Another Bouncing Ball: June 2009 Archives

I plan to expand my work with mirrors into a time-based interactive performance on the Fourth Plinth at 9:00 am UK time, July 24, 2009. Live webcams will broadcast in real time; there will be BBC and international media coverage.

In case you sit up nights worrying that the Chinese aren't quite grasping the whole capitalist thing, let this photo reassure you. These are Terra-cotta warrior shaped packets of chili sauce.

Secret/sacred objects of the type being returned are typically used in religious ceremonies by central Australian Aboriginal men. They are considered to be physical manifestations of sacred ancestral beings and as such have great spiritual power.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

Among people with a professional interest in the arts, "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," which opens today at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, will merely deepen the tarnish on the reputation of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

I have dermatographia, a condition in which one's immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin's surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph. Even though I can direct this ephemeral response by drawing on it, the reaction is involuntary, much like the uncontrollable nature of a blush.

As a journalist and filmmaker, I am called upon by the Islamic Republic of Iran to respect the red lines. These "red lines" include belief and respect for the Supreme Leader and the savagely unjust rules of traditional Islamic law in my country. I am expected not to write or demand equal rights. I am not allowed to make any film without the permission and without censorship by Iran's Minister of Culture. If I did openly do all these things in Iran, I would be disappeared, tortured and raped. I would be killed as have so many women journalists, filmmakers and activists in Iran. Among those killed include Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photo journalist who was tortured and murdered for attempting to photograph and publicize brutalities committed by the Iranian regime.

This is Iran. This is what it means to live under Ayotollah Khameini and his goons. No change is possible while Iran is controlled by autocratic, fundamentalist religious despots who determine the laws of the land. There has been no real election. Candidates are all hand-picked and cleared by a central religious committee. It is a farcical imitation of the free nomination/ election process that we have pictured in the free world. There is no possibility that a secular, pluralistic, freedom-loving democratic person who loves his or her country can become a candidate to run for president (or any other office) in Iran.

It helps if you're a fundamentalist, and she is. She believes in the basics of building the collections and mounting serious exhibitions. Expansions are great and nobody has done it better than she has, but she proceeds from sound museum ideas.

...as a man whose physical presence was first androgynous and then seemingly cyborgian, forcing his astounded public to puzzle over their assumptions about race, gender and age.

You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

A prop can still be a deadly weapon. Actors on Hollywood sets are routinely warned to be careful with guns used as props, but in 1984, Jon-Erik Hexum, a star of the CBS action series Cover-Up, pretended to play Russian roulette by putting a blank-loaded .44 Magnum to his temple. "Let's see if this will do it," he reportedly said, and pulled the trigger. The burst of hot gas fired at close range penetrated his skull.

All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.

So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. (Revelation 3:14-22)

Two of my co-workers have basically moved into Volunteer Park Cafe (link added). They work out of the cafe many days out of the week. This adorable little cafe located in an otherwise residential portion of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle is quite homey, so it's no surprise they're making it their workday "home". In addition, as I joined them and another friend for lunch, after we ordered, one of the "regulars" informed the owner that I'd be writing about my meal.

In addition to all the food we ordered and paid for, a plate of free cookies and cake magically appeared towards the end of our meal. I make it a rule not to let restaurant owners know why I'm there and I pay for my food. I chastised the informer appropriately, but I did eat those cookies. My general philosophy is that I try to be as fair as possible. I don't ask for special treatment, and I don't expect any. That said, I do photograph my food and restaurant folk are not dopes.

Regina, I still love you, even though your comments about me are preposterous.

To readers of (Another) Bouncing Ball: I'm going to slip this comment in weeks after the original posting in the hopes that only readers but not Regina Hackett see it

First, I sat next to Regina Hackett back at the old P-I on Wall Street (where the Globe spun for a reason) and not once did she say she found me brilliant. So that sets me apart from Emily White. Regina never even called me semi-smart.

Second, Dave Horsey's tactic of telling a critic that he loves her is the first thing he learned on the (University of Washington's) Daily, back when he and other Dolly Parton-style big hairs were chasing Charles Odegaard trying to slip out the back door of the Administration Building at the University of Washington.

In fact, Horsey yelled "I love you" to Odegaard in a shameless effort to get an exclusive. It worked. Odegaard stopped and thus Horsey gained his first Pulitzer.

As for Horsey saying he loves Regina Hackett, I can only say, get in line, pal. I loved sitting near Hackett so much that when I turned coat and went to the Seattle Times, I graciously allowed Regina to have my old phone number, 448-8332. (That number now rings into a dictation machine that transcribes comments into a blog called 8332.)

Later, I tried to get Dave to join me at the Times but he had an understandable concern about the chilly water that flowed in the veins of the editorial-page editor of that era. Finally, if ArtsJournal decides to throw a fancy party for its advertisers, I'm quite willing to give the speech and celebrate the shock of the new, or the new new thing, or the value of hits or eye balls, or whatever puts digital journalism on the cutting edge of cutting costs as the mass medium turns mini, along with the pay checks.

Have tux, will travel. Casey Corr

P.S. If by chance, this posting is a duplicate, I apologize. I got an error message when I tried to post the first version and lost my draft. The blogging world has its cruelties.

The eternal fear of structural collapse and bodily injury on any project bigger than a man is tall.

Free Sheep roots out forgotten places, their histories and memories, and distills them into potent, one-shot events that leave indelible burns on the city's collective memory. Free Sheep happenings are mayflies on fire.

The art of bringing dead things to life is how Kiki Smith, who was once a busker with a Punch and Judy show, relates her work as a sculptor to puppetry. Or half-life, since part of what makes puppets so compelling - and, to many minds, creepy - as objects is that they always appear to be as much dead as alive.

The puppet that opens its eyes after everyone has gone to sleep...

(About Calder's Circus, from 1961:) The sight of a big old bear of a man playing with tiny childish objects ... encapsulates a lifetime's effort to make art as gratifying as a toy.

fingers tangled in strings...

In the creation of art, it is the puppet one makes of oneself that is most important. (Harold Rosenberg)

'Stop. Will you. Stop Dave. Will you stop Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid Dave.'  These are not questions, nor are they appeals. They are chains of signifiers.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

I thought Max was the patron, and he had an artist working with him. I guess I should have asked, but I'm an engineer. I looked into the engineering issues. Rarely do people offer to give us something. I found it refreshing. Max got support from the city's art commission, and the state's, too.

You have to hand it to him. He did it all. He should have been stopped, but he did it all. 

Men typically engage in bizarre competitions and intrepid behavior during their lives as a means of bolstering machismo and camaraderie. Instituting male pedagogy, identity and peer acceptance in suburban America can, for example, take the form of climbing the tallest tree as a child, asserting athletic prowess in adolescence, and winning reckless drinking competitions in early adulthood. My work illustrates the simultaneous presence of lunacy and beauty in these types of testosterone-laden behaviors.

Liz Magor:

When she was a child, she liked to slip into a forest near her home in search of a kid-size weasel hole. She thought if she lived there with a dog and a bag of potatoes, the silence of the natural world would replace the ruckus in her head. Her work is about the folly of aspiring to be in a hole, and the cultures that become one.

Hollow

Jack Daws:

Inside a series of small black boxes Daws sealed a variety of drugs, from crack cocaine and crystal meth to ecstasy, heroin and LSD.

Partially, they are a tribute to Robert Morris' box sculpture from 1961, Sculpture With the Sound of Its Own Making, as well as Charles Ray's Ink Box from 1986, which wasn't a box but a vat of black ink. Those who touched its surface expecting something smooth and hard came away with a record of their infraction on their fingers.

Daws' infraction is an inside job. Who is in possession of the drugs, and who is the pusher when no one can lay hands on the substances in question (assuming they're really there) without destroying the art?

Felony Sculpture

A Koran page handwritten in light -- that is, in gold and silver inks on a sheet of parchment dyed deep blue -- is the exhibition's oldest work, dating from the 10th or 11th century. Seen by candlelight, the words, which describe the rewards of Paradise, would have glinted against the dark ground like constellations in a night sky.

These portraits are laborious, noodling things, their lines repeated over and over as if Giacometti were determined to create something solid from nothing, then to obliterate that something. Far more relaxed -- and surely Giacometti drew as compulsively as he did to relieve tension -- are the drawings that look incidental, on the fly: an empty studio interior, apples in front of a window, a pot of tulips, a tree. Heaviness lifts; anxiety is dispelled. The faint lines of the tree fly outward and upward like flames, evidence of a lightened-up, fly-away artist that some part of Giacometti may always have wanted to be.

Dear Friends:
Seattle is a wonderful place in the springtime. The grass grows thick and technicolor green and flowers and trees burst with vibrant color. Rhododendrons unveil purples and pinks, yellows and red, daffodils and magnolias and cherry trees line the streets like pom poms. Spring is in full swing and boy is it a colorful affair.

Lundgren Monuments enjoys this parade of color. So much so that their monuments often sparkle with the same dazzling colors of nature. Think of how the cemetery landscape could change with glowing swatches of color sprinkled upon it's landscape. Think of how a burst of color can remind us of the magic in life, the sheer refusal to exist in shades of grey.

We wanted to share two new projects from Lundgren Monuments. The first is a bright pink arched top memorial. We set it up this afternoon and couldn't help but smile as we walked around it. It looked like a giant piece of candy, a tall glass of lemonade, an electrified flower pedal. Strangers passed by to get a closer look. "Is that a..." Well, yes it is.

The second is a family memorial we installed this morning in Floral Hills Cemetery in Lynnwood, Washington. This rising moon/setting sun theme consists of a solid block of Butterfly Blue granite, capturing a 300 pound, four inch thick cast glass disc. The sun/moon element will change color and luminosity morning to evening and season to season.

We hope you are enjoying the spring season and that sunlight and color brighten your day. Sincerely, Greg Lundgren.

If the artist has become a commodity why not circumvent the art altogether and literally own a piece of the artist?

 Influences came in slowly but didn't mature and go back out again.

I was in a sense more qualified than my peers. None of them had studied with Leger. Why wasn't I hired? There's the obvious reason, but I wouldn't want to guess.

I was a mail-order bride, shipped to Seattle.

I hate to talk about him in the past tense. Bill and I sat up nights thrashing out issues of representation. He may well have been as much of an influence on me as anybody.

I hope when they think about me, they think about what I've been able to do against certain kinds of odds.

I had the idea of the moment. I worked it out in Seattle and it took me places.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude

The real always has been important territory for artists. The difference now is that while most of the more arty, "imaginative" options are looking tired, the "new realism," if we dare call it that, seems to be gaining ground. It's as likely to tweak and distort the world as to record it faithfully. It digs more deeply than ever before into what reality, and its documentation, can mean to us.

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

- Robert Frost, The Oven Bird

Across the globe, a wave of artists is answering the oven bird's question. What makes Heide Hinrichs exceptional is not that her work looks as if it happened to fall in place and awaits removal by a janitor, or, in Schwitters' case, the Nazis.

That bit of ordinary magic is common. It's the story that she tells without any suggestion of a narrative, not of the glut of consumer society's casual discards but wreckage after a fall.

Stagger out into the light after losing everything and there are her sculptures on the floor, the flayed skin of soccer balls hung up on a wire or deflated inner tubes curled as if smoked in a fire.


She stops the cynical and seen-it-all dead in their tracks. Next to her, Anselm Kiefer seems a bit bombastic (and I love Anselm Kiefer). While his work rages, hers is absolutely quiet.

In 1957, a young Paul Taylor aspired to her kind of silence. To that end, he and his partner stood motionless on a stage for 4 minutes, in a piece called "Duet." (The New York Times famously reviewed it with four inches of blank space.) The piece was thought ridiculous, even in time by Taylor.

What no one has done in dance, Hinrichs does with objects that become a kind of dance. They are motionless but move on.


This Saturday at noon, Hinrichs talks about her work at Howard House.

It's no secret that the media world is being turned upside-down, and as in any revolution there is some pain and discomfort in all the changes. But there are also incredible opportunities. Something new is being born, and I think we're giving birth to it right here.

Art consists in going the full length. If you start with drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.
- Ravel, quoted in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Little lamb if you are able
Turn yourself into a table
- fragment from Irish fairy tale

Do not reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow in and through, endlessly, like music.

Many, many people driving or walking by of course believed it was a "real" protest against performance art... In the end, a protester by the name of Garrett Hobba took the prize of $500 in $5 dollar bills. He showed up to see what the situation was and ended up winning. (Vital 5's) Greg (Lundgren) let his intern pick by using a rifles scope (minus the rifle) from across the street. Whoever she pointed at first won.

What do we want... NOTHING!!!
When do we want it... NOW!!!"
Hell No...We Don't Know.

Harvey: Jesus Christ, Regina. Your lead is dead.
Me: Don't you admire its conceptual rigor?
Harvey: Even if there were hope, which there isn't, I don't have time for CPR.

Duston Harvey (my favorite by a mile): You're wasting too much time on that blog.
Emily White: I hope you don't think I have time to read your blog.
John Levesque: I hate blogs. (Big sigh)

Featuring two vagina-shaped crashed cars impaled on penile poles and bare-breasted paintings of super heroes, the show is the closest thing I've seen to pornography lately.

It took me a long time to warm to Squeak Carnwath's painting. Twenty years ago, I regarded it as a self-involved pastiche of outsider-art mannerisms. But the Oakland Art Museum's survey of the past 15 years of Carnwath's work makes a nearly irresistible case for its authenticity and substance.

Part of Frank's originality was to institute the photograph as a membrane responsive both to a moment's reality and the photographer's feelings about it.

In the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum you'll find a tiny African copper relief that probably predates, and would surely have awed, the great Lorenzo Ghiberti. You'll encounter a bust of a Nigerian beauty to rival Nefertiti; an Oceanic Apollo with the physique of an Olympian; and a Micronesian statuette that is, with its stacks of faceted planes, Brancusi before Brancusi. (Review here.)

These portraits are laborious, noodling things, their lines repeated over and over as if Giacometti were determined to create something solid from nothing, then to obliterate that something. Far more relaxed -- and surely Giacometti drew as compulsively as he did to relieve tension -- are the drawings that look incidental, on the fly: an empty studio interior, apples in front of a window, a pot of tulips, a tree. Heaviness lifts; anxiety is dispelled. The faint lines of the tree fly outward and upward like flames, evidence of a lightened-up, fly-away artist that some part of Giacometti may always have wanted to be.

In "Zero Gravity Madonna Lab," plump pink babies grow like hothouse tomatoes as older kids, in hermetically sealed bubbles, evoke science experiments gone wrong. In "Flaming Arrow," a sunny sky rains cherubic cowgirls as a monstrous maw opens in the desert floor to devour everything around it.

Her paintings add depth and color to such point-blank encounters, making the grand sweep of history come alive. If her oils and acrylics on canvas were novels, they would have a lot in common with works by Mark Twain, Wallace Stegner and Thomas Pynchon.

Pagel again: His review of Pae White is a thing of beauty:

Over the last couple of decades, Pae White has made art out of almost nothing but thin air: a handful of cat whiskers affixed in a drop of glue, a spray-painted spider web set in resin and the shimmering reflections cast from a slab of mirrored Plexiglas sheets. At 130PE, the light-handed artist continues her lighthearted gambit, transforming incidental things into instances of wonder that are ripe with delight.

What's new is the delicate touch of melancholy. Smoke and leaves are the vehicles for White's casually exquisite installation, which consists of woven tapestries, laser-carved sheets of brightly colored paper and hundreds of fake leaves, all made mechanically and many painted, stained and shaped by hand.

Buddy Bunting stakes out prisons. He parks by the sides of their roads to sketch, photograph, and videotape them in a hurry, before he gets caught.

Nobody is supposed to look too closely at a prison. Bunting does it in part because prisons are what he knows. Growing up in a Maryland area where a prison moved in and provided plenty of jobs, Bunting's regular friends were prison guards as well as prisoners. He knows the in and the out, so he stands at the border and makes art.

In 1993, after endless negotiations with the Department of Energy, Acord became the only individual on the planet licensed to ``own and possess" nuclear material. To mark his triumph, he had the license number tattooed on the back of his neck.

Free First Friday Lecture Series: Paul Margolis: Quilting and fiber artist Paul Margolis works with unique materials such as vinyl and lace. His piece I Imagined I was a Meter Maid is featured in Bellevue Arts Museum's Forum. Join him for a lively talk about this creative and quirky work of art as well new ideas and past pieces. 6:30 - 7:30 pm FREE for members/$5 non-members.

6. Location, Location, Location. Think twice about the gallery you have chosen. Is it off the beaten path, perhaps in a sewage pipe or demolished building? Is it easily accessible? (For example, does it have a door, or do you have to crawl through a window?) Is it surrounded by barbed wire? Once a patron enters, is he ever heard from again? Is the gallery owner reputable or does he have a name like Louie the Lip?

It's really important to serve some sort of refreshment at your opening, as it creates ambience and draws people to the show in ways that your art never will. Seriously. Typically, galleries and museums serve wine and beer, and on occasion hard liquor and finger foods.

In 2000, an employee at the American Visionary Art Museum was sent to purchase food for an art opening and was told to, "buy on the cheap." She returned with the following items: A slab of butter, hamburger buns and Craisins. Guests mistook the Craisins for salsa gone bad, and kept going outside thinking they might find hamburgers cooking on a grill, but to no avail.

The iron giant is a fine fellow,' said Tiktok, 'and works as steadily as a clock. He was made for the Nome King by Smith & Tinker, who made me, and his duty is to keep folks from finding the underground palace. Is he not a great work of art?'

The National Gallery, the Met, the Huntington and the Nelson-Atkins have all opened major American presentations this spring. (The Met isn't done: Its American paintings and sculpture galleries open in 2011.)

On a morning when an American president born in Hawaii to a Muslim Kenyan father and a Kansasan mother is speaking about Islam, Israel and the United States at Egypt's Cairo University, while back home a Latina visits Capitol Hill to drum up support for her landmark nomination to the Supreme Court and while New Hampshire becomes the sixth state to offer state-level marriage equality, does it make sense for our art museums to present American art galleries that present American art as it might have been considered in 1935?

The less you frighten people, the further you get. People here tend to think of artists as the enemy. Conversation bump along on square wheels, but they bump along.

Alchemy is the age-old dream. I want to render high-level nuclear waste harmless and use it in sculpture.

The Department of Energy is like the Catholic Church in the 12th century. It's a fully mature bureaucracy. It's committed to the dogma that waste should be buried in the ground. It has 30 years of studies worth billions of dollars saying that waste burial is good. Getting it to backtrack is hard.

Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

I can't imagine why. I'm making fun of you people.

Two-and-a-half months have elapsed since the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased print publication. Its passing has been commemorated through private parties, radio shows, documentary films and countless news stories. (Photo via.)

This Wednesday night, the community gets its chance to say farewell. Journalism organizations from around the region are co-sponsoring a free public tribute to the newspaper and its contributions to Seattle. The program will include a multimedia retrospective of the newspaper's 146 years of publication, a musical performance by Heidi Muller and appearances by special guests including historian John Hughes and author Bruce Barcott. P-I favorites such as David Horsey, Art Thiel and Regina Hackett are scheduled to appear. Ken Schram will emcee. The event will be from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 3, at Town Hall. Admission is free but reservations are required. Call 206-331-1276 or e-mail seattlepitribute@gmail.com.

Start anywhere. Look. Wonder why any given art is the way it is and not some other way. The artist made certain choices, producing certain effects. Walk back the cat, as they say in espionage. Perhaps read art historians and critics for clues--but not solutions. Your own pleasure must be your goal and guide. A great deal of art, of any period, is ridiculous. But you won't be a fair judge unless you consent to regard each work as sincere and intelligent until proven otherwise. (Developing taste speeds up the process, but it's still a process.) If you hate a work on first sight, fine. That's an authentic response. But stick around. Keep looking. You will have further responses. You might end up hating the work even more, but with an enriched understanding of both it and yourself. Very often, our judgment evolves the other way: what we think we like, at first, disappoints upon contemplation. The artist Edward Ruscha promulgated a handy rule in this regard: "Bad art is 'Wow! Huh?' Good art is 'Huh? Wow!'

The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog's life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
touching and tasting and testing everything
investigating everything
without benefit of perjury
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
a real live
	   barking
		  democratic dog
engaged in real
		free enterprise
with something to say
		         about ontology
something to say
		about reality
			        and how to see it
					      and how to hear it
with his head cocked sideways
			        at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have
			  his picture taken
				              for Victor Records
		         listening for
				His Master's Voice
	and looking
		       like a living questionmark
				       into the
			               great gramophone
			           of puzzling existence
           with its wondrous hollow horn
	      which always seems
               just about to spout forth
			         some Victorious answer
				     to everything.

After other leads fizzled, attention turned to Picasso and Apollinaire and their gang of young, avant-garde poets and artists. This group, sometimes called la bande de Picasso, was famous for its seething dislike of the kind of stale museum art that the Louvre represented. Apollinaire had signed a manifesto that threatened to "burn down the Louvre."

In museums throughout America's circa-1965 industrial heartland, Gilliams hang next to Frankenthalers hang next to Nolands. They all look a bit dated, like an end rather than a beginning.

This entry is about art students who won't go to art museums. Apparently, some students today think that viewing art online is good enough or better. That's what I discovered reading a blog item by Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York and is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University.

Yesterday a colleague who teaches painting emailed me that it's hard for him to get his students to go to a museum to look at a work of art. They just can't see the point. Why schlep into New York to go to a museum to see a painting, especially since, as often as not, the hyper-bright, clean crisp image of it that's posted on the museum's Web site makes the real thing look limp and lame by comparison?

I'm illiterate in the historical, classic knowledge of photography, the stuff teachers attempted to bore into my head, which I resisted. The way I've always tried to cull information from older art and put it into my work is that I view it all anonymously, on a visceral level. Lately I've been looking at a lot of images from Surrealism and Dada, but I never remember which ones are the Man Rays, say, because I'm just looking for what interests me.

My daughter and I were strolling through the Seattle Art Museum recently, enjoying the treasures in the museum's still-feels-new expansion wing, when I turned a corner and saw these words: "Kerry & Linda Killinger Gallery."

I stood there, gobsmacked.

The Killinger Gallery: I'd never noticed it before. Donor names on gallery walls and theatre seats are so ubiquitous that they rarely register. But this one popped up as if lit up in Dan Flavin neon. Here was Seattle's culpability in the global economic crisis laid bare. Here was our shame displayed.