- Courtesy of Dave Price and Museums of Wonder
- WOW Just wow.
On the weekend of April 27th to 29th, Seattle will get another Gauguin show—the other Gauguin show, its promoters are calling it. This one will happen not far from the first one, Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise at Seattle Art Museum (my review). The show of Edgar Leeteg’s Gauguin-like paintings on black velvet will take place at 1016 Alley Arts, located two blocks south of SAM at 1016 First Avenue. The opening is Friday April 27 from 6 to 10 pm, with music by the nine-piece ukelele band The Ukadelics. (Continues through Sunday, April 29.) Full details will be on our art calendar soon. That weekend is also the last for the Gauguin show at SAM.
Marlow and Jodavid Harris are the organizers behind the show. They also own the great Official Bad Art Museum of Art at Cafe Racer in the U District, which is terrific, if you haven’t been by. And here’s a film about it all, including local characters like Price and Fantagraphics’s Larry Reid.
This is a case where I don’t really care about the art itself, but without this art and these people, Seattle would be no good at all.
Leeteg is a really, really, really good story. Believe me; read it in a piece by Cynthia Rose in the Seattle Times from 1998. It explains why Leeteg is the leader of the black velvet painters, Leeteg’s Seattle connection (locally based rock promoter Dave Price* is his biggest collector), why Seattle artist/provocateur Charlie Krafft loves Leeteg (“Because he represented everything the establishment hates”—not a good enough reason for me to be in love with an artist, but I do love Charlie Krafft), and it tells Leeteg’s life story as a mama’s boy, a billboard painter, and the grandson of a graveyard sculptor (another Seattle connection: calling Greg Lundgren).
*Price is “the guy they call whenever someone like Black Eyed Peas come to town and they need a fancy dressing room or green room,” says Leeteg show organizer Marlow Harris. I kind of want a glimpse into this guy’s work and life, right?
