pike place market Archives

Muse/News: Provoking Prints, Artful Trash, and Untold Stories

Rachel Eggers on Aug 21 2023

SAM News

“Visually astounding, thought-provoking.” That’s Kai Curry for NW Asian Weekly reviewing Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec, now on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Get over to beautiful Volunteer Park to see these stunning prints!

And Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through September 10. Check out recent mentions in Seattle Medium, Crosscut, and Seattle Met.

Have you gotten your tickets to SAM Remix yet? It’s this Friday! It’s The Ticket’s top pick.

Local News

Via Paul de Barros of the Seattle Times: “Peek inside KNKX’s new Seattle home by Pike Place Market.”

The Seattle Times’ Moira Macdonald brings you scenes from Sea-Meow.

“More art, less trash”: Crosscut’s Scarlet Hansen on Seattle ReCreative and other area “creative reuse” centers.

“Seattle ReCreative operates like a thrift store for art supplies. The nonprofit receives donations from fine-art supplies to plastic straws, cutlery and beaded necklaces, all of which would otherwise end up in landfills.”

Inter/National News

Barry Schwabsky for Art in America: “Francoise Gilot Was More Than Picasso’s Muse—She Lived Life on Her Own Terms.”

Roslyn Sulcas for the New York Times on Koyo Kouoh’s rejuvenation of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (known as Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town.

Via Artnet’s Sarah Cascone: Check out the National Mall’s first outdoor public art show of sculptures. We want to see Wendy Red Star’s! (Hot tip: Her work is now on view in American Art: The Stories We Carry at SAM.

“‘The mall remains a symbol of our Democratic ideals as a nation. Beyond Granite: Pulling Together does not shy away from those aspects in our history that can be very hurtful to Americans. We must tell those untold stories fiercely,’ Charles Sams, director of National Park Service, said at the exhibition’s unveiling. ‘We are only stronger by our diversity. Without it, ecosystems collapse.’”

And Finally

“How to Support Maui Fire Victims from Seattle.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Alborz Kamalizad.

Muse/News: Choose Your Adventure, Indigenous Presence, and Delaney’s Glow

Rachel Eggers on Oct 18 2021

SAM News

Frisson: The Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Collection is now on view at SAM! With 19 examples of dramatic, large-scale Abstract Expressionist and post-war works of art, the show has Brendan Kiley of the Seattle Times saying, “…choose your own adventure. There are no wrong answers here.”

“It’s a chance to peek at the midcentury art movement not through the eyes of scholars, but the eyes of people who looked carefully and only bought what they loved.”

The Stranger’s Jas Keimig recommends Frisson, joining KUOW to talk about this “beautiful, and historic for this region, presentation of modern art.” Graydon Carter’s digital weekly Air Mail included a mention of the show.

And Puget Sound Business Journal’s Patti Payne interviewed Lyn Grinstein, the daughter of the late Jane Lang Davis, about what their collection means to SAM and Seattle, and the power of art.

“It has a universal nonspecific vocabulary, and if you give it the time and sit with it quietly, it is as nourishing to heart and soul as any meditation, because it speaks this universal language of emotion. This is what art is supposed to do and this is what cultural collections do for us.”

Local News

After three years of inclusive leadership, Vivian Hua plans to step down as the executive director of Northwest Film Forum in 2022, reports the Stranger’s Jas Keimig.

Vonnai Phair of the Seattle Times on the 50th anniversary of saving the Pike Place Market from possible demolition.

“New works by local Native artists let everyone know: You are on Indigenous land,” reports Crosscut’s Margo Vansynghel.

“‘In a cultural and spiritual sense, having the Indigenous histories of the land — and the current Indigenous presence on the land — recognized in physical formats is hugely meaningful,’ says local artist and curator Asia Tail.”

Inter/National News

Artnet’s Katie White on “three things you may not know” about Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night (is that possible? We’re intrigued!).

“What Quilts Mean Now.” Kayleigh Perkov for Art in America on Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The New York Times’ Roberta Smith on Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

“Delaney’s multiphased achievement fits in all over the map of 20th-century American art: the Harlem Renaissance, the Stieglitz circle, American Scene painting and Abstract Expressionism, but it is still waiting to be written into these histories.”

And Finally

“Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM’s Associate Director of Public Relations

Image: Dawn Shapes, 1967, Helen Frankenthaler, American, 1928–2011, acrylic on canvas, 77 x 933/4 in.Seattle Art Museum, Gift of the Friday Foundation in honor of Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis, 2020.14.5 © Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. Photo: Spike Mafford /Zocalo Studios. Courtesy of the Friday Foundation.

Muse/News: Monet’s Struggle, Return of Live Music, and Old Women Artists

Rachel Eggers on Jul 12 2021

SAM News

Coast in to see Monet at Étretat, now on view at SAM. Huma Ali for the UW Daily has an overview of the focused exhibition, including remarks from curator Chiyo Ishikawa.

“We tend to think of somebody like Monet as successful all his life,” Ishikawa said. “But with a career of that many years and of that many different concerns, decade by decade, it’s very interesting to me to think more about the kind of struggles that he had and the way that he had to work out these problems on his own.”

And Julie Emory of UW Daily highlighted a collection show also on view at SAM: Northwest Modernism: Four Japanese Americans. Emory focuses on the sculpture by beloved Seattle artist (and UW alum) George Tsutakawa that is included in the show.

Local News

Here’s Crosscut’s Brangien Davis with her weekly ArtsSEA letter: she remembers Seattle glass art legend Benjamin Moore and highlights the Wing Luke Museum’s self-guided walking tour of works by the Tsutakawa family (with a mention of Kenzan Tsutakawa-Chinn’s installation, Gather, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum).

Mark Van Streefkerk for South Seattle Emerald on the three local artists tapped to create original designs for limited-edition Orca cards.

Melinda Bagreen for the Seattle Times on the “weird and wonderful” return of in-person concerts with the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

“In a preconcert interview, [festival artistic director and violinist James] Ehnes had remarked, ‘We’re really hungry for live performance,’ and that hunger showed in the zest and urgency of the music-making.”

Inter/National News

“The Medici Were History’s Greatest Patrons—and Also Tyrants. The Met’s New Show Tackles How Art Served Power”: Eleanor Heartney for Artnet.

Emily Wilson for Hyperallergic on Dana King’s Monumental Reckoning, an installation of 350 sculptures in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park representing the first Africans kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1619.

Jillian Steinhauer for Believer on old women artists.

“These women come from vastly different backgrounds and have made widely disparate types of work, but they’ve often been treated the same way: as an archetype, like the wise crone in fairy tales. And though the old-woman artist has spent her whole life building her own agency, when she finally makes it to the mainstream, she gets presented primarily as an object of fascination.”

And Finally

“It’s constantly reinventing itself, just like me”: Holly Regan on Pike Place Market.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Image: Claude Monet, 1890, Theodore Robinson, American, 1852–1896, charcoal on paper, 27 × 13 in., Seattle Art Museum, Partial and promised gift from a private collection, 2005.163

Muse/News: First Thursday, drawing darkness, and a monument to Shirley Chisholm

Rachel Eggers on Apr 29 2019

SAM News

The Seattle Times includes this week’s First Thursday on their community calendar; it’ll be the last one at which to see Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer! Don’t miss this exhibition.

SAM is included in this CNN Travel story on Pike Place Market and what to see and do nearby.

Local News

Fill up that calendar: The Seattle Times has collected all the best arts events launching in May.

Lisa Edge of Real Change reviews Soy yo at Vermillion, one of the many satellite shows of yəhaẃ̓; she notes “the works have an overarching theme of the care and nurture that femme and female folks provide.”

The Stranger’s Jasmyne Keimig on Bad Gateway at Bellevue Arts Museum, the first museum exhibition of graphic artist Simon Hanselmann; every single hand-painted page of his forthcoming book will be on view.

“It’s impossible to read the whole story just standing there (though do try, if you wish). But stepping back, you get a sense of the artist’s ambition and vision, his diligence in exploring the dark recesses of his visual imagination.”

Inter/National News

Jets to Dakar! Artsy takes a look inside Kehinde Wiley’s just-launched artist residency in Senegal; called Black Rock, he says it will offer artists “the opportunity to rub up against sameness and difference at once.”

Cartoonist Sarah Glidden draws her obsession with the Guggenheim’s recent Hilma af Klint exhibition, finding a kindred spirit and a dizzying array of insights and questions.

Famous for firsts, the late Shirley Chisholm marks another: the first female historical figure with a public monument in Brooklyn. The New York Times has the details on the design by Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous.

“It allows you to be enveloped in a conversation about interacting and bringing others along. This approach to a monument is that it’s an invitation to participate.”

And Finally

A journalistic project to tuck into (save room for spumoni!).

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Manager of Public Relations

Image: Installation view Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer at Seattle Art Museum, 2019, photo: Jen Au

Object of the Week: Rummage

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Mar 31 2017

The word “rummage” has satisfying and nostalgic connotations for me. Hearing it triggers memories of summertime outings to what my grandma called rummage sales, where I’d pore over knick-knacks and tchotchkes in search of another person’s junk that would be my treasure. To rummage is to search with a kind of directionless mind—to not know what we’re looking for until we find it. When we rummage we’re also navigating through a mass of objects, of all varieties, without neat structure or organization. If you think about it, it’s the disorganization and diversity of these things that gives us something to do: We sort the unsorted according to our principles and desires.

In the season of spring cleaning it’s much easier for me to imagine contributing to the rummage pile than doing any rummaging of my own. Still, it seems a fitting time to reflect on Mark Tobey’s important 1941 painting Rummage, celebrating the barrage of sights and sounds found at the Pike Place Market.

The market became a touchstone for Tobey, and in the art of Pacific Northwest modernism, Tobey’s work pictures the market most and best. The connection he felt to the energy, the people, and the goods was quasi-spiritual. Tobey called the market “a refuge, an oasis, a most human growth, the heart and soul of Seattle.”¹ His visits to the market were restorative and cathartic, and they also provided plentiful aesthetic stimulation for his work. While he would return to Pike Place for subject matter at various points, the years 1940–1942 saw Tobey complete the greatest number of market studies. Rummage, painted in 1941, fits into this period of concentrated attention.

Tobey gives us a maelstrom of ‘40s Seattle symbols: lounge chairs, mannequins, spoons, wheels, neon signs, birds, and clocks, arranged haphazardly, and pictured from different vantage points. His figures join the scene quietly and timidly, their presence overwhelmed by the visual noise around them. Looking at this painting, I picture Tobey doing his own rummaging, perusing the market’s stimuli and selecting his subjects from it. In a broader sense, he was also selecting from Western art’s tradition of forms in space, Cubism’s rethinking of those forms, and Asian art’s different emphasis on line.

One of the Seattle Art Museum’s best-traveled pictures, Rummage has greeted viewers in Tacoma; Portland; San Francisco; Detroit; New York City; Poughkeepsie; Palm Beach; Cincinnati; Baton Rouge; Utica, New York; Albany; Buffalo; Baltimore; Andover; Copenhagen, Denmark; Frankfurt, Germany; Berlin; Nuremburg; Munich; Hamburg; Essen; London; Colorado Springs; Pasadena; Milwaukee; Valparaiso, Indiana; Fort Worth; Los Angeles; Oakland; Cortland, New York; East Lansing, Michigan; Columbia, Missouri; Newark, Delaware; Tucson; Aurora, New York; Macon, Georgia; Geneseo, New York; Jacksonville, Illinois; Lafayette, Indiana; Neenah, Wisconsin; Madison; Chicago; Pittsburgh; Interlochen, Michigan; Dallas; Osaka, Japan; Omaha; Miami; Des Moines, Iowa; Philadelphia; and of course, right here in Seattle.

Here’s proof that rummaging—seeking and finding—translates well.

–Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator

¹ Mark Tobey, Mark Tobey: The World of a Market, Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1964, introduction

Image: Rummage, 1941, Mark Tobey (born Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890; died Basel, Switzerland, 1976), transparent and opaque watercolor on paperboard, 38 3/8 x 25 7/8 in. Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 42.28

Object of the Week: Pike Street, Seattle

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on May 27 2016

“The Market will always be within me. Established back in 1907 by the farmers themselves—not for the tourist trade, but as a protest against the high prices paid to commission men—it has been for me a refuge, an oasis, a most human growth, the heart and soul of Seattle. . . .

For me every day in the Market was a fiesta. But, alas, wars came: the old men I had learned to know died; more and more stalls were empty; the Japanese were sent away. Mrs. Morgan, who ran a flower stand, said, ‘Mr. Tobey, the Market ist deadt’ The years dissolve, and I return to visit the Market. A few old friends remain—the brothers of the fish stall, but the interesting sign above their heads has been stolen. The chairs that ascended the incline directly below them, upon which tired shoppers used to rest, have been torn out. But the main part of the Market is still active, still varied, exciting, and terribly important in the welter of overindustrialization. There is the same magic as night approaches: the sounds fade; there is an extra rustle everywhere; prices drop; the garbage pickers come bending and sorting; the cars leave the street which reflects the dying sun. The windows are all that remain of light as the sun sets over the Olympics. A few isolated figures appear and disappear, and then the Market is quiet, awaiting another day.”¹

The Seattle Times published this bio sketch on Tobey on March 17, 1946. Author Margaret Callahan links Tobey’s penchant for working in the public market to the difficulty he faced in finding an affordable private studio.

The Seattle Art Museum hosted an exhibition on Mark Tobey and the Public Market in August, 1963, leading to the publication of a book on the same topic: Mark Tobey: The World of a Market (1964). The back cover features this image of Tobey, at home among the papayas.

—Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator

Image: Pike Street, Seattle, 1941-1942, Mark Tobey (American, born Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890; died Basel, Switzerland, 1976), opaque watercolor with pastel on paper mounted on paperboard, 28 1/4 × 21 3/8in. Gift of the Marshall and Helen Hatch Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2009.52.111 © Mark Tobey / Seattle Art Museum

Image: Claude Monet, 1890, Theodore Robinson, American, 1852–1896, charcoal on paper, 27 × 13 in., Seattle Art Museum, Partial and promised gift from a private collection, 2005.163

Image: Installation view Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer at Seattle Art Museum, 2019, photo: Jen Au

1 Mark Tobey, Mark Tobey: The World of a Market, Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1964, introduction

Image: Rummage, 1941, Mark Tobey (born Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890; died Basel, Switzerland, 1976), transparent and opaque watercolor on paperboard, 38 3/8 x 25 7/8 in. Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 42.28

1 Mark Tobey, Mark Tobey: The World of a Market, Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1964, introduction

¹ Mark Tobey, Mark Tobey: The World of a Market, Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1964, introduction

¹ Mark Tobey, Mark Tobey: The World of a Market, Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1964, introduction