April Surgent, "Between the Night and the City." Photo: Jeff Curtis.

This year’s Neddys (a.k.a. the Neddy Artist Fellowship finalists) are up at Tacoma Art Museum, and I went along to the official opening party on Saturday night. Plenty of people, and just a bit more than the usual excitement that attends these things. Why? Because this year, for the first time, the Neddy awards honor artists in one of the Northwest’s most idiosyncratic media: glass.

Established in 1996 by the Behnke Family and Foundation as a memorial to Seattle painter Robert

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Tacoma Art Museum has just put out a call for design solutions for the museum’s plaza and perimeter, with a budget of $3 million, as part of a new five-year strategic plan for the museum. The plan calls for “a landmark civic space that enlivens downtown Tacoma.”

So what needs fixing? According to TAM’s press release, an increase of visibility via landscape, art and signage and a more welcoming entrance, plus a better connection between the parking lot (currently way down below the front door, accessed from a back street) and the museum entrance (currently achieved by a cold

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The Museum of Glass’ new Mobile Hot Shop Truck. Photo: Kevin Young.

After two years of renting trucks to transport its mobile Hot Shop to schools, art fairs and the like, the Museum of Glass now has its very own Mobile Hot Shop Truck. The 36-foot truck holds two glassblowers, a commentator, raw glass, tools, workbenches, a small furnace, glory hole and annealer, plus a tent to shelter the artists as they demonstrate.

To celebrate, the new truck will be parked on the plaza outside the Museum this weekend from 6-8

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David Macaulay helps install David Macaulay: The Way He Works, on view at Tacoma Art Museum through June 14, 2009. Photo: Phoebe Keleman.

It’s all happening at Tacoma’s three big museums on the weekend. Plan now, because there’s a busy schedule lined up.

At Tacoma Art Museum on Sunday, illustrator David Macaulay (above) is the big draw at The Big Draw, a free afternoon festival of community drawing (and more.) Macaulay, the author of the famous “The Way Things Work” series of children’s books, among other things, will discuss his work at

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Bellevue Arts Museum is adjusting its opening hours, opening every day of the week but beginning later in the day. And to kick things off, the museum will offer a 50% discount on admission on all four Mondays during the month of April.

Seriously, folks. It ain’t no April Fool thang.

The new hours of operation are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays and noon-5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

According to the press release, by adjusting the hours of operation the museum will “be able to make the most efficient use of its resources

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"Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices," an exhibit telling the story of the women’s suffrage movement in Washington, opens Saturday at the Washington State History Museum with a schedule of free events.

The exhibit will run through Sept. 27, and the more than 200 objects on display include a dress worn by suffragette leader Susan B. Anthony, a pair of her eyeglasses, her diary and a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments, the founding document of the women’s rights movement in the United States. Anthony campaigned throughout the last half of the 19th century for women’s rights, but died 14

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Jill Nordfors Clark, “Desert Journey.” Photo: Sayaka Ito.

Every so often I pop into Bellevue Arts Museum, and whenever I do, I realize I should go more often. Don’t be fooled by the museum’s focus on craft: This is a place that does exactly what good art should do–it blurs the boundaries. Aesthetically-driven craft, sculptural art–it’s all there, from Tip Toland’s eerie, life-size nudes to Etsuko Ichikawa’s gorgeous, ceiling-high slashes of flame.

Just opened this month is “Intertwined,” an exhibition of contemporary baskets from the collection of Arizonans Sara

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The past and the present will be on view side-by-side at the Washington State History Museum starting Saturday when a photo exhibit titled "Washington Then and Now" opens to the public.

Among the 100 photos in the exhibit is a yesterday/today pairing of pictures of downtown Tacoma (the older view taken sometime in the 1900s) and shots of a dirt road winding up to Mount Rainier in 1903 and a paved contemporary highway following the same route. The oldest photo was taken sometime in the late 1850s and is an image of

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