Muse/News: Protest art, citizen journalists, and radical quilts

SAM News

Brangien Davis of Crosscut reflects on art that protests and protest art, highlighting an 8-bit video game created by The Black Tones, Barbara Earl Thomas’s intricate paper cuts (to be featured in an upcoming show at SAM), and a “speculative fiction” press release imagining if SAM dissolved (which was erroneously published).

“Some art that erupts during social upheaval is momentary, some persists in minds and hearts, whether a poster, a painting, a flag, a fist or maybe even a video game.”

Local News

Jasmyne Keimig of the Stranger continues to cover both the action and the art around the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP); this week, she notes that “The Bathrooms at Cal Anderson Park Look Sick” after a recent paint job by two volunteers.

The Seattle Times features a comic from Lyla Dalnekoff, the 11-year-old creator of drawingthroughit.com. She explores our “new normal” and asks “what are you most excited to do once coronavirus pandemic restrictions are lifted?”

Crosscut’s Agueda Pacheco Flores and Margo Vansynghel interview Omari Salisbury, Tessa Hulls, and Ulysses Curr, three citizen journalists who have been documenting CHOP. With portraits by Dorothy Edwards.

“Hulls says she prefers to see herself as a ‘bullhorn,’ amplifying the voices and stories that larger media outlets or reporters who don’t cover the protests from the ground might miss.”

Inter/National News

This week, opinion pieces by arts and culture leaders from around the country:

Yesomi Umolu of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago outlines “15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice.”

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, asks, “Are you willing to give up your privilege?”

Dr. Kelli Morgan, a critical-race and cultural historian, addresses the expressions of white supremacy she sees in the museum field.

“If we are to eschew this exclusionary culture in American art and its institutions, it is imperative that we change the value system upon which both our art museums and our art history is founded.”

And Finally

Wrap yourself in the radical quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins.

Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Muse/News: Supporting change, learning a city by foot, and farewells to Toni Morrison

SAM News

SAM director and CEO Kimerly Rorschach shared the museum’s position on proposed changes to Washington State’s overtime rules. These changes are long overdue, and SAM has been a leader in implementing adjustments. However, a slower ramp-up would be more sustainable for non-profits.

Local News

Marcus Harrison Green of the Seattle Times on Blood Lines, Time Lines, Red Lines, the Warren Pope solo show now on view at NAAM that explores the city’s history of racist housing policies.

“Pulling a reverse Henry David Thoreau”: Crosscut’s Brangien Davis on Seattle Walk Report, the comic that explores the magic of the city by foot. Its anonymous creator will name herself soon!

With “Currently Hanging,” The Stranger’s Jasmyne Keimig gets close to an artwork. Here, she visits a figurative gold sculpture by Casey Curran that echoes previous works by Anthony White and Tessa Hulls.

“The sculpture reminds me of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa-meets-the-alien-from-Annihilation-meets-Rodin’s-Thinker. All things I love.”

Inter/National News

“The first Abstract Expressionist”: Who would you name? The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has a new exhibition that may answer that question.

DCist on the Phillips Collection’s new exhibition of 100 works by 75 artists on global displacement; director Klaus Ottmann calls it “the most ambitious exhibition the museum has ever undertaken.”

Author Toni Morrison died this week at the age of 88. This New York Times obituary celebrates her “luminous, incantatory prose resembling that of no other writer in English.”

“Ms. Morrison animated that reality in prose that rings with the cadences of black oral tradition. Her plots are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act.”

And Finally

Quiet As It’s Kept.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Image: Installation view Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, Seattle Art Museum, 2019, photo: Natali Wiseman.
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