Category: Local

Indigenous Futurisms Fest comes to Tacoma this June, 2023

As a showcase to Indigenous science fiction authors, scholars, and artists, ALMA in Downtown Tacoma will host the Indigenous Futurisms Festival Northwest (IFFNW) Friday and Saturday, June 9-10. While admission is free and open to all, registration is encouraged.

IFFNW will showcase award-winning First Nations and First American scholars, artists and other Native creators from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There will be an interactive programming highlighting musicians, painters, instruction on making tabletop role playing games (TTRPG), podcasts, discussions with elders, children’s activities and many live performances.

“IFFNW will help dispel contemporary misrepresentations of who they are today. We are thrilled to collaborate with ALMA as a safe and welcoming gathering spot that channels, celebrates, and seeks to nourish the soul of this land, the people on it, the people from it, and those just passing through.”

Kristin Gentry (Choctaw), says Native Realities’ Director of Community Engagement and Outreach

What is Indigenous Futurism? Dr. Grace Dillon, editor of Walking the Clouds, and Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, coined the term to describe literature, comics, art, fashion, and other media that seek a way forward through fantastical and speculative imaginings that hold close to values of relationship, integrity, interconnection, and balance. Dillon chose the term in homage to Afrofuturism, which is an “examination of how Black culture intersects with technology and the African diaspora.”

Examples of other Indigenous Futurists works include Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirited and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, and The Marrow Thieves.

The Facebook event page for IFFNW can be found here.

Shop for gothy gifts at Full Moon Flea Market

Nestled in Antique row is shopping for the goth-inclined: Full Moon Flea Market – a self-proclaimed purveyor of “Grim Gifts and Goods: Dark Arts and Antiques from the Pacific Northwest.”

After a few years of being housed within the Sanford and Son building they moved to a storefront last year. They feature over the work of over 65 local artists – of spooky, macabre, horror, punk, LGBT, and witchy works. You can also everything from jewelry to pins and buttons, stickers, patches, books and zines, cards, art prints, and so much more.

Due to some health issues the physical storefront will be taking a hiatus for some months but they will be returning soon after. Their last in-store day will be May 28th, after which they will be doing all their business through their website – Please visit! Follow them on Instagram and Facebook. They will be doing a product refresh with new works from a variety of their awesome artists! Fullmoonfleamarket.com

Austin Studio Tour 2020 – Online and Outdoors

Big Medium‘s Austin Studio Tour had to change their format this year, due to Covid-19, but they launched gallery tours virtually and self-guided tours outdoors. As usual, the tour ran across two weekends, November 14 – 22, 2020 and combined both East and West Austin for a total of over 400 artists.

The online tour featured pre-recorded and live-streamed videos, it allowed visitors to safely explore studios online, listen to artists talk and offer demos, workshops, panels and performances. There were Q&A live streaming happy hours, ‘ghost phone tutorials’ on Zoom, and a conversation with an art therapist. Many of the artists discussed what it was like to be an artist during this pandemic, especially challenging and different for those doing collaborative art.

Alex Coronel’s studio

One of my favorites was the work by metal artist Valérie Chaussonnet, who salvalges discarded metal and transforms them into incredible pieces of art. Last year I saw her Japan inspired work in the Round Rock Downtowner Art Gallery.

The live stream events are over but you can still explore the Austin Studio Tour by artist, by artworks, virtual (for pre-recorded videos) or outdoor, and themed tours. For the outdoor tour they offer a map for visitors to safely guide themselves through the city to view sculptures and murals without interacting with the artists. The themed tours offer collections of artists featured by a local partner, such as the Austin Chronicle or a local brewery such as Thirsty Planet.

So while in 2020 it was not possible to crowd the streets and studios with beer or wine in hand, speaking face to face with artists and meandering through industrial hallways, this year’s digital format allows us to explore over 400 artists on our own time and maybe that’s actually really cool. I think there is a lot to gain from this method and hope that in future Big Medium employs this as a hybrid approach. It would help those whose transportation and time are limited, as well as those with accessibility issues. But honestly, I have never found it humanly possible to see hundreds of artists in two weekends, rain or no rain. I do however, miss the food trucks, wine and Sa-ten.

2020: Coming up for air, albeit with a mask

It’s been a year since my last post and there were many reasons for that. First was work, developing taxonomies and controlled vocabularies for machine learning related projects. Then Covid happened, so I couldn’t go out to museums and galleries. Then I had to become a learning coach for my teen who is taking multiple AP classes online. Add to this ongoing efforts to stay current on technology and knowledge management by taking webinars, reading books, and going to virtual conferences. On top of all that, the hot mess that was American politics. It is Dec. 1st and I have finally come up for air – albeit with a mask.

I will do my best to re-cap and document the beta launch of Austin’s EAST online studio tour in a second post. It happened a couple weekends ago and unfortunately overlapped with an online conference so I was not able to attend in real time, but I will do my best to document for posterity.

After this I will try something new. All this time I have been tracking and posting links on Twitter for a variety of topics: online museum resources, digital humanities, digital preservation, open access courses, ethical AI, Asian visual culture and literature, taxonomy, ontology, linked data, and more. I’d like to attempt once a week to compile and curate these into newsletter type posts.

Once a month I will do my best to safely find a way to go out and look at art and review it. I will perhaps also make a post once a month looking at what local exhibitions are currently open for view and will share safety notes and tips, as well as share what online resources are available for those wanting to stay at home.

I will also work toward making occassional posts promoting resources and options for those wanting to live a more eco, sustainable, plastic-free lifestyle as that is top of mind as well.

I’d like to also share and promote local, small businesses in featured posts, pulling in photos from my Instagram account.

2021 will begin in just one more month – and I am feeling very hopeful that we will get past all this.

Art|Tech|Eco|Culture

“We are Round Rock” – at the Downtowner Gallery

Answering the call to interpret the theme “We are Round Rock” the Downtowner Gallery saw 60 submissions by 31 local artists. Covering a great variety of styles, some art focused on local nature or sports themes, others spoke to more abstract feelings.

20191026_180258
Jennifer Landis – “Winterscape”

This show will last until Sunday, Nov. 17 – please visit and contact the artists directly if you are interested in any of the pieces. If their contact info is not provided please reach out to info@roundrockarts.org.

20191026_180212.jpg
Nia Olabesi – “Red Hot Jazz”

20191026_180152
Melissa Starkweather – “Fiddle leaf fig”

Enjoy this show and the public sculptures outside in the Main street square. Afterward take a walk through historic downtown Round Rock and enjoy a coffee at Star Coffee. 

20191026_180133.jpg
Lucian Richards – “Solitude”

Austin artist – Alyssa Taylor Wendt: HAINT

Recently in early 2019, at the UT Visual Art Center (VAC), Austin-based artist and curator Alyssa Taylor Wendt showed her video exhibition HAINT. A cinematic tryptic filmed in Detroit, Croatia and Texas over a three year span, Wendt shared a surreal reflection on multi-generational memory and the effects of the war.

One of the leaders of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton, was deeply affected as a young wartime psychological medic working with soldiers suffering from shell-shock, or trauma. As an aspiring poet, he found their use of language fascinating, their “distant, often illogical, verbal relationships”.   Around the same time he was becoming exposed to the work of Freud, concepts like the unconscious and its links to dreams.

HAINT is a testament to how the memories of families, conveyed across generations can become intertwined with dreams and nightmares. Drawing in part upon her family’s wartime tales and experiences yet overlapping with current locations it’s unclear where her family’s history ends and her own inner landscape begins.


Alyssa Taylor Wendt, “Baphomet,” 2014. Digital chromogenic print.

The tryptic features different scenes, stitched together with an inner logic, overlaid with drone music, Eastern European folk songs and opera. HAINT takes place within industrial ruins, open fields and abandoned homes. There we see a cast of mysterious characters interacting, singing and performing what resembles Butoh dance. There are dramatic and surreal reflections of violence, but we cannot know if these represents her own internal conflicts or are references to her family’s stories. What could be more apt for communicating the dance between memory and trauma?

Nina Katchadourian’s Curiouser at Blanton Museum of Art

Multimedia artist Nina Katchadourian’s exhibit Curiouser will be at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin until June 11, 2017

A child of transatlantic flights, raised by Armenian and Finnish parents, Nina Katchadourian is a conceptual artist steeped in mapping and translation. Her parents and brother figure into her pieces, appearing in video and audio works. They provide active and supportive participants for her rituals and mythologies which create unique order out of seemingly mundane, disparate items. For the viewer her multimedia pieces are playful, evocative and break down the molds imposed by popular culture and homogeneity.

Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #4

Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #4

Studies have shown that the mind when subjected to chronic stress and conventional demands over a period of time, with no space for reflection or creative re-organization, can begin to suffer loss of memory. Parts of the brain, through both overuse and atrophy can see a shrinking of connections and activity. The visual arts can be valuable in that they force a separation from the rational world, providing a controlled space in which one can engage with playful exercises in fragmentation or contradiction. Whether through surrealistic juxtaposition, the absurd, or an exploration of childhood play revisited after 30 years, Katchadourian’s art is perfect for this.  Her work engages in a natural disengagement from inherited conceptual categories. In one piece she takes apart all the countries on a Rand McNally map of the world and then pieces them back together, re-imagining geography. Her entire show resembles this process and is a welcome relief for our imagination. I saw groups of both children and adults delighting in the serendipity behind her creations. I can say with certainty that their minds grew and stretched happily in the process.

Geographic Art

In some of her pieces, such as the Genealogy of the Supermarket, Katchadourian locates absurd links between unrelated images, building enormous webs of relationships between them that could exist, if the world followed different rules.   In another she has observed a torn and abandoned spider web and she attempts to rebuild it with red thread.

The humor in her artworks is not a cynical humor, from a secure, knowing vantage point, ironically disrupting or challenging preconceptions in some cruel manner. Instead it is the humor of an outsider, traveler, or child who builds her own meaning and order, organizes and arranges collections that communicate relationships or patterns.

Katchadourian sees a world of languages and cultural objects and arranges them, repairing gaps like a broken spider web so they can communicate new stories. For the viewer, we are grateful for these changes to have our own static categories interrupted, challenged, and rebuilt. And for the modern mind, bogged down by repetition and tired structures, these new mythologies allow us to breathe and build new connections, maybe even with red thread.