Clockwise from top right: Details from works past Jeffry Mitchell, Alden Mason, Minoru Yamasaki, Alice Wheeler, and Dale Chihuly. For a slideshow of works mentioned below, click here.

Alice Wheeler has been taking boggling photographs for most three decades, and every 1 is pure Wheeler. She's most known for her visions of Nirvana at their most innocent (many, unfortunately, in black-and-white), but her later works auscultate what didn't die with Kurt Cobain: the low-down, pioneer-meets-meth-lab weirdness of the Northwest behind the corporate facades. Girl with Bowie Shirt, Hempfest, Seattle has all the Wheeler hallmarks: the genderfucking, the masking and projection of identity, the nuclear color, the beautiful landscape harboring histories of wiped-out natives and Green River killer victims. To a higher place all these, the vital chemical element is the ii-way gaze—one outsider (Wheeler) recognizing another outsider.

Two hundred xanthous-and-black-striped canaries flew free—in a museum. White walls had turned dark and warm by the sooty licks of a billion candles, forest floors were covered with hand-placed metallic plates, and freestanding glass vitrines held piles of cast wax heads. The entire place was made strange and symbolic. This ineffable promenade of installations—people are nonetheless murmuring about information technology—happened because the Henry Fine art Gallery, nether the direction of Richard Andrews, removed all typical resistance and gave itself completely to the artist. The interaction betwixt museum and creative person became a part of the art and a office of the history of the city: It was the loftier betoken of the Henry transforming into its all-time cocky, a contemporary art museum driven past artists.

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Southwardtraight beyond the Columbia River Gorge from the Maryhill Museum of Art—a concrete mansion with peacocks and Rodins and chess sets from around the world—a perfect skeleton twin of the museum stood for a single summer. It was made of scaffolding and shiny blue construction netting. Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo (working nether the proper name Lead Pencil Studio) conceived and designed it in Seattle, and so put their materials on a truck and assembled their full-sized mirror out there in the middle of nowhere, on empty land, harnessing the beyond-the-gorge doubling of the earth itself. The unlikeliness of this project invited you to consider the scale of the unlikeliness of constructing the original physical mansion in the first place. Information technology was a home before it was the Maryhill Museum of Art, on a brutally windswept expanse of deserty nowhereness—well, it was supposed to exist a home. A human made it for his family, but his family refused to motility in, preferring to stay back East. Maryhill Double was rooted in this specific history, of 1 lonely Seattle pioneer'due south stubbornness despite lifelong personal and professional failures (too many to list). Unremarkably, museums are proud places of social and cultural triumph. The Double tenderly revealed a different story.

The Miss Havisham of the Seattle skyline: Not but bony, ghostly, and in one case idealistic, the white arches that appear out of nowhere and serve no function take gotten more interesting with time. Now they echo the charred remains of the Twin Towers, which Minoru Yamasaki designed: It was these white arches that attracted the Globe Trade Center commissioners to Yamasaki in the first place.

This is the nigh radical work of public art in the region: 4 white porcelain walls in ii toilet stalls at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Merchandise Center (one stall in the women's room, one in the men'due south room, unmarked from the exterior). The porcelain blocks buckle at the edges every bit if they'd exhaled and collapsed, and what looks like white frosting (caulk) seeps in at the seams. On the surface are breastlike shapes with nipple holes, asking to be sucked or touched or worse. In a bathroom, where we almost aggressively manage bodily embarrassments, they come dorsum with a common cold vengeance. This architecture doesn't cooperate in covering upward and flushing away, doesn't do what architecture unremarkably does (idealize your body, give you a prophylactic and keen outer beat, manage your waste material). This architecture calls out unidealized you.

Two same-species lovers with long protuberances: Jeffry Mitchell poses gay honey as ridiculously encoded, only discussable via elephants or elephantine euphemisms, or in kittenish terms. There are difficult ideas hither (and considered traditions, too, similar the Quaker pickle jar the underlying form is based on), but you come to those later. Kickoff yous hit the surface: a forest pile of flowers and berries and vines and tree branches and pretzels and hidden rabbits and a horseshoe and what looks like the face of a bear. These are fat fleshy loops fabricated out of breakable ceramic, coated—but only coated, and only lightly—in the refinement of pretty white and platinum luster. Underneath, in the earthenware itself, unperfected finger pinches and rough little marks are even so visible: There's always the memory of softness. Instead of irony in that location is wonder, humor, humility, and a warmth so intense you may likewise call information technology love. Really, that'south information technology: No other Seattle artist has come close to producing as much sheer love every bit Jeffry Mitchell.

Charles Krafft went to war-torn Sarajevo in the 1990s and met with an arms dealer. He returned dwelling house with a cast for an AK-47, which he filled with porcelain. Out came AK 47, a lovely tribute to the weapon Krafft calls the "lilliputian black dress" of the modern military. It's not the merely ambitious work of art Krafft has fabricated out of decorative, domestic materials. He's made grenades in the style of Delftware, china from homo cremains, and altogether cakes for white supremacists. "The best weapon [society] has for dealing with dangerous art," Arthur C. Danto writes, is "the theory that art, in its very nature, is innocuous." Krafft likes to call bullshit on that theory equally frequently as he can. His art calls out both the potential that art might exist dangerous (and censored, as his has occasionally been) and the tragic joke that it's not. Krafft sells plenty of fine art. Naturally, as the Northwest'south best iconoclast, he goes without gallery representation.

John Baldessari and George Nicolaidis, Boundary, 1969

It was part of a sprawling exhibition, which only 2 people (its organizers) ever saw all of, called 557,087. That was the population of Seattle at the fourth dimension. Boundary was made out of blackness-and-silvery labels attached to telephone poles and street signs. They read, "Boundary: A section of a city, especially a thickly populated surface area inhabited by minority groups oft every bit a result of social or economic restrictions." This was but a year after Seattle voted to end racial housing discrimination, and this "boundary" contained the Cardinal District, making visible something that was existent just unmarked—and marking information technology in a absurd, bureaucratic tone. Art tourists seeing it had to accept wondered if the residents of the neighborhood knew the signs were there. Residents who did know had to wonder: What the fuck? (Did someone put a sign on our back?) And what did y'all need with you lot to cantankerous over this boundary? How would you lot know if the purlieus was even in the "right" identify? It's an explosive public work, with staying power: Boundary could exist remade today, if anybody had the guts. Where's the ghetto now?

Korris Graves was both the jester (run into below) and the hippie priest of the four "Northwest mystic" artists, and so dubbed by Life magazine in 1953. This painting, born in Seattle but at present living in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, actually has 2 creators: The bird is pure Graves (he'd been bird-watching—and identifying with birds—since he was a sickly kid), but the web of white lines enveloping the bird is stolen from boyfriend mystic Mark Tobey'south "white writing" technique developed in 1935. Graves ripped Tobey off, no question—but it's a transformative theft. Tobey'due south Asian-calligraphy-influenced abstraction was cold, theoretical, and Eastward Coasty. Graves's was warm and personal only transcendental, as well. A immature World War II soldier who became an fine art scholar confessed afterward that, in boxing, it was his retention of Bird Singing in the Moonlight that comforted him.

Morris Graves, "You lot or your friends are not invited to the exhibition of Bouquet and Marsh paintings by the viii best painters in the Northwest to exist held on the afternoon and evening of the longest day of the year, the offset 24-hour interval of summer, June 21, at Morris Graves' palace in exclusive Woodway Park", 1953

This disinvitation was sent to everyone on the Seattle Art Museum mailing list. It was ignored. They thought information technology was a joke. According to the Seattle Times, "They arrived by droves, some formally dressed, to find the gateway to his house blocked with a table that held the moldy remains of a banquet 10 days sometime, consummate with tipped cups and vino stains, soaked with the drizzle from an overhead sprinkler. A recording of 'dinner music' was interspersed with a recorded pig fight. Graves stayed out of sight, laughing nonstop." Anti-art (finally) had arrived in Seattle.

Mierle Ukeles, Assignment for Anne Focke, 1981

The feminist creative person Mierle Ukeles washed the front steps of museums. She dusted the art. She called information technology Maintenance Art, and it resembled the tasks of every woman at dwelling house: Why couldn't women's work be artwork? For an exhibition in Seattle, she assigned Anne Focke, a founder of the and/or gallery, the task of thinking of her maintenance of the gallery as fine art. In doing then, Ukeles unknowingly transferred the task to one of the simply people in the history of Seattle e'er to make administration into a lifelong piece of work of art (it'southward ongoing). The work that and/or was doing at the time is fable, although it's difficult to find whatsoever information about information technology except from Focke herself—who didn't want to talk about it because she hates "best of" lists, to her credit.

This is the only piece of work in the Olympic Sculpture Park that knows that the rest of the piece of work in the Olympic Sculpture Park is sedate and/or expressionless. It is a giant, locally found nurse log (a dead log) in an outbuilding made especially for it, with sciencey tools on metal carts and wall tiles painted with species that alive on or near nurse logs and a mobile shelf of related reference books, addressing art'south aspirations to educate. (People have talked about spotting a mouse in the log, but this has non been confirmed.) This artificial environment is managed by the museum overseers, only only to an extent: Nobody knows exactly what volition happen, or even what is going on in the log right now. The things growing out of it comport with them the eternal prospect that they'll outgrow their building—a bulb busting through the drinking glass one day would be grand—and kickoff inhaling the unrarefied air of downtown.

It was a white wheel made of milk-carton paper, 17 feet in diameter and 32 inches thick at its bulging eye, suspended from the ceiling of Suyama Infinite. It had a hole in its side, through which was a view of the structure holding information technology up: more paper, all newspaper, graduated circles of paper spiraling in on themselves—a whole world of elaborate, hidden, flawless geometry. The wheel, which had been congenital in 32 private wedge-shaped forms, could be pushed into making slow revolutions; along with this deliberate motility went the steady, monotonous sound of drips of water falling into buckets on the floor. Duty Cycle (which alluded to Bruch's 1980s performances feeding homeless people in Pioneer Square) was an homage to labor for labor's sake, a piece that represented nothing so much as the fourth dimension the artist lost in making it, the product of an unglamorous process that nevertheless added up to something majestic and fragile. Duty Cycle was a thing with every bit lilliputian existential logic equally a person: anti-heroism at its best.

Freeway Park is like a craggy mount on its head; the superlative is at the lesser. You climb downwardly elaborate descending stairs to stand on a narrow plane with a bracing view. Merely this isn't a vista. You face up an ugly metal screen. A thin slice of waterfall rushes in front end of it, falling from the top of the park. Through the water and the metallic, you tin can see the subject you came all this way to look at: cars flying by nether an orangey electrical light, inside the concrete tunnel of Interstate v. It'due south as if the park were hither first, and then the city sprung upward around it, interrupted it, completed it.

There is no place similar the Seattle Central Library, but it is not an icon and its specialness has aught to do with uniqueness of form. Its shape—vaguely like a cracking hip thrust toward the water—is odd, just in the way that a machine's innards are odd: A logic is there to be discovered, though information technology immediately escapes you. The main area on the Fifth Artery level is a marvel of openness that's not blank or empty or uncomplicated or romantically American-Western, only contained and organized, which is emphasized by two major features: a giant and unadorned concrete shaft in the center of the infinite and the relentless, soaring pattern of diamonds composing the edifice'southward drinking glass-and-steel skin. Getting through the library requires learning its inconvenient patterns, which so still trip you lot up at sure places—fine. Knowledge is Byzantine and laborious. You can't go around this library on autopilot. It is not "natural" in its progression, yet the top public floor, glass to the sky, is landscape poetry.

Idue north 1970, New York native Jacob Lawrence—a national art star since the 1940s for his series of paintings of the blackness migration northward—came to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington. The Migration serial is Lawrence's masterpiece. Simply hither his attending pivoted from the past, and he started painting the hereafter being built: He saw in Seattle a place full of people who work with their hands, people united (across race and gender) in labor, applying aboriginal tools to the endless-seeming resources of the Northwest. What they're building is never quite in view. It's the human activity of building itself that matters. The series is signature Lawrence: saturated colors, bulky forms, jangling perspectives. Artforum called information technology "Carpenter Cubism." Today information technology's Obamanian.

James Turrell, Lippy Edifice, Jan 29–July 29, 1982

The Centre on Contemporary Art, now a shell of itself, began spectacularly in 1982 by turning over an empty Pioneer Square edifice to an artist who filled information technology with no objects at all for six mind-bravado months. Inside instead were 4 glowing installations of calorie-free (3 of them new) that disrupted the stardom between object and environs, betwixt light and infinite, between solid and imperceptible: Yous perceived yourself perceiving them. James Turrell is now a household proper name—his meditative "Skyspaces" are fixtures at museums around the country, including the Henry Art Gallery, and he'south sculpting an entire crater in Arizona—but his 1982 works instantly established in Seattle a tradition linking modernism, spirituality, and installation.

This sculpture in Myrtle Edwards Park on the Elliott Bay waterfront is literal: Information technology is a large, dumb thing y'all tin sit on. Iii cement bases of varying shapes are paired with granite pieces from a quarry at Skykomish. The pairs are lined up from left to correct (if you lot're facing Elliott Bay) as a visual enactment of the title: the granite adjacent to the cement, and then against it, then upon information technology. Nothing is memorialized or metaphorized; this monument is nowadays tense all the way. Most people either express joy at it or miss it. Michael Heizer more commonly sculpts behemothic geometric shapes in the middle of Southwestern deserts, simply in this—his first major urban commission, it just then happens—he is forced to carve out a human space in the slim border zone betwixt sublime water and mountains and urban core. These blocks are piece of furniture for meditations about scale.

Nature in paint: Making it as directly every bit possible is the task, right? Alden Mason responded—for a few years only, before moving into another style entirely—with great big canvases that are a mix of Morris Louis (who stained his canvases in mysterious studio pours and died before specifically explaining) and Willem de Kooning (who could make a painting expect equally though information technology had a million layers and colors—and mayhap it did). Mason's abstractions are substantially living landscapes, bubbling and oozing even at present.

You walk into a 90-pes-long (or 60-foot-long, depending on the iteration) darkened corridor lined on each side by life-size figures: glowing, ghostlike. They're video projections. Every bit you walk toward each figure, you activate the video, and the person-phantom walks toward yous, looks straight at you, then turns and walks away. You're well-nigh coming together another man, but it's a one-half presence and partly a mirror of yourself. What inspired this understated curiosity of technologically enabled and disabled interactivity—a hitting at Documenta 9 and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, now in the drove of the Henry Art Gallery—was a photograph taken in Seattle around 1930 of a tall ship on the sea. Tall Ships haunts the lonely, technological imagination of the Northwest.

It's a fact: Dan Webb tin can spring annihilation out of a cake of material. Nobody else in Seattle can do that. He could make big, perfect, lasting sculptures forever. But the contrasting fact that he can't control time is the never-ending subject of his bloodshot art. His masterpiece is Picayune Cuts, made in honour of his brother, who died of a brain tumor. It's not an actual carving but a series of photographs of the process of making a carving. The primeval photos testify a cake of wood; then a man's head carved out of that wood; so, gradually, that same human's skull; then a nub; then zilch. Forth with these photographs—40 of them—a Plexiglas box full of the sawdust is on display: an urn. Dust is agonizing in the midst of such acts of creation.

The earth'due south most famous glass artist is actually far more talented as an organizer. 100,000 Pounds of Ice and Neon was his all-time event. He get-go experimented with embedding neon in ice in 1971, at the Rhode Island School of Design; he did information technology again in 1992, on the streets of downtown Seattle, to coincide with his solo show within the make-new Seattle Fine art Museum, for a piece called twenty,000 Pounds of Ice and Neon. Simply the version of the installation he made in 1993 in Tacoma was in another realm: It was indoors, on the skating rink at the Tacoma Dome, and v times heavier—100,000 pounds of ice and neon shaped into vii-foot-high orbs and tumbleweeds and slabs like popsicles for giants. The Tacoma Dome had opened 10 years before with a neon-art controversy that nearly shut down public art in the city, which happens to be Dale Chihuly's hometown. He brought neon back and converted the doubters: In two days, 33,000 people came to run across the installation, dubbed "ice-henge"—for gratis—in the dark interior of the dome, where the ice didn't just cook, but melted, rolled down to the rink, and froze again into secondary mounds around the bases of the bent neon tubes before the whole thing disappeared completely.

Susan Pavel, du'kWXaXa't3w3l (Sacred Alter for Each Other), 2007

No list similar this would make any sense without native art, and nevertheless most everything that passes for the native fine art of Seattle is actually fine art from hundreds of miles n of hither. Only in the terminal few decades have the Salish-speaking people, the real native people of this coastal-turned-urban region, begun to repossess their lost and undervalued traditions. This mountain-caprine animal-hair robe—the commencement such robe to be made in a century—woven and hand dyed with native plants by Susan Pavel, is not merely a robe: It is a she, a feminine entity with a mission, as one Skokomish spiritual leader says. She (robe) commemorates the "sacred change" of rediscovering Salish means and is meant to inspire futurity generations. The vertical dashes are backbones, urging strength even in struggle; the tied ends on the robe's fringes are a reminder non to leave things undone. She is a soft monument.

Jason Sprinkle ("Subculture Joe"), Brawl and Chain on Hammering Man, 1993

On Labor Day of 1993, the unknown artist Jason Sprinkle fastened a ball and chain effectually the ankle of the largest sculpture in Seattle, Hammering Human being, the very well-known sculpture outside Seattle Art Museum by the very well-known artist Jonathan Borofsky. Sprinkle took care when he did information technology. He padded the chain so information technology wouldn't harm the other artist'south work. Seeing this intendance, Borofsky allowed the intervention to stay up for a week. It wasn't just a protestation; it was a proposed collaboration that gave the sculpture tension, made information technology work.

Anonymous, Unknown, Whenever

There is a peachy work of art being made right now that volition never exist seen, or never exist seen past critics, or that will be seen and overlooked—making this list necessarily incomplete. It is by someone who hasn't studied art, or by someone spray-painting the street, or information technology is the product of a career artist who decides that it isn't any good and has to be destroyed. Despite its ability to be or to do something that matters, fifty-fifty something very small, it volition be melted down, cut up, painted over, passed by, or shoved into a drawer—information technology volition join many others like it. I wish I had found it. recommended

To run across alternate lists past selected members of Seattle'southward art establishment, click hither .