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On the List | July Capitol Hill Art Walk, Seattle Outdoor Theater Festival at Volunteer Park, redlining history

(Image: Seattle Shakespeare Company)

Artists and art lovers heaved a collective sigh of relief after the Art Walk got some good news last month: the longtime Capitol Hill event will live on. The implosion of the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce won’t mean the end of one of its most visible neighborhood promotions, thanks to help from the Capitol Hill Block Party, now the event’s official fiscal sponsor. Find our Art Walk picks plus more art to see and things to do below and head over to the CHS Calendar for even more events or to let us know about anything we’ve missed.

WEDNESDAY, July 10: Bike (touring) enthusiasts who prefer their bike movies bathed in golden hues will surely appreciate the Seattle premiere of California Golde, a Kodak super 8 short film about riding bikes the smoky Sequoia National Forest in California, hosted by Swift Industries, a small local bicycle bag company. Rhino Room, 6.30 PM (21+) 

Cedar (detail), 24 x 54″, watercolor on paper, 2018 by Erin Kendig

THURSDAY, July 11: At this month’s Capitol Hill Art Walk, the old and the new collide. Particularly at Ghost Gallery, which celebrates its first year in a new space at Chophouse Row with a showing of Erin Kendig’s watercolor and gouache Northwest nature paintings, crystallized specimens, books, and prints by artist Tyler Trasher and guest mixology by Siolo Thompson.  Roq La Rue, another local art veteran in a new location, features the promising “The Night Theater” by Rick Araluce, who makes miniature dioramas and larger installations, windows into other worlds one could call dreamy if they didn’t invoke such an acute sense of loss and desolation. In No More Room at the Inn,” German artist Nicholas Strobelt, who studied at the University of Washington, speaks to another type of loss, “Seattle’s rapidly changing and exclusionary landscape” at Chophouse Row’s Goethe Pop Up Seattle.  Follow the common thread of loss into The Factory, where Steven Miller’s photographs 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s feature gay porn magazine pages burning in a backyard fire pit —ideograms for the losses of the AIDS years, with reflections on lust and pleasure licking at its edges like flames. Find more events, including dark wave music by 2 Libras at Ritual, on the Capitol Hill Art Walk calendar and map. Various locations 

FRIDAY, July 12: Seattle is a city built on tide flats, landfill, racism, and exclusion — of the original inhabitants, the Duwamish, and later basically anyone who wasn’t considered white. From the 1910s through the 1960s, real estate agents and lenders used redlining, a national practice, to segregate the city. (With, by the way, a starring role for Capitol Hill: in 1927, neighborhood residents went door to door to ask homeowners to keep African-Americans south of Madison Street.) Redlining’s enduring effects and dynamics will be discussed during Seattle on the Line at the Northwest African American Museum. Northwest African American Museum, 6.30 PM 

SATURDAY, July 13: Within not much more than 24 hours of their installation, six of the seven paintings made by Timothy White Eagle and other installations by Gabriel Stromberg and Pete Rush for the AIDS Memorial Pathway near Cal Anderson Park were ripped down or stolen. “There were seven individual portraits of friends lost to AIDS, they were my friends, now my ancestors,” Timothy White Eagle wrote in a post on Instagram. This Saturday, the city invites everyone to be a part of the response and help create a new art piece together during Community Art Building & Ancestor Celebration Picnic (potluck). The goal is to tie thousands of ribbons to the fence in the empty frames. “This is our response to vandalism,” arts admins from the city write, “to create a new piece which is almost impossible to vandalize (…) It is a community action of honoring our collective past and a gesture in the face of hate.” Bring food, ribbons, old fabrics, and blankets to lounge on. Cal Anderson Park, 5-8 PM  

Mark Redito’s pop song Boba Date sounds precisely like what Bubble Tea tastes like. His sprightly mix of electro synth-pop, tropical percussion, J-pop and dance music is delightful and irresistible, sure, but like boba, it contains more than meets the eye at first. Recently, Redito — the Filipino-American musician formerly known as Spazzkid — infused his music with “Tropical Futurism,” a cultural aesthetic inspired by Afro-Futurism, a way for Redito pay tribute to the island culture he grew up with. Celebrate this and the release of his new album, Neutropical, at Chop Suey. Chop Suey, 6 PM 

SATURDAY, July 13 – SUNDAY, July 14: Seattle Shakespeare Company’s festival of free outdoor productions of classical plays is not limited to Capitol Hill (performances extend to parks in Tacoma, Des Moines, Everett and other locations across the region), but this weekend, the Company descends on Volunteer Park with showings of the classics Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. Can’t get enough of The Bard? This weekend’s Seattle Outdoor Theater Festival expands the Shakespeare buffet with 18 more free performances, of As You Like It and other plays, performed by ten local theater companies. For those fearing a Shakespeare indigestion: there are also showings of The Fabulous Fable Factory, Aerial Shenanigans, The Bee Man of Orn and Totally True & Almost Accurate Adventures of Pinocchio. Volunteer Park 

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