In an announcement this week, the Tacoma Art Museum was one of 58 cultural organizations in five states to receive 2012 grants from the Paul G. Allen Foundation, a non-profit granting organization founded in 1988 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Jo Lynn Allen. This cycle of grants totals $6.6 million, focusing on Native American communities and innovative projects.
The Tacoma Art Museum received $75,000 to organize their 2014 exhibit “Art, AIDS, America,” a collaboration with curator Jonathan Katz at the Brooklyn Art Museum. The show is intended to travel around the country.
To complement Tacoma Art Museum’s current exhibition of Mexican folk art, Trío Lucero del Norte will play son huasteco and other traditional dances from the Huasteca region of Mexico this Sunday afternoon. Ticket price includes gallery admission. 2 p.m. Jan. 7. $15/$10 members/$5 students. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma. 253-272-4258, www.tacomaartmuseum.org
Saxophonist Patrick Lamb at Jazz LIVE at Marine View
The Jazz LIVE at Marine View concert this month features saxophonist Patrick Lamb, whose music fuses funk, soul, R&B and jazz. He’ll be backed by a …
It’s all happening at Tacoma Art Museum this Sunday: The annual Let It Snow free community festival also includes the second annual 20/20 Identity and Portrait Project, featuring 20 local individuals sharing stories and photographic portraits in anticipation of the major photographic exhibition Hide/Seek coming to TAM in 2012.
The festival ushers in winter with music from bell choir the Rainier Ringers, dance performances from Metro Arts and Grant Elementary students, make-it-yourself pop-up holiday cards or ornaments and more. You can also walk across Pacific Avenue to the new ice rink, co-sponsored by the museum. All museum entry is …
David Linares, "Blue Devil Judas Figure." Courtesy image.
If you have any connections with the South – Texas, Arizona, Mexico, Southern California – you’ll know how gorgeous Mexican folk art can be. Filling the space with blood-red vermilions and royal blues, with grinning skeletons and pious saints, with tin and papier-maché, it’s somehow larger than life. But we don’t get to see a lot of it up here in the Pacific Northwest. Fortunately for Tacomans, as of last weekend, there’s a whole gallery full of it at Tacoma Art Museum, complementing and expanding their usual Dia de los Muertos offerings of giant lobby tapetes (sand paintings) and community ofrendas (altars).
“Folk Treaures of Mexico” brings to Tacoma a smattering of historical and contemporary Mexican folk art from the Nelson A. Rockefeller collection housed in the San Antonio Museum of Art, which has the country’s largest quantity of this genre. At over 3,000 objects the Rockefeller collection is way to large to travel completely, but the TAM exhibit gives a delicious, spicy-hot taste, with a broad range of media and period.
It’s also a wide range of size. The art starts tiny, with a mirrored case full of thumb-sized clay figurines roping cows and carrying market goods, through painstakingly tiny straw mosaics so shadowed and subtle it looks like a painting at four feet away, past long woven rebozos and an intricately yarned ceremonial “tapestry” all the way to giant eight-foot demons made in the 1980s by the famed Linares family, constructed of papier-mache and painted in grinning black, red and blue. Read more »
The annual Gig Harbor Film Festival runs this weekend, featuring a gala appearance by Julie Andrews plus features and shorts by regional, national and international filmmakers. October 14-16. $40 3-day pass, $75 gala or $8/$6 per film. Galaxy Theatre Uptown, 4649 Point Fosdick Drive NW, Gig Harbor. www.gigharborfilmfestival.org
This Sunday, watch artists Fulgencio Lazo and Jose Orantes install two giant tapetes (sand paintings) on the floor of the museum’s lobby area in honor of Dia de los Muertos, coming up at the end of this month. Schools and community …
The newest show at Bellevue Arts Museum, “Travellers: Objects of Dreams and Revelations,” features new work by Olympia felt artist Janice Arnold: a 20-foot-high, seven-foot-square Mongolian yurt made of fire-inspired handmade felt. Opens today, then 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday, noon-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. $10/$7/free for under-six. 510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue. 425-519-0770, www.bellevuearts.org
Summer Stadium pottery sale
The annual Stadium district summer sale is on again, featuring pots, bowls, vases, sculptures and more in both recent work, older work and seconds by local potters. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. today, 10 …
Tacoma photographer Peter Serko, whose Museum of Glass-related work is on show now in the museum, will lead a mini photo workshop for all ages at MoG’s Family Day, along with a discussion of his work, and an outdoor composition workshop by Jennifer Adams. 1-4 p.m. Aug. 13 (1 p.m. discussion). $12/$10/$5/free for under-six. 1801 Dock St., Tacoma. 866-4-MUSEUM, www.museumofglass.org
Haffer’s photographs at TAM
Virna Haffer was a Tacoma photographer through the early and mid-20th century; her work was not only groundbreaking technically, but also socially and artistically. Thanks to recent research, Tacoma Art Museum …
The City of Tacoma’s Arts Commission and Evergreen State College are the only two Washington state recipients of a new grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, announced NEA chairman Rocco Landesman on Tuesday. The “Our Town” grants give a total of $6.575 million to 51 communities in 34 states to fund public-private partnerships that both support the arts and shape the local community in social, physical and economic ways to increase livability.
At $200,000 the grant to the Tacoma Arts Commission is one of the largest. It will help fund the redesign of the Tacoma …
