On Sunday, the Center on Contemporary Art shut down its South Lake Union space and decamped to a temporary location in Ballard, the Shilshole Bay Beach Club, owned by one of board president Joe Roberts's companies.
Roberts and vice president Mike Sweney insist that CoCA has no plans to fold, although the organization, founded in the late 1970s as one of the many sponsored projects of the influential incubator and/or, has been in one kind of trouble or another most of the time since. (So, it should be said, have plenty of alternative spaces born in that era.)
The story is so familiar it hardly needs telling: CoCA owes $36,000 to its landlord and has a weak board where all the pressure falls on a few active members. Its 2004 relocation to 410 Dexter Avenue North (not far from the now-dead Consolidated Works) was supposed to be a rebirth. "We moved into South Lake Union expecting an arts renaissance," Sweney e-mailed. "Alas, things didn't work out that way. Except for openings, traffic has been nonexistent, leading to a precipitous drop in membership. Several key board members have recently left and we have been hesitant to fill those voids until we figure out our next step. We need to find a space and neighborhood that can fully support our mission."
But CoCA has more than physical problems. For better or worse, alternative spaces live and die by the personalities of their programmers, and nobody's running CoCA these days except for some volunteers and a few beleaguered board members. Plus, where CoCA was once the only source in town for cutting-edge contemporary art, now it joins an ensemble cast and ends up looking like the dowdy aunt of Henry Art Gallery, Western Bridge, Howard House, Crawl Space, SOIL, Lawrimore Project, and James Harris Gallery.
No longer the cool kid yet still living on the emerging end of the spectrum, CoCA is caught doing all the work for none of the glamour, which makes it hard to attract donors and trustees to fund staff positions, and to make them appealing to curators. If it does die this time around, CoCA's inability to address this underlying problem may be, more than anything, what killed it.
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The day Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park opened (January 20), I wrote on Slog about the frantic do-not-touch signs: "If the museum continues to behave as though this park is exactly like the controlled zone of a museum... then the park is going to be a massive flop." Two days later, I reported that SAM conservators were out pressure washing the finger-oil graffiti from Richard Serra's Wake. (Sealing Serra's Cor-Ten steel with wax could minimize its vulnerability, but the museum has decided not to do that, the P-I reported.) "OUCH! EVEN THE LIGHTEST TOUCH HARMS THE ART," one sign shouts.
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