The Whatcom Museum in Bellingham is opening a new building next weekend, designed by Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen, and dubbed the Lightcatcher for its elliptical 34-foot-long wall of glass. Images of the building are here.

John Grade—he of the biodegradable, buried, wind-whipped, canyon-residing, glacier-sitting sculptures—has the major opening exhibition in the 26-foot-high gallery. It's called Elephant Beds, and it's inspired by the microscopic algae that formed the white cliffs of Dover.

An enlarged version of it premiered at Fabrica in Brighton this summer: 20 white bell-shaped objects suspended from filaments hung in the deconsecrated church. Over time, half of them descended into a pool of ink, where they disintegrated (they are made of water-degradable corn-based polymer and paper). At the end of the exhibition, the other half were marched down the road and straight into the English Channel.

In Bellingham, the installation is half as large: Five will descend into ink; the other five will be walked into Bellingham Bay. Grade hopes he'll be able to get video of them underwater this time; in the English Channel the waves were too powerful. The Bellingham walk will take place April 10, after they've been in the gallery for five months.

Here's a video of the installation underway in Bellingham; awesome images from Brighton on the jump.

• Ryan Molenkamp

Each artist is a resonator for the others. Molenkamp's paintings look like they reveal scaffoldings of unseen sedimentary deposits all around us, whole cities whose scale is always shifting. Johnson's carved Styrofoam universes jutting out from the wall are alternative maps to the same sort of indeterminate locations. It is not clear where they've been cut and where they've been torn, and the odd breaks of the surfaces resemble ice floes. They cast dark, jagged shadows.

• Ryan Molenkamp

Meanwhile, Arnold's delicate works are bright and light, at risk of floating off if they weren't pinned to the wall and grounded by their own heartbeats. Their rhythms are created by repetitive motions: the sewing of soft, hairy yarns in rows on hundreds of feet of fragile cash-register paper, hung in half-unspooled rolls on the wall; the cutting away of dozens of strips of paper to reveal, curtain-like or hair-like, the wall beneath the paper.

It is a tight, teeming universe in there. These are images shot during the installation. But as (almost) always, you have to see it to get it.

• Ryan Molenkamp

In this morning's art walk list, I inadvertently left off Ken Kelly's torrential new works at Howard House. I love looking at them in a long row.

The Seattle artist recently had a serious hospitalization and could use a little love—come out and support him at the opening tomorrow.

• Black and Tan

• Flash

• Little Remix

When the Dutch government didn't want Google Earth showing satellite images of military installations, it censored them—stylishly, in camo, as if they were paintings-by-number.

Greg Allen plans to paint them (isn't there a digital way? he asks), and he posts a number of the enticing-looking things, with a further link to even more of them here.

This is my favorite, the plump treetops almost indistinguishable from the bloaty dots.

Do not tell SuttonBeresCuller that it was such a breeze for this nice German fellow to convert an old gas station into a clean, usable property. Boys, just keep going: We are rooting for you.

This was the gambit, and it looks like PUNCH came away at least with a few bucks (I hope).

The Henry Art Gallery owns only 10 of Allan Sekula's 30 WTO protest photographs. owns all 30 of Allan Sekula's WTO protest photographs, and is only showing 10 because of limited wall space on the mezzanine. Then don't use the mezzanine! The full set should be up.

That complaint aside, even with just 10 we get a chance to see how heroically Sekula set out to be Zen about the protests. Meaning: he didn't want to overlay anything on the scene. He wanted to see it.

That meant shots like the one above, where absolutely everything is glass and nothing is direct—so different from smoke-and-carnival shots that it stands out as a moment of unsettling silence. Because the businessmen are behind glass, we're extra-aware that the photographer is behind the glass of the camera's lens. The photograph is disturbing precisely because it so aggressively suppresses physical contact, perfectly capturing the fear of it erupting.

On display with the photographs is Sekula's letter describing how he thought about this work. It says:

In photographing the Seattle demonstrations my working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-journalism: no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.

Later, working at the light-table, and reading the increasingly stereotypical descriptions of the new face of protest, I realized all the more that a simple descriptive physiognomy was warranted. The alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied and inspired than could be conveyed by the cute alliterative play with “teamsters” and “turtles.”

I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction of global capital. There was a strong feminist dimension to this testimony, and there was also a dimension grounded in the experience of work. It was the men and women who work on the docks, after all, who shut down the flow of metal boxes from Asia, relying on individual knowledge that there is always another body on the other side of the sea doing the same work, that all this global trade is more than a matter of a mouse-click.

One fleeting hallucination could not be photographed. As the blast of stun grenades reverberated amidst the downtown skyscrapers, someone with a boom box thoughtfully provided a musical accompaniment: Jimi Hendrix’s mock-hysterical rendition of the American national anthem. At that moment, Hendrix returned to the streets of Seattle, slyly caricaturing the pumped-up sovereignty of the world’s only superpower.

At the Henry, which is also featuring Stranger columnist Christopher DeLaurenti's surprisingly musical recording created from field recordings of the protests. It sounds unlikely, but this used to be the only recording I could write to. I know it inside and out, and it really is a marvel.

There's also a Flickr pool called Henry WTO+10 where you can add your own photos from the protests.

More of Sekula's WTO images here.

• (Almost) nothing to see here

Essentially, he gave away a hundred dollars in gold. It was entirely possible that nobody would ever discover the sculpture in their chunk of change.

But somebody did—and the person who did is an artist, and a maker of cakes, including one with the face of a penny. It's a pretty great little story. The artist tells it in her own words on the jump.

Tomorrow's Artwalk includes (click to enlarge)

Bill Finger's 1972, age 12 at PUNCH

Nola Avienne's eida (steel, magnets, metal, shoe polish, and blood) at SOIL

Drew Daly's Float 1, Float 2, and Float 3 at Greg Kucera

Mary Ann Peters's taganga at James Harris

and Stranger Geniuses SuttonBeresCuller's works-in-progress-that-will-be-completed at Lawrimore Project

and much more. Overview site with maps here.

• Sketch by Antoine Predock for the Tacoma Art Museum

Last week, NYT architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff declared this epoch over. And that's not such a bad thing. It was exciting, writing about all those buildings. But so much money was sunk into buildings that funders forgot that they were also supposed to pay for, you know, art and its plain old maintenance (not to mention, in many cases, for the care and feeding of buildings after they're built).

But today comes the news that the Bilbao Guggenheim is considering trying to revive another depressed town using the museum-as-medicine treatment, this time near Guernica in a place called Urdaibai. It's being sold as a "green" project, but not everybody's buying it...

This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.

In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.

When Josh Faught was announced as this year's Betty Bowen Award winner, I asked: Who is this guy? Since 2007 he has lived and taught in Eugene, Oregon, and he has never shown any work in Seattle or Portland, as far as I know (he did show some drawings at the Helm Gallery in Tacoma, but I missed them).

Last week I interviewed him (podcast coming) and got to Seattle Art Museum to see his work, and at this point I agree with jamey marie braden: breath of fresh air for realz! His work is warm and sad and lonely and expectant—political and physical.

Here's Endless Night, the 2008 work that's installed at SAM.

At SAM the installation is a little different than here. The fighting burst of light coming from the pink candle on the old-fashioned chamberstick is not on the left, as pictured, but on an adjacent wall from the other "windows." The sorry-looking rolled-up window that stands in the corner here is next to it (Faught calls this freak flag a "failed" textile), tied with a ribbon that reads "Not Your Bag."

These windows are a series of loose afghans made of crocheted yarn dipped in indigo dye. Strings stream down their faces like rain.

They're taken from 60s/70s patterns, but this is not what the patternmakers intended. The designs have been scaled up and the afghans are wrapped around garden trellises, their sides unevenly scalloped from the poking edges of the wood. They're the size of paintings, but where painted canvases would be stapled neatly to stretchers, these wear fat scars of imperfect handstitching.

There's nostalgia here for sure: you're not just standing in front of a dark window to wait for something to happen, but remembering how it felt to stand in front of a dark window. What could have occurred? It feels like this nostalgic past might yet turn out differently.

When I interviewed Faught, we talked some about politics. About the way his work is urgently political, how it analogizes being gay in a straight world and working with fabric in the art world. How it deals with issues of sagginess and solidity in sculpture. Signs of nervous hands versus signs of mastery in craft. Most artists outsource labor to hire somebody skilled; Faught uses shaky assistants.

He grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, a placid place haunted by suburban-style threats (toxic chemicals! sex predators!), and there's a tender acknowledgment of fear and disruption in what he makes. Triage (2009) is a patchwork tapestry painted with nail polish, wearing political pins and a row of self-help books in sewn pockets. You Can't Live Scared (2007) is a dark, webby weaving hung next to a Super-8 film of the artist trying to read an explicit personals ad while climbing, naked, into the bathtub.

I wish those were here at SAM; I'm all eyes at this point. I'm fantasizing about a Northwest queerness show already, with Faught, Jeffry Mitchell, Matthew Offenbacher, Eli Hansen…

Here's a good interview with Faught by the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and some images of work he had in the recently closed show Call + Response.

He turned to photography—to photographing other outcasts. He started at home, in Buffalo's poorest neighborhoods. He worked in collaboration with the subjects he found.

The only thing I asked them was to look at the camera. I liked it when I saw their eyes, and that's when I knew I was ready to make their picture. When you look at these pictures, you know there was no monkey-business, and that I was not sneaking around trying to steal pictures of people. To make a photograph in this way is an act of respect.

Here in Seattle, 40 of Rogovin's works were recently donated to the Henry Art Gallery collection. A show is coming up.

Here's Adrian Searle walking by, then going inside, this London spectacle. The art is a lady, her poodle, an ear couch, nose sconces, some flowers, some chocolates, and 1940s Vogues. Baldessari is the best, but I don't know about this.

Peter Shelton, whose work cloudsandclunkers is a really nice moment at Sea-Tac Airport

managed to install a pig on its side at LAPD headquarters—and the cops noticed. Tee hee.

Friday night in Seattle art was extraordinary. Hundreds of people showed up for the Henry Art Gallery's bash stuffed with art, which is where I was (making this bad decision), and I heard from several people that the Betty Bowen Award talks across town at SAM by Josh Faught, Matthew Offenbacher, and Jenny Heishman were extra-great.

Inside the front door at the Henry is a show that people passed right by, in the darkened room that was once the bookstore and gift shop. The clumsiest possible impression of a romantic seaside scene is created. A canoe sits on supports on the floor. Under it, a department-store fan, a silvery-blue garland, a clear Plexiglas box, and a couple of footlights make reflective magic, sending "moonlit" "water" skittering and shimmering across the wood floor and the empty retail shelves.

Standing inside the canoe are two life-sized cutouts of Seattle artists Jenny Zwick and Joe Park. Videos of the artists, dressed as doppelgangers and playing and singing a duet, are projected onto the cutouts. The song they're doing is "Tonight You Belong to Me," made famous by the beach scene with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk. In the movie, he whips out a ukulele and she a cornet; here, she's on guitar and he plays a melodica. The sweetness and comedy are underscored by the fact that the silly twinkling across the floor and shelves is actually kind of transporting.

Yesterday I caught four new shows at the Henry, and they're being celebrated tonight with a great big party you should not miss:

Eirik Johnson's poetic yet clear-eyed photographs of how the lumber industry has shaped our regional landscape.

• Starlite Drive-In, Roseburg, Oregon, 2006

Ten of Allan Sekula's "anti-photojournalistic shots" of the WTO protests with his letter explaining why and how he approached the event.

A giant collections show including wild shoes and a gorgeous corset from the extensive and never-seen fashion holdings of the museum.

• This isn't the actual 50s corset in the show, just a teaser...

And almost 100 Robert Mapplethorpe Polaroids (max size is 4 by 5 inches) hung in tender pairs. This show is irresistible.

Also tonight will be performances at The Gift Shop, Seattle artist Matthew Offenbacher's ongoing installation inside the Henry. Somehow it will involve Joe Park (seated) and Jenny Zwick, doing something that might look like this.

What I'm seeing in this photo (first referenced in Morning News) is the art. What are those paintings? They are strategically covered. And look at that white person who snuck in!

Tucked in the back of SOIL Art Gallery is a video by Peter Nelson called On Dying. It's simple: one talking head at a time on a stark white background, each person telling a short story. The voices are of old men and women talking about dying—remembering siblings who committed suicide or died in accidents, their expectations for their own deaths ("Heaven will be better."), their struggles to figure out how and where to sleep after husbands and wives die.

But there is a central disconnect. The faces "speaking" these words are young—not children, but people in their twenties, people whose voices should not sound like this and people who do not have these stories to tell.

The stark background isolates the faces and the sounds as the only elements, throwing the tension into immediate relief; there's nothing else to consider. At first you think: These people are acting; what good actors! Then you realize this is not quite the case, that they are not actually speaking but only lip-syncing. The audio-video synchronization, under scrutiny, is noticeably imperfect. But it is also close enough to be uncanny. These "actors"—friends of the artist—have become possessed. They seem to be telling themselves things they will need to know eventually.

^{Nelson, a photo and video grad student at UW, also has an entire solo show at 4Culture this month. It's called Former Best Friends Forever and is based on his interviews with his own former actual best friends from various periods in his life, represented in the gallery in recordings playing in discrete settings—inside the cab of a Chevy pickup parked in the gallery, on headphones at a work desk. His former BFFs are variously gruntled and disgruntled.}