive our mannequin building program this last year coincided with a second meeting of museum mount makers this May in Washington D.C. A call for papers was impetus to document my first efforts and learning process within a twenty minute presentation format. Shelly Uhlir, exhibit specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian put together a two day conference involving 200 participants, presenters and posters. All of the Smithsonian Museums were available for behind the scenes tours.
Last Friday, June 4th, SAM Remix was held at SAM Downtown. With a sold-out crowd of over 2,000 people (many of them in wigs), art-making, music, tours and more activated every corner of the building. All night long in South Hall, a playlist curated by Kevin Cole, senior programming manager and DJ at KEXP 90.3 FM, responded to the exhibitions kurt and love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death – Andy Warhol Media Works. Cole crafted this eclectic playlist to include everything from Grace Jones to Le Tigre, while KEXP DJ El Toro gave a “My Favorite Things” tour in the galleries and DJ Riz spun beats in the Forum. Visit The KEXP blog to see the entire tracklist and to hear a sample of the music from Friday night.
The next Remix will be held on Friday, August 27th at the Olympic Sculpture Park from 8 pm–12 am. Buy your tickets online early before it sells out!
Caroline Walker, Education & Public Programs Coordinator
SAM Exhibition Designer, Chris Manojlovic, recently returned from two weeks in Japan, where he and Collection Care Manager, Julie Creahan, were traveling with SAM’s exhibition, Luminous Jewels: Masterpieces of Asian Art from the Seattle Art Museum. The show, comprising highlights from SAM’s Asian art collection, is currently on tour in Japan. As couriers, Chris and Julie’s role was to oversee the safe handling of the collection during its de-installation and packing at one venue, transportation, and installation at the next host institution. This is correspondence we received from Chris when he was on the road.
Family Fun workshop participants age 5-12 and their guardians explore Heide Hinrichs installation, Borrowed Tails, with teaching artist Ben Waterman. For these young people and their families this was the first time viewing and making art in response to a contemporary art installation. The potential confusion that occurs when entering an artful space such as Hinrich’s installation was short lived for these youngsters and quickly turned to wonder as they searched for clues and discovered the latent connections within the exhibition. The excitement rose as the group approached the Chase Open Studio to create their own installations.
Using similar materials as Hinrichs, children play and work at their own installations. Photo: Nate Herth
The creation of a collaborative installation asked children to consider the choices of others as well as their own. Photo: Nate Herth
Nate Herth, Museum Educator, Teen, Family & Community Programs
Nothing is more rewarding to a museum educator than seeing the positive impact of your programs on students. During the six month run of Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act more than 9,300 students visited the SAM’s galleries and experienced Calder’s work in person. Students learned about how he used geometry and math to create beautify balanced sculptures and created their own works of art out of wire and recycled materials in the museum’s art studio spaces. Here are some of our favorite thank you notes and quotes from students who visited the exhibition.
When you are in Seattle and the weather changes from 65 and sunny to thunderstorms and lighting within the hour, you know it’s…SIFF time! Otherwise known as the time of year when you most want to go into a movie theatre and stop trying to figure out if summer has arrived yet (it hasn’t). If you are as overwhelmed as I am by the 250+ page book of films that SIFF has put out, you’ll want to peruse other people’s lists of “must-see” movies, like this one, focused on the theme of visual arts. As suspected, they mostly fall into the documentary category, but there’s at least one other mixed in. Enjoy! And let me know which ones I forgot – I got a little bleary-eyed by page 235.
As SAM’s summer exhibitions Kurt and love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death—Andy Warhol Media Works opened last week, the Adult Public Programs team has been working hard to get ready for all of the affiliated lectures, performances, tours and June 4th SAM Remix. The simultaneity of these two exhibitions is exciting from a programmatic standpoint because we have the opportunity to use educational experiences to explore some of the conceptual connections between works in both. One of the projects I have focused on developing in recent months is a set of three classes that are part of our adult workshop series “SAM Creates.”
Kurt and love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death — Andy Warhol Media Works, two upcoming special exhibitions, open two weeks from today. Here is “Why Kurt?” the first of a series of 6 videos featuring local artists whose work is central to the exhibition, as well as KEXP DJ and Seattle Weekly columnist Hannah Levin and Jacob McMurray, senior curator at EMP I SFM. This video gets to the heart of the exhibition, articulating Kurt Cobain’s historical impact on our culture, and zeroing in on the influence he has had on artists working today.
April is the month when we celebrate Earth Day.
Earth Day was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970. Interestingly, Nelson announced his intent to have a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment – which led to the first “earth day” – in the spring of 1970 at a conference in Seattle in September 1969. (Source: EarthLink.)
Earth Day gives us a great excuse to look at books and videos in our library collections that focus on environmentalism and land-focused art.
Make your voice heard – there’s a local opportunity for one of 25 eligible historic locations to be granted $1 million dollars by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation through a joint initative called Partners in Preservation. The cash is distributed according to an on-line voting system – according to the PIP website, “At the end of the voting period, the site with the most votes is guaranteed funding from a total of $1 million that American Express will give away to support the preservation of historic places in the Seattle-Puget Sound area.” There are so many great projects – it’ll be hard to narrow down just one.
When a natural disaster strikes, like the recent earthquake in China1, saving human lives is naturally the first concern. In the aftermath however, the loss of cultural artifacts and historic sites can be devastating to communities as well. Art and architecture provide evidence of our shared histories and give us a foundation on which to build a common identity. Living in Seattle, an area of the world prone to seismic activity, one might ask what Fremont would be like without its troll, or the Seattle skyline without the Space Needle? Hopefully, we will never know.
Those who went to the Meany Hall concert of Pakistani musician Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in 1993 will still remember the thrill of hearing his voice and his group—with the audience dancing, and dollar bills being thrown onto the stage! It was a taste of the power of qawwali, the musical tradition of Sufis in Pakistan and India.
Sometimes a seemingly simple task like sending out an invitation can end up involving people on the other side of the planet.
