Alt Art History in Seattle
Last month SL and I took a trip to Seattle. We always want to see as much modern art as we can in new places, so we went to the Seattle Art Museum. The 1980s salmon exterior, carved out of the bottom floors of a mall and high rise building, was an underwhelming tell.
The collection at times had the feel of Modern Art Box Checking— a couple Warhols here, a Kehinde Wiley there, a deKooning over there— you can see the curator walking, and the only coherence is the clipboard.
Nicholas Galanin’s Neon American Anthem was exceptional though.
The Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth exhibit was extremely well done, with over 100 textiles showing the meticulous processes of dyeing threads to create complicated hand-weaving. Ultimately unmoving to me.
Typically, SL and I buy the catalog for shows that move us, so we can do more research and write joint essays about everything we see that we love. This means a trip to the museum gift shop, which is a fave place. In the absence of an exhibit we want to follow up on, we try to get a book on the permanent collection or the building’s architecture— anything that will memorialize our visit.
That's when we found the book "Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical" by Patricia A. Junker.
It was published in 2014 by the University of Washington Press. The book examines the work of a group of artists who came to be known as the chronically underappreciated “Northwest School of modern art”.
These artists, including Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson, buoyed by the pivotal contributions of journalist Margaret Callahan, curator Dorothy Miller, gallerist Marion Willard, agent Elizabeth Bayley Willis, and the art dealer Zoë Dusanne, were all drawn to the Pacific Northwest's natural beauty and its rich Native American and Asian cultures. Their work reflects their deep connection to the region and their search for spiritual meaning.
The only one of these artists with which we were familiar was Mark Tobey. We saw his show, Threading Light, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. It was a revelation in abstraction— narrative and depth.
Reading the book gave me heavy Regional Sour Grapes vibes— that defensiveness you see in places that spin outside the center of gravity for a particular cultural epoch. Think Detroit in House music before techno came to light or the 1993 Chicago music scene as compared to the Seattle behemoth or Bob Holman acting like Slam Poetry was his for a while.
But letting go of this framework, reading it with earnestness and closing my eyes every once in a while to let go of Big Time NYC Modernism, I saw that what the book presents is a potential alternative history. One where mysticism and nature and the gravity of Asia might have won.