posts about art, art shows, galleries and other visual arts…
By Aigner Loren Wilson This past January, Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) won a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The grant will be used to bring awareness, resources, activities, and fund its annual Dia de los Muertos Festival that happens in the fall of each year. With the grant, TAM plans …
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Tacoma artist Sharon Styer is primarily known as a photographer whose photographs of vacant and abandoned buildings, among other subjects, are haunting and mysterious. Now she’s onto something new. About two years ago, Styer began making collages that are funny, bizarre and intelligent – often with known …
Review by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Art House Designs is a large frame shop and gallery with hundreds and hundreds of paintings, prints and other artworks displayed salon style on the walls and on tables and even stacked on the floor. The collection includes hundreds of original paintings and prints by local and regional …
By Alec Clayton The art gallery in South Puget Sound Community College’s Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts will be named for retiring trustee Leonor R. Fuller in honor of her advocacy for arts and education. The dedication event will take place January 24. Fuller served as the chair of the Women of Washington …
By Anna Schlecht Olympia has become a “city of murals”, with an ever-growing number of large format artworks on walls across the urban hub and beyond. Some murals appear overnight, executed without payment or permission. Others are juried by experts and commissioned for thousands of dollars. Into this pantheon of public art enters a unique …
By ALEC CLAYTON Almost everyone familiar with the Olympia art scene knows – or should know – Susan Aurand’s work. For many years, beginning in 1974, she taught at The Evergreen State College, and over the years she’s shown her art in such local venues as Childhood’s End Gallery and South Puget Sound Community College …
By ALEC CLAYTON On a Wednesday morning in November, over 20 people gather around two long tables in downtown Olympia’s Hummingbird Studio. They’re students at The Evergreen State College, or they’re from the Transitions Program of Olympia School District, which provides opportunities to envision the potential for post-secondary education. As the Transitions website puts it, …
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Bill Collins and Gail Ramsey Wharton are the perfect pairing for a Halloween show. The imagery in Wharton’s collages is bizarre and highly inventive, and Collins’s recent paintings of houses and cars are downright spooky. Plus, the weirdness in both is done with tongue firmly planted in …
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS The exhibition now showing in the gallery at South Puget Sound Community College is amazingly lush and gorgeous. Called “What Lies Beneath,” the show features photographs by Seattle artist Melinda Hurst Frye and sculpture by Olympia-based Cyrra Robinson. The works from each — while more realistic than …
By ALEC CLAYTON It is a rare artist who gets invited to mount a one-person show at Childhood’s End Gallery. According to owner Richenda Richardson, there have only been 20 solo exhibits out of approximately 400 in its 43 years. Three have been by Marilyn Frasca. Frasca’s show for Arts Walk will have about 50 …