Kurt Cobain – the artists who were there

In the mid-1980s, when Kurt Cobain was a high-school dropout with a guitar, Alice Wheeler was a punk girl with a camera, enrolled in Evergreen. They met in Olympia, both drawn to the music scene. Later, when everybody wanted to take his picture, he’d clear the room but let her stay.

Charles Peterson was the only punk-rock intellectual to graduate from Bothell High School in 1981.
By the time he enrolled at the University of Washington, he had a Hasselblad tattooed on his left arm and was heavy into the Seattle music scene. He remembers the faculty telling him he was wasting his time photographing rock and roll.

Now at the Seattle Art Museum curated by Michael Darling, Kurt surveys Cobain’s profound influence on visual art. (Review to follow.) Wheeler and Peterson are the only artists in the show who knew him.

Peterson’s interest is motion,
the way the crowd looked when the music hit it and the way the musicians
folded their bodies around the sound to push it out from the stage and
into the world. When he zeroed in on an individual, it was to count the cost.

Wheeler cares about relationships, hers to the subject, the subject to the camera, and the subject to the field.

Wheeler, early days:

Wheeler, a couple of years later: