Results tagged “seattleartmuseum”

SAM Remix Hits Its Stride

Long gone are the days of showing up to an empty SAM After Hours event and damning yourself for thinking it might have been cool this time. On the contrary, if you felt the bar scene was a little empty last Friday night, SAM might owe you an apology (and a reason to go ahead and mark your calendars for February 26th).

Fall Flashback

In true West Coast style, this event is stripping away all barriers of exclusivity and getting its "do-gooder" on by making the event free and donating all profits from their raffle to Art Corps for kids.

Can't Miss It: Monday

Bumbershoot: Cement (and lament?) the fact that summer is over with the last day of Bumbershoot 09. Drown your sorrows in music, art, and funnel cake. Make it a Metric Monday.

DARK: Samuel Ligon, writer and editor of the Spokane lit mag Willow Springs, comes to town tonight to discuss his new collection of short stories. In Drift and Swerve, Ligon runs his characters through the gamut of contemporary American personal hells: drugs, abuse, sexual longing, spiritual emptiness. As is often the case, it's the book's black humor and the author's cutting prose that keep it from being a cruel slog-fest of a read. Ligon appears with Sam A.J. Rathburn and Amy Schrader, two recent Willow Springs contributors, who will also read from their work.

    

Michael Darling, the Seattle Art Museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, has assembled a surprisingly cool show with , which opened last weekend at SAM and runs through Sept. 7. The post-WWII period saw the apex of high Modernism in painting with the abstract expressionists, led by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They took the Modernists' radical approach to painting to the utmost extreme, by actually separating the brush from the canvas and completely rejecting representational art. At the same time, though, a new group of painters were laying the groundwork of Postmodernism, and were searching for new ways to break free of the canvas.

Can't Miss It: Wednesday

NONCONFORMIST INDIE ROCK GOD: That's right, Destroyer (aka Dan Bejar aka the "unofficial" wine-swilling member of the New Pornographers) is in town tonight, ready to baptize the new Crocodile with...frankly, you never quite know with Dan. One recent album, Destroyer's Rubies, opened with an over-nine-minute track, with Bejar announcing portentously, "Cast myself towards infinity, trust me, I had my reasons." Trouble in Dreams was summed up as "shitfaced" by Pitchfork, who also called Bejar an "untouchable wizard." What a character! If you haven't had a chance to visit the new Croc yet, this show is as good a reason as any.

Wall Art - Child by archie.timbol

Stalk of the Town

Katelyn is airborne, on her way to Turkey (!!!) for the month. This weekend, she'll be exploring Istanbul by her lonesome. She plans on geeking out over all the religious history and food-related sight-seeing she can pack into four days before she flies down to the Mediterranean coast for the next leg of her adventure.

Get Out Tonight: Warhol Screen Tests at SAM

We used to think Andy Warhol's work was amusing.

Author John Updike was at Seattle Arts & Lectures this week. The upcoming SAL appearance of Annie Leibovitz (November 19) is sold out. Michael Pollan (January 12) is almost sold out.

POLITICS JUNKIE: The jury's still out on whether or not McCain is going to display how capable he is of handling politics and governing at the same time (i.e. the job of the president) by showing up for tonight's debate in Mississippi. But, the Presidential Debate Commission will be there, a giant pool of reporters will be there, and his opponent Barack Obama will be there ready and willing to turn the whole thing into a town hall meeting if that's what has to happen. Oh, the drama of the whole thing! Tune in at your own home, at your friends' houses, or at a number of locations around town that will be holding watch parties. (UPDATE: McCain has decided to show up, after all. We'll refrain from commenting and leave that all up to you.)

Like it's not embarrassing enough to just trip and stumble in a public place. A young visitor to the Seattle Art Museum suffered even further embarrassment by tripping and falling into a world famous work of art. The stumbling Seattlite damaged Double Elvis, a piece by Andy Warhol. According to the Slog's report on the incident, the SAM's spokesperson said the piece had been dented and was sent to the museum's conservators for repair.

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.
If you've been meaning to drop in to see those three panels from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, why not tonight? It's up on the third floor. The panels been restored -- we believe they're now in HD. You can say things like, "550 years old? I wouldn't have guessed a day over 379!"

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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