For the next year, Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park will feature the work of two famed Seattle art galleries. The Seattle Asian Art Museum, of course, calls the park home. This week, the museum and surrounding park are being joined by a new installation of fourteen stone benches evocative of the park’s history in AIDS activism and its natural history.

Installed by the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery at points around the park, the Soft Services stones from Brooklyn artist Chloë Bass are each engraved with inscriptions, “artist-written text that both stands alone and creates a larger meaning across the series of seating—and a silhouetted image applied in light-responsive pigment, which allows the image to shift slightly based on the time of day, weather conditions, and sight lines.”

The large decorated and inscribed stones are meant to connect with the park’s history as a centerpoint for the annual AIDS Walk that morphed over the decades from a gathering of queer health activism to an annual tradition dedicated to supporting those living with HIV and AIDS:

The title, Soft Services, is a phrase drawn from the artist’s research and interviews with members of the activist community, in reference to the care efforts made during the height of the AIDS crisis. At the time, the rare opportunity arose to use the Ryan White (CARE Act) monies towards “soft services”—aspects of support deemed assistive but not strictly necessary and as such not covered by traditional healthcare (massage, meal trains, dog walking, etc.) Through this installation, Bass explores the notion of what true care means, what we define as essential versus optional, and who has access to it, questions of heightened importance at this moment of crisis and recovery.

The stones are also meant to reflect the dichotomy of plant life that make up the park:

Bass conducted research on local plant-life and the effects of human intervention, deliberately or transitively via environmental effect. The black locust was introduced to Volunteer Park by the Olmsted Brothers when it was designed, and thus not native to the area. The alder is native to the park and still exists within it. While western juniper, according to climate change specialists, will likely be coming to the Pacific Northwest region (thus the park) in the coming years, as Seattle’s climate warms. Each plant also has many medicinal uses and mythological histories that played a part in the artist’s selection.

The works are also, coincidentally, an interesting follow-up for the park after the sudden removal last August of an offensive plaque from a large stone placed there in the 1950s and intended to honor the soldiers of the Spanish-American War.

From a more practical standpoint, the new stone installations create new places to sit or perch around the 48.3 acre park and mostly fill-in some of the emptier areas of the park’s edges. While the stones might remind some of garden and home decor rocks imprinted with inspirational words like “strength,” “grace,” or “courage,” most of the phrases and passages are a little more thought provoking.

“My work evokes the particular state of attention produced by being alone in public: the sudden sense of everything as fascinating, the strange anxiety between feeling invisible and suddenly becoming aware that you are seen,” Bass says in the gallery’s description of the work.

The installations connect back to the UW’s Henry where two more works from the series are also being placed. It is part of the Henry OffSite project designed to bring the gallery’s experiences into area communities. Funding has been provided by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, David and Catherine Skinner, and the Volunteer Park Trust.

The stones are meant to be placed in the park through August 2023.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum, meanwhile, is debuting its new Beyond the Mountain exhibition, an immersive exhibition with work by six contemporary Chinese artists who are “inspired by classical Chinese art forms to tackle urgent and complex present-day issues.” The works include video, multimedia installation, painting, and photography.

You can stop through to check out the new stones and benches Thursday as the park hosts the next in the summer series of events celebrating the new Volunteer Park Amphitheater. This week’s performances are dedicated to dance with Lucien Postlewaite,  Whim W’Him, The Seattle Project, and Dance Church putting the new dance-friendly stage to work.

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