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

Crouching Figure
Maria Frank Abrams

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.