What's Northwest about the Northwest Biennial?



Talking with curator Rock Huska about this year's selected artists.

Isn’t it weird that the biggest art show from Seattle to Portland is in Tacoma instead of Seattle or Portland? “I know! I know!” says Tacoma Art Museum curator Rock Hushka, who created the 9th Northwest Biennial (Jan. 31 – May 25) with guest curator Alison de Lima Greene of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Last year the Portland Art Museum scrapped its Biennial for the Contemporary Northwest Arts Awards — five solo shows of regional artists. And Seattle Art Museum concentrates on the Betty Bowen Award, $15,000 and a solo show for one Northwest artist. So by default, Tacoma’s Biennial takes the lead as the defining regional survey.

“It’s our way to write the chapter of recent Northwest art history,” says Hushka.
But, um, since it’s at the Tacoma Art Museum, isn’t it also weird that twenty-two of the twenty-four artists in it are from Seattle and Portland, not Tacoma? (Two are from Eugene.)  “I have some interesting statistics,” says Hushka. He explains that over 90 percent of the applicants were from the two bigger towns, and just 5 percent — about thirty artists — from Tacoma.

So why aren’t 5 percent of the artists chosen Tacomans? Partly, it’s because TAM supports so many local artists (as staffers, contractors and educators), and it would be a conflict of interest to include them in the Biennial. (TAM also features local art in its permanent collection and temporary installations, and Hushka writes about Tacoma artists in City Arts.) He grants that the Biennial artists are “from Portland and Seattle pretty much, sadly. This speaks mainly to where artists can make a living. Artists have to live in urban centers. That’s where the collectors and galleries are, and universities and art schools.”

When Mark Twain visited Tacoma, locals urged him to “boom [promote] Tacoma” on the wider scene. The best way to do that, art-wise, is to do precisely what TAM is doing with the Biennial: serve both the artists of the city and the region in a national context. “The whole purpose for me is to understand what’s Northwest about Northwest art,” says Hushka.

Painter Michael Brophy, fixated on the local landscape, is “an obvious example” of what he’s got in mind, says Hushka, but so are the necklaces and earrings of Micki Lippe, who turns images from weekly walks in the woods into jewelry, and Margie Livingston’s quasi-abstract paintings of tableaux in her Seattle studio. “She paints the light here, because that’s the only place she can find it,” says Hushka. Jack Daws wins inclusion because he’s got Northwest attitude: “He’s Seattle’s most conspicuous agent provocateur,” mocking greed with a Counterfeit Penny of pure gold. Hushka adds, “Susan Robb embodies important Northwest traits: her focus on sustainability, carbon footprints — she’s almost a stereotypical Northwesterner. Yet she moves in art circles that may not be different than if she were in Brooklyn or Berlin. She makes us think about issues.”

Seattle Biennial artists outnumber Portland artists seventeen to five. “There’s more DIY spirit in Portland; Seattle’s more focused on conceptual concerns.”

Some cranky malcontents called the last Biennial a stale parade of usual suspects. This time, Hushka says he found lots of surprises. The biggest surprise: he had no Texas throwdowns with co-curator Greene. “We agreed to an amazing degree — I expected there to be a lot more contentiousness — but we came to decisions from completely different perspectives.” Take Victor Maldonado’s sixteen-foot-long painting Flood Escalade. “She liked it from more of a formal aspect, and also her experience of Hispanic artists in Texas. I liked it as personal narrative, and also all the work that Victor’s done as part of the art community of Portland.”

Hushka thought he was going to exhibit Susan Seubert’s gritty, provocative photos of Abu Ghraib torture victims and teeth extracted from Iraqis by U.S. Army medics, but he was stunned instead by her old-fashioned ambrotypes of her neighbor’s bird nests. “They were a big, pull-in-your-breath surprise. Just so beautiful and sublime and completely unexpected. They’re about meditation and time and the fragility of human existence and all that.” Expect a grid of twenty-five nest photos.

“Michael Kenna [a photographer who’s had five hundred shows] was also a huge surprise,” says Hushka, chuckling. “Why would an artist of his stature submit his work to a regional biennial?”

Honoring Ken Kesey’s maxim, “Art is not eternal,” Hushka made sure to include ephemera like Linda Hutchins’s Lineal Silver drawings (“She scrapes the edge of an antique silver spoon inherited from her grandmother on the wall, leaving a beautiful gray line, grinds it all the way down to the nub”) and Stephanie Robison’s Wrecking Ball Cloud made of plastic and boat-wrapping material (“This idea that you could wreck clouds is sorta humorous and kinda fun”).

Since the 9th Biennial is basically a smackdown between artists from Seattle and Portland, which city is better? “Ho, ho, ho! Which is better? They’re different,” says Hushka, always the soft-voiced soul of diplomacy. “There seems to be a lot more do-it- yourself spirit in Portland; Seattle tends to be more focused on conceptual concerns, probably driven by MFAs from the UW. There’s more community spirit in Portland.” Amen to that, says this Portland-turned-Seattle critic.

Hushka aims for a Biennial audience comprising both states’ top gallerists, collectors and connoisseurs — and also four-year-olds. “Hopefully, we’ll get preschoolers in here. We’ll tell them, ‘Find all the red in the gallery’ and ‘Find all the trees.’” One thing’s certain. Everybody, from tantrum-throwing toddlers to tantrum-throwing critics (and rejected artists), will be asking some form of the same question: What do all those paintings really mean?

Art: (top) W. Scott Trimble, Untitled #4, 2008, reclaimed wood, 96 x 400 x 96 inches, courtesy of the artist; (bottom, from left) Denzil Hurley, untitled, 2007–8, oil on canvas on panel, 24 x 18 inches, courtesy of the artist and Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle, photo by Doug Manelski; Susan Seubert, Nest (detail), 2008, ambrotype, 65 x 55 inches, courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland.