— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अस्सी-आठ —
Shobhit and I went back to
ArtLove Salon for yet another event last night—we keep going back to that space, on the 5th floor at 110 Union. The space also includes part of the 4th floor, with a staircase down there; what gallery or company is represented where is a bit confusing. I we met a woman whose name I forget, and I really wish I could remember what it was, who was affiliated with ArtLove Salon, and I asked her about this: there's a section of space on the 5th floor (that's where their main entrance is) curated by
PublicDisplay.Art; I think the rest of the space on the 5th floor would be curated by ArtLove Salon. There is a
separate space on the 4th floor, with its own entrance on the 4th floor, curated (currently, at least) by
Shift Gallery. That space is much smaller and has far fewer pieces on display; it's on the other side of the south wall of the 4th floor space accessible by stair from ArtLove Salon on the 5th floor.
I tried to get clarity on what gallery takes up the ArtLove Salon connection to the 4th floor, and the woman could not get too specific; she said there are several—even though as an experience, the art down there is like one big art gallery. Nearly all of it is for sale, and none is sold on commission, so I do kind of wonder how ArtLove Salon itself gets funded. Maybe the renting of the space for events? I learned that is also an option. Anyway, when I told the woman it sounds like maybe a kind of gallery collective, and she said, "That's a great word for it." Maybe they should run with that.
I also asked her about whether my perception of the artist community in Seattle being huge is accurate or naive. She agreed that it's huge; I just never understood the breadth of it until Shobhit and I started going to several different neighborhood Art Walks—there are
13 of them, in fact; Shobhit and I have been paying attention to roughly half of them. I asked if she had any sense of how it compares to other cities of comparable size, though, and she said she did not; she only lived for a while in San Francisco, apparently, and she said she never saw any Art Walks there.
I just did some light googling, and it sounds like Seattle may be quite distinct in this regard—cities like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles inarguably have far more significant overall art scenes, but only Seattle hosts so many decentralized,
neighborhood-specific Art Walks. I just found
this short article about it, indicating that this has been a Seattle distinction for over a decade. (I kind of love that, of all publications, I found that in the Travel section of
The Times of India.)
I have already mentioned how First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square claims to be the longest-running regular Art Walk in the nation; and how that one is clearly Seattle's most popular. It has the largest concentration of galleries and venues really close together, which makes it the most easily walkable. What fascinates me most about all this is how I've lived in Seattle proper for nearly 28 years and am only now registering this wonderful distinction about my city.
Danielle is planning to join us for Belltown Art Walk on Thursday this week. It'll be fun to share these kinds of details with her. Of all the Art Walks we've done, only Pioneer Square surprasses Belltown in both volume and quality.
Anyway, back to ArtLove Salon specifically—we were there for an artist panel event moderated by our Braeburn Condos neighbor, Mary. It was called "
The Creative Way," apparently an extention of artist Zoom conversations Mary had been hosting regularly since the beginning of last year. The panel consisted of nine artist friends and aquaintances of hers, and I may have been the only one who clocked the diversity among the panelists, which I thought reflected well on Mary. As far as I could tell (and admittedly I was making a few minor assumptions here), the panel included three White men, two of them straight and one of them gay; three White women; and three gay Black men. My impression of them all as individuals somewhat varied, but I enjoyed each of them take a turn discussing how they transitioned from a safer direction of their professional lives to a riskier creative pursuit.
This was the second event Shobhit and I attended in this exact venue at the invitation of Mary; the first was
last April, when Mary herself was interviewed about her art—by a guy who was on the panel last night. So now I've started a "
Mary L. Art Events" collection of photo albums, the second being
from last night.
ArtLove Salon had participated in Downtown Art Walk last month, which
Shobhit and I also did, so that's why we've now been in that space three times in the past year. As usual, they had light refreshments available; Shobhit and I both had three small cups of wine over the course of the evening, plus several of the snacks. They had a bunch of sushi rolls laid out, but they all had meat in them; Shobhit found out they had a limited number of vegetarian versions and brought us three of them to share. Shobhit let me eat two of them. They were very tasty. Otherwise it was mostly things like chips and vegetables with hummus dip, also some cheeses. Some crackers would have worked well, but there weren't any crackers. This functioned as our dinner, but when we got home later we still polished off the cheese bread we bought on clearance at QFC the other day.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अस्सी-आठ —
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अस्सी-आठ —
The event was at 5:30, and the plan was for Shobhit to meet me at work and we could just walk around downtown to kill time. But, it has been unseasonably cold this week, it was a bit breezy yesterday, and it was about to rain when Shobhit was downtown shortly before I left work; he texted me that he was staying warm at the Central Library, which is three blocks from here.
He was there a little while before I got off work, and he texted me a list of countries at first, and I was like: what the fuck is this about? Then he texted a photo of travel books on the shelf, for both Amsterdam and Brussels. And I thought: hey. Great idea! This might be a new protocol for all our major travels going forward. Get travel books from the library, find recommendations that interest us, take notes.
I walked over there, and he met me on the ground floor, where he showed me four books he had picked out, about The Netherlands, Amsterdam, and Brussels. We ended up checking all of them out on his library card.
We still had time to kill, though, so I went back up with him to the section of the
Book Spiral where the Travel books are located. It occurred to me we could also find one for our two-day trip to Whistler, British Columbia in June. And indeed, I found one, and discovered a ton of points of interest, particularly on the highway out there north of Vancouver, I was previously unaware of.
Shobhit still needed to meet his steps goal for the day, so we walked the spiral up to the highest point we could get to, which is probably on the 10th floor of the building (give or take); then we walked the entire spiral back down until we had to find stairs through the lower floors back down to 4th Avenue, where I checked out the Whistler book on my own card.
The beautiful Seattle Central Library has been here now for 22 years; it's easy to take for granted, but also easy to look up and still marvel at what an awesome building it is. I took four photos on our walk around the library, and decided to add them to my original
Grand Opening photo album from 2004. Ugh, I was 28 years old when that happened.
I do love that more than two decades after opening, our Central Library remains an architectural jewel of the city. Just one of many reasons to
love this place.
— पाँच हज़ार नौ सौ अस्सी-आठ —
[posted 12:31pm]
