Weekend Picks

The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts holds their 46th Annual Conference in Seattle this month, while work from more than 35 important and emerging ceramic artists is on display at BAM. The show is rooted in the concept of play, though not only for fun and games. “It is also serious business, teaching essential life skills and developing healthy, well-balanced lives through the pleasure of participation.” Yoko Sekino-Bove’s jubilantly colored porcelain tea ware is called “Hanafuda Sake Drinking Game Set,” and “Swan, Awareness Series” is Adrian Arleo’s eye-covered bird. They’re representative of a playfully twisted show.

Motoi Yamamoto makes labyrinths from salt. His elaborate floor paintings are created as painstakingly as sand mandalas and similarly reflect the transience of life. His symbols and themes—thousands of tiny feathers, mazes, branches, ascending staircases, crumbling castles—are born from the grief of losing a loved one. Watch Yamamoto’s process during the first weekend of “Making Mends,” an exhibition on healing through art, alongside deeply personal work from artists including Jennifer Zwick, Debra Baxter, Margot Quan Knight, Vik Muniz and 12 more.

In the only West Coast tour of this groundbreaking show, HIDE/SEEK is a survey of American art which traces shifting sexual identities over 150 years. Debuting at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010, it features exceptional work from John Singer Sargent to Andy Warhol, from Georgia O’Keefe to Robert Mapplethorpe, from Berenice Abbott to Catherine Opie, and scores more, all with a connecting thread of deeply felt artistic and social commentary from co-curator Jonathan D. Katz. Audio tour recommended.

“The Brink” is the Henry Art Gallery’s biennial award spotlighting an emerging Northwest artist; this year’s recipient is Vancouver, B.C. resident Andrew Dadson. This first solo museum exhibition of his work focuses on Dadson’s intensive use and fascination with “the material and the metaphor of the monochrome.” Dadson is interested in zones and boundaries: He photographs lawns painted in solid colors, and applies thick layers of paint to multiple standing canvases which lean against walls and each other. As the Henry notes, “These works suggest voids that have become part of a mysterious, and possibly contentious, narrative.”

After more than 10 years of love triangles, online affairs, unknown baby-daddies and soul-searching trips to Korea, the series finale of Sex in Seattle is finally opening. Kathy Hsieh’s long-running theatrical soap opera follows the lives of four single Seattle women as they struggle with love and life à la Sex and the City. But unlike Sex and the City, aka The Whitest TV Show Ever, Sex and Seattle puts the spotlight on Asian-American women dealing with gender, race and cultural politics. In the final episode, the four friends wonder, “From media expectations to parental pressures to living up to the model minority stereotype, how can any modern-day woman hope to achieve true happiness?” Tune in to find out—no Tivoing here.

There’s a lot to look at this month at Platform, starting with painter Robert Yoder’s DILF! (Think about that acronym for a moment.) Yoder hosts exhibits four times a year at his permanent home gallery, aptly called Season. Known for reappropriating found objects and retired road signs into vibrant collage, he’s brought oil paint, low-relief sculptural elements and the color black into these new works investigating his emotional and physical fantasies. “To expose myself is vital in my work,” he says. “Conceit, betrayal and guilt combine with romance and devotion to form an uneasy tenderness.”

Café Nordo is equal parts dinner and theatre, installation art and psychedelic voyage, high cuisine and high concept. The infrequent production takes over Washington Hall for six weeks—the final event at the venerable space before it undergoes significant renovation—with a multi-room around-the-world-style dramatic dining experience. Groups of participants will be led by performing-artist guides from one self-contained world to another and offered locally sourced delicacies prepared by Chef Nordo Lefesczki in each, capped by a communal banquet as grand finale. Says director and food designer Erin Brindley, “It’s a rare opportunity to have such a massive space with so much character. History is dripping from the place while we’re creating our installations.”

Before making musicals based on films became the Broadway fallback (Spiderman? Shrek?) king of comedy Mel Brooks made The Producers—the best musical ever based on his movie based on the worst musical ever—and won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards. Max Bialystock, a washed up, once-great Broadway producer and his mousy clerk develop a money-making scheme: raise millions of dollars to put on the world’s worst musical and then flee to Rio with the cash when the show flops big time on Broadway. The only hitch: It’s show business, baby, sometimes you try so hard to go wrong you go right. It’s springtime for Hitler and Issaquah!

Some time ago, actors Noah Benezra and Hannah Victoria Franklin started a devil-worshipping, Cleopatra-fucking, black jean-wearing hip-hop duo named Blood Kry$tal Wolf. The time has come for them to tell their story. Bed Snake is one part theatre, two parts hip-hop concert, three parts satanic ritual, and four parts crunk. Will Wolf achieve his dream of stardom? Will Kry$tal succeed in eating his soul? Will there be more profanity or blood-drinking? One thing's certain: “Bed Snake promises to melt your face.”

See masterful quilts by Loretta Bennett, one of the younger generation of quilters from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The rural community became known for its distinctive and sophisticated style during the civil rights movement, when the Freedom Quilting Bee was organized. Their skills and aesthetic have passed through at least six generations; Bennett’s brilliantly colorful designs do her forebears justice, and then some. Her work is paired in the gallery with dreamlike etchings, lithographs and woodcuts from American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler.