A tip last week suggested that Bumbershoot organizers One Reel may not be including American Poster Institute's Flatstock at this year's festival. I sent out an e-mail last Wednesday, and One Real Associate Director Aubbie Beal responded to my e-mail late yesterday with this statement: "It's true that Flatstock is taking a break from Bumbershoot this year due to current space constraints. However, we are hopeful that we will find a mutually agreeable, suitable location for them next year, when new spaces become available after the Next 50 Celebration has ended."

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• Images courtesy the artist
• The Widow

To make their pictures, [Chesser and his collaborators] bring together 10 or so people for a few days at a chosen location, usually wildernessy. Each "camp" has a theme—one was focused on hunting and the female element, another was called The Death of False Optimism—and they pre-create garments, sets, situations. For some pictures, the staging is based on, say, a Caravaggio painting; other times it's improvised ("It's dawn, grab whatever you have and let's go to the edge of the canyon").

A full story on Seattle artist Adrain Chesser, including looking at his remarkable early series I Have Something to Tell You and links to where he's showing in the city now, here. His web site here.

• "I have something to tell you."

ARTINFO's top ten favorite mean things that have been said about Dale Chihuly.

Aaaaaand the Chihulyseum at Seattle Center opens Monday. It'll cost you 19 bucks to get in.

They say the sun is on its way out of Seattle for a while. This hurts. For summer on a stick in the coming days, go to Adam Sorensen's candy landscapes at James Harris Gallery through June 2. The show's called Honey from the Sky, Yogurt from the Mountaintops.

Here's a detail from one called California (the whole thing is here). The artist is not from California. His California's stripes and colors are inspired by those '80s Hobie designs.

• The Stranger

I cannot link directly to "Wild Things," David Samuels's cover piece in this month's Harper's, because Harper's won't let me.

But it's a great read. Samuels hangs out at the zoo for months. He draws wild and unexpected connections that also make perfect sense. He sees humans as animals and animals as equal subjects, but not for any animal-rights-type purpose. He's just demonstrating what he sees. The place is full of lies, and not necessarily the ones you think (kind of like every place?). He describes the director of the zoo as "a grown-up boy whose mental age is approximately seven." You should pick up a copy.

Here's a bit:

Near the fire pits, a fat mom is yelling at her kid for wasting food. "You never, never, never waste food! Never!" she instructs, in a scary tone of voice that is guaranteed to echo in the head of her future young diabetic. The Hasidic parents behind her are engaged in an odd-looking ballet, wheeling rickshaw-like contraptions that can carry three or four kids at a time. Their older children walk alongside the rickshaws in a parade of unseasonable black clothing that provides irrefutable evidence of the success of a communal experiment in rebuilding a human population that was systematically shot, gassed, and burned alive by their fellow humans. Below a footbridge, two slender gazelles butt heads, as a young boy standing alongside me unzips himself and sends a slender arc of golden urine into the illusory space of their enclosure.