For the last thirteen years, Seattle has cheekily retorted the MacArthur Foundation’s annual announcement of “Genius Grant” winners by presenting a roster of its own local “geniuses” through the Stranger Genius Award. The Stranger, which is the city’s weekly alternative news and entertainment paper, selects and awards five individuals each year, from the fields of art, performance, literature, film, and music, with $5,000 of unrestricted[…..]

Can architecture transform lives? Can it transform us? These questions lay the foundation for Structure and Ornament, a solo exhibition of work by Seattle-based artist Leo Saul Berk, on view at Frye Art Museum. Presented in a meandering array of multimedia sculpture, site-specific installation, and video with sound, Berk’s ongoing series is a reflection on his childhood home in Aurora, Illinois—a site formative to his personal and artistic growth. In the[…..]

Future Ruins, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, is indeed monumental, incorporating a range of media including print, sculpture, video, and sound. The exhibition does not present a quiet, post-apocalyptic landscape that fetishizes decay; rather, Valenzuela addresses divisions of labor and the nature of work, making these complex issues manifest through the specter of the 21st-century economic landscape. And though it is discordant at[…..]