FACT: Founded in 1927, the Henry is the oldest public art museum in Washington State. Take that, SAM! more ›

It's the first Thursday of February, which means that the Seattle Art Museum is open "After Hours," and entrance is free. Their Art for All musical guest is okanomodé, and provokes this cross-pollinated promotional copy:

Melding composition, style and genre with the skill of Basquiat blending color, okanomodé spins song into frenzy and makes magic with his tongue.

Francophiles attending the Beaujolais Nouveau gala in Bellevue Friday will have the chance to bid on more than a dozen travel packages (tickets to Paris? ho-hum...) as well as some rare and valuable works of art. An original lithograph by the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is likely to draw the most interest. more ›

Stand at the corner of First and Pike, and you almost hear the thunder of Seattle's hotel wars, the howitzers of the future as they battle for attention in the trades, the travel mags, the lifestyle glossies. more ›

We finally made the (arduous!) four-block trek down to the Frye to check out "Anxious Objects: Willie Cole's Favorite Brands." The exhibit highlights the last 20 years of Cole's work, heavy on the mixed media sculptures he's famous for. Cole takes ratty, disposable, everyday domestic objects and transforms them into pristine pieces that mimic symbols from South Asian and African art: scorched ironing boards become Domestic Shields, detached gas pump nozzles arc up from the floor like vipers ready to strike, and hundreds of thrift store high-heeled shoes transform into masks and dragons and mandalas. Cole's understanding of the forms and symbols at work in African and South Asian art shines through everything; the shapes and styles he evokes are spot on, no matter the medium. We had no idea irons could be so sexy. more ›

National film festival correspondent Kyle Anderson on Seattle's other one more ›

It seems every blogger in the Pacific Northwest is singing the praises of the Seattle Art Museum after their reopening. It'd be fun to be the contrary voice that slams the whole affair but really, we don't have it in us - we loved the SAM this weekend as well, so chalk this one up in the "yay" column. more ›

But let's not lose sight of another change that's proved another vast improvement: Pentagram's reworking of SAM's brand identity. more ›

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There will be plenty to see, do, and hate tomorrow, here is a guide—although we’ll probably end up sleeping in, before re-organizing our photo albums. more ›

The American Institute of Architects asked 1800 Americans to name their favorite buildings in the US. After further refinement and surveying, the AIA compiled a list of the top 150 and released it on Wednesday. more ›

Not true! Sure, Alexander Calder's 39-foot painted steel Eagle is going to be Seattle's next icon, but from this angle it looks kind of like a puppy getting ready to nip at its master's trousers. Rivalry of middle-aged artworks: Eagle is 35, Needle's pushing 50. more ›

>>>EMP, 6pm. First The Police's Andy Summers gets interviewed by EMP Senior Curator, Jasen Emmons. Then he signs his book, One Train Later: A Memoir. You need tickets to stand in the "Don't Stand So Close To Me" book-signing line, available with purchase of the book from University Book Store. Andy will sign one piece of memorabilia per copy of his book. Did we mention he has a book out? $5 at the door, free for Museum members. more ›

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No thanks to the Seattle Art Museum or their contractor, Sellen Construction, for making it easy to attend Hempfest this weekend. Their obstinacy in complying with terms of a Parks Department permit wasn't resolved until midweek. more ›

To the right is a picture of a llama named Bravo, which we chose because Seattle Opera's BRAVO! Club has 477 members and they would not all fit in a photo. Also, we like llamas. more ›

Sixteen years ago today Randy Johnson threw the first no-hitter in Mariners history. The 6'10'' lefthander scattered 6 walks in the 2-0 victory over Detroit. more ›

Dale Chihuly's copyright infringement suit against two of his former contractors has hit the New York Times (yeah, you need a login). (And we look forward to seeing the Stranger's post pointing out that they wrote that story first.) more ›

What's Seattlest doing this weekend? What isn't Seattlest doing this weekend? more ›

Bank of America, McDonalds and Starbucks? Seattlest is reeling a little from the notion of an overtly corporate party to celebrate the start of the year of the dog at Union station on Saturday, February 4th. more ›

After being closed last year for reroofing, the Seattle Asian Art Museum opened January 14 with four new shows. The wily curators at SAAM knew you weren't paying attention, though, so they scheduled the Grand Reopening for this Saturday, the 21st. The celebration inside features "music, dance, and theater from Asian cultures," a grouping that includes Sumo wrestling and DJ Anup Shastri. There will be FREE Starbucks Coffee served between 10am and 1pm for the incredibly budget-conscious and possibly anemic. Suggested admission for adults is just $5, which is so inexpensive it doesn't make it worth our while to tell you that children get in for even less. more ›

This weekend, Seattlest will be representing at a high school basketball game, a chamber music concert, a church in Burien, and Alderwood Babies-R-Us, respectively. For the full 411, see below. more ›

Local hater Pete Bagge drew a little comic strip last year for the anarcho-fascist propoganda outlet Reason Magazine that heaped scorn and ridcule on the innocent men, women and children of the art world. Now, one year later, Bagge's karma comes back to bite him in the ass with an art world style exhibition of that very same comic. Will the hypocrisy blow Bagge's mind? Will it be as bad as that one scene in the Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker cuts off Darth Vader's head only to see behind the mask... his own face!? more ›

KEXP recently announced that they will be pulling out of the Tacoma area and ceasing to broadcast on the 91.7 KXOT FM band they were using down there. The easy thought on this is similar to the one that appeared when, say, the Bellevue Art Museum announced it was shutting its doors: That is, "Anyone that lives in the area outside of Seattle is lame and doesn't care about art or culture and if they did they would live in Seattle. Furthermore, attempting to bring anyone outside of Seattle art or culture is a lost cause because they just don't care." Seattlest doesn't subscribe to that, of course, but it's out there. Actually, we were intrigued by the whole KEXP South experiment from the start, although we wouldn't quite say we thought that investing that volume of resources in old school radio land was the best idea. We don't pretend to know enough about the inner workings of KEXP to deliver any actual facts here, but it seems apparent that a battle has been waged on the inside of KEXP pitting geographic, FM expansion vs the internets and the internets have come out on top. The Tacoma invasion has been repelled and that AP "Little Radio Station That Could" piece has been reprinted in seemingly every paper in the country. more ›

Werner Herzog and David Cronenberg---the names alone are enough to make a crowd of film fanatics gasp. That's exactly why local den of cinema-geekery Seattle International Film Festival Group is spotlighting each filmmaker's work with screenings next week at the Seattle Art Museum; first Herzog and then Cronenberg. more ›

Crap do we love art. In fact we love art so much that if you had tickets to see something incredibly amazingly good, but there was art that we were supposed to see that day, sorry dude, you'd be going alone. more ›

We aggressively agree when they come after the EMP, sometimes to the point of inspiring an uncomfortable silence in the wake of our diatribe. Rarely do we have to defend the Needle, which is not to say that we actually want to go there. Can't we locals and tourists alike admire it from afar? And generally we beam in the steady glow of praise piled onto the Central Library, as if we drew it up ourselves one night over drinks with Rem. more ›

We at Seattlest keep a running list of "Things We Mean To Check Out" going at all times. But in this ever-changing world in which we live in, time sometimes runs out. "Why didn't someone remind us?" we wail, petulantly. So we're going to take our personal tragedy and pay it forward, but in a good way. more ›

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