Olga Koumoundouros is based in L.A. and had never been to Seattle
before this year. On a simple search for a cafe on the Eastside a few
months ago, she found herself on a short dirt road in the middle of
downtown Bellevue. Two shacks—derelict ranch homes,
really—stood on one side of the road, swallowed in green
overgrowth, their roofs buckling with moss. On the other side of the
road was a freshly built high-rise, surrounded by construction cranes
hovering everywhere, catering to the skeletons of towers scattered all
across Bellevue’s transmogrifying landscape.
She was there at the invitation of a high-rise developer, of all
people. A high-rise developer who claims to know nothing about art, but
who for the next three years is donating an apartment with a view and
2,000 square feet of two-story, immaculate exhibition space in his
newest building to contemporary artists—to Koumoundouros,
first.
Koumoundouros is one of the five artists who made Endless
Column, Constantin Brancusi’s 100-foot-tall cast-iron sculpture
from 1938, come crashing into the Studio Museum in Harlem this
summer—or made it look like it had, anyway. When she works alone,
she often builds temporary structures, like a raft for Huck and Jim
installed in a California swimming pool, or a warren of rooms made in
plywood recycled from demolished high-rises that, from the top, spells
the word “TERROR.”
She’ll be back in Bellevue Saturday, August 4, to begin her
three-month residency and exhibition. This program she inaugurates is
the latest in a series of ambitious contemporary art projects that have
opened in and around Seattle in the last five years: the building of
Tashiro-Kaplan, the transformation of the Frye Art Museum, the opening
of Western Bridge, and the opening of Lawrimore Project. Now there’s
Open Satellite, completely different from the rest. It will give a
rotating cast of curators the chance to bring four artists a year from
outside the region to Bellevue, where they’ll spend three months
making, installing, and showing their work and interacting with the
rest of Seattle art.
The first curators, who selected Koumoundouros, are Annie Han and
Daniel Mihalyo, also known as Lead Pencil Studio (and 2006
Stranger Genius Award winners). They invented the concept
behind Open Satellite in part because they’re Seattle artists who have
benefited from exposure outside the region—but also longed to see
artists traveling into their home city, not just out of it.
But they are quick to point out that this is a project not just in
Bellevue but also of, for, and about Bellevue as well as Seattle.
Koumoundouros, for instance, is hoping to base her installation on
elements from Bellevue’s history, and she is negotiating to try to use
parts of the shacks she found, which are scheduled for demolition.
And Open Satellite is dependent entirely on the largesse of downtown
Bellevue developer John Su, who is bankrolling it. It’s housed in his
23-story 989 Elements apartment tower, which opened to residents last
September. The lobby of the tower is small and, though decorated with
seating by Maya Lin, not particularly welcoming. Upstairs is a more
open sitting area, with tables and a bar and signs advertising the
building’s slogan—”Beyond Just Living.”
Su is sitting at one of the tables, explaining why he’s doing
this.
“What are we missing in downtown Bellevue?” Su says. “Artists. They
can’t afford it here.”
The son of a Taiwanese businessman and the brother of an architect,
Su is a civil engineer who chose to study at the University of
Washington instead of Columbia University because at the time, he says,
UW’s program was number 10 in the rankings, one slot above Columbia’s.
He wants the best, not only for himself, but also for his adopted city
of Bellevue, where he moved from Seattle in 1980. He contacted Han and
Mihalyo, who are architects as well as artists, after reading about
them in Architectural Record.
Su had already been involved in developing an “Ashwood Arts
District” in Bellevue, and he first thought of using his prime
ground-floor space in 989 Elements for an installation by Han and
Mihalyo. But they countered with proposals for larger projects,
including the exhibition hall for visiting artists. It was the biggest
idea they had—and the one he went for right away.
“It’s a gift,” Mihalyo says. “Developers are potentially the new
Medicis.”
Su views contemporary art from a cautious, interested distance. He
says he doesn’t know anything about it, and he, Han, Mihalyo, and
exhibitions director Abigail Guay (a Stranger contributor)
joke about his philosophical stance toward it.
“To me, whatever people do, they should find a way to make money,”
Su says. “To artists, making money is a dirty word. But we are not
asking for any income at this point. We are just saying, ‘Let’s do the
right thing first and see where that is leading us.'”
What’s clear is that his three-year commitment is remarkably
generous, and backed by his trust in Han and Mihalyo. “They have the
passion,” he says, “and they are very stubborn.”
And they’re hoping for more than just good new art. Mihalyo, who
grew up a mile north of 989 Elements but hasn’t been back to Bellevue
much in the 10 years since his family moved away, wants Open Satellite
to challenge stereotypes about where art and artists belong regionally.
He doesn’t want the space to be an island, but a part of its
environment.
The collapse of the Bellevue Art Museum in 2003, whose complex web
of causes has never been entirely explained, has been boiled down
instead to a stereotype: Bellevue is too backwater for new art. (The
museum has helped to boost this perception by shifting its focus to
craft.) The flip side of the stereotype is that Seattle is inauthentic
and vain—and those perceptions run beyond contemporary art. A
maintenance man at 989 Elements interrupted me while I was interviewing
Su to ask why a liberal newspaper with “ridiculous” stories would
bother coming to conservative Bellevue.
“This cross-lake snootiness is something, I think, that needs to be
talked about as a region,” Mihalyo says. “Open Satellite is a double
challenge. It’s not just, will Bellevue support it, but also, will
Seattle support contemporary art outside its area?”
Mihalyo has harsh words for artists who look down their noses at
places that are neither urban centers nor rural idylls, the two classic
haunts of the artist.
“As a contemporary artist, you can’t blindfold yourself to areas of
culture that are relevant to the rest of the nation,” he says. “We are
supposed to be culture, but we are ignoring the relevant part
of culture, in a way. If we can’t succeed in that environment, then we
aren’t really contemporary artists, because that is a contemporary
environment.” 
