Do This Tonight:
When you go down to the Pioneer Square artwalk, you should show your gratitude for getting into all those museums for free (and also re-up your karma points) by stopping into the Pioneer Square Cafe Vita for a “laptop rally” put on by 4Culture.
4Culture is King County’s main arts and culture organization—most of their projects involve rehabilitating historic buildings for community and arts purposes and providing support for arts organizations and community groups. Well, they’re looking at serious cuts, upwards of 80 percent of their funding, according to Executive Director Jim Kelly.
A “laptop rally” is a fun way of saying that they’re meeting up to write letters to state legislators tomorrow night, pushing the lodging tax bill—a bill in Olympia that takes sales tax revenue from hotels and motels and other temporary lodging, and funnels it toward arts and culture programs.
Tonight at Caffe Vita in the Tashiro Kaplan building (125 Prefontaine Place South) in Pioneer Square, from 6 to 8pm.
There are also some museums that aren’t in Pioneer Square. My recommendation is to head to the Central District’s Northwest African American Museum, if you’ve never been before—they’re showing an exhibition of art from Seattle’s Ethiopian community. You should also make a point of heading to the Seattle Asian Art museum while they’re still showing the New Old/New New Exhibition, which features a bunch of their newest acquisitions in contemporary Chinese art as well “modernist” paintings as old as 1690.
Northwest African American Museum (2300 South Massachusetts Street), open til 7 pm on Thursdays.
Seattle Asian Art Museum (1300 1st Avenue), open til 9 pm on Thursdays.
See all of today’s events here.
Do This Tomorrow:
The Henry Art Gallery hosts its quarterly open house, a party of art, DJs (DJ Darwin from Mad Rad) and hot dogs.
Untitled, by Kiki Smith.
Perhaps most notably, there’s a show of photography based on the art of Kiki Smith, a feminist artist whose sculptures and paintings undertook a paradigm shift in the imagination of the (particularly female) body.
Even more interesting, in my opinion, is art by Isabelle Pauwels (who recently won the Northwest’s Brink Award, worth $12,500). Belgium-born Pauwels sets out to understand her grandparents and ends up exploring the brutal Belgian colonization of the Congo in the 1830s, via a giant collage of relevant… things… she’s gathered (including the full-sized thatch hut included in Pauwels’ show).
There’s also an exhibition in the Henry’s gift shop, once abandoned and now refurbished as a space for punk-rock art and sculpture.
DJ Darwin of Mad Rad will be spinning, and there will be beer and also cupcakes from Cupcake Royale. The hot dogs are courtesy of Dante’s Inferno.
Tomorrow at the Henry Art Gallery (15th Ave NE & 41st Street), from 6:00 to 11:00 pm. $10.
Tomorrow’s Full Calendar:
The SXSW Send-Off Tomorrow at Neumos featuring Fences, Mash Hall, Visqueen, and Hey Mareilles. Neumos, 925 E Pike Street), at 8 pm. Tickets are $10. 21+.
A festival of films made by teenagers, with help from the Northwest Film Forum, The Center School, Reel Grrls, and 911 Seattle Media Arts Center. 6:30 to 8:30 pm, at the Central Library Teen Center (1000 Fourth Ave). Free.
Tomorrow’s installment of Pilot Books’ small press series features Tom Hansen, who wrote a memoir about selling heroin in Seattle in the heyday of grunge. 7 pm, at Pilot Books (219 Broadway E, upstairs). Free.
