• Roq La Rue Gallery was hot and hopping at its new Pioneer Square location last Thursday, with Stacey Rozich's patterny, humanish creatures crawling all over the walls. Roq used to be in Belltown, which has some seriously bad juju at this point. "Belltown—I don't even know what to say about that place," one gallerygoer said. "That's a place that needs a togetherness program." Also new on the gallery scene: James Harris in the former Howard House space on Second Avenue, opening Wednesday, May 8, with big, bright photographs of sunsets projected on shattered mirrors by Bing Wright, and bright, messy portraits and plaster heads by Rachelle Rojany.
• Some ballet-world rumormongers are speculating that Peter Martins, ballet master in chief at the New York City Ballet, will leave his post in the next few years. You know who'd fit that job perfectly? Peter Boal, current director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Think about it: He grew up in NYCB, then came to Seattle, where he proved he could steer a large dance institution. We'd miss him sorely if he left, but it would make perfect sense for him to return to his roots for the third act of his career.
• Certain artists are only talking about certain upcoming events if certain critics sign a nondisclosure agreement. And that's all we can say about that.
• Photographic Center Northwest has a new executive director—somebody who combines the cachet of Aperture, the New York photo foundation where she worked for 15 years, with the home fries of Puyallup, where she grew up: Michelle Dunn Marsh. She has degrees from Bard College and Pace University, she teaches at the New School, she worked for Chronicle Books, and she just founded an innovative—partly crowdsourced, partly curated—art-book publishing company called Minor Matters. She'll start at the Photo Center on August 5, with an emphasis on drawing together the art form and the region. Did you know, for instance, that MoMA and Portland Art Museum were the first two American museums to begin collecting photography back in the 1940s?
• On May 2, Seattle playwright and performer Chad Goller-Sojourner posted a Facebook update that read: "I'm trying to imagine a situation where a group of Black Seattleites donned masks, took to the streets and hurled rocks, bottles, spit, hammers, insults, flares, chunks of concrete, newspaper bins, construction barriers, trash cans and metal rods at the police.—I'm trying to imagine a situation where a group of Black Seattleites did all this, along the way breaking vehicle and store front windows, injuring eight police officers, and a woman just trying to get home.—I'm trying to imagine a situation where the next day, the headlines screamed 17 PEOPLE ARRESTED ON MISDEMEANOR CHARGES.—And yet, try as I might —I can't." 
