Articles

“Art isn’t a way to be famous and rich, but it is a way to connect on a spiritual level with your paintings, people, and good friends.” This quote by Alfredo Arreguín from the DreamPath Podcast, Episode 8 perhaps best describes the acclaimed artist’s goal for his work. Arreguín’s unique combination of complex, geometric patterns with portraiture and landscape elements blend to create for the viewer either a spiritual moment or opportunity for introspection. The exhibit, “Arreguín: Painter from the New World,” brings together two key elements of the artist’s style: abstraction and formative cultural elements. Both characteristics of the artist’s aesthetic exemplify a style that is instantly recognizable in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Alfredo Arreguín’s artworks are included in many key art collections around the world, including significant paintings at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program, and the Seattle Art Museum. This writer is often delighted by recognizing one of his familiar scenes from across the gallery in numerous art museums around the country. Western Washington has enjoyed several major solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, including most recently an exhibition at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. The exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art adds an additional art historical element for the viewer to consider when experiencing Arreguín’s work: European Modernism. This formal analysis references several of the artist’s instructors from his time at the University of Washington, many of whom have work on display in the second-floor galleries. 

One such instructor was Francis Celentano, a professor of painting at the University of Washington and key figure in the Op Art movement in the United States in the 1960s. A quote by Arreguín explains the relationship between the two artists: “I was getting good at figurative art so in his class he had a set-up with white geometric shapes. He asked me to join his class. All that light and subtlety and shapes—it was very inspiring. These were things I could do in my own compositions.” The exhibition includes several new and older paintings that highlight the artist’s stated interest in both geometric shapes and the influence of light on those forms. “Emerald Island” from 1970 is at the entrance of the exhibition, a location of prominence since it was the first of the artist’s pattern paintings. A grid defines the composition and squares are filled with gradient colors that evoke shadows amongst the confident lines. Inside the boxes are seemingly unrecognizable characters that retain the artist’s hand in their calligraphic style. As the root of Arreguín’s signature style, “Emerald Island” illustrates the juxtapositions in his work: geometry combined with organic and naturalistic elements. 

The exhibition is loosely organized based on several themes. The first paintings lay the groundwork for a consideration of the artist’s interest in geometric abstraction and other modernist artistic movements in the 20th century. The artworks that follow are excellent examples of the other main characters in the artist’s oeuvre: the figure and nature. Arreguín includes many beloved Northwest animals, such as salmon and orca whales, in his recent work. The artist has long featured the jungle in his work, often drawing from his experience as a child growing up in Morelia. The jungle provides the artist with a lush, natural backdrop, which he then often organizes with intricate pattern designs. Some of his work appears to comment on the delicate balance of these scenes. This is best illustrated in “Kodiak II,” which features a solitary moose standing over the shrinking glaciers in Alaska. 

Arreguín’s paintings of almost otherworldly landscapes are as recognizable as his portraits. Some include prominent historical figures like Frida Kahlo, while others feature other artists and writers that the artist knows personally. Many of his subjects endured great adversity. Whether the challenges they faced were physical, such as Kahlo, or in the fight for rights, Arreguín pays homage to their courage and determination. The gallery guide created for the exhibition is an excellent resource for visitors to learn more about the artist’s interest in portraiture, in addition to the range of cultural influences that inform and inspire the artist’s work. The guide provides a lens for understanding his imagination, memories, and vision. 

As a compliment to Arreguín’s exhibition, the museum features “In Pursuit of Abstraction: Instructors at the University of Washington School of Art in the 1960s”. Several artists mentioned in Arreguín’s exhibition have artworks on display in the second-floor galleries and there is another informative gallery guide available that describes the various art historical “isms” in the show. 

Chloé Dye Sherpe

Chloé Dye Sherpe is a curator and art professional based in Washington State. 

“Arreguín: Painter from the New World,” guest curated by Matthew Kangas, is on view through October 9, Monday through Sunday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. at Museum of Northwest Art, located at 121 South First Street in La Conner, Washington. For more information, visit www.monamuseum.org.

For Phoebe & Scott, June 11, 2022

A marriage is a waiting and an arrival, an endless joining and parting, a balance of needs and desires, of work and play. It is both the urge and the reason, the plan and its delay, the measure of everything we chance, win or lose, in the night-to-night and day-by-day.

I once had a terrible class of eighth graders. The trouble was mostly the girls, who had started to blossom out beyond the boys, who were the usual dolts and delinquents, but still quiet and polite. The girls felt their dawning rivalry, and were merciless with each other. They drew blood any way they could. All I could do was break up the fistfights and threaten them with the cops.

And then one chilly day, hopeless, at an utter loss, I saw it was Valentine’s Day. And I asked the kids to take out paper and pencil and describe something someone did for them, that convinced them they were loved. Anything. Some kids wrote about their parents, sisters and brothers. Some told long stories. Some kids made stuff up. When they were done, they wanted me to read them all outloud, without saying whose was whose. So I shuffled them up and did. This one girl had written “He gives me flowers without picking them.” That was it. “He gives me flowers without picking them.” How do you even do that? But there it was, and it cut deep, and got to the heart of the matter. Honoring the transitory beauty in the moment, appreciating that a cut flower will have no offspring. That all it has is this moment. Stunning, irresistible, maybe a heartbeat too early or too late.

That is why we are here. That is the kind of creatures we are. Because someone can touch someone else in a way no one else can even see. And that everyone should be treated that well, in that secret invisible way. “That flower over there, by the fence? That one, the brightest one, is yours.”

When it works, we stand together against the unfeeling world. Somebody’s got our back. Yet even when it works, it sometimes comes and goes. We have to reconnect, we have to not forget to reconnect. Even in our momentary joys. Even when we let go a minute, we need to recall our promises, and double back, and hold on like we still mean it. And reconnect with all our heart.

Paul Hunter

Paul Hunter is the author and poet living in Seattle. His most recent book is a second cowboy novel set in Texas, Mr. Brick & the Boys, out from Davila Books in January. A third cowboy book is nearing completion, Untaming the Valley, set in a fictional spot in Southwestern Montana. He has several poetry collections, including Stubble Field (Silverfish Review Press), Ripening (Silverfish Review Press), and Breaking Ground (Silverfish Review Press), which received the 2005 Washington State Book Award. 

Word by Word

That I dream in sentences may seem a bit odd.

Except it isn’t, really.

How the sentences began is a story in itself, intertwined with my love of reading, prompted by whatever book I’m immersed in or, more likely, by my opinion of whatever book I’m immersed in. I hear the words. Then, slowly, they emerge. Words that want nothing more than to make my mind a truer place in which to live.

They are not always successful.

Nor are they new to my dream cycles. When I was a kid, Highlights was my favorite read, and mine alone, though I was supposed to share the magazines with my sisters. I didn’t share them with my sisters. In winter, I hid them under my bed. In summer, in my tree fort.

No one ever found me in my fort and that’s what I wanted. Without interruption, I was eager to know myself in the world outside of my family, my school, my street.

My fort was neat, airy, and when the afternoon sun hit the paper birch, the white bark illuminated every insect hovering in the air between the lowest branches and the ground. It was about this time that I started dreaming in sentences.

My father said, “don’t let the neighbor kids climb up,” which didn’t bother me, I didn’t want the neighbor kids to climb up. But I couldn’t imagine what he meant by “dangerous.” To me, the weather-beaten boards weren’t a hazard, but safety. I thought the lopsidedness of my three walls (it was more of a lean-to) was its most endearing quality. To this day, a well-kept cottage can fill me with house-envy. But it’s not like that when I see lavish reflections of wealth. It’s as if I can feel certain tensions seeping out and then, there they are, gathering in a sleepy sentence inside of my head.

I’m not saying every gigantic house is chaos waiting to happen. I’m just saying that’s how I internalize them. Listening to my parents’ marriage implode within the sturdy split-level my father built, my fort became, not all at once but as their fights intensified, a requirement for the rest of my life. I felt more at home in my fort than anywhere else. I think I’ve been searching for that same feeling ever since.

A few of my homes have come close. Sometimes I feel as if my true place is still out there.

I write terribly in the dark and most mornings I have no memory of the sentences. But when I re-read the scribble, I see how the words want to matter just as much as I do, they want to try. They bomb just as often. But they try.

This morning, the exclamation points ran off the pad. It looks as though I was upset. 

And I remember with absolute clarity why I was so upset: Earlier, I ate red meat for the first time since I was seventeen. I didn’t know I was eating it. It was in the sauce. I was fine. My stomach didn’t even seem to notice. My mind, however—clearly more sensitive to the thought of beef than my stomach—rebelled, leaving exclamation points in its wake.

“In my tree fort I began to see how my life would always be about small losses, small wins.” Half an hour ago, this sentence surfaced during the nap I tried to take. The words made their way in, they made mistakes (for instance: I don’t like the word “wins”), they made me listen. To everything.

Even the memory of that fort makes me smile. I manage to forget the world’s harms and come back to my nest in the woods, and that’s the closest thing to happiness I know.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli, author, speaker, and master dance teacher, is the author of Every Little Thing, a collection of essays nominated for a 2022 Washington State Book Award. Her novel, The Star Struck Dance Studio of Yucca Springs, was released in 2020 and her first children’s book, Bella Likes To Try, is to be published in the fall of 2022. For more information, visit www.marylousanelli.com.

exile

oh daughter of mine

there will come

a day when you

must make

that fateful journey

away from home

after the night of broken glass

your parents will vanish

the world will shatter

and you must flee

go then

to find the iris

of a dragon’s eye

you’ll find

a garden

under the churn

of blue water

where the stars

of a lost constellation

lie in slumber

mountains of clouds

black columns

of shimmering stone

hover around

the scales 

of this sleeping giant

you will feel

the movement

of waves in air

and water

quietly bob along

until you find

the oldest star

let it carry you

to the farthest shore

where the light

is never extinguished

and birds sing

in the tallest trees

Alan Chong Lau

Alan Chong Lau is a poet and visual artist based in Seattle, Washington. He serves as Arts Editor for the International Examiner, a community newspaper. As a visual artist, he is represented by ArtXchange Gallery in Seattle, Washington.

John Levy is a poet and photographer. His most recent book of poetry, “Silence Like Another Name,” was published by Otata’s Bookshelf. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Alan Chong Lau and John Levy have published three volumes of a poetry and photography collaboration that can be found by searching online for “eye2word.”

This summer and into the fall, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art is putting on a retrospective of works by the celebrated Northwest visionary, George Tsutakawa (1910-1997). Maybe “Northwest visionary” doesn’t quite do the artist justice: Tsutakawa attained international stature in his time, rivaling that of his friends Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. With over seventy artworks on hand—paintings, drawings, sculptures, hand-crafted furniture—as well as a gorgeous exhibition catalogue, the retrospective is a real occasion.

People often asked George Tsutakawa if he was Japanese or American, and he liked to answer “both.” His commitment to both, his ability to unify them, is part of what makes the artist loom large in the post-WWII arts scene. Born in Seattle in 1910, Tsutakawa was sent to Japan in early childhood, receiving a rich education in traditional Japanese arts and culture. His well-off family charted out his educational future, but Tsutakawa rejected it, particularly its militarist aspect. Disowned, Tsutakawa came back to Seattle. At University of Washington, he studied art and philosophy while working in fish canneries and produce stands to support himself. 

The horrors of WWII and a climate of racial hatred caused many Japanese Americans living in the U.S. to distance themselves from their Japanese heritage, and this was true of Tsutakawa. He poured himself into European and American culture and embraced modernism in all its forms. But a cultural shift was going around him. Local painters like Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, writers like Gary Snyder, musicians like John Cage (then teaching at Cornish), had all been moving in an opposite direction: they disdained many aspects of “Western” culture and found artistic and spiritual inspiration in Zen and other “Eastern’’ practices. Tsutakawa was well-suited to flourish in those cultural cross-currents. 

The retrospective concentrates on his work from the 1950s forward. One of the earliest pieces on view is “Beach Pattern No. 11” (1950). Tsutakawa’s reverence for water is already present in the work. While the watercolor reveals traces of his later style, what leaps out more strongly is the influence of Cubism and Expressionism. 

Encouraged by Mark Tobey, Tsutakawa began to revive his connection to the Japanese aesthetics he’d once renounced. You can see this evolution in works from the 1960s and beyond. One highlight of the show is “Cracked Lake” from 1974. The large painting in sumi and gansai (Japanese watercolor) plays a game of making ink and paper look like clay. It’s the clay of a dried-up lake-bed that Tsutakawa represents, but this image echoes the ceramic style most prized in Japan during Tsutakawa’s childhood: Hagi ware. Rawness and simplicity characterizes the style, as does the unpredictable web of cracks in the glaze. 

What is also striking about “Cracked Lake” is what’s absent from it: water and life. Other paintings from the same period teem with living creatures. It’s as if “Cracked Lake” invites a meditation on impermanence.

As fine as the paintings may be, Tsutakawa made his greatest marks with wood and bronze sculptures. One major inspiration for Tsutakawa’s new directions in sculpture came from reading the 1952 travelog, “Beyond the High Himalayas.” Its author, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas described obos, stacked rock formations erected by pilgrims traversing mountain passes, each traveler adding their own stone or flat boulder to the monument. Whatever import the artist found here, obos entranced him enough that they began turning up in his paintings (“Flying Obos”). In ‘57 he set out to explore these humble forms in a series of wooden sculptures. For these works Tsutakawa chose teak, a wood that is native to India and Southern Asia. This show includes several pieces from the series, some in wood, some in bronze. 

Tsutakawa made his breakthrough bronze fountain sculpture in 1960; “Fountain of Wisdom” was based on the obos concept. The piece was commissioned for the entrance to the Seattle Public Library—the artist’s first major public art commission (two more commissions came before the first was even unveiled). This exhibition includes select proposal drawings and models (maquettes) depicting several of his towering fountains; the exhibition catalog includes several photographs of the actual works installed at sites all over the world. 

The obsession with the obos didn’t end there for Tsutakawa, however. At the age of 67 he climbed to the 15,000-foot level in the Himalayas to see obos with his own eyes. This story comes up in the exhibition catalog, and it speaks volumes about Tsutakawa’s life. 

Maybe it is that larger-than-life quality that inspired Bainbridge Island Museum to install a tribute to the artist in the museum’s two-story window gallery. For this effort, the curatorial and installation teams collaborated with artist June Sekiguchi and artist/engineer Charles Faddis. It’s a fitting gesture for a towering figure like Tsutakawa. 

Tom McDonald

Tom McDonald is a writer and musician living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

“George Tsutakawa: Language the Nature” is on view at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, located at 550 Winslow Way on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and open daily from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. For more information, visit www.biartmuseum.org.

“There is another world, but 

Before visiting Loper and Veltkamp’s exhibitions, the guest first passes through a series of installations that are worth mentioning. Ko Kirk Yamahira’s suspended installation hangs above the viewer while they also experience Tricia Stackle’s Color Spectrum Collection; sculptures that are designed specifically for human interaction. The objects were arranged in a circle and their undulating forms invite people to sit, lie down, climb, and otherwise experience them. Stackle is based in Mount Vernon, Washington, a city about 60 miles north of the museum, and this is part of an ongoing relationship between the artist and BAM. From their first art interaction in the museum, visitors are aware of their role and presence in and around the work. it is in this one.” The words of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard reverberate from the gallery walls of the Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM). Even though the quote is included in Patte Loper’s exhibition, it is possible that the general viewer can utilize questions raised by the phrase for multiple art exhibitions and artistic expressions. Empathy, creativity, perspective, and communication are all attributes that aid the inquisitive viewer, and all these characteristics come into play with the artworks currently in the museum. From Loper’s scientific labyrinth drawings to Joey Veltkamp’s vibrant reminders rooted in nostalgia, the exhibitions provoke the viewer to consider their role in the natural world, relationships with neighbors (human and natural), and humankind’s position in this world.

Patte Loper and Joey Veltkamp’s exhibits are both in the third-floor galleries of the museum. The interpretive text details that Loper’s exhibit began as a study in how the foundational theories of early museum collections and scientific explorations appeared  to support a destructive relationship with the natural world, as opposed to promoting humankinds’ interconnectedness to that world. Later, the COVID-19 pandemic continued to push the artist to consider perspectives that were not human at all. What does a world look like if humans are not at the center? Further exploration in a cemetery led the artist to review our connectivity with the natural and spiritual world, and how all these elements relate and communicate to each other. 

Loper examines these relationships in a series of drawings called “Tapestry Maps.” The interpretive museum texts connect these drawings to Hieronymus Bosch’s artwork, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which some scholars have interpreted as scenes of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. However, one interesting comparison is between Loper’s “Tapestry Maps” and the “Creation” scene by Bosch, which is visible when the triptych is closed. Visually, both works are devoid of color and reference a globe. Bosch’s “Creation” is perfect; empty of humans and occupied by thriving plant life. In contrast, Loper’s maps outline the movement of reality as our existence progresses from heaven to earth to hell, a result of the living and conscious creatures becoming more disconnected. In addition to these incredibly detailed drawings, Loper includes an installation and sculpture. The work is conceptual, and the subject matter is challenging, so it is helpful that the artist also includes a station for viewer participation and reflection.

Across the hallway, the viewer is immediately drawn to the playful and colorful work of Joey Veltkamp. Titled “SPIRIT!,” the exhibition includes many of the artist’s quilts, several drawings, banners, an exterior installation, and one rug. While the objects are numerous, the subject matter and mood is remarkably consistent. Veltkamp is interested in what makes his home unique: the food, people, beauty, and history of the Pacific Northwest. 

The exhibition is not lacking in Veltkamp’s whimsical sense of humor as he highlights some of the stranger elements of the Northwest. Twilight, Twin Peaks, serial killers, and Subarus are all mentioned in the colorful quilts on display. 

Veltkamp’s exhibition is rooted in his lived experience as a queer folk artist living in the Pacific Northwest, and the show is filled with very personal references from his life and childhood. His dreams, hopes, and fears are all on display. Two quilts are presented on physical beds in a gallery, and above the beds hang beads and crystals on wire that are suspended from the ceiling. The materials catch the eye as they glisten and refract colorful light on the walls and people around them. The artist encourages guests to “walk around and feel the full experience of queerness: the joy, the sorry, the loss, the gifts, the experience.” The exhibition is an invitation to see the world with Veltkamp as your guide.

The exhibitions could not be more visually different, but it seems that some of the core messages and questions are related. How do we connect with ourselves? How can we be better neighbors? How can we work together to make this world a better place? Take a trip to Bellevue Arts Museum and maybe consider these questions yourself with the artists as your guide.  

Hats off to BONFIRE Gallery for another cutting-edge exhibit with two of the most outrageous artists in Seattle. Deborah Faye Lawrence and Nancy Kiefer both push the boundaries of what is acceptable, but in strikingly different ways. The title, “Still Hung Up,” refers to a phrase that used to refer to passionate affairs gone wrong. But now it means the artists’ obsession with creativity.  

Nancy Kiefer has a long career of creating insanely confrontational, close up images of women. They are sassy, angry, beautiful, naughty, and recently tragic in her mothers of the disappeared from her “Fierce Woman” series.  These are not easy to look at, the colors are harsh, highly saturated and discordant. Kiefer’s use of black line is aggressive. But what immediately almost overwhelms us is the power of all of these women, whether they undulate like a flame as in “Eye Rise,” offer protection with a flip of a long nailed hand in “Gorgon (Protector),” or hold a terrifying witch mask in “Puppet.” 

Kiefer is a storyteller as well as a painter, and we see stories in these faces. She exposes the grotesque in our public world with these private women. Kiefer boldly strips away the outside and gives us only the inside and it is, of course, also her own intense emotional experiences that inform these works. 

Deborah Faye Lawrence disrupts us with collaged images that create unexpected juxtapositions paired with an intense choice of words and references. She frequently uses tin TV trays as the ground for her complex collages. Like Kiefer, her women are strong and naughty. In “Hen Party,” four rooster headed acrobats perch on others only partially seen. They triumphantly hold at bay an intense onslaught of pointed streamers from every direction, each with a different barbed expletive for women. 

At the entrance of “Our Blue Planet,” Ken Workman, the direct descendant of Chief Seattle, welcomes us from the shores of the Duwamish River, the historic homeland of his people, now a superfund site.

That pairing of history, water, and the present condition of the planet is one theme of “Our Blue Planet.” We next see above our heads, a long banner by Carolina Caycedo that documents the changes in a river as it goes from clean (blue) to polluted (mud colored). Nearby in Caycedo’s video, we learn from the people living on the Paranà River in Brazil, about their traditional ways, the impact of a huge dam on their lives, and their brave resistance.

This landmark exhibition has ten themes and almost one hundred art works, all drawn from the museum’s own collections and local loans. Three curators collaborated on its organization, mostly remotely, during the pandemic. Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art; Barbara Brotherton, Curator of Native American Art; and Natalia Di Pietrantonio, newly appointed as Assistant Curator of South Asian Art, created themes that refer to water as necessary to life, as pleasure, as law, as mythic, and as desecrated. They encompass celebration, poetry, ritual, and catastrophe. The exhibition is truly global spanning every continent.

At the outset, the revival of Indigenous Canoe Journeys is honored with regalia by Danielle Morsette for the ceremonial greetings during stops on the way to the host tribe. These elegant garments are part of the theme “Rivers and Canoes that Sustain Life” which also includes striking videos of actual journeys by Tracey Rector.

The theme “Rains that Flood and Hypnotize” naturally includes a compelling photograph of a monsoon in India by Raghubir Singh of four women huddled together. In contrast, Amrita Das vividly depicts the overwhelming destruction of the 2004 Tsunami in Sri Lanka in the linear patterns of the indigenous Mithila Style.

One of my favorite themes was “Future Waters through the eyes of Women and Children.” The seemingly science fiction landscape of Dallol in Northern Ethiopia, one of the hottest and driest places on Earth, is the setting for the work of Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh, who reenacts the almost impossible process of getting water there. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video “The Boat People” imagines a future world in which children collect the detritus of what we have left behind and create rituals with them.

One of the strengths of Seattle Art Museum is Australian indigenous art, and as we hear daily about climate disasters there, the work by those artists takes on all the more significance. They appear throughout the exhibition culminating in the gallery “Where Water is Law in Northern Australia” with newly created works incised on found aluminum next to the more traditional bark paintings.

Reinstalling works from other galleries in new contexts is another surprise of the exhibition as we greet “The Mask of Ḱumugwe’(Chief of the Sea)” from the Kwakwaka’waka who presides over “Sea Creatures Who are Honored and Endangered.” Not far away is a promised gift, a dramatic bronze turtle. It is an homage to a ritual tradition as well as a reference to efforts today to preserve these turtles and other marine creatures through collaborations between scientists and Indigenous elders.

We see with new eyes in the reinstallation of Marita Dingus’s stark statement about the slave trade and Claire Partington’s surprising porcelain ensemble that goes way beyond decorative arts in “Tragic Memories of Global Trade.”

“Mythic Vision from Water’s Creation to Regulation” includes Raqib Shaw’s colorful fantasy of underwater life “Garden of Earthly Delights V” as well as references to the dangers and mysteries of the sea from ancient China to the present.

Finally “Desecration of our Troubled Waters,” speaks to our deeply troubled planet. “Desecration #2” by John Feodorov brings together the sacred and the profane in his depiction of pipelines spilling pollution into the ground of an Indigenous reservation, painted on a sacred white carpet.

Be sure to download the QR codes to listen to the artists own dramatic commentaries. I was particularly mesmerized by the video from the Torres Straits (an archipelago of 300 islands north of Australia), and La Toya Ruby Frazier, who spoke eloquently about her project on the pollution of water in Flint, Michigan.

This not to-be-missed exhibition immerses, enchants, warns, and finally, hopes to inspire us to action. A video at the end “Water Protectors,” asks artists, activists, leaders, and scientists, to answer the question “What can people do to honor and protect water?” We must all ask ourselves that question. 

Susan Noyes Platt

Susan Noyes Platt writes a blog www.artandpoliticsnow.com and for local, national, and international publications.

“Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water” is on view until May 30, Wednesday through Sunday 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. at Seattle Art Museum, located at 1300 First Avenue in Seattle, Washington. Visit www.SeattleArtMuseum.org for more information.

You enter most museum exhibits a minute or two after you step through the museum’s front door. For the “Wood” exhibit at the Jefferson Museum of Art & History in Port Townsend, it’s different: this show starts with the front doors—they are part of the exhibit.

The museum is rebuilding the structure’s original cedar doors after 130 years of service. A video in the lobby documents the crafting of the new construction. The experience puts you immediately in the right frame of mind to appreciate the world of “Wood.” The rebuild also hints at the broader changes underway at the museum, as its leadership reimagines the way it frames and presents local history.

“Wood” offers a cross-section of the region’s woodworking talents. It showcases furniture, sculpture, and tools, along with pieces that are more difficult to classify. With its focus on five artisans, the exhibition is balanced and admirably diversified. One of the featured artists is just starting out on her path, while some are in their mature master phase. Some of the artisans are well known and well shown in the region, while others keep a lower profile. 

The range of the work on display is similarly diverse. Several pieces are all about function and utility—a rocking chair, a sheet music stand, a milking stool—while some works are fine art objects. All of them achieve beauty, and visitors may struggle with the standard museum admonition, “Do not touch.” But on that point, the curators have set out blocks of various woods for visitors to pick up, smell, and otherwise inspect, with descriptions of each wood’s characteristics from a woodworker’s perspective. These are especially worthwhile if the only wood you can reliably identify is particle board. 

We begin with the pairing of Annalise Rubida, an emerging talent, and her mentor Steve Habersetzer, a traditional master craftsman. Both are affiliated with the Port Townsend School of Woodworking (PTSW). Both have a mind for the practical—their contributions are pieces of furniture, and tools or objects meant to do work. Rubida’s Windsor rocking chair is an impressive and ambitious piece. But her more modest creations are charming as well, such as her pair of hand-carved brooms (a long-handled push broom, and a whisk-broom). Tool users tend to be toolmakers—you get the sense that Rubida would never clean up wood shavings and sawdust with a Shop-Vac. 

Habersetzer brings decades of experience with wood—he worked as a logger at one point, a ship-builder at another. He is something of a purist these days: he uses only hand-tools, and he works with locally sourced and sustainably harvested wood. Most of Habersetzer’s work in the show—such as the buckets made of cedar staves—embody simplicity and practicality. These values he now passes on to the next generation of craftspeople coming through PTSW.  

Like Rubida and Habersetzer, Seth Rolland is a furniture-maker, but in his creations we see more emphasis on imagination and decoration. Scandinavian design aesthetics influence some of his work, and he likes to bring in materials such as stone and glass into his explorations of organic form. Several pieces by Rolland are entirely sculptural, such as “Ghost Tree,” with its display of wood bending. Note that he crafted “Ghost Tree” from a single piece of wood. 

Next comes Brian Perry of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, a prominent wood carver. Some of his creations are in Seattle’s Burke Museum and in various public spaces on tribal land. He often works at large scale: story poles, totem poles, wall facades, canoes. “Wood” features Perry at a more intimate scale, including his powerful “Salish Weavers Spirit,” a carving that honors the art and craft of weaving. In Coastal Salish tradition, women do the weaving, men do the wood-carving. The women use non-representational design elements in their textiles; the men depict animal and human figures in their carvings. Perry’s “Salish Weavers Spirit” includes a geometric motif drawn from the weaving vocabulary, and its shape suggests the whorls that weavers use for the spinning process. One take on Perry’s carving (perhaps a naive take) is that it sees beyond divisions between art practices, between genders, between the human and the spiritual.

The exhibition continues into and concludes below the main level in a room that was once the women’s jail. In this captivating context we find turned-wood objects by Helga Winter. The irony is that Winter is the freest of the five artisans in “Wood”—her elegantly imperfect and asymmetric vessels are free from functional considerations, and are unconstrained by age-old tradition. Even the wood she favors—Pacific madrone—reflects her free-spirit: the hardwood is notoriously unpredictable in response to cutting. It is prone to warping and even cracking, but Winter embraces that waywardness. She often decorates her surfaces with color and abstract design—sometimes using busy marks and dotted patterns, other times using thin washes of solid color that keep the wood grain visible while glowing with a presence of their own.

Rounding things out, “Wood” includes photographer Jeremy Johnson’s large format black-and-white portraits of the show’s five artists, and a display of the hand tools used by 19th century home-builder A. Horace Tucker. Tucker constructed some of Port Townsend’s most iconic homes, including the Pink House, Captain Fowler’s House, and the 1868 Rothschild House. His work literally looms large over the town, and may even have something to do with the vitality of the woodworking scene that “Wood” celebrates.  

Tom McDonald

Tom McDonald is a writer and musician living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Jefferson Museum of Art & History (540 Water Street in Port Townsend, Washington) is open Thursday to Sunday from 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. “Wood”is on view through May. Visit www.jchsmuseum.com for information.