Purchasing

This First Thursday, May 6, marks the trial run of Parking for Peanuts at the Merrill Place Garage in Pioneer Square.  The garage, located at the intersection of Alaskan Way and S King, has partnered with the Pioneer Square Community Association to offer free parking between the hours of 5 and 10 p.m. for visitors to First Thursday events.  To take advantage of the offer, drivers will need to show the garage attendant a receipt from a Pioneer Square business or a business card from a participating gallery.  If the experiment is a success, the service could be extended into the summer.

May 2010 Exhibitions

First Thursday opening reception: May 6, 6-8pm.
Through May 29

Bui. 3rd Ave. Oil on panel, 2010. 24 x 36 inches.

Tram Bui‘s exhibition of new oil paintings on panel extends her interest in dichromatic silhouettes of buildings under construction.  The colors are vivid and the drawing precise, but the surfaces are more meticulously rendered.  Unlike her previous shows, this body is conceived as a whole, systematically exploring basic color theory through a succession of two-color pairings, alternating the descriptions of the sky and the building.  All but one of the images draw on various views of the same building rather than different buildings.  The changing color pairings provide the dominant effect as the colors advance and recede through the contrasting combinations defining the architecture.

• View previous work by Bui

Dowell. Interim, Reykjavik. Acrylic on canvas, 2010. 40 x 60.

Sharon Dowell is a painter, curator, teacher and gallery director from North Carolina.  This is Dowell’s first Northwest exhibition of her architecturally inspired acrylic paintings. “I am interested in the documentation of memory and place and I strive to find beauty in often overlooked structures and spaces.”  The framework of the building facades provide rhythm and order to her loose, spatial layering and bold color planes.  Navigating a seeming contradiction, the artist achieves both structure and freedom with her painterly handling.

Mora. Baile de mineros (Dance of Miners). Linocut, 1947. 4-1/8 x 5-1/2 inches.

Francisco Mora (1922-2002)
Linocuts and Lithographs

The son of a weaver and a musician, Mexican artist Francisco Mora was born and educated in the southwestern state of Michoacán.  In 1941, he relocated to Mexico City where he began exhibiting with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a graphics workshop that built on Mexico’s rich tradition of printmaking in order to further a variety of revolutionary political and social causes.  In 1947, he married renowned African-American artist Elizabeth Catlett, with whom he exhibited widely.  During the 1950s, Mora received a number of commissions for public mural projects.  Accomplished as both a painter and printmaker, Francisco Mora is best known for his gritty, poignant graphic works depicting the daily lives of miners and other laborers in Mexico’s working class.  His prints are in a number of museum collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City, and the British Museum.

Reception: Thursday, April 22 6-8pm
Through Saturday April 24, 2010

West to East, E.V. #6 and #8, 2010. Intaglio, serigraph, drawing, and collage on Hannemuler paper. 15-1/2 x 42 inches each.

Produced by Donald Fels and Spanish master printers as part of his Girona Research Project. Please join us for this very special exhibition to view each of the intriguing series created by Fels on the Costa Brava.

Email or call 206 624-7684 for more information.

Recapitulations of Emptiness, No. 3, 2009-10. produced in collaboation with Timothy C. Ely. freshwater pearl, meteorite dust, cinnabar, gold, laser engraving, and carbon on paper. 31 x 22 inches.

Field of the Sky, Ian Boyden‘s exhibition at The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho, opens tomorrow night, April 8 from 7-9pm, with an artist’s lecture at 7:30. The exhibition continues through July 3, 2010.

His artistic practice reflects an intense interest in East Asian aesthetics, material relevance, and poetic imagination. He studied in China and Japan, and received degrees in the History of Art from Wesleyan University and Yale University. In 1998, Boyden founded Crab Quill Press and later moved to Walla Walla, Washington, where he is a selfemployed artist.

Download the Field of the Sky press release PDF to continue reading.

View available works by Ian Boyden

Elephant Bed (Brighton), 2009. Corn-based polymer, biodegradable methyl cellulose skins. 20 forms, 24' x 6' x 6' each.

John Grade has been named winner of the annual $10,000 Willard L. Metcalf Award for “a young artist of great promise,” from American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as the winner of the $25,000 Pollock-Krasner Award, an international award, given to “those individuals who have worked as professional artists over a significant period of time.”

Additionally, his current exhibition at Whatcom Museum is featured in the March 2010 issue of art ltd. magazine:

On April 10, 2010, Seattle artist John Grade’s installation at the Whatcom Museum in Washington State—comprised of ten, 24-foot high hanging sculptures made of degradable polymer materials, titled Bloom: The Elephant Bed—will end. Those pieces which have not slowly disappeared into a large pool of ink during the course of the exhibit will be walked into Bellingham Bay, where they will be left to dissolve in its waters, reprising a similar Elephant Bed ritual last year in England. This summer, Grade’s enormous, bog-inspired Seeps of Winter, which exhibited at Seattle’s Suyama Space in 2008, will be erected on a glacier in the central Cascades, and his woodwork Fold will be buried in the desert to become infested with termites. Both these latter works will later be retrieved, in their resultant eroded condition. Continue reading…

The Whatcom Museum > Bellingham Bay procession takes place this Saturday, April 10th beginning at 2:30pm.  Update: Plans have changed.

Procession in Brighton, UK

View John Grade’s works page