Oh god, finally. Finally, finally, finally.
The season of sunshine, the season of the Seattle Art Fair, the season of bike riding and Shakespeare in the park and everyone who’s been moaning about how cold and dark it is suddenly moaning about how hot and bright it is is upon us! The season also heralds the launch of the Summer 2017 Edition of Seattle Art and Performance, a Stranger Quarterly. Here's a quick peek at what you can find in it.
If it gets to be a little much—the heat—duck into Mariane Ibrahim Gallery and have a look at new paintings by Mwangi Hutter, including the larger-than-life one, Again fulfilling. As Emily Pothast discovered, the story of the artist(s) is as interesting as the painting itself.
The musical based Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home is (at last!) coming to Seattle in July. The musical-theater nuts who work at The Stranger have been annoying office-mate Jessica Fu, who saw it two years ago in New York, for details in advance. Finally we asked her to write down a few of them and published them for the quarterly.
Speaking of memoirs, Claire Dederer’s latest, Love and Trouble: A Mid-Life Reckoning—a funny, revealing book about sadness, romantic love, and Seattle itself—is recommended by more than one hard-to-please Stranger critic. Sean Nelson interviews Dederer about the process of writing it and how it feels to put so much of her personal life on the page.
The blockbuster traveling exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors caused Seattle Art Museum’s website to crash the first day tickets went on sale. The Quarterly includes an overview of Kusama’s career—and the source of the hallucinations that spurred her creativity.
And, of course, this is also the season of outdoor music festivals (see the full summer calendar here). For anyone venturing out into the direct sunlight (or in some cases, the wilderness) for a weekend’s worth of shows, Chase Burns has some advice.
And finally, the Stranger Things To Do Staff has compiled a breakdown of all the most noteworthy events happening in Seattle this summer (now through September 5). As mentioned above, the Best Festivals, plus the Best Art Shows, the Best Theater, Dance & Comedy, the Best Readings & Talks, the Best Classical Music and Operas as well as the Best Jazz Concerts, and finally, the Best Film Events.
