Sculpture Study Group, Part I
Jen Graves Talks to Tivon Rice, Susie J. Lee, and Suzanne Beal
Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park opens in two weeks, providing essentially another entire outdoor museum to the city. It's a place Richard Serra has called "fucking magnificent," and he says it makes him happy "not only for myself, but for sculpture, and the culture of the country." All righty then. Let's start really talking about it. (To hear Serra, watch the PR-style documentary Art Without Walls: The Making of the Olympic Sculpture Park, which premiered last night on KCTS and is airing a bunch this month.)
In the first of at least two conversations on In/Visible about sculpture, The Stranger's art writer Jen Graves talks to the artists Tivon Rice and Susie J. Lee, and the writer/curator Suzanne Beal. The three of them took a UW class on the park, taught by former SAM curators Lisa Corrin and Susan Rosenberg, back in the spring of 2005, when the park was still just a glimmer in the museum's eye.
For the class, they toured the art-spangled homes of the Wrights and the Shirleys, the two major donors to the sculpture park, and as the earliest students of the park, these three have thoughts, observations, wishes, interpretations, and complaints on what's going in on the waterfront.
Next week on In/Visible: Permanence in sculpture. Should it be everlasting, like Calder's Eagle? How can it change and still stick around?
