
Overgrowth and Understory Outdoor
Sculpture Exhibition at Cougar Mountain Regional Wildlands Park
Opening Reception Saturday, July 10, 3 - 5 pm
Anti-Aircraft
Peak, SE Cougar Mt. Way in Issaquah
On Display July 10 - October 1, 2010
In collaboration with King County Parks, CoCA will present "Overgrowth
& Understory" the first-ever exhibition of temporary, outdoor sculptures on
Cougar Mt. Regional Wildlands Park (Anti-Aircraft Peak & Sky Country
Trailheads), from July 10 - October 1, 2010. In addition to its function as a
Cold War missile site in the mid 20th century, the park also features historic
coal mining sites as well as many miles of trails in second growth forest
surrounded by an increasingly urban environment.
The exhibition,
arranged around the perimeter of open fields adjacent to trailhead parking
lots, will focus on interpretations of nature, history, and the built
environment in a world of change. Overgrowth & Understory is King
County's only venue for temporary sculpture in a forested setting where part of
the exhibit includes a walking tour of 15 minutes to three hours (5 miles
between the art exhibits near the Trailheads), passing natural features like
the "Cave Holes," "Klondike Marsh," and "Cougar Pass."
Download
printable sculpture location maps (pdf format) here:
Tabloid
(11 x 17) |
Legal (8.5
x 14) |
Letter
(8.5 x 11)
ARTISTS: Anette Lusher, Shirley Wiebe, Miguel Edwards,
meadow starts with p, David Francis, Shannon Durbin, Magdalena Hill, Suzanne
Tidwell, david kitts, Ray C. Freeman III, Kristine Eudey, Catherine Thompson,
Aaron Haba, Barbara De Pirro, and Sarah Savidge.
Driving
Directions:
Sky Country Trailhead From I-90 Take Exit 13 and drive
south on Lakemont Boulevard SE for 2.5 miles. Turn left on SE Cougar Mountain
Way and then right on 166th Way SE. Follow 166th to its end (0.7 miles). On the
right is the Sky Country Trailhead parking lot. This lot includes space for
horse trailers.
Anti-Aircraft Peak Trailhead From I-90 Take Exit
13 and drive south on Lakemont Boulevard SE for 2.5 miles. Turn left onto SE
Cougar Mountain Way. Follow the double yellow line. (The road will first swing
left and become 168th Place SE, and then right to become SE 60th Street.) Turn
off 60th Street uphill onto the dead end road, SE Cougar Mountain Drive. The
road will change to gravel, and at the very end is the Anti-Aircraft Peak
Trailhead, where you will find restrooms, picnic tables, and a
playfield.

Heaven and Earth II Outdoor Sculpture
Exhibition in Carkeek Park
Opening Reception Saturday, June 26, 2 - 5 pm
Environmental
Learning Center, Carkeek Park, 950 N.W. Carkeek Park Road, Seattle, WA
On
Display June 26 - September 26, 2010
Official Heaven and Earth
Website here.
Following a widely acclaimed debut in 2009 that received
national attention, CoCA, Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Carkeek Park
Advisory Council (CPAC), and the Associated Recreational Council (ARC) have
partnered again to bring another exhibition of temporary, outdoor sculpture to
Carkeek Park in northwest Seattle. As before, the theme concerns the natural
world in a time of dramatic change. Some of the art is designed to weather in
place and erode while other work incorporates movement and interactive use by
visitors. Last year's exhibit can be seen at
www.heavenandearthexhibition.org.
In
reviews by the
Seattle
Times, Ballard News Tribune, and Tacoma News Tribune, the 2009 exhibit was
recognized for its unique combination of art in a wooded urban park, among the
only such exhibitions in the country. While art in downtown parks is typical of
many cities, only Seattle features art in the forest. As Michael Upchurch,
writing for the Seattle Times, wrote, "the 'show' takes you through oddball
corners of Carkeek Park with a sculpture-seeking intent that's surprisingly
satisfying - no matter what you find."
The exhibition this year
features 12 artists with 15-20 works located throughout the park. A walking
tour of the whole exhibit takes about an hour, but some work can be seen in
much less time, including a variety of work accessible from the access road.
Maps can be downloaded for free at CoCA's website beginning June 26. A catalog
of this year's exhibit will be released in August.
ARTISTS: Big Camera
Group, Barbara DePirro, Miguel Edwards, Julie Fisco, Anette Lusher, Ingrid
Lahti, Julie Lindell, Piper O'Neill, Eden Rivers, Sylwia Tur, Ken Turner, and
John Henry Wooten IV.

Altered Photo
Curated by Joseph
C. Roberts
Artists Reception Thursday, August 12, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA Ballard,
6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays at Ballard 10 am -
5 pm, August 12 - September 4, 2010
Sarah Givaty
Michael Klein
Edward McHugh
John
Schuh
Ray Schutte
Alexander Vieth
Rebecca Woodward
Panel
Discussion, Thursday, August 12, 7:30pm
Originality, authorship,
authenticity, integrity, and attribution in the digital age.
Joseph C.
Roberts, Moderator
David Ulrich, Chair, Cornish College Art
Department
Paul Berger, Professor, UW Art Department
Matthew Kangas,
author and critic

MARIA FRANK ABRAMS: FOUR
PAINTINGS
MATTHEW KANGAS, CURATOR
Reception, Thursday, August 12, 5-7pm
CoCA Belltown, 2721
First Ave (corner of First & Clay), Seattle, WA 98101
On View Every Day,
24 hours, July 17 - August 30, 2010
MARIA FRANK ABRAMS: FOUR PAINTINGS is an exhibition on the
occasion of the publication of BURNING FOREST: THE ART OF MARIA FRANK ABRAMS.
The long-time Mercer Island, Wash. resident, now 86, attended the University of
Washington School of Art on a Hillel Foundation scholarship and arrived in
Seattle three years after her release from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany
in 1945. Born in Debrecen, Hungary, Abrams is an important part of postwar
Northwest and American art history, won numerous awards, and had several
important museum surveys of her work, including at the Seattle Art Museum and
Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Acclaimed for her beautiful landscape scenes
of the Puget Sound area, Abrams has been overlooked as a transitional figure
between the Northwest School (she studied privately with Tobey) and an emerging
formalist modernism of the 1960s and 1970s. Developing her style over a period
of years, she alternated between representational and abstract imagery and
introduced photographic and collage elements into her later work. The four
paintings Kangas has selected for the COCA exhibition present essential
examples of her shifts from early and late imagery dealing with her experiences
of the Holocaust and her attempts to suppress such memories through beautiful
but often cloudy landscapes. In between, as the exhibit demonstrates, Abrams
achieved a strict geometric style as well as moody scenes that may symbolize
smoky skies in Poland and Germany filled with the detritus of the crematory
ovens of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen where Abrams spent time as a prisoner and
slave labor inmate.
MATTHEW KANGAS is a noted art critic who has
written for Seattle Times, Argus, Seattle Sun, Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, Artforum, Art in America, Art-Guide
Northwest, and Art Ltd., among many other publications. He has
curated or juried over 40 exhibitions as well, including major art-historical
surveys for SAFECO and Bumbershoot between 1983 and 2004. Three essay
collections have been published in New York by Midmarch Arts Press and are
available in bookstores and amazon.com. Kangas also organized a retrospective
and wrote the accompanying book William Cumming: The Image of
Consequence for the Frye Art Museum in 2005. He is a graduate of Reed
College and Oxford University and lives in Seattle.
BURNING FOREST: THE
ART OF MARIA FRANK ABRAMS
BY MATTHEW KANGAS
MUSEUM OF NORTHWEST ART, LA
CONNER, WASH.
AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.COM
Maria Frank Abrams:
Burning Forest is a crucial addition to the literature of modernism in
America and its expression among European exiles such as Maria Frank Abrams (b.
1924) in Seattle during the mid-twentieth century. With a preface by Peter Selz
and foreword by Holocaust expert Deborah E. Lipstadt, Matthew Kangas's new
monograph deepens our vision of how Pacific Northwest art developed and
flourished.
Emerging as an artist at exactly the same time German
philosopher Theodor Adorno said creative and profound applications about the
Holocaust were impossible, Maria Frank Abrams challenged such neo-shibboleths
through material mastery, professional achievements, and the offer to Americans
and others of the life-affirming vision conveyed through her art. Memory may be
dark, but it is a key pathway to light in the art of Maria Frank
Abrams.
In this lavishly illustrated study, art critic Matthew Kangas
chronicles Abrams's evolution from adored child artist to Holocaust survivor to
second-generation Northwest School artist and late-blooming geometric abstract
painter. Drawing intensively upon the artist's interviews and oral histories,
as well as family archives and photographs, Kangas makes the case for Abrams as
an overlooked transitional figure in Pacific Northwest art: from "mystic"
adherent to sophisticated, European-inspired modernist.
After her
studies with Walter F. Isaacs at the University of Washington School of Art,
Abrams was embraced by Mark Tobey, with whom she studied privately. Their
collective influence shaped her destiny as an artist. Kangas restores the
Hungarian cultural context of her development and fully documents the artist's
harrowing early life in Hungary and her family's fate at Auschwitz in
1944.
He makes the case that over the years the artist's memories of
World War II indirectly seeped into her art even as it was sometimes
accompanied by brightly colored scenes of Northwest nature. Reappearing in her
canvases, prints, drawings, murals, and examples of scenic design and public
art, they are held in the rich qualities of her mature vision that fuses dark
and light, dawn and sunset, sadness and joy.