Community Calendar

The Beaver Session has been running every Sunday since October of 2014 (with a slight pause for covid). It is hosted by drummer Max Holmberg and features an opening set by a rotating group of musicians followed by an open jam session. The music tends to lean toward the straight ahead side of jazz.

Tickets for all shows go on sale Monday, March 28 at 10 a.m. at https://www.ticketmaster.com/.

The lineup:

Norah Jones - June 15-16, 7 p.m.

She & Him - June 17, 7 p.m.

John Fogerty - June 18, 7 p.m. - tickets go on sale April 4

Tenacious D with special guest Puddles Pity Party - June 21, 7 p.m.

Chris Isaak and Lyle Lovett & His Large Band - June 25, 7 p.m.

Trombone Shorty's Voodoo Threauxdown featuring Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue - July 2, 6 p.m.

Jason Mraz & Raining Jane, Lalalalivesongs - July 9-10, 7 p.m.

The Black Crowes present: Shake Your Money Maker - July 19, 7 p.m.

Michael Franti & Spearhead - July 22, 7 p.m.

Goo Goo Dolls - July 23, 7 p.m.

David Gray - July 25, 7 p.m.

The Revivalists - July 30, 7 p.m.

Amos Lee - August 6, 7 p.m.

The Australian Pink Floyd Show - August 17, 7 p.m.

Bonnie Raitt with special guest Mavis Staples - August 19-20, 7 p.m.

Fitz and the Tantrums, Andy Grammer - August 21, 6:30 p.m.

Gipsy Kings featuring Nicolas Reyes - August 26, 7 p.m.

Steve Miller Band - August 27-28, 7 p.m.

Chicago - September 2-3, 7 p.m.

Ziggy Marley - A Live Tribute to His Father - September 9, 7 p.m.

An Evening with Jackson Browne - September 16-17, 6:30 p.m.

Summer Book Bingo 2022, the adult summer reading program co-presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures and The Seattle Public Library, launches today! For eight years, Summer Book Bingo has been a joyful, connective, and free way for Washington state readers to expand their summer reading—and to enter to win fabulous prizes!

HOW IT WORKS: Each square on the bingo board presents a reading challenge, where you read and record a book title that fits that category. New categories this year on the adult board include “Banned or Challenged Book,” “Set South of the Equator,” “A Book About Books,” “LGBTQ+ Love Story,” and many more.

Have young readers in your life? SAL offers a Kids Book Bingo Board for readers ages 0-17, too!

1) Download your board. Fill in the card with the titles and authors of the books you read from now through September 6, 2022.

2) Read books, fill in the squares, and find your community. Want to find reading recommendations? Search the hashtag #BookBingoNW2022 on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook to get ideas from our wonderful community of bingo players.

SPL librarians have also prepared suggested reading lists for many bingo squares, which you can access on spl.org. For more recommendations, you can also ask a librarian at a location with in-building services or fill out a brief form at www.spl.org/YourNext5.

And, we always recommend checking in with your local independent bookstores for suggestions! (A list of SAL's bookstore partners is on the back of each board.)

3) Enter to win fabulous prizes! When you’ve filled the front and back of your bingo board for either Bingo (a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line) or Blackout (filling out all 25 squares), you can submit it to enter prize drawings in a number of ways; see the back of your board for details.

Blackout card entrants will be entered in the drawing for one of three grand prizes, including a subscription to the 2022/23 SAL series of your choice. Both blackout card and bingo entrants will be automatically entered to win a gift card from one of Seattle’s independent bookstores.

Entries must be received by 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022.

More information: https://lectures.org/community/book-bingo/

To make the most of the summer, South Lake Union is hosting Summer in SLU — a fun, family-friendly, interactive experience in the heart of the city. Summer in SLU provides free daily activities from July 20-Sept. 10, 2022, including an art installation, food pop-ups, craft workshops, and more.

The focal point of Summer in SLU is an interactive art installation title Mi Casa, Your Casa 2.0. The red three-dimensional frames feature a swinging bench and are a blank canvas for people of all ages to enjoy. The installation is created by artists Esrawe + Cadena and produced by Creos.

Each day, Summer in SLU has something unique to offer:

Quick Crafts with Expressions Art Lab, Tuesdays, 11 am-1 pm
Spark your creativity with a 30-minute craft activity, presented by the Amazon Expressions Art Lab. This experience is free and open to participants of all ages. No reservations are required, so availability is on a first come-first served basis. Projects include alcohol ink coasters, paper marbling, feather macramé and more.

Food Pop-Ups, Wednesdays, 3-5 pm
Visit the Day 1 Playfield on your way to happy hour for a foodie pop-up, ranging from cookies to fruit kebabs. Each Wednesday is a new surprise, and all are free of charge. While supplies last.

Urban Oasis; Thursdays, all day; Tiki bar hours, 11 am-3 pm
Take a break from the workday in your own Urban Oasis. Thursdays will feature lounge chairs, thatch umbrellas, and a self-serve Tiki Bar. Tiki Bar is open 11 am-3 pm or while supplies last; all water refreshments are free of charge.

Giant Lawn Games; Friday + Monday, 8 am-6 pm; Saturday + Sunday, 3-7 pm
Nothing says summer like a round of lawn games in the sunshine. Every Friday-Monday, enjoy a variety of games including cornhole, Giant Jenga and Giant Connect Four on the Day 1 Playfield. First come, first to play; no reservations needed.

The events are hosted by South Lake Union and presented by Amazon.

South Lake Union is excited to take on summer with you. To let us in on the fun, follow @southlakeunion on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and use #SummerinSLU to share your photos!

The Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation is a vibrant month-long immersion into the Seattle dance community, and a chance to dive deep with dance practitioners experimenting at the leading edge of dance technique, creative practices, and dance improvisation. Grounded in SFDI’s nearly 30 years of community-building and intergenerational collaboration, this festival is a gateway for new dancers to connect with artists making work in the Seattle dance and improvisation community, and a chance for Seattle-based artists to train and research with internationally renowned artists. Whether you are brand new to dance, just out of college, or an experienced dance practitioner, SFD+I is a festival for you. The festival is composed of three interwoven modules, TRAIN, RESEARCH, and SHARE. So whether you would like an intensive three-week experience of training while creating and performing a new work by a Seattle-based choreographer, or you’re interested in a week-long research intensive, or both, all participants can find connection and enrichment in the festival’s many threads. Registration and details, including our 2022 faculty and choreographers, will be announced by the end of January.

Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design will feature Oscar Winner Ruth E. Carter's costumes from more than a dozen films on display in an exhibition exploring her perspective on Afrofuturism: the application of knowledge intertwined with imagination, self-expression, and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Exhibition Highlights:

55 costumes designed by Ruth E. Carter from films including Black Panther, Do the Right Thing, Selma, Malcolm X, Roots, Coming 2 America, and more
Immersive, interactive experiences including a Black Panther “Warrior Falls” photo opportunity
Afrofuturistic installation incorporating original artwork by Brandon Sadler
Original drawings, paintings, photographs, sketches, and mood boards
Descriptive text panels with supplemental digital materials

IN THE SPIRIT is an annual summer celebration of diverse Native American arts and culture. A juried exhibition of exciting new works by contemporary Native artists opens in June and is on view through the summer at the Washington State History Museum, accompanied by programs, artist talks, and an Artist Awards event.

See exciting new works by Native artists from our region and beyond during this very special exhibition at the Washington State History Museum. Each work is accompanied by the artist’s statement. Step into the gallery and explore art that relates to a wide variety of themes, presented in a range of mediums including textiles, paintings, carvings, beadwork, mixed media, basketry, and digital works. Vote for your favorites; two People’s Choice Awards will be announced at the end of the exhibition.

Explore the history, artistry, and production of Hawaii’s enduring fashion statement, the Aloha shirt. This exhibition of 60 objects, including original textile artwork, production sketches and swatches, advertisements, and vintage shirts, tells the story of an early innovator, John “Keoni” Meigs, in an industry that has left an indelible mark on fashion in the United States and the world.

Although many claim authorship, the exact origin of the Aloha Shirt remains uncertain. The patterns of Polynesian tapa cloth, the colorful and bold floral designs of Tahitian pareau, and the sheer Japanese fabric used for making kimonos are often cited as some of the early stylistic influences of the shirt.

Sometime in the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when Hawaii’s economy began to shift from an agricultural to a service-oriented economy and tourists started flying to Hawaii in ever-increasing numbers, the emphasis of the island clothing industry shifted from the production of work clothes to sports and casualwear. Combining the young islander’s love for colorful clothing with the tourist’s desire to bring home keepsakes of their holidays on the islands, the Aloha Shirt enjoyed massive popularity, particularly after the conclusion of World War II.

In the history of the Aloha Shirt, there has been no more innovative merchandiser nor better self-promoter than “Keoni of Hawaii.” John “Keoni” Meigs (“Keoni” is Hawaiian for John) was a self-taught painter whose talent became known to the early shirt manufacturers in Honolulu. In 1938, he created his first designs, concentrating on Polynesian tapa patterns inspired by the originals he had studied at the local Bishop Museum.

One of the most innovative Island fabric artists, Keoni is credited with creating as many as three hundred Aloha shirt designs. In Meigs’ words, “In a sense, Aloha shirts put Hawaii on the map. The first thing people did when they arrived was make a beeline for a department store to buy one. A lot of kooky things were designed, but I always tried to be a purist when it came to using motifs from Hawaiian sources.”

Underwater Research based at Cama Beach State Park with Russ Holmes and Michael Kyte showing their research into sea star wasting syndrome using an undersea ROV.

Russ Holmes and Michael Kyte utilize an Underwater ROV (remotely operated vehicle) in Saratoga Passage between Cama Beach State Park and Whidbey Island. Footage will show a wide range of species from depths of 20 to 200 feet. They will bring the ROV and let people see it in person and how the controls are run. The ROV is owned by Cama Beach Foundation which helps support educational activities at Cama Beach State Park.

The public is invited; held at Cama Center at Cama Beach State Park. Business meeting at 10 am; presentation at 10:30 am. Discover Pass or Day Pass required to park in the state park. https://soundwaterstewards.org/event/2022-08-08-monthly-mtg/

Seattle-based artist Stefan Gonzales chronicles the lives of ordinary objects through photography, sculpture, and installation. Their project for the next iteration of the Frye’s Boren Banner Series will represent the culmination of a monthslong process of collecting and documenting raw materials from area construction sites. Selecting worksites according to chance and intuition, Gonzales will gather similarly sized samples of unaltered materials like quarry stone, photograph them in their home studio, and return the objects to be built into the intended structures. Their Boren Banner image will be a compilation of these photographs that functions as a provisional archive—a small, subjective core sample of the enormous quantity of earth that is currently shifting within our community.

Over the last several years, Gonzales’s practice has focused on decolonizing and feminizing the aesthetics of 1960s–70s land art, which is strongly associated with the “heroic” masculinity and rugged individualism of artists like Robert Smithson. Smithson’s most famous artwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), is a 1,500-foot-long formation in the Great Salt Lake that is made from over 6,000 tons of displaced dirt and black basalt rocks. The work, alongside other touchstones of land art like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), has what Gonzales calls a remarkable “mythological imprint” that obscures the history and preexisting significance of the site. “They were talking about big, open, free geologic locations,” Gonzales says, “but what about the land that Spiral Jetty sits on? Who occupied the land first? That land had not really been ‘empty’ in the past.”

In contrast to these monumental gestures, Gonzales attends closely to individual elements of the built environment that normally go unnoticed. The artist’s recent projects have relied on a group of otherwise unremarkable stones that they continuously reconfigure, variously photographing them in the detached style of scientific cataloguing or arranging them in sculptural formations within gallery settings. Gonzales notes, “Something happens in this exchange from domesticated object to art object. When they are at home, they may be paperweights, doorstops, firepits, ashtrays, furniture, and so on. When they are in a gallery, they are an object used to perform the roles of minimalism. Decisions are made based on their structure, color, weight, reflexivity, mass, and how those various qualities interact with each other.” The artist’s Boren Banner project broadens the scope of their inquiry into the ways that context shapes perception and bestows value.