Seattle Public Sculptors

From Seattle's earliest days as a Gold Rush boomtown to its celebration of the future during the 1962 World's Fair, local artists have created public art installations--statuary, reliefs and other sculpture--that have become familiar features of the city's landscape. This comprehensive study of 12 Seattle sculptors and their works examines the motivations of the artists and their benefactors, the development of the city's public art policy, and the political forces behind the pieces that are now part of the city's rich history. Biographical details and historical perspective are provided for such artists as Lorado Taft, Alice Robertson Carr, John Carl Ely, Max P. Nielsen, August Werner and James FitzGerald.

"A Michael J. Repass Book" -- Title page.

The Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, where Alexander Calder's The Eagle soars over Puget Sound, Roxy Paine's stainless-steel Split glistens in the rain, and Richard Serra's Wake beckons visitors to walk within its towering forms, stands out as an exemplary civic project: an urban park open and free to all and a dynamic green space filled with great art. The innovative design turned a former industrial site on Elliott Bay into a remarkable place that not only celebrates the inseparable nature of art, urban infrastructure, and landscape but also captures the majestic character of the Pacific Northwest. Using the park as a model of how public-private partnerships can create innovative civic spaces, this informative and visually stunning book will bring the Olympic Sculpture Park to a broader audience beyond the greater Seattle area and will be a vital resource for museum professionals, architects, urban planners, students, and general art lovers.

Beginning with the 1899 installation of a stolen Tlingit totem pole at Pioneer Square and stretching to artist Lou Cella’s Ken Griffey Jr. sculpture erected at Safeco Field in 2017, Seattle offers an impressive abundance of public monuments, statues, busts, and plaques. Whether they evoke curiosity and deeper interaction or elicit only a fleeting glance, the stories behind them are worth preserving. Private donors and civic groups commissioned prominent national sculptors, as well as local artists like James A. Wehn (who sculpted multiple renderings of Chief Seattle) and Alonzo Victor Lewis, who produced a number of bas-reliefs and statues, including one of the city’s most controversial--a World War I soldier known as “The Doughboy.” The resulting creations represent diverse perspectives and celebrate a wide array of cultural heroes, dozens of firsts, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, aviation, and military and maritime service. Author Robert Spalding provides the history surrounding these works. Beyond the words chiseled into granite or emblazoned in bronze, he considers the deeper meaning of the heritage markers, exploring how and why people chose to commemorate the past, the selection of sites and artists, and the context of the time period. He also discusses how changing societal values affect public memorials, noting works that are missing or relocated, and how they have been maintained or neglected. An appendix lists the type, year, location, and artist for sixty monuments and statues, and whether each still exists. Another useful appendix offers maritime plaque inscriptions.

Beginning with the 1899 installation of a stolen Tlingit totem pole at Pioneer Square and stretching to Safeco Field's 2017 Ken Griffey Jr. sculpture, Seattle offers an impressive abundance of public monuments, statues, busts, and plaques. Whether they evoke curiosity and deeper interaction or elicit only a fleeting glance, the stories behind them are worth preserving. Private donors and civic groups commissioned prominent national sculptors and local artists. The resulting creations represent diverse perspectives and celebrate a wide array of cultural heroes, dozens of firsts, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, aviation, and military and maritime service. "Monumental Seattle" traces the history of these works, exploring their deeper meaning and the context surrounding their creation. It discusses how changing societal values affect public memorials and includes an appendix listing the type, year, location, and artist for sixty, and whether each still exists.

Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture. Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists' video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the "Concepts" series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the "By Herself" series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years. This profile by art historian Patricia Failing is both a celebration of a distinguished artists and a historical summary of the development of video as an art form from the early seventies to the present day. The making of Chase's widely acclaimed filmdance, Circles II (1972), is discussed within the context of her own artists evolution and also as exemplary of an artistic milieu shaped by McLuhanism and a growing interest in multimedia experimentation. An entire chapter focuses on the institutional and theoretical working environment for video artists in the 1970s, outlining the circumstances under which New York became the best-endowed center for the production of artists' video. Attention is also paid to the specific manner in which Chase learned to employ video technology, the mechanisms of exhibition and distribution of independent video art, and the theoretical and practical issues raised in collaborations among artists from different art forms. Centering upon first-hand commentary by Chase and her colleagues, Doris Chase, Artist in Motion is an accessible introduction to a pioneering artist and her milieu. The Foreword by noted critic and teacher of video art Ann-Sargent Wooster adds a valuable dimension to the volume. Doris Chase, Artist in Motion is illustrated with representative examples of Chase's work and includes selected lists of her videotapes and films as well as her works in public collections. It will appeal to students of video art as well as to those intersted in women artists and feminist performance.