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Summer 2024

Arts

Northwest bounty still life
Spring 2012

A delicious dilemma: Ingredients for a photographic still life

A Feast of Good Things - photo by Bruce Andre

With Washington’s abundance of food, we struggled to limit the still life photo for our feature “A Feast of Good Things” to just a few ingredients. Besides the native, naturally occurring foods like shellfish and salmon, our state rates second in the nation in sheer number of crops produced. Here’s a sampling:

Olympia oyster  While clams and other oysters reach market size in two years or less, the Olympia can take four to five years. Even then, it’s still quite small. Native … » More …

Bob Brumblay (left) and Dave Fitzsimmons holding works by Griffin
Spring 2011

An art history

Worth D. Griffin stepped off the train in Pullman in the fall of 1924 to find Washington State College’s art department barely four years old and with just one other full-time faculty member. Prior to that, the only art instruction offered was painting lessons for students with the pocket money.

But Griffin had come to help teach design and creative composition and build a program. The Indiana native had studied commercial and fine art in Indianapolis and at the Art Institute in Chicago. In addition to working as a magazine illustrator, he trained among American realists, artists focused on rendering unidealized scenes of daily life. … » More …

Fall 2010

Spiritual landscapes

Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings

From the Collection of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan

WSU Museum of Art, October 1–December 11, 2010

Ngamaloo, 2008Ngamaloo, 2008, acrylic on linen by Elizabeth Gordon (Balgo Hills region)

Although the details and relationships vary amongst Australian Aboriginal groups, in the beginning the landscape of the world was formed by mythical ancestral beings. Every action of these ancestors had landscape consequences. According to the fine … » More …

Summer 2010

World of Mateo

 

Anaheim VacationlandAnaheim Vacationland by Matthew Leiker, 2007, acrylic on board

 

The work of Matthew Leiker

WSU Museum of Art, May 18–July 2

 

The World of Mateo is filled with images of an American subculture known by no particular name but seemingly related to road culture, California style, album jacket graphics of the 50s and our affinity for Hawaiian island iconography. Mateo celebrates a time of Tiki lounges, drive-in theater refreshment cartoons, and a plethora of music that bubbles vibrantly with the hypnotic tones of the ukulele, inspiring his imagination to create … » More …

Fall 2003

Wings to fly

Mia Song Swartwood hovered over the Gladish Auditorium stage on pointe, adorned in vibrant plumage of gold, teal, and purple, arms stretched skyward, joyous in flight. Cast in the lead role of The Sparrow Queen, the May 10 inaugural production of Pullman’s Graham Academy of Contemporary Ballet, Swartwood embodied the free spirit that ultimately unites two estranged sisters in the ballet based on a Japanese fairy tale.

Swartwood’s own life is something of a fairy tale that began in South Korea. Left at a local Catholic Children’s Services Center in Inchon the day she was born, Swartwood was adopted a year later by Jim and … » More …

Winter 2006

An equation for beauty

The painter spends his days on the third floor of an ancient biscuit plant in a seedy section of industrial Ballard. The building, just a block from the Ballard Bridge, houses a collection of artists, mostly ceramicists whose main-floor kiln warms the warehouse through the winter.

But acrylic paint is the medium for Michael Schultheis, 39. A climb up steep wooden stairs, and we’re welcomed by Cesaria Evora’s alto voice singing in Portuguese from a paint-spattered boom box. “Ah, she’s wonderful,” says a similarly paint-spattered Schultheis standing at the door to his bright studio.

He is in the midst of creating paintings for a fall … » More …

Fall 2006

Art and Enterprise: Jordan Swain '00

So I’m riding around Bellevue with this very high-energy 27-year-old painter, and I’m starting to think, “Well, maybe I should take up painting.” That’s how infectious my companion is. She makes it sound like so much fun.

Jordan Swain ’00 offers me a warm diet soda from her emergency stash of supplies she keeps in the back of her car because she often doesn’t have time to stop and eat. We pull into Children’s Village, a safe haven in Renton for women and children who have been homeless, refugees, or victims of domestic violence. Swain and other artists donated their time and talent to brighten … » More …