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The Seattle Design Festival is a program of Design in Public, a multidisciplinary nonprofit organization that promotes the role of design in improving our city. Design in Public is a strategic initiative of AIA Seattle, a chapter of the American Institute of Architects, founded in 2011 to unleash the design thinker in everyone to illuminate Seattle’s challenges and ignite action.
The ninth annual Seattle Design Festival features citywide tours, exhibits, outdoor installations, activities, neighborhood design crawls and more from August 16 -25. Our 2019 theme explores how we achieve the BALANCE that is needed for our earth, our communities and our families.
Cauleen Smith. Sojourner (production still), 2018. Single-channel video (color, sound); 22:41 min. Courtesy of the artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and Kate Werble Gallery, New York.
Through her films, objects, and installations, Los Angeles-based artist Cauleen Smith envisions a world that is black, feminist, spiritual, and unabashedly alive. Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film but operates in multiple materials and arenas. With this exhibition, she revises the coercive threat, “take it or leave it,” and proposes a new rule for a better world: create something, offer it, and gift it—regardless of whether the gesture is accepted or rejected. “Give it or leave it” is a rule for the self, not an ultimatum for the other, born of generosity, hospitality, and selflessness.
Featuring new films and banners, a site-specific light installation, and sculptural works, Give It or Leave It interweaves four distinct historical universes: Alice Coltrane (1937–2007) and her California ashram; a 1966 photo shoot by Bill Ray (b.1936) at Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers; Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) and his desert assemblages; and black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) and her Shaker community in Philadelphia. These locations, while not technically utopian societies, embody a spirit of speculation, self-determination, and radical generosity between artist and community.
The figures referenced by Smith do not turn their backs on the here and now: each exploration served as antidote to a pervasive hopelessness perceived in American society. This defiantly aspirational energy drives the exhibition, activating a historical cosmos to reimagine the future.
Cauleen Smith (American, b. 1967, Riverside, California) is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Drawing from structuralism, Third World Cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines, while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including those at the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Prospect.4, New Orleans; the New Museum, New York; D21, Leipzig; and Decad, Berlin. Smith has had solo shows of films and installations at The Kitchen, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; and Threewalls, Chicago. She earned her BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles’s School of Theater, Film, and Television. Smith teaches in the School of Art at CalArts.
Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and curated by the Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator Anthony Elms.
Support for the exhibition has been provided by The Ellsworth Kelly Award. The Ellsworth Kelly Award made possible by The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Additional support has been provided by B.Z. & Michael Schwartz, Meredith & Bryan Verona, and Susan Weiler.
The installation at the Frye Art Museum is overseen by Amanda Donnan, curator. Media sponsorship is provided by The Stranger.
John Henry Twachtman. Dunes Back of Coney Island, ca. 1880. Oil on canvas. 13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. Frye Art Museum, 1956.010.
End of Day presents a selection of portrait and landscape paintings by American artists from the Frye Art Museum’s permanent collection. Spanning the period between the Civil War and First World War, the images oscillate between an embrace of progress and a sense of nostalgia for what was perceived to be a simpler American era.
Image: Madeline Courant Rathbun
A Partnership for Youth exhibition, Frame of Mind: Storytelling Through Animationshowcases the results of an eight-week workshop for teens led by teaching artists from Reel Grrls, during which students develop, animate, and edit their own stop-motion film projects.
Courtesy of the artist.
Jane Wong’s poems and essays unearth silenced histories, immigrant narratives, and intergenerational trauma. The Seattle-based writer’s recent projects consider the social, historical, and political contexts that “haunt” the work of contemporary Asian American poets. For her first museum solo exhibition, Wong draws inspiration from her upbringing in a Chinese American restaurant in New Jersey as well as her family’s experience of hunger and poverty in rural China to consider the ways we reconcile the gaps in our lives and histories.
Engaging gluttony and hunger across multiple generations, After Preparing the Altar, The Ghosts Feast Feverishly conjures food as childhood comfort while throwing into sharp contrast the personal histories of Wong’s own family members. Wong’s mother was born at the end of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), a Maoist campaign that sought agricultural and industrial reform in the Chinese countryside. Also known as the Great Famine, the campaign resulted in an estimated 36 million deaths due to starvation. Wong’s installation is comprised of altars, sculptural poems, and personal effects that provoke deeper understandings of food waste and the realities of low-income immigrant families.
Seeking to honor her family, ancestors, loved ones, and all that sustains life in an otherwise fraught world through writing, Wong implores us to become more attuned to our shared histories. As the final lines of the exhibition’s title poem ask, “Tell us, little girl, are you/ hungry, awake, astonished enough?”
Jane Wong (American, b.1984, Long Branch, New Jersey) is a poet, essayist, and professor who grew up in a Chinese American take-out restaurant. Her poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, and jubilat, among others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, 4Culture, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016), Jane is an assistant professor at Western Washington University. Invested in public scholarship, her project on the poetics of haunting in Asian American poetry has appeared as a TEDx talk and a multimedia website.
Jane Wong received the 2017 James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, which is funded by the Raynier Institute & Foundation through the Frye Art Museum | Artist Trust Consortium. The award supports and advances the creative work of outstanding artists living and working in Washington State and culminates in a presentation at the Frye Art Museum.
Toyin Ojih Odutola. Birmingham (left, center, right), 2014. Four-color lithograph with gold leaf. 24 x 16 ½ in. each. Frye Art Museum, Purchased with funds provided by Seattle Art Fair, additional funds provided by Frye Art Museum Director’s Discretionary Fund, 2018.007.01-.03
Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings, paintings, and prints question physical and sociopolitical identities as they pertain to skin color. This suite of three lithographs, recently acquired for the Frye Art Museum’s collection, demonstrates Odutola’s signature approach to portraiture, in which the sitter is seen obliquely or from multiple, unusual angles within one composition.
** New 4K restoration from the original camera negative! **
More than 40 years before RuPaul’s Drag Race, this ground-breaking documentary about the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant introduced audiences to the world of competitive drag. The film takes us backstage to kiki with the contestants as they rehearse, throw shade, and transform into their drag personas in the lead-up to the big event. Organized by LGBT icon and activist Flawless Sabrina, the competition boasted a star-studded panel of judges including Andy Warhol and his superstars Edie Sedgwick and Mario Montez. But perhaps most memorable is an epic diatribe calling out the pageant scene’s racial bias delivered by Crystal LaBeija, who would go on to form the influential House of LaBeija, heavily featured in Paris Is Burning (1990). A vibrant piece of LGBT history, The Queen can now be seen in full resplendence thanks to a new restoration from the original camera negative.
Description and all photos on this page courtesy of Kino Lorber.
See http://bit.ly/b4dragrace for more information and photos!
Goethe Pop Up Seattle invites you to the premiere of „A Duet Evening,” featuring two duets choreographed and danced by FLOCK, a German-American dance company founded by Alice Klock and Florian Lochner in 2017.
FLOCK’s “Duet Evening” explores honest communication, stronger connections, and a healthy connection with the natural world. At its root, the entire evening is about listening, collaboration, and the belief that one can build new and beautiful things when working together.
The show runs 50 minutes and includes one intermission. A Q&A follows the dance performance to enable the audience to dig deeper into the work and to ask any question about the pieces and FLOCK.
About FLOCK
FLOCK is a co-choreography company founded in 2017 by Florian Lochner and Alice Klock.
Alice Klock was trained at numerous ballet company schools, Interlochen Arts Academy, and the Alonzo King’s Lines BFA program. Florian Lochner trained at Ballettschule Malsam in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Mannheim, where he was the recipient of the Birgit Keil Dance Foundation scholarship. As FLOCK, they create and perform their own work, teach as a team, create new works at schools and companies, and produce their own shows in the US and abroad with international dance artists to offer their audiences a wide variety of dance styles.
A new creepy comedy by Kelleen Conway Blanchard, directed by Catherine Blake Smith
August 2-31, 2019
Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm
After murdering the Matron at the Starling Home for Feeble Minded children, two orphaned sisters set out to find their–probably not dead–mother while being pursued by a tormented detective and a vengeful haunted baby painting. Annex’s Gothic Sweetheart returns with a magically creepy tale.
CAST AND CREW:
Name | Role
Catherine Blake Smith • | Director
Kelleen Conway Blanchard • | Playwright
Cast
Pilar O’Connell • | Bettina, the smart twin
Madison Jade Jones ∞ | Lotte, the sweet twin
Mike Gilson º | Jack Jr., the Reverend’s gifted son
Chad Ro º | Tom, the prophetic boy with gills
James Weidman º | Reverend Jack & others
Val Brunetto • | Mother, Eudora Swiles & others
Sasha Bailey • | Missus Starling & Veronic Wald
Zenaida Rose • | Detective Penny & others
Production Team
Omar Faust º | Production Manager
Brandon Eller º | Stage Manager
Adam Zopfi-Hulse º | Production Designer
Jacob Viramontes º | Lighting Designer
Josh Valdez º | Co-Sound Designer
Wei Low •/∞ | Co-Sound Designer
Violet Séverine Blanchard • | Original Music Composer
Jen Nelson • | Choreographer
Chapin Montague • | Production Intern
Pronoun Guide
They/Them ∞
She/Her •
He/Him º
** New 4K restoration from the original camera negative! **
More than 40 years before RuPaul’s Drag Race, this ground-breaking documentary about the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant introduced audiences to the world of competitive drag. The film takes us backstage to kiki with the contestants as they rehearse, throw shade, and transform into their drag personas in the lead-up to the big event. Organized by LGBT icon and activist Flawless Sabrina, the competition boasted a star-studded panel of judges including Andy Warhol and his superstars Edie Sedgwick and Mario Montez. But perhaps most memorable is an epic diatribe calling out the pageant scene’s racial bias delivered by Crystal LaBeija, who would go on to form the influential House of LaBeija, heavily featured in Paris Is Burning (1990). A vibrant piece of LGBT history, The Queen can now be seen in full resplendence thanks to a new restoration from the original camera negative.
Description and all photos on this page courtesy of Kino Lorber.
See http://bit.ly/b4dragrace for more information and photos!
