Bellevue Arts Museum makes sense of its galleries

Bingo at the Bellevue Arts Museum.

In 2005, when it reopened as a crafts center, BAM hosted Garth
Clark’s traveling show, The Artful Teapot, featuring the best in
contemporary pots. After that came a long, slow slide.

A craft museum has to take up its bed and walk. It has to assume the
burden of its niche, honor its legacy and cut a new path through the
thicket of material creation. Objects wandering between worlds, too
proud to be craft and too timid to be art, are not going to cut it.

By 2008, BAM had righted itself, although its difficult galleries were awkward hosts for the exhibits they housed. Good artists ended up looking at if they were waiting for their space to materialize and had unpacked their work in the hallway as a temporary measure.

Now, halfway through 2009, everything clicks: the art, the space, the flow, the light and the installations.

BAM is the ultimate come-from-behind institution. It’s surely the only art museum to have announced its own death, shut down and revived its own corpse a year later, in BAM’s case, with a craft-driven mission.

Like virtually every other culture institution in the country, money’s tight, but unlike so many others, attendance is a bright spot. According to Tanja Baumann, director of marketing, BAM’s first quarter numbers reveal a solid advance, from 6,338 in 2008 to 9,496 in 2009.

Next post, a review of the four three exhibits (time ran out on historic American quilts) currently on view. That leaves the lobby, where Seattle’s Paul Margolis’
I Imagined Myself as a Meter Maid (full-sized cart, 2002), made of quilted fabric (including lace), wood, metal and foam, dominates. He’s an artist/ bus driver who has previously quilted such objects as stop signs, none of which are online. He deserves a wider career.

Click images to enlarge.