Today’s pick:
1. The Frye Art Museum has two excellent-looking shows going on right now. The first is a display of works by the “Kids of Survival,” an art collective formed in the economically blighted South Bronx of the early ’80s by educator Tim Rollins and his students, The result, although mixed, is worth checking out.
A piece by Rollins and K.O.S.
The other, I Wish I Knew Who I Was Before I Was Me, is a show curated by students at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, a commmunity arts-education nonprofit program of the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, in West Seattle. Youngstown students chose works from the Frye’s permanent collection to display for the show, and also responded to the pieces with paintings, poems, and music of their own.
Both shows run from now til March 31, at the Frye Art Museum (704 Terry Avenue). Open from 10 am to 8 pm Thursdays. Free.
On tomorrow’s calendar:
1. Jack O’Dell, a once-prominent member of the American civil rights movement, is going to be at UW tomorrow to read from a new book of collected essays, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell. O’Dell, who had been a member of the national Communist Party in the 50s, was in charge of the New York office of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference until 1963.
In ’63, the FBI targeted O’Dell as an apparent Soviet agent. King, bowing from pressure by John F. Kennedy and worried that O’Dell would become a liability, asked him to take a less prominent position in the movement. O’Dell spent the ’70s and ’80s working on advocacy projects with the likes of Jesse Jackson. These days, he lives in Vancouver with his wife and works with community groups on advocacy issues.
O’Dell and the editor of the volume, Nikhil Pal Singh, will both be at the reading tomorrow.
Tomorrow at 4 pm, at the UW Communications Building, Room 120. Free.
2. St. Vincent is playing at Neumo’s tomorrow night. Her music (and her voice) is remarkably pretty, lulling, français, almost boring, and then, all of a sudden, it’s overwhelmed by a wave of computerized whooshes and dance beats, or it turns into fast-jazz quirkiness. It’s very hip right now.
She is also gorgeous. Her music videos are melodramatic feature slow walking and death contemplation and uncontrollable weeping. Marrow is her best song and video.
St. Vincent.
With Fences and Wildbirds & Peacedrums. Tomorrow night at Neumos (925 E Pike Street), 8 pm. Tickets are $13.
3. Grey Gallery and Lounge, Capitol Hill’s great bar/art gallery, is having its two-year anniversary tomorrow. If you get there between six and nine, you can pay the Sew People Experiment $5 to show you how to sew an arm band or a tank top. Otherwise, you can show up at nine and get tipsy to Grey’s usual mix of hipster chic and sweet turntableism (featuring Grey staple WD4D, and a whole lineup of others).
Tomorrow night, at 6 pm. At Grey Gallery (1512 11th Avenue).
