West Coast artist Archives

How SAM’s Interpretation Team Brought Poke in the Eye to Life

Seattle Art Museum on Aug 23 2024

Have you ever wondered who creates interactives at SAM? Hi! We’re Emily and Ramzy and we design interpretive experiences at all three of SAM’s locations. We work on SAM’s Interpretation team which creates educational in-gallery experiences designed to spark creativity, connect visitors to the art, and share dynamic storytelling.

We hear from visitors regularly that they are hungry for more opportunities to interact with the exhibitions on view, learn about the art in our galleries, and show off their creativity. We considered Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture to be the perfect opportunity to pull out all the stops and create a cohesive suite of interpretive offerings that further explore the exhibition’s themes. In close collaboration with Carrie Dedon, SAM Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art and the exhibition curator of Poke in the Eye, and Justin Scoltock, SAM Exhibition Designer, we developed four interpretive offerings: a ceramic touch table, a counterculture response wall, a hands-on art activity, and rotary phone audio guides.

Ceramic Touch Table

How many times have you been in an art museum and thought “I wanna touch that”? For the average art museum, encouraging visitors to touch is a rarity. Making museums multi-sensory allows visitors to show up as their whole selves, ensuring museum-going can be more memorable, educational, and welcoming to all.

Since Poke in the Eye focuses so heavily on ceramics, we wanted to ensure that people had the chance to experience all the shiny, globby, sharp, and rough textures that make the ceramic works what they are. This led us to develop the centerpiece of the interpretive gallery space: a giant blob-shaped table we affectionately call the “touch table.” The table features 25 samples covering the various stages of the ceramics process, all with completely different textures, colors, and glazes, that any visitor can walk up and touch.

To guide visitors as they touch, we wrote accessible didactic signage to accompany each type of ceramic. This presented a natural opportunity to try something new for SAM: incorporating braille labels into the galleries. We hope this is one small step of many toward SAM’s progress in making art and interactives more accessible.

So far, it has been clear that people simply love to touch stuff. Visitors respond with visible and often audible joy when they see the words “please touch” in the galleries. There’s also a huge variation in how people engage with this table. Some read every word of the educational signage, some talk out loud with a friend about the different textures they’re touching, and others don’t read any signage and just touch the ceramics. Any of the above is fine by us!

Counterculture Response Wall

We knew the interpretive space wouldn’t be complete without an opportunity for visitors to express themselves and share their ideas. Counterculture is a key throughline of the exhibition, and we wanted to give visitors a chance to understand the concept more concretely by making it personal and related to their own lives, not just as an abstract idea from the 1960s and 70s. After selecting one of four prompt cards about counterculture, visitors can respond however they’d like using colored pencils: with words, with illustration, or most popularly, a mix of both.

An unexpected but welcome outcome of this interactive is how much visitors love reading other visitors’ responses. Any time we pop into the interpretive space, we’re bound to see visitors looking at others’ responses and pointing, smiling, or remarking on the ideas, impressive illustrations, or multiple languages they see on the shelves. We’ve been blown away by the creativity that people are exhibiting in their responses to these prompts.

From Ordinary to Extraordinary Art Activity

Expressing yourself conceptually in response to a prompt is a great way to share your personal connection to the exhibition’s themes, but why stop there? We know that a dose of creativity is powerful for both learning and well-being, so we wanted to provide a more visual opportunity for visitors to create.

Many of the artists featured in Poke in the Eye use mundane, everyday objects as inspiration for forms that they included in their art. These ordinary objects are transformed into new, original, and extraordinary art by the artist. We wanted to give people a glimpse into this perspective and a chance to try out a version of this process themselves, by transforming an illustration of a trailer, a toilet, a teacup, or a rotary phone into something extraordinary.

And wow, “extraordinary” is an understatement! Our visitors have really understood the assignment. As of mid-August, visitors have transformed about 7,000 object cards. It seems that the rotary phone is one of the most popular cards that visitors choose to transform. As designers, we’re thrilled to know that visitors are engaging with both the activities in the interpretive gallery and our final interpretive offering which is sprinkled throughout the exhibition: the rotary phone audio guides.

Rotary Phone Audio Guides

While exploring Poke in the Eye at SAM, you may have noticed a few old-school rotary phones in several of the exhibition’s galleries. Pick one up and you’ll hear exclusive content about some of the artworks on view in the exhibition. These phones are part of the Interpretation team’s latest efforts to break out of the box and put a new spin on a classic museum offering: the audio guide.

To create this retro experience, we tackled two major obstacles: hacking 60 year-old rotary phones to play MP3 files, and developing engaging audio content to connect our visitors with the art. To hack the rotary phones, we called in Sasha Falsberg, SAM Systems Engineer, who took each one apart, studied the mechanics, and reassembled them with a tiny raspberry pi computer. Now when you pick one up, the pins on the phone trigger the Pi and an MP3 plays until you place it back down— it’s magic!

For the audio content development, we had two main goals: 1. Feature the voice of artists and 2. Develop family-friendly content. We interviewed artists Fay Jones, Patti Warashina, and Jeffry Mitchell, who shared their unique perspectives on creativity, process, and the stories behind their artwork. For the family stops, we developed scripts in the form of a thoughtful dialogue between a teeanger and a kid, encouraging close-looking and connection to the art. This kind of scripted, theatrical conversation was a new approach for SAM, so we collaborated closely with educators, parents, and kids to ensure that the content would land with our younger visitors.

Since opening Poke in the Eye in June, we’ve seen the phones spark joy in our visitors, regardless of age. Even though we designed the family stops with kids in mind, it’s been a pleasant surprise to see that adults have been enjoying the rotary phones just as much, if not more, than kids! There’s something about the tactile and playful experience of picking up a vintage phone in the galleries sparks the curiosity of visitors of all ages, leading to meaningful connections with each other and the art.

What’s Next?

Creating interpretive experiences for Poke in the Eye has been an incredibly rewarding experience for our team. From hands-on experiences, to art-making and rotary phones, we’ve had the opportunity to flex our creativity and collaborate across departments throughout the museum. In the last two months, it’s been exciting to see firsthand the impact on the visitors’ experiences at SAM. In the galleries, we see friends showing off the everyday objects they’ve transformed, toddlers using the step stool to reach for the ceramic touch table, and kids leading their parents to the vintage phones in the next gallery. We can’t wait to continue this momentum into our future exhibitions at SAM, designing interpretive experiences that foster creativity, belonging, and connection with the art for all of our visitors.

– Emily Gardner, SAM Assistant Manager for Gallery Learning, & Ramzy Lakos, SAM Digital Interpretation Specialist

Photos: Chloe Collyer.

Poke in the Eye Object Spotlight: Double Poke in the Eye II

Nicole Block on Aug 6 2024

Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture is now on view at SAM! This homegrown exhibition features 87 ceramics, sculptures, paintings, and drawings from SAM’s collection—some of which are being shown for the first time. Throughout the run of the exhibition, we’ll be periodically sharing insight on a few of the eclectic artworks on view. Stay tuned for more object spotlights to come.

Did you know that Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture derived its title from one of the artworks on view in the exhibition? It’s true!

Created by artist Bruce Nauman in 1985, Double Poke in the Eye II features two faces made up of bright neon tubing. The figures look at one another while the hands in between them alternate lighting up. There is a slight delay between when the hands light up, but the two figures are always simultaneously poking each other in the eye, both at fault. Their pointed fingers just barely touch one another’s eyes and one face has its mouth open, seemingly arguing.

Nauman began making works in neon in the 1960s, often using wordplay and both text and figurative imagery, to address “pain, life, death, love, hate, pleasure” to quote the title of another neon work by him that puts those words into a never-ending circle. Neon is typically used for commercial advertising, attracting the consumer’s eye to a storefront, but Nauman’s signs twist this commonly recognized aesthetic to question philosophical and artistic ideas.

Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison to study mathematics, physics, and art, then the University of California, Davis for his MFA. UC Davis was a hub for artists who rejected abstract and minimalist aesthetics and boundaries of low and high art. William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson were among those who taught Nauman at Davis and are also featured in Poke in the Eye.

Nauman mainly studied sculpture, but after graduating, became known for his performances recorded in his studio space. Nauman captured himself doing repetitive tasks and exercises; for example, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967–68, is ten minutes of Nauman doing just what the title describes. Watching these mundane actions captured on film draws attention to the topics of surveillance and privacy, as well as the human body’s physical limits and abilities, and what qualifies as art. To Nauman, anything an artist does in his studio is art and one of the most accessible materials an artist can use is his own body.

Though Double Poke in the Eye II is not a performance piece, it echoes some of these themes. It mimics an endless, repetitive action as the figures go back and forth poking one another. Due to the way the lights click off and on and make the work change moment to moment, the viewer can get caught up watching this pattern repeat, trying to observe the whole sequence. In the way that viewers watch Nauman’s own body perform these repetitive actions, here we have people performing the same simple poke, again and again. Though the neon colors make this scene cartoonish, this piece illustrates a moment of pain and bodily harm that the viewer is forced to watch.

Yet, a “poke” has less serious connotations than a punch, a jab, or a stab to the eye. A poke is slightly silly. We “poke fun” at things to make light of them. The word choice for the title is significant because Nauman is also interested in the role of language in his art.

The gaps where language is imprecise are part of what Nauman wants to tease out. In 1989, Nauman said:

“When language begins to break down a little bit, it becomes exciting and communicates in nearly the simplest way that it can function: you are forced to be aware of the sounds and the poetic parts of words. If you deal only with what is known, you’ll have redundancy; on the other hand, if you deal only with the unknown, you cannot communicate at all. There is always some combination of the two, and it is how they touch each other that makes communication interesting.”¹

The work isn’t just a poke in the eye but a “double poke” which is a not a common phrase: Is it a double poke because of the two figures poking one another? Or because there are two eyes as possible targets? Or could they be poking twice in a row?

Besides the verb of “poke”, the emphasis on the eye in this work is key—damaging someone’s vision impairs a major way of interacting with the world, limiting the way they can perceive others, art, and everything around them.

Double Poke in the Eye II is open to interpretation and double meanings. When asked about what the title of this particular work means on a SAM questionnaire, the artist simply replied “It is what it is.”

For the exhibition though, this title represents the experimental modes that these artists used to depart from their contemporary artistic movements and seek something new. Many of these artists in Poke in the Eye depicted figures in their work (rather than abstraction); worked with neon, ceramics, and textiles (rather than paint and canvas); and were silly and self-effacing (rather than serious).

Artworks like these are a type of a poke in the eye—they stand out as offbeat and off-kilter from expectations of what art should be.

– Nicole Block, SAM Collections Associate

1 John Yau, “Words and Things: The Prints of Bruce Nauman”, in Bruce Nauman Prints 1970-89, ed. Christopher Cordes (Castelli Graphics: New York, Lorence Monk Gallery: New York, Donald Young Gallery; Chicago, 1989), 10.

Photo: Chloe Collyer.

Muse/News: Meeting Ourselves, New Leader, and Pirate Myths

Rachel Eggers on Aug 5 2024

SAM News

Author and speaker Jodi-Ann Burey writes for ARTE NOIR about spending “an afternoon with Jacob Lawrence” at the Seattle Art Museum. A 13-work exhibition of the modern artist, Jacob Lawrence: American Storyteller, is now on view.

“Why does one painting call us more than others? What parts of ourselves, buried or thriving, known or unknown, does art draw out? What does it mean to stand in front of a Jacob Lawrence painting and think only of my mother? I make a mental note to call her on my way out.”

“An Uproarious Survey in Seattle Brings Together the West Coast’s Artist-Heretics”: Art historian Patricia Failing reviews Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture for ARTnews. You’ve got one month left to see it at SAM!

“Wrapping together art-historical revisionism and kid-friendly displays, the Seattle Art Museum’s new exhibition, “Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture,” flashes back to artistic rebellions of the 1960s and ‘70s associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Funk art, and Northwest studio ceramics.”

Local News

The latest weekly newsletter of Cascade PBS’s Brangien Davis features Actualize AiR, the new endeavor in the Coliseum Theater, and mourns the passing of potter Reid Ozaki. BTW: Did you know that Davis has launched a new video series, Art by Northwest? It broadcasts on Friday nights and streams the following Mondays.

Here’s Jas Keimig for South Seattle Emerald with another helpful “Arts in the South End Roundup” for the month of August.

Big news via Tat Bellamy-Walker of The Seattle Times: “Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum picks Brandon Bird as CEO.”

“Bird doubled down on the need for the museum to be ‘anchored and grounded’ in reflecting its mission to be a family-focused institution that uplifts the experiences of all Black people, particularly those in the Pacific Northwest.”

Inter/National News

Via Brian Boucher for Artnet: “Snoop Dogg Paid an After-Hours Visit to the Louvre. Zaniness Ensued.”

Andrew Russeth for The New York Times on Pacita Abad’s first retrospective, which opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last year and is now on view at MoMA PS1.

Maev Kennedy for The Art Newspaper on the conservation of a rare pirate flag for an upcoming exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in London.

“The exhibition will demolish cherished myths about pirates, including walking the plank and maps of buried treasure. It will also reveal that some kept disappointingly pragmatic rules on board—Bartholomew Roberts, better known as Black Bart, insisted on lights out by 8 pm.”

And Finally

Celebrating James Baldwin’s 100th birthday through his sentences.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Chloe Collyer.

Poke in the Eye Object Spotlight: Red Hot Pot

Nicole Block on Jul 23 2024

Poke in the Eye is all about encounters with the odd and unusual as well as challenging expectations of what you’ll find in a museum. Patti Warashina’s Red Hot Pot (1969) embodies this spirit with more than just tongue-in-cheek humor.

The shape of Red Hot Pot is not a standard form like the ceramic vessels that we use everyday. The large, curved rectangular white base with a black bottom edge resembles a toaster. But instead of toast emerging from this form, a bright pink tongue pops out from a pair of large red-orange lips and teeth. The shiny finish on the surface makes the lips look picture-perfect, glossy, and red hot, as the title says.

Red Hot Pot is part of Warashina’s Basket and Loaf series where the forms (in this case a loaf) allude to themes of food and the kitchen, traditionally associated with women. Starting her career in the 1960s in a male-dominated art world and the rise of second wave feminism, Warashina often critiqued gender stereotypes and the sexualization of women’s bodies. Curvy vases have long been associated with women’s bodies and their reproductive capabilities, as vessels that can be filled. Warashina’s Faucet Pot (ca. 1966), also on view in Poke in the Eye, critiques this symbolism explicitly.

Likewise, the plump lips of Red Hot Pot mimic a seductively red mouth, but the tongue sticking out seems like an act of defiance. The lips aren’t blowing a kiss, but are drawn into a smile, poking fun at us for looking.

In isolating the lips and removing the rest of the face, Warashina draws attention to how sexualized a woman’s mouth can be, but also makes it more peculiar in this context. Warashina was inspired by Surrealist artists like Rene Magritte and Marcel Duchamp who are known for their strange, dreamlike scenarios that demand we inspect the mundane more closely.¹ Red Hot Pot is definitely dreamlike, or maybe nightmare-ish, adding a mouth to this inanimate object.

Talking about her work recently, Warshina said, “I like things that are not quite right, they’re kind of loony… The parts and pieces fit together and if they kind of go against each other that’s even better. You know, I don’t like things to be too logical. I like things that are kind of disturbed.”²

Warashina grew up in Spokane, Washington where her father, a Japanese immigrant, and her mother, a second-generation Japanese American, encouraged her education. However, they didn’t envision Warashina becoming an artist, and neither did she. Warahina attended the University of Washington intending to get a practical degree to work as a dental hygienist. When she took her first elective art classes, however, she fell in love with clay and experimenting with its techniques. Warashina returned to teach at the University of Washington from 1970 to 1995. In 2024, she received the UW Alumni Association’s Golden Graduate Distinguished Alumnus Award.³

Throughout her career, Warashina was inspired by her fellow artists, especially those on the West Coast like Peter Voulkos, Viola Frey, David Gilhooly, and Howard Kottler, who were exploring different ceramic techniques, modes of humor, and figurative forms. Abstract art had become a dominant force in the art world, especially on the East Coast, with Abstract Expressionism from artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and Minimalism from the likes of Donald Judd and Frank Stella. However, art departments at universities like the University of California, Davis, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington became hubs for alternative approaches, rejecting abstraction, and typical materials like paint and canvas.

Art history in Europe and the US has tended to focus on paintings and sculpture (usually carving from marble or stone), Meanwhile, more everyday and functional materials like textiles and ceramics have been relegated to the category of “craft.” But many of the artists in Poke in the Eye like Patti Warashina pushed ceramics, and other materials like fiber and neon, to new possibilities and built the art world of today that recognizes extraordinary artists in any medium.

When talking about the divide between what is art and what is not, Warashina defined it for herself: “When I come in and I see something that raises my blood pressure, then I know that there is something more than just a bowl or a sculpture or a painting. It makes me react to the painting chemically in my body. And that’s when I know—or music, you know. It makes my body react. And that is my way of judging whether, I guess, quote, whether it’s art or not… It alters your being.”⁴

Red Hot Pot, though it might cause confusion, discomfort, or even a laugh, provokes a reaction and that is what Warashina is looking for. To hear more from Patti Warashina herself, watch her recent SAM Talks conversation with Carrie Dedon, SAM Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

– Nicole Block, SAM Collections Associate

1 “UW ceramic arts program is in good hands with Patti Warashina,” UW Magazine, December 1, 2007, https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/the-wonder-of-patti-warashina/.

2 Airstream Turkey by Patti Wararshina, audio tour, Seattle Art Museum, 2024, https://www1.seattleartmuseum.org/tours/media/1544.

3 “Ceramic artist Patti Warashina Receives UW Alumni Association Golden Graduate Award.” UW Magazine, 2024, https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/ceramic-artist-patti-warashina-receives-uw-alumni-association-golden-graduate-award/.

4 Doug Jeck oral history interview with Patti Warashina, September 8, 2005, accessed September 13, 2017, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-patti-warashina-12864.

Images: Red Hot Pot, 1969, Patti Warashina, American, born 1940, ceramic with glaze, 11 x 19 1/4 x 19 in. (27.9 x 48.9 x 48.3 cm), Gift of Lucy and Herb Pruzan, 2023.23.3 © Patti Warashina, photo: Scott Leen. Photo: Chloe Collyer.

Poke in the Eye Object Spotlight: American Gothicware

Nicole Block on Jul 2 2024

Howard Kottler’s American Gothicware from 1972 spoofs the well-known painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic, made in 1930. By placing a decal of the image on four plates and adding his own twist to each one, dinnerware becomes Gothicware à la Kottler!

During the start of the Great Depression (1929–1939), Grant Wood painted this now-iconic couple (the models were actually Wood’s dentist and sister) looking somber and proper in front of their farmhouse. Many viewers interpreted Wood’s painting as satire of older generations and outdated traditional values, while others saw it as a reflection of the resilience of farmers like these in the face of tough times. Since then, this painting has been parodied and reproduced in many forms, symbolic of one particular view of what it means to be an American.

Howard Kottler, working 40 years later, was a ceramicist in Seattle who taught at the University of Washington. Kottler was inspired by Pop Artists like Andy Warhol who experimented with reproducing famous images from pop culture and the art world. After World War II when the American economy was booming, artists were fascinated with the way that consumer goods and images could be mass-produced and identically replicated. Along with that, artists were also drawing from earlier movements like Dadaism and the idea of the readymade to challenge hierarchical definitions of art.

Kottler decided to use an everyday material that one could easily overlook, ceramic dishware, to bring politics to the table. American Gothicware conveys Kottler’s subversive attitude toward American life by altering Grant Wood’s painting across four plates: Look Alikes, Personal Possession, American Minstrels, and The Silent White Majority. Each plate offers a visual confrontation of the original painting by Wood and with it mainstream American values.

Look Alikes duplicates the man’s face and places it on the woman’s body, transforming them into a gay couple of sorts, or identical twins. In Grant’s painting, each character is strongly associated with their gender roles—the woman in her apron with houseplants on the porch behind her indicating her role as caretaker of the home, while the man is in overalls and a coat, holding a pitchfork and aligned with the red barn over his shoulder. While their stern expressions already made these two look alike, Kottler adds ambiguity about gender and the relationship between the characters. Kottler himself was a gay man and often included these questions and hidden meanings in his artworks.

In Personal Possession, a painted landscape seeps into the bodies and faces of the two characters, covering everything except their facial features and hair. Their skin is the color of the sky and their clothes have been replaced by a forest scene with some signs of human development: a bridge in the background and a tunnel to the right. The pioneer settlers who took the land as their own personal possession now wear the land as part of their clothes. It has become part of their identity as farmers who tend the land, but Kottler seems to ask if it was ever theirs to claim, critiquing the history of Manifest Destiny that is often taught in US history.

American Minstrels also delves into more unpleasant parts of American history. This image subtracts color from the skin of the two farmers to make them appear as white as the plate itself, making their whiteness literal. The title implies this could be seen as whiteface, an inverse of blackface minstrel shows wherein white performers would dress up as Black characters and parody their speech and behavior. Black performers would also participate in these minstrel performances, exaggerating their differences from white society. Minstrel shows were popular entertainment throughout the 1800s and perpetuated stereotypes that still linger today. Kottler’s reference to minstrels leaves the work open to more questions—what is being performed here and in the original American Gothic?

The Silent White Majority also critiques whiteness in America, co-opting a phrase that President Richard Nixon coined in 1969 for the American voters who did not vocally join in the counterculture and political discourses surrounding the Vietnam War. Here, the pair’s faces are mask-like with white covering the mouths but leaving their eyes and noses exposed. Their literal whiteness again calls attention to race, but even in their silence, they have power as a majority to influence politics in their favor, maintaining the status quo.

By modifying the recognizable symbol of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Kottler subverted and questioned prevailing ideas about American identity in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and national history. Alongside these political messages, American Gothicware challenges the medium of art too, transforming the humble ceramic plate into an artwork that offers a visual and conceptual feast

– Nicole Block, SAM Collections Associate

Photos: Alborz Kamalizad.