The 17th-to-19th-century Indian paintings visiting Seattle Asian Art Museum this winter have made perfectly rational people drool. On normally empty weekday afternoons, the galleries are full of clumps of people clutching magnifying glasses and craning toward the miniature details, rapt. (My review here.)

Now hear the curator of the exhibition, the wondrously named Debra Diamond, talk about the paintings.

Obama equals change, right? Well, how does change apply to art?

You’ve seen art by Dan Webb and Susan Robb, now hear them talk about what they think should change in art, and what should never change in art.

I throw out a bunch of questions, and they respond with a bunch of ideas: Is irony really the enemy? (Yes.) Does the national government have a role to play in the lives of artists? (What national government?) Will the collapse of the market help make better art? (It already has.)

Don’t expect them to agree. Webb is working in public art as a political statement; Robb has just returned from the Global Creative Leadership Summit in New York, where she was the only visual artist included among a bunch of world leaders in every field. (Here’s one of the panels she found herself on.) They both have plenty to say about the future of art in Obama America.

Is this the real meaning of public art? Art that actually reshapes the environment to better suit what the public needs?

Cheryl dos Remedios would say yes. Here’s my column about what she wants to do, and just click to listen to our entire conversation about the LIV Project.

—Jen Graves

^{Jackson Pollock’s Mural, which cash-strapped University of Iowa administrators considered selling last year.}

Last month two pretty shocking things happened in the museum world. One, the nation’s best contemporary art museum considered subsuming itself in another museum but did not seriously or publicly consider selling art to keep itself afloat. Two, a far more obscure museum did sell two works of art in order to keep its lights on—and was publicly blacklisted by the museum community.

These are not isolated cases. Universities and libraries have tried (some successfully) to sell off artworks to square up their balance sheets. Other museums, like the Detroit Institute of Arts, are holding on to their van Goghs despite facing tens of millions of dollars in shortfalls. And it seems there is news every day about another museum’s financial woes in this economy: today’s exposed victim is the Denver Art Museum.

To people outside the art world, the math can seem obvious: If museums are sitting on all this valuable art, why don’t they sell some of it to pay the bills?

That, as you can imagine, makes many art people scream.

Things tend to devolve quickly into shouting matches.

But do they have to? Is compromise possible? Can museums ever sell works of art except for the purpose of collecting more art (the current rule)? Where did that rule come from? And who is the best authority for determining whether sales that do fund other art purchases are in fact justified?

Into this controversy waded Jori Finkel, a writer from Los Angeles for the New York Times, whose story about the history, philosophy, and controversy of deaccessioning—“Whose Rules About Art Sales Are These, Anyway?”—appeared on December 28.

Now, in a taped phone interview, she takes an even broader look, talking about what didn’t make it into her story and what her greater goals were in writing the piece.

She also directs attention to voices outside the usual suspects (which are also worth checking out for background here, here, and here): Michael O’Hare’s public policy paper “Capitalizing Art Museum Collections: Awkward for Museums but Good for Art and Society,” and Adrian Ellis’s 2004 essay for The Art Newspaper, “A New Approach to the Deaccessioning Issue.”

Once you start thinking about it, you can’t stop. And the current rule seems both incomplete and overly restrictive. Surely there’s an opportunity here for reasoned reform.

UPDATE
Editor’s note: One blogger central to the conversation about deaccessioning at the National Academy and elsewhere was inadvertently left out of this conversation. Check out the work of Lee Rosenbaum (Culturegrrl) here.

^{Roger Fernandes’s Sleeping Spirits Awaken (2001), acrylic on canvas, 30 by 40 inches}

It took Seattle Art Museum eight years to put together its current exhibition of Salish art—the art of the native people of this region—and SAM’s show, amazingly, is the first major museum exhibition ever devoted to the work and culture of the Salish.

Why has Salish culture been so lost for so long? What is it really about, and how does the SAM show succeed and fail in presenting it?

Salish artist Roger Fernandes—who grew up in an apartment on Capitol Hill but in a close Klallam family (the Klallam are from the Port Angeles area)—talks about his own search for his artistic heritage, and why he deliberately makes art that his ancestors would recognize.

(For my review of the SAM show, click here.)

^{Photo by David Shankbone}

What Lawrence Weschler does is he writes about the world in ways that make it seem bigger and much more exciting—both more complex and more penetrable—than you ever thought before. He does this by writing (for magazines, in books, on the web) about art, politics, and science, drawing them all together. “I write about people who are just moseying along in the dailiness of their lives and suddenly catch fire,” he says. It’s not far-fetched that he’s written about torture and repressive regimes: what interests him is that spark, “the thing that has to be repressed when repression takes place.”

He also runs cultural things: New York University’s New York Institute for the Humanities and Chicago’s Humanities Festival; Alastair Reed calls him “The P.T. Barnum of the Mind.”

In this far-ranging conversation, he talks about everything from how his Robert Irwin biography, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, was self-medication; how modernism sprung from the invention of kindergarten; whether sub-Saharan clitorectomy or the North American college application process is stupider; a performance of Waiting for Godot by imprisoned lifers in Sweden (who escaped on tour!); and how The Stranger accidentally got him into a fight with his then-boss, New Yorker editor Tina Brown.

You really don’t want to miss listening to this. Just saying. I’m going to listen to it again myself.

^{The Date the Internet Told Us We Would Die (detail), by Caleb Larsen}

Caleb Larsen is a young artist (now studying at RISD and clearly very caught up in art history) who works extensively in digital media and has his first real outing in Seattle at Lawrimore Project this month. I caught up with him to talk about the generation of a patch of frost in the gallery, how to film boiling water without steaming up the camera, the restoration of the oral tradition to the epic of Gilgamesh by way of computer, mopeds, titles, and his death.

^{Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, a wooden box that sells itself on eBay}

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg first showed this artwork, Funk Staden, at the politically charged Documenta mega-show in Kassel, Germany in 2007. It hung in a European palace in the hometown of the German who first depicted Brazilian cannibals in the 16th century—and now it has come, in expanded form, to Seattle.

Dias is Brazilian and Riedweg is Swiss German, but they live in both places and speak several languages. They’re culturally interstitial people who make interstitial art; wherever they are they find and become attached to communities of Others—people who don’t usually appear in art, except maybe as vague subjects: janitors, prisoners, sex workers, or in this case, the impoverished residents of the favelas in Dias’s hometown of Rio de Janeiro, where paranoid and otherwise secretive drug dealers throw elaborate private funk balls.

Funk Staden is an enactment of a mini-funk ball organized by the artists. What you see above is a shot of the whole installation of video screens and mirrors at the Frye; below is a still from one video.

In this extended interview, the artists talk about how they made this work and why, about what the election of Barack Obama means to them, and about their 14-year relationship to each other, to various cultures, and to artistic practices from formalism to documentary filmmaking.

^{Fuck Grid #34 (2007), pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches}

Betty Tompkins began making Fuck paintings in 1969. It was the height of minimalism and conceptual art, so she thought she’d try calling them Joined Forms. She eventually dropped the act and just called them Fuck paintings, adding Dick paintings and Cunt paintings, too.

What keeps a woman working on photorealistic paintings of hard-core heterosexual pornography for 40 years? Well, she did take a break in the late 70s and early 80s to make works that were all text, of which she says: “I bored myself silly, so I went back to sex.”

Listen to her talk about her quick rise, her years as an art-world exile, her comeback, her repeated brushes with censorship.

In person her works can be surprisingly tender; they can also be harsh and cold in the Chuck Close way (some are created by stamping words on the canvas rather than with brush strokes).

I’m sorry to say that her show of paintings and drawings (especially two exquisite drawings created in the 1970s with a Dremel tool, which she only knew to be called a “flexible shaft,” causing some great innocent doublespeak), at Lawrimore Project is only up through today, October 18. (We tried to do this interview earlier, but because of scheduling conflicts and illness, we just couldn’t.)

Her own web site is here.

Here is an image she alludes to in the podcast, her single homage in all these years to the breast. This one is called Fuck Grid #32:

^{Gus’s Pawn Shop from the series NIAGARA by Alec Soth}

Alec Soth is a particular sort of wandering American storyteller, a lyrical documentarian. When people talk about his photographs, they bring up names like Robert Frank, like Flannery O’Connor, like Mark Twain, even.

Recently Soth was in Seattle, receiving an award from the Photographic Center Northwest and staying at the Sorrento Hotel on First Hill. I met him just after he arrived, and he was already a little out of sorts. He had lost his wallet. Then he found it, I don’t know how, he left me in the lobby during that part, and when he came back we ordered Diet Cokes and went upstairs to sit down and talk. He didn’t have a camera with him, or was it that he didn’t really feel like shooting? He was crotchety and smart and evasive and funny and open all at the same time. Something about him was resistant to the interview process (in a good way), even though he talked plenty. I think you’ll see what I mean. You’ll also hear him reveal what he’s working on, which involves hiding out. It also involves making art about the election process while trying like hell not to be political.

Also, he wholeheartedly agrees with Ed Schad’s take on my take on nostalgia and sentimentality when it comes to art. (Me, too. Not my take, I mean, but Ed’s take on my take.)

Mary Temple spent weeks at Western Bridge making a huge painting that opened to the public last weekend. (The image above is from an earlier, similar installation on the East Coast.)

The painting is extremely quiet. It is white paint on white walls, and depending on the light, it can almost disappear entirely. It is painted to fool you into believing, at least for moment, that it’s not there. When you walk in, it looks like there’s nothing in the room at all, just the shadows and light beaming in from the windows of the building. This is what Temple calls “the doubting zone.” She has her reasons for sending you there.

There was a moment in the influential California artist Robert Irwin’s artistic life—documented in Lawrence Weschler’s classic book Seeing Is Forgetting the Thing One Sees (my love letter to the 25-year-old book here; the new 25th-anniversary special edition can be pre-ordered in hardback for $31.50 here or in paperback for $16.47 here)—when Irwin realized he was looking around.

He was painting one or two thin lines across a canvas, and kept moving them up or down just slightly until they felt absolutely right. It could take weeks to get one line in the right place. And then, when they were perfect, he realized he had another dilemma: they were only perfect in his studio, where they were made. The placements of the lines depended on the room around them, not just the white space of the rest of the canvas. Irwin realized that, for him, art doesn’t stand alone. He was making art in relation to what was around it.

Well, once you start bringing architecture or space into the experience of art, you might as well bring in time, too. That’s the idea behind New York-based artist Wade Kavanaugh’s new installation at Suyama Space, in which the bumps of land that were leveled off in the Denny Regrade at the turn of the 20th century reappear in rough, ghostly form indoors.

The bricks that make up the mounds are handmade from scraps of salvaged drywall layered together like wafers. The choice of drywall makes it as if the artist is imagining the walls of the gallery deconstructing into the shape of the former land on the site.

The rough, sandblasted surfaces of the bricks—there are 10,000 of them, according to the artist—and their subtle spectrum of color due to the original uses of the pieces of drywall make the piece visually engrossing, especially when seen from slightly above, on the staircase adjoining the gallery.

Unfortunately, Kavanaugh had to deal with several egresses from the room (four exit doors, two bathroom doors, and a fire escape, if you can believe it), so there are too many paths through the land forms, and the movement aspect of the experience feels unresolved.

Before you head down there (the show’s up through December 12), listen to Kavanaugh talk about the genesis of his idea, what the colors tell you, and what he does with all this material when he’s finished.

L.A.-based artists Harry Dodge (born Harriet, but now not identifying as either male or female) and Stanya Kahn are as uncompromising as they are hilarious. The entertaining but unsettling performances in their videos—both in front of and behind the camera—are plainly spontaneous, but the final works are carefully crafted. To get a sense of what they do, watch a segment of their Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out here (that’s Kahn you see in the frame, and Dodge is shooting).

Then listen in to this sprawly phone conversation with them.

For more, there’s a comprehensive New York Times profile of the artists here, and a nice Time Out piece about them here.

Their 2006 work Masters of None (pictured above) is screening at TBA:08 in Portland through October 4, and the artists will talk at the Back Room Friday night, September 12.

^{This photograph is old, but Davidson doesn’t look very different today. He still wears the bowtie.}

Sam Davidson has run a gallery in Seattle for 35 years: He knows where all the bodies are buried. But he also deals in quiet art, often prints, generally the sort that doesn’t send a lot of journalists around to bother him. He’s an undertapped resource.

A few years ago, Davidson opened a contemporary satellite in the middle of the East Edge Artwalk route—near SOIL and Platform, Shift and Punch. Mike Sweney ran Davidson Contemporary, and artists could take risks there (John Grade, for instance, completed his first-ever installation there; Grade is now showing at Bellevue Arts Museum).

But about a year ago, Sweney went to work for the state, and Davidson has decided to close the contemporary space. Its last show is this month’s.

Sam Davidson isn’t going anywhere, though, and he’s got a lot of knowledge and plenty of opinions, as soft-spoken as he is. In this interview, he talks about why he’s disappointed with Seattle Art Museum and the Olympic Sculpture Park, the bravery he expects from the Henry Art Gallery, his love for the ducks at the Frye Art Museum, how he’s something of a “Broadway Danny Rose” character, and why he won’t join the bowtie club of the Northwest.

Here’s the Davidson Gallery, in Occidental Square, that is staying open:

On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Guatemala, descending into an ancient Mayan cave. Tourists aren’t allowed in, but Berk and some others bribed the guards, who then conducted the tour of the dark, totally disorienting place—a place Berk was unable to get out of his head afterward.

Now it’s finally come out of his head, and into the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, in the form of strange, surrealistic, suggestive shapes in two drawings and a sculpture-on-stilts.

Listen to him talk about the whole experience.

That’s a still from a digital video made with clay animation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. It’s called Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007), but, as you can imagine, it is not as innocent as the title makes it sound. It is, in fact, quite sick—even though nothing that happens in it is really wrong.

The lascivious woman lures the hungry pack of children from their crevices in the back side of a tenement. (See what I mean that something’s wrong but not overtly wrong, just by the potential entendres in that sentence?) The children surround and grope her. They pull out her breasts. She feeds them. It is a clay-milk orgy. Then, they close their eyes like babies do after you feed them, when they go to sleep, except these babies look overstuffed, and like they might have choked to death, just a little.

It’s all very sinister and vague, which is basically the tone of the entire show Ask A Banana, Baby at Howard House. The show features three Swedish artists—Djurberg, Annika von Hausswolff, and Johanna Billing—and their videos, animations, and photographs. It’s not a big show, but it makes a definite impression.

Hear curator Sara Callahan, who is Swedish herself, talk about why she chose these works, which make Sweden seem so, well, freaky and freaked out.

That’s Isaac Layman. He’s asleep, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his torso as he breathes. The camera is making a picture of him that takes four and a half minutes to complete—it’s a digital process, but it mimics the earliest photographs, when people had to remain perfectly still for minutes on end so that they would be captured as if in a single, clear moment. Any movement would be tracked in the final image. Here, Layman mounts a digital back onto a traditional 4 by 5 camera, and it records one line 1 pixel wide by 8,000 pixels high and then moves to the right to record the next line. Layman is being downloaded.

If you look closely, you can see that his pockets are scallop-edged—that’s not the way they really look, it’s an effect from the motion of his breathing during the shoot. But that’s kind of a gimme.

What’s stranger is the fact that Layman himself doesn’t know what was going on in the mind of his subject at the time this was shot—he was asleep. He’s in the same position we are: seeing someone without really getting any information about him.

Layman’s whole show of new work at Lawrimore Project—called Photographs from the Inside of a Whale, and shot entirely in his Seattle home—is an investigation into how good the information you get from a photograph really is.

Listen to him tell it.

Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has had something on the side: something called Task.

Task is an event involving volunteers who come together in a public place for an entire day and give each other tasks to do for the whole time they’re there. While it’s happening a mini-society forms. All Herring does is choose the volunteers, start things off, and then observe. This happened in Seattle June 28; my on-the-scene reporting on the first part of it is here; a longer essay considering it is running in next week’s paper.

In this interview, conducted on the eve of the event in Seattle, Herring talks about why Task is actually not on the side of his studio work, but instead at the heart of it. He talks about the outbreak of Task “parties” around the country. He talks about his year of saying yes to everything.

Listen in.

And here are two images from Seattle’s Task (photographs by Duncan Scovil):

^{These are the bleachers that lead down from the Fifth Avenue level to the auditorium. Remember 83-year-old Bob from my earlier writing? That’s him up and moving around while a young woman naps.}

That there is Matthew Day Jackson’s Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery’s new show The Violet Hour. It’s made of a Skip Nichols race car (crashed/Corvette), steel, wool, felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic.

Like Jackson’s other two works in the show, this one is a glorious thing to look at and look at and keep looking at. It’s also full of associations in and outside of art—the first to come to mind are Richard Prince’s treatments of upstate New York, Beuys’s plane crash and rescue by the Tartars, and stained-glass windows that survive in bombed-out cathedrals. Traditional Western art and pioneer stories are swirling around, too: the driver’s seat is made from a leather cowboy saddle, and set in the passenger’s seat like an eerie mask is a reflective astronaut’s helmet wrapped in gray felt. Oh, and the entire sculpture is solar-powered.

^{That’s the “shattered” windshield of the car.}

^{There’s the cowboy saddle and the space helmet inside the car.}

The Violet Hour is a remarkably entertaining show for being so simultaneously grim. Jen Liu’s videos feature Pink Floyd standards sung in Latin plainchant, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” performed by a community brass band and performed as an operatic aria for a soprano, cannibalism, brutalist architecture, and pretty young men. In Croatian artist David Maljkovic’s videos, young people in a post-communist daze linger under the burdensome, overpowering modernist architecture of the Italian Pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, loitering in and around cars that have been immobilized.

The overlapping themes in the show reveal themselves continually: cars, architecture, nature, text, religion, crystalline forms. It’s a show in which you can do plenty of mental work while also having a great time.

Talking to the artists (except Maljkovic, who had to remain in Croatia with his wife, who’s expecting) was much the same experience. Have a listen.

On the beleaguered morning after the opening party for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards last Saturday, the five winning artists sat down in a conference room in the Portland Art Museum and gave each other insane love. This recording is the result of that union.

There was Whiting Tennis,

Dan Attoe,

Marie Watt,

Cat Clifford,

and Jeffry Mitchell.

The Bellevue Arts Museum hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it, what with the shutting down, the “signature” (read: impossible) architecture, and the embezzling.

Okay, but what does its contemporary curator, Stefano Catalani—who has produced more exhibition catalogs in the last few years than any other local curator—have to say about working at BAM?

Here he is. (And here’s a site that says he is actually an Italian prince. He does have a princely mustache…)

Click here to listen.

^{Laylah Ali’s Untitled (from the Greenhead series) (1999), gouache on paper, 10 by 11 1/4 inches}

A few months ago, I wondered what Seattle Art Museum planned to do with its gallery devoted to artists of African descent. There was talk of residencies? Group shows?

The new group show, Black Art, is not only the first broadly themed effort in the small gallery, it’s also a self-reflexive exhibition about the function of the gallery itself. It asks, how useful is the term “black art”? What if blackness were looked at as broadly as possible?

The show is a harvesting of SAM’s permanent collection for “black art,” plus a handful of loans. The results are sometimes surprising.

Listen to Jackson-Dumont tell it.

Here are more of the images in the show:

^{Randy Hayes’s Victor/Victim (1982), pastel on paper, 83 1/4 by 50 7/8 inches}

^{Halford Lembke’s Crouching Negress (1932), wood, 6 3/8 by 3 1/16 by 2 7/8 inches}

^{Max Beckmann’s Jahrmarkt (Annual Fair): Der Neger (The Negro) (1921), drypoint, 29 by 26 cm}

^{Mark Tobey’s Broadway Girl, Head (1957), sumi ink on paper, 23 1/2 by 15 1/2 inches}

^{Sergio Vega’s Paradise on Fire 5 (2007), photograph}

Sergio Vega, who was born in Argentina and now lives in the foresty middle of Florida, has been working on a project called Paradise in the New World for 10 years.

Using his own writings—in voices from academic to confessional—plus photography, sculpture, and video, Vega goes in search of the promised paradise. He treks to the area of Brazil where explorers once said this paradise could be found (pictured above, in a 2007 fire), and he looks at our estranged relationship to tropical paradise as moderns, often distinguishing between First-World and Third-World definitions of modernity.

^{The parrot phone is one example of modern systems mimicking natural ones. A talking bird becomes a talking machine.}

Vega’s newest additions to the project, photographs and a video of two men who discovered and worked in the Brazilian gold rush of the 1970s, are on display at the young contemporary art space Open Satellite in Bellevue, in an exhibition curated by Pablo Schugurensky. Facing off with the Bellevue gallery’s gigantic window wall is a blackout curtain cut to look like a giant silhouette of a jungle canopy.

Vega sits down in the gallery and talks while his home—or at least his home town in Florida—is burning.

San Antonio-based artist Dario Robleto has two shows up currently at the Frye Art Museum, but that’s not why In/Visible decided to do two podcasts with him rather than only one. It’s because he’s too interesting to cover everything in one sitting.

In part one, recorded and posted in late April, Robleto talked about his personal history in and around hospice and honky tonks in Texas, and about his philosophy of “attainable magic.”

The wild materials he uses in his artworks are all real things in the world, as far-fetched as they sound—for example, there’s trinitite, glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, when heat from the blast melted the desert sand.

In part two, recorded May 15, Robleto focuses on his materials, explaining how he gets them and what they mean to him. (Here are a few examples of what he uses: bones from every part of the body, ground seahorse, men’s wedding bands excavated from American battlefields, residue from female tears of mourning overlaid with residue from male tears of mourning, pain bullets, tracheal extractor, ground pituitary gland.)

His latest find? A multimillion-year-old blossom, perfectly preserved, and a multimillion-year-old raindrop, caught in amber. Those objects will be part of an upcoming group exhibition (called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet) with Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Xu Bing, and four other artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Robleto is also in a group show called Old, Weird America (the title comes from Greil Marcus’s take on Dylan’s basement recordings) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

His 10-year survey, Alloy of Love, opened last weekend at the Frye in Seattle. Below are two of the many works in the show.

^{Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together (1998-99), hand-ground and melted vinyl records, various clothing, acrylic, spray paint. Several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned, or thrift-store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift-stores or placed where it was originally found.}

^{Detail from A Color God Never Made (2004-05), cast and carved de-carbonized bone dust, bone calcium, military-issued glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, c. 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), fragments of a soldier’s personal mirror salvaged from a battlefield, soldiers’ uniform fabric and thread from various wars, melted bullet lead and shrapnel from various wars, fragment of a soldier’s letter home, woven human hair of a war widow, bittersweet leaves, soldier-made clay marbles, battlefield dirt, cast bronze teeth, dried rosebuds, porcupine quill, excavated dog tags, rust, velvet, walnut}

^{Matthew Offenbacher’s The Freak in a State of Total Tokenism (2007), oil on canvas, 49 by 29 inches}

Matthew Offenbacher is the painter behind La Especial Norte, the latest in a spotty but notable historical lineage of artist-run zines in Seattle. (Anyone remember Redheaded Stepchild?) He talks about how this one came about, and what he wants to do with it. And, tangentially, why his newest paintings are of his cat.

Maxwell Anderson (who, yes, is grandson of the playwright) was in Seattle a few weeks ago to discuss issues of international art repatriation at Seattle Art Museum—in conjunction with the Roman Art from the Louvre show that’s closing this weekend.

We caught up with him at an absurdly late hour after his talk (11 pm PS, 2 am his time), but he was as eloquent as ever. The fact is, Anderson is one of the smartest and most up-to-date museum directors in the business, and in this podcast, he describes many of the philosophies that make him so good.

Just listen.

And check out the best museum web site in the country at the museum where he’s director in Indianapolis. Next year, the IMA will open its 100-acre art and nature park, which sounds something like what the Olympic Sculpture Park could have been but isn’t. Anderson says it won’t be about “trophy hunting and monument building.”

Oh, and here he is doing one of his regular YouTube videos about the art at the museum. (Yes. Imagine a director making time to do that.)

^{An installation view of Dario Robleto’s An Instinct Toward Life, in his show Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others at the Frye. (Photos by Adam L. Weintraub)}

2008 is not even half over, and I’m putting money on Dario Robleto’s new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum as the Seattle exhibition of the year. Basically, Robleto, a San Antonio-based artist, went in search of a dead Seattle woman, Emma Frye (co-founder of the museum), and this show is the story of his dark travels.

^{A closer view of An Instinct Toward Life, with two madonna-and-child paintings from the permanent collection.}

Not much is known about Emma, except that she was married to Charles, had a miscarriage, and never after had children. Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others is an imagined walk through her life led by a call-and-response of 19th-century paintings from the Frye’s permanent collection and 21st-century “sampled” sculptures made by Robleto using such materials as melted-down audiotape of the longest-married couple talking about their marriage, melted lead excavated from various wars, and fulgurites, or glass made from lightning striking the desert. The show is also a story about the making of an art collection, about war and love, and about loss and the remix—but this is enough to start with.

^{A detail from Robleto’s sculpture Time Measures Nothing But This Love.}

Just listen to the artist talk.

This month at James Harris Gallery is Margot Quan Knight’s coming-out party in Seattle.

She is, basically, a disillusioned photographer. A wonderfully disillusioned photographer. She’s become disillusioned from her fantasy (our collective fantasy?) that photographs describe, if not reality, then still a version of truth. Until recently, she made composed images of unreal events that revealed themselves to be fictions indicative of real sensations and experiences, often ones that defy time, like this one (that’s her):

^{Drop, 2006}

But then she was hit by a car. And she started graduate school (MFA at Bard; she finishes this summer). And the result of those things intersecting with Berenice Abbott (and other readings in photographic history), a strobe-light dance she saw at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the thought of her mother getting older resulted in a break—out of which came an entirely different body of work, all based on reflective surfaces.

Artists at the beginning of their careers—and sometimes, artists at any stage—may be doing great things, but they don’t always really know what they’re doing. That can be perfectly fine, or a disaster. In Quan Knight’s case, her eloquence is not necessary to understand her work, but it’s a very nice surprise. Listening to her will be well worth your time.

And because these works are all reflective, I’m posting a video (by Quan Knight) that depicts the works the way you would experience them, rather than the blank, more formal stills on the gallery’s web site.