Buster Simpson is one of Seattle's foundational artists—and the guy who's left more art out in public in this city than anyone else. Belltown has been called Simpson City. That refers to its good parts. Now he's the artist on the redesign of the central waterfront.

He's been running around impishly doing all this since the 1970s, after having gotten his start with a catastrophic installation at Woodstock in 1969.

The whole story of the artist is now on HistoryLink.org, the great online archive of Washington State that was founded back in the day by Walt Crowley and has become an invaluable resource. Here's the overall story, and here's the story of his first installation in Seattle in 1973, a little known installation/performance/sculpture/squat co-created with Chris Jonic called Selective Disposal Project. (I wrote them. I've started doing some writing on the side for HistoryLink, and it's really fun to just step back, research, and tell history.)

Make sure you get to the Frye Art Museum by October 13 to see the first-ever comprehensive museum survey of Buster Simpson's work, with sculptures, installations, videos, photographs, and plans to reshape the centers of whole cities and plant the scion of an English tree on the lawn of the U.S. Supreme Court. Buster is still, always, fighting the bullshit.