The call to redesign Tacoma Art Museum’s plaza and perimeter garnered 95 submissions. And now TAM has winnowed those down to six design firms, it announced today.

Submissions for the $3 million project were received by individuals and firms from Tacoma to New York.

The shortlist of finalists are BCRA (Tacoma), the design team led by E. Cobb Architects (Seattle), Johnson Architecture and Planning LLC (Seattle), Mithūn (Seattle), NBBJ (Seattle), and Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen & Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture (Seattle).

The museum wanted the proposals to address landscape, art and signage elements to increase visibility

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Justin Hahn, “Dresden A and B.” Photo courtesy David Domkoski.

Don’t look now, but there are aliens in the library.

Facetious, maybe, but on first sight, that’s what Justin Hahn’s sculptures in the main branch’s Handforth Gallery look like. Four of them have skeletons of steel rod, draped with melted green or white plastic with the texture of goop. Another is a chunky bronze with clunky white polycarbonate hands like minstrel gloves. A bunch of others are tiny stick-figure people about a foot high with steel rod bodies.

Fun for the

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Edmonds’ Driftwood Players perform “Minnesota Moon” at 7:30 p.m. tonight for AACTFest. Image courtesy Judy Cullen.

AACTFest: the best of community theater

Community theater groups from around the country gathered this week in Tacoma for the biennial AACTFest; there are three public performances left. 1:30 p.m. today: "Nine" and "Catfish Moon." 7:30 p.m. today: "Minnesota Moon" and "Intimate Apparel." 7:30 p.m. tomorrow: "John and Jen" and "Hold Me." $7. Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, Tacoma. 253-591-5894, www.broadwaycenter.org, www.aactfest09.org

Nancy Worden’s "Loud Bones" at TAM

The work of Seattle jewelry

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Big news for the BareFoot Collective: the contemporary dance company and its studio is moving into the Merlino Arts Building on the corner of 6th Avenue and S. Fawcett Street to share space with Tacoma City Ballet. The move will begin next week, and a farewell brunch to the old space at 1604 Center St.

It’s a perfect fit. Tacoma City Ballet has a wonderfully large, airy studio with sprung wood floors, enormous windows and 19th-century atmosphere, plus two other rehearsal studios. But they, like most arts groups lately, have been feeling the pinch of the recession. BareFoot, meanwhile,

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Di Morgan Graves, “We’ve Got Balls.” Image courtesy Lynn Di Nino.

In the ongoing battle to convince the rest of the world that Tacoma is something more than an affordable Seattle suburb with high crime rates, our art community–led by the indefatiguable Lynn Di Nino–has come up with a brilliant idea: postcards of Tacoma, showing us as a place where art, beauty and humor meet, along with a good dose of sarcastic self-deprecation.

Picture Tacoma is a series of artist-designed postcards about our fair city. They’ve been on sale for

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Lisa Kinoshita with one of her Vetri pieces. Photo: Lisa Kinoshita

If you’re in downtown Seattle this week, drop by Vetri International (the up-and-coming-artist wing of Traver Gallery) to see the work of Tacoma jewelry artist Lisa Kinoshita.

Kinoshita operates very modestly out of a tiny storefront studio on Puyallup Ave called Mineral, but her work makes appearances on local catwalks and national fashion magazines. Working with fascinatingly gorgeous natural objects like horn, bone, insect carapace and the like, Kinoshita creates intricate settings with silver and leather to create jewelry that’s

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The 100th Monkey art community party is on again, and this month it’s at Old City Hall next Wednesday night. For those who haven’t managed to go yet, here’s the deal: Turn up with some food or drink to share, some art (if you’re an artist) and prepare to meet some new folks. Result? You’ll have a great time. You can also buy artist-made tiles and enjoy free music and performance art. And if you buy the 100th tile, you get to host the party next time! (Hence the name.)

So what’s

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For the fourth year, The Grand Cinema is holding its Tacoma Film Festival: one week of arthouse, indie, foreign and (especially) Northwest-made film. And once again, local artists get the chance to design the poster, which will be displayed all over the city. Last year’s entries ranged from an Earth goddess with a camera to a black-and-white of the SR509 bridge to a Terry Gilliam-esque Tacoma in the sky.

You can see the full list at www.thenewstribune.com/944/story/442829.html

So here’s the deal for this year’s competition. Deadline is July 20. All entries

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