Tacoma Art Museum announced today that Laura F. Fry, a Western art expert from the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, will be the curator for TAM’s new Haub wing, a 15,000 square foot extension of the museum planned to house last year’s gift of 280 pieces of Western American art by German billionaire Erivan Haub and his wife Helga. Fry will join TAM in April.

“We are delighted to welcome Laura to the museum,” said museum director Stephanie Stebich. “This is a critical position for our museum as we move forward with sharing the Haub Collection …

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Brent Hartinger, a former Tacoma writer who hit big with his gay-empowerment young adult novel “Geography Club” in 2003 is now seeing his award-winning book turned into a movie, with a fall release date planned. Directed by Gary Entin, the film stars Cameron Deane Stewart as the protagonist Russel Middlebrook, with “90210” actor Justin Deeley, Nikki Blonsky (“Hairspray”) and Ally Maki (“Ten Things I Hate About You”) supporting.

“I’m thrilled,” said Hartinger, who moved to Seattle a couple of years ago but who based “Geography Club” on his former hometown Tacoma, where it was initially banned by the University Place school district. “I spent almost a week on the set in Los Angeles last summer, and it was a surreal experience.”

Hartinger, who married his long-term partner Michael Jensen in December, is the author of numerous young adult books, including two more in the Russel Middlebrook series, and a number of plays including a stage adaptation of “Geography Club.” He co-founded the gay teen help center Oasis in 1990. Read more »

After the success of last January’s inaugural orchestral trip to Cuba and last September’s exchange of seven musicians from sister-city Cienfuegos here to Tacoma, the Northwest Sinfonietta has completed a second tour with greatly reduced forces.

Conductor Christophe Chagnard, concertmaster Brittany Boulding and pianist Joel Fan were the only musicians to travel with the Tacoma-based chamber orchestra this year, compared to last January when ten members went to play side-by-side concerts with the Orquesta de Cámara Concierto Sur in Tacoma’s sister-city Cienfuegos, along with 67 private patrons, who also took guided tours of other cultural sites. This year, only …

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“A Due Celli” at University of Puget Sound

You don’t often get to hear two world-class cellists play duets, but at UPS tonight artist-in-residence David Requiro and guest artist Meta Weiss will play a concert of music from Paganini’s “Moses” variations, arranged for two cellos, to Schubert’s string quintet in C major, expanded by Maria Sampen, Jennifer Caine and Tim Christie on violin and viola.

7:30 p.m. Jan. 25. $12.50/$8.50/free for UPS students. Schneebeck Concert Hall, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner St., Tacoma. 253-879-6013, pugetsound.edu

“Celebrate Asia” with the Seattle Symphony

The Seattle Symphony honors the local Asian community with its fifth annual “Celebrate Asia” concert at Benaroya Hall this Sunday. The East-West program features Japanese blind pianist Nobuyuki Tsjuii playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concert no. 1, Indian violinist

Ambi Subramaniam and mridangam player Mahesh Krishnamurthy playing “Shanti Priya,” written by renowned Indian violinist and composer L. Subramaniam, plus Debussy’s “Pagodes,” a Bali-inspired orchestral piece and a new work for shakuhachi flute. Pre-concert activities include local dance companies and a lion dance, with taiko drumming following the show.

Pre-concert lobby music 3 p.m., concert 4 p.m. Jan. 27. $19-$76. Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., Seattle. 866-833-4747, seattlesymphony.org

Mosaics at Museum of Glass

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Inside Kittredge Gallery it’s very, very dark. Eerie blips and taps punctuate the stillness. And in the center of the room is a kind of temple created by light, inhabited by seven inscrutable ceramic priests. It’s “Kukai,” a brand new collaborative installation by Tacoma ceramic artist Yuki Nakamura and Vashon digital media artist Robert Campbell that redefines each art form into something both ancient and futuristic.

The set-up’s cleverly simple. Seven foot-high clay towers – beautifully made, like unusual chess pieces – stand on a dark, mirrored surface, which reflects their length down into eternity, and also …

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It sounds like a tenuous theme for a group show: Art with blue in it. But “Azul,” which opened last week at Tacoma’s B2 Fine Art Gallery, is anything but shallow. Instead it dives to sophisticated depths, sailing smoothly over diverse genres and media and covering a surprisingly wide range of emotion.

What helps is the gallery’s subdivided interior space. Usually problematic for the kind of group shows B2 likes to mount, the space this time helps the theme, offering quite separate visual areas for the half-dozen artists involved and allowing each of them room for more than the usual cursory one or two works.

The front room is occupied by Francisco Salgado and Susanna Rodriguez, and dives at once into the moody depths of the color. “Emocion Azul,” by the Mexican-born, Portland-based Salgado, is this show’s poster work and for good reason: The contorted, bunched muscles of this nude, sculpted in plaster and covered with tiny twigs in a coating of cobalt, speak eloquently of despair, confusion, depression. Just three feet high, this figure condenses human suffering into a wordless essence, prickly and naked.

Around the walls the Chilean painter Rodriguez captures the inhuman ambiguity of the city in moody Cubist works. Her bluey-gray buildings jumble together against angular clouds like tombstones or ship masts, occasionally lit with a harsh pink sunset or an eerily green shot of light.

Most of the other artists are local. Read more »

Tacoma Art Museum and local tribes once again collaborate to bring the annual Northwest Native Community Celebration to the museum this Sunday. The free festival celebrates Tacoma’s Native American heritage through art, dance, music and three canoes from the Puyallup and other Coast Salish tribes.

“The Northwest Native Community Celebration continues the relationship that Tacoma Art Museum and the City of Tacoma share with the Puyallup Tribe,” says the press release.

Among the activities are a market of local artisans from basket weavers to painters, and hands-on activities in the art studio. Music and dance performances will be given by the Sacred Water Canoe Family, Native B.R.I.D.G.E. and Chief Leschi School. Read more »

Contrary to what ArtTix might have told you in this morning’s GO section, the monthly Blues Vespers at Immanuel Presbyterian is on Sunday at 5pm, not Saturday. Featured artists are Junkyard Jane and Jim King, and the Rev. Dave Brown will speak on “Dr. King: Dreaming like Martin.” It’s free, as always.

901 N. J St., Tacoma. 253-627-8371, ipctacoma.org