Parlor Games: Biblical Proportions

A battle over the Tacoma Art Museum’s place in the pantheon of Northwest art sparks a divine round of name calling.

Illustration by Hallie Spurgin for City Arts.

Thanks to its Northwest Biennial, the Neddy Awards show and the current Concise History of Northwest Art (up through May 23), has Tacoma Art Museum become the museum of Northwest art?

Not so fast, says big Seattle critic Matthew Kangas. On Artdish.com, Kangas disses Concise History as a “woefully incomplete” show, where “minor works replace masterpieces.” He snipes, “The [TAM] staff needs to grow up.” Kangas also says TAM shouldn’t collect British Columbian art, since BC doesn’t show much of our art.

But isn’t TAM doing more than any other museum to articulate a Northwest canon? “I certainly don’t buy into the ‘rising Tacoma’ business,” Kangas tells City Arts. Seattle rules. “There’s simply no comparison between the two cities, including TAM’s role in Northwest art.”

The TAM show’s co-curator Rock Hushka calls Kangas “vicious” and wrong. “We shouldn’t show works from BC because the Vancouver Art Gallery doesn’t show Seattle artists? That’s truly the feeblest argument I’ve ever seen committed to the written word,” says Hushka. “Minor figures elbowed out major ones? Kangas devalued works by Ambrose Patterson, Imogen Cunningham, Jacob Lawrence, Alden Mason, Dennis Evans, Randy Hayes and about a hundred other artists.” 

Maybe. But Kangas also helped launch a marvelous Northwest art parlor game. Top online critic Regina Hackett called Kangas “the art critic equivalent of Moses. He comes down the mountain with the rules.” Kangas retorted, “If I’m Moses, Regina is the Virgin Mary: very pure but impossibly associated with bizarre cults that have clouded her thinking.” 

Giving local art stars biblical names turns out to be more fun than giving people stripper names. Hushka likens himself to David and Kangas to Goliath. Here are Hushka’s other biblical Northwesterners:

Adam and Eve = Roi Partridge and
Imogen Cunningham
Noah = Patterson Sims
Jesus = Morris Graves or Mark Tobey
Sarah = Judy Sourakli
Thundering God of the Old
Testament = Bruce Guenther
Caesar = Mimi Gardner Gates
St. Augustine = Lisa Corrin
St. Catherine = Robin Held
St. Paul = Chris Bruce

“Hilarious,” says ex-Tacoma art critic Jen Graves, now at the Stranger. “I shall be Paul.” In a City Arts poll, arts people suggested more religious secret identities.

“I was named after Pope John XXIII as I was born May 23,” says art dealer John Braseth. “I suppose this makes me John the Baptist” – a fitting comparison, given that Braseth announced the coming of that deity of early collectors, Virginia Wright. However, a Braseth non-fan calls him “Mary Magdalene before she got saved.”

“I would aspire to be the local art world’s Martha, sister of Mary,” says the Henry Gallery’s Betsey Brock. “A hard worker and a good hostess. Joey Veltkamp [City Arts’ art critic] is John the Evangelist. Jeffry Mitchell is St. Francis of Assisi.”

“I love Samson because he is hot,” says dealer James Harris, “but I certainly do not think he would be an identity for me. It would have to be someone from Sodom and Gomorrah.”

City Arts cartoonist/writer Molly Norris says that she is Jacob, “because I was always mom’s favorite, I got pretty much anything I wanted from my dad, I have a knack for getting along with people, and I am sometimes not entirely honest. Like Jacob I am also a leg puller.”

Changing tacks a bit, artist Jake Seniuk dubs fellow artist Charles Krafft “the Norse god Loki, the shape shifter.” Artist Victoria Haven says she’s “Abigail, who is said to have used reason, cunning and courage to get the job done and avert bloodshed.”

Ex-Seattle Times art critic Sheila Farr wishes art people were more like Abigail and less like David and Goliath. “Arts writing,” says Farr, “is becoming like national politics, tuned to shock-jock rants and smearing the competition.” •