Talk Around Town
Best News: In April, artist Claire Cowie will fill the front room of a Los Angeles gallery with her funny-wild-cute sculptures. If you attended her show last July (see "In and Out of Context," Emily Hall, July 11, 2002) at the James Harris Gallery, you know about Cowie's ceramic animals, which melt into themselves, looking, at times, suitably alarmed. (Others are more blasé.)
At last search, you could get a round-trip ticket to L.A. for about $250. What do you say we pack the gallery on opening night? I put this question to Jim Harris on the phone the other day; he was too distracted by whether or not his dog, Pearl, was going to nick a piece of pizza to take me seriously. Anyway, Cowie's show opens April 19 at cherrydelosreyes (12611 Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, 310-398-7404). What's more fun than a gallery full of Seattleites?
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In Other Good News: The Seattle Research Institute has finally achieved web visibility with a lovely new site (designed by young cat Josh Lovejoy) at www.seattleresearchinstitute.org. The institute takes pains to differentiate itself from other intellectuals: "We will do more than publish books with elegant sentences," the site declares (which I believe, since the group was founded by elegant writers Matthew Stadler, Nic Veroli, Diana George, and Charles Mudede--yes, Charles Mudede, who is sitting not 20 feet from where I'm writing this).
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In Mysterious News: What's up with the Seattle Art Museum's big contemporary West Coast show? All the buzz is rumor... the exhibition, called something like From Vancouver to Baja, opens this fall, and no announcement has been made yet about who's in. Last fall, SAM's Lisa Corrin, along with a couple of co-curators from other West Coast institutions, made studio and gallery visits to see the work of about 30 local artists; what I've heard is that only five will be chosen.
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In Ongoing News: 911 Media Arts Center's irate members continue to build a strategy to preserve the organization from what they feel is an untrustworthy board of trustees. On February 20, over 100 members voted to change 911's articles of incorporation--a change that would give members the right to vote boards in and out. It's still unclear whether the nonvoting membership can vote to change the organization's bylaws, but I bet I know what the members' first action would be....
