You’ll Like Tacoma

Tacoma has at least two well-known slogans to hang its hat on: The City of Destiny and You’ll Like Tacoma. The former has the more illustrious history, having grown out of Tacoma’s choice as the western terminus for the Northern Pacific Railroad’s transcontinental railroad, in 1873 (beating out Olympia, Seattle and Bellingham for the honors). But the latter – first introduced at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, in 1909 – with its curiously modest tone is still a crowdpleaser today.

Like the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, You’ll Like Tacoma was created as a publicity tool, and debuted at the A-Y-P Exposition, held on the campus of the University of Washington. The world’s fair featured wondrous exhibits from North America, Europe and the Pacific Rim, and would draw more than three million visitors in its four-and-a-half month run. On June 2, 1909, the Tacoma Daily Ledger wrote: “Shimmering across the end of Lake Union to all who passed came the pleasant message ‘You’ll Like Tacoma‘ in glistening 20-foot white letters by day and in glowing electric characters by night.” The message was installed by the Tacoma Boosters on the shores of the lake facing the exposition. Among the highlights of the expo were “the Largest Flag in the World,” flown by cadets from Washington State University; and William Dubilier’s spanking new invention, the “wireless telephone” (actually, a precursor to the radio). Tacoma’s claim to fame is revealed on a postcard from the time: “The Longest Shoreline Electric Sign in the World Seen at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.”

In 2005, the Tacoma Arts Commission turned the iconic image into a poster and included it as a free insert in the Art at Work catalog. With its modern-looking font and retro vibe, it became an instant hit, snapped up and even framed by admirers. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Art at Work, it seems only right to resurrect the image and the slogan that so many Tacomans can’t get enough of. Stay tuned for the next appearance of You’ll Like Tacoma – in a startling new form.

NEA grant awarded to City of Tacoma and Tacoma Art Museum

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently awarded the City of Tacoma and our Tacoma Art Museum an “Our Town” grant – one of 51 awarded nationwide! This grant is the NEA’s latest investment in creative placemaking – bringing together public and private sectors to shape the economic and social characters of a neighborhood around arts and cultural activities. Sounds like the perfect award for downtown Tacoma, right?

The $200,000 grant will go toward the redesign of the Tacoma Art Museum Plaza and the adjacent Pacific Avenue streetscape. Hopefully, this redesign will increase access to the museum and the connections between the museum district and the rest of the downtown area.

“I remember sitting in the US Conference of Mayors TAPES (Tourism, Arts, Parks, Entertainment, Sports) Committee meeting in January when this grant opportunity from the NEA was announced, and thought that the redesign of Pacific Avenue and the Tacoma Art Museum plaza area fit perfectly in line with the vision of creative placemaking they were describing,” recalled Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland. “And, now, we’re the recipient of our full request.”

“Tacoma Art Museum is proud to partner with the City on this project,” said Stephanie A. Stebich, Director, Tacoma Art Museum. “In the 1990s, the museum worked closely with the City during the construction of its current facility, transforming downtown Tacoma. Our continued work together will build on that success and ensure Tacoma is a thriving, creative and welcoming community with the arts at its core.”

Are you excited? Because we’re pretty pumped, and we can’t wait to see the changes. Learn more about the TAM Plaza redesign here.

Save the date!

Save the Date! Toy Boat Theatre will be presenting Dakota’s Belly, Wyoming August 5, 6, 7, 12, and 13. All shows start at 8pm, 1314 MLK Way. Not to be missed!

Analog Tacoma

"Dandelion," silver gelatin print by Jennifer Adams.

Artist Jennifer Adams recently described her work in an online interview as “analog, tender, fragile, simple. For my photography, I tend to use natural light, everyday subjects and simple, toy cameras. My other work favors old papers and book pages, simple text and fragile textures.” She finds compelling subject matter in her hometown of Tacoma, a place with time-worn edges and industrial districts, and whose famous “grit” may mask unvarnished moments awaiting discovery.

Adams is presenting Landscapes, an exhibition of photographs commissioned by Spaceworks Tacoma at the Woolworth Building, opening July 15. In keeping with the “analog” tone of the installation, she will display the photographs clipped onto a clothesline – a nostalgic symbol that bespeaks the rituals of 1950′s and ’60′s suburban America. Many of the photographs were shot with a plastic toy camera, called a Holga, that she favors for its soft, dream-like effects. The photos, while taken locally, do “not necessarily depict iconic Tacoma locations,” she says.

A silver gelatin print by Jennifer Adams

Adams is a photography instructor and an entrepreneur, in addition to being a studio artist. She earned her entrepreneurial chops with the ongoing, indie craft fair, Tacoma is for Lovers. In 2010, she designed the Spaceworks pop shop, fly, where she rocked the hip-and-homespun product lines of Tacoma artists. She has been a visiting artist at the Tacoma Art Museum and Museum of Glass, and a freelance photographer for Sub-Pop Records. This year, Adams was nominated for the Foundation of Art Award from the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation, rewarding artistic talent and contribution to the creative community. Landscapes, the Woolworth Building, 11th & Broadway, July 15 – October 31, 2011.

Nature’s CODA

"CODA" by Lisa Kinoshita

The mysterious, secret and energizing connection between human beings and the natural world is the subject of CODA, an installation by Lisa Kinoshita, on view at the Woolworth Building through October 31. In a stark white room, a herd of wild stags crashes through the field of consciousness, where a hospital bed lies empty and white snow fills a television screen. The powerful and indifferent vitality of nature is juxtaposed with an image of individual human mortality. Or is it?

"Untitled," a collar of water buffalo horn and sterling silver, by Lisa Kinoshita. Photo: Roger Schreiber

Kinoshita asks viewers to decipher the meanings of objects that create disquieting associations – strewn flashlights, a broken plaster hand, a wooden stool suspended by a rope noose. “There’s something people instinctively grasp when they look at wild creatures; that we are a part of nature and the life process, and not the other way around. It makes human life seem more poignant,” she says.

She finds inspiration for her narratives in artists such as Joseph Beuys, and works such as the 1965 performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, in which the artist, his face masked in honey and gold leaf, cradles a deceased hare while carrying it through a roomful of drawings, whispering to it tenderly and lifting it up to the pieces. The work is ripe with symbolism (honey combined with gold transforms the head as a vessel for the creation of thought, in Beuys’ lexicon).

CODA represents man and creature in their final, numinous surge, locked in a fixed environment yet separate. “Beuys said that ‘everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or question. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings’ with their rationality.” Kinoshita, who is also a jewelry artist, incorporates natural objects such as bone, raw crystal and petrified wood in her bench work.

Sing Us a Song, Piano Man

Getting down to work: Nate Dybevik rehabilitates pianos

“The piano is a very common but mysterious instrument. Many people have them but they know nothing about its parts or mechanisms inside. I want to take some of the mystery out” of the inner workings of the instrument, says composer, musician and piano restorer, Nate Dybevik. To achieve his ends, he is creating a “piano museum” at 1310 Martin Luther King Way, where visitors can watch as he rehabilitates a Haynes baby grand piano and a vintage Bechstein upright from Germany.

Lest you suspect the 25-year old Dybevik of being a prematurely gray aesthete with piano dust in his hair, guess again. He may be a musical wunderkind – the kind who began playing the classics at age seven and writing original compositions by age 12 – but he is also a singer, an accomplished jazz pianist, a sweet guitar picker in the style of Leo Kottke and Mississippi John Hurt, a composer of film and commercial scores, and a floater in the Seattle/Tacoma indie music scene. We’d have trouble defining the man if he didn’t help us out (did we mention he makes graphic art, as well?).

Nate Dybevik took up guitar picking while teaching English in Korea (there was no room for a piano in his apartment).

At the moment, he is working on a recording of guitar pieces; you can get a sampling here:

Spaceworks Tacoma is supporting Dybevik’s work with a six-month Hilltop residency that will allow him to consolidate his creative activity, which has been spread across three worksites citywide. He says his new storefront will offer a public space for electro-acoustic performances as well as a drawing studio. The centerpiece, however, will be the piano museum. “Instrument making is an art that doesn’t really lend itself visually,” he says, “but I think [it] could if presented right….Recently I went to the Musical Instrument Museum in Arizona, where I observed thousands of captivated people observing and reading about musical instruments from all over the world. People really have an interest in instruments, no matter how simple or complex they are….Who do you know that doesn’t like music?

“Letters” recognized by Americans for the Arts!

We are so excited to announce that James Grayson Sinding’s Letters was recognized by the Americans For the Arts 2011 Public Art Network (PAN) Year in Review!

Each year, hundreds of projects from across the country are submitted for review, and up to 50 are selected as examples of outstanding public art projects. All submissions go through a selective review process. This year a record 430 project submissions were received and only 47 projects were selected. A full list of projects and more information about Year in Review can be found at www.PublicArtNetwork.org. Congratulations James, this is quite an honor!

Fashion and Pheromones

In her new Spaceworks installation, Julia Barbee manipulates nature for art.

Artist Julia Barbee‘s deconstructed-fashion collection, Frocky Jack Morgan, has received shout outs in the Los Angeles Times, Portland Monthly and beyond. But while one segment of her fashion oeuvre is designed to dazzle the eyes, another strand of her art – a more wickedly sexy, cerebral and scientifically-grounded one – dazzles the mind.

This moth is a participant in one of Barbee's fashion-and-pheromone experiments.

“I just completed a sculptural installation of five hanging silk pieces which I grew borax crystals on, and hung from the ceiling in [a] gallery space,” she writes in her project proposal to Spaceworks Tacoma. “They were part of an exhibition around the idea of identity and being named, and they ended up being stand-ins for bodies. In fact, they housed the cocoons of Polyphemus silk moths, which emerged during the exhibition and released pheromones into the sculptures.” Barbee will introduce a variation of this glittering organic experiment, sans silk moths, for a Spaceworks installation opening July 15 at 912 Broadway.

Barbee's studio in Portland, OR.

A recent graduate of the Masters of Fine Arts Fibers program at California State University, Long Beach, Barbee is charting new territory, one where fashion, the perfumer’s art and etomology meet. In an e-mail conversation, the Portland, OR-based artist described the origins of her studies – and her own attraction to smell. One goal of her MFA program, she says, was “to reduce a wearable [garment] to its essence. The idea of an oil slick on the skin was a really powerful, visceral and ephemeral manifestation of that. Smell is directly connected to memory in a way no other sense is.”

Hilltop Block Party, Thursday, July 21, 5 to 8p.m.

Spaceworks has gone viral (well almost). The popular public arts program designed to energize vacant downtown retail space through art exhibitions and performances has just expanded with the addition of four new studios on Tacoma’s Hilltop. To celebrate, the participating artists are throwing an Art Block Party on the 1300 block of Martin Luther King Way on Thursday, July 21, 5 to 8p.m., as part of the Third Thursday Art Walk. The new venues will be open to the public offering FREE tours, live music, a DJ performance and refreshments. Artists will be on hand to answer questions and offer information about upcoming events, collaborations, and ways to become involved in the Tacoma art scene. Participants include:

• Fab-5 – The graffiti incubator is launching FABITAT, an innovative creative lab aimed at inspiring underserved youth through the arts.
• Nate Dybevik – A musician, composer and apprentice piano rebuilder (training under internationally renowned expert Obi Manteufel), Dybevik will have his dismantled, vintage European piano “projects” on display.
• Toy Boat Theatre – This new theatre troupe is developing a play, Dakota’s Belly, Wyoming, by Erin Cressida Wilson, in conjunction with the theatre department at the University of Puget Sound. Show will open in August.
Spaceworks’ neighbor to the north, Fulcrum Gallery, will also be welcoming visitors to the block party with an exhibit of paintings by Peter Scheesley. Pull on your flip-flops and come out to meet the new peeps on the block!

Schmooze the News on the Tacoma Arts Blog!

Guess what, Tacoma? We’re launching a new blog! Tacoma Arts is a comprehensive index for the best of Tacoma arts-related information and updates including public art, artists and arts organizations on the move, special projects, calls to artists, funding and professional development opportunities. So check it out and subscribe so you’re never out of the loop! www.TacomaArts.wordpress.com