The Artist in Place is a year-long exploration of place and its relationship to the work of the artist. We first gathered in the fall of 2010, and began by studying fundamental works, such as Wallace Stegner’s The Sense of Place and Lucy R. Lippard’s The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, before moving on to books rooted in our own unique corner of the world: Skid Road by Murray Morgan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan, and War Dances by Sherman Alexie. Meanwhile, we explored and gathered first-hand experiences of Seattle by walking the streets, talking with people, and visiting parks, museums, the public market, the central library, and a wide variety of the city’s neighborhoods. Everything was open to the students’ curiosity and fodder for their writing. – Christine Sumption, Adjunct Instructor. Humanities & Sciences
For this book, students selected an art form—their own or another that sparked their interest—and got to know its community in Seattle by visiting local arts organizations, talking to local artists, and exploring the ins and outs of the local arts scene. Then, they zeroed in on an individual artist, group, or phenomenon and undertook personal interviews. And they wrote. The result is Art Reigns. The aim was not to create a comprehensive account of the arts in Seattle, but to highlight the variety of individual artists who currently call this city home. – Christine Sumption, Adjunct Instructor, Humanities & Sciences
From the introduction by Josh Thorsen, Music:
The book you now hold in your hands is the culmination of a year of work from visual artists, designers, musicians, dancers, actors, and theater technicians all packed neatly together in one room for six hours a week as part of a class titled The Artist in Place.
That’s the boring explanation, anyway.
At the start of the year, that description may have been accurate. We were a bunch of aspiring artists not unlike any other core sampling of the population at Cornish College of the Arts. Then the magic happened. No sooner had our fearless leader declared the classroom a “no bullshit zone,” than we were whisked off, not only to places in the city like Olympic Sculpture Park, Pioneer Square, and the Seattle Public Library, but to places within ourselves like the meaning of being an artist, what ideas we stand behind, how we as artists view the universe, and which of our experiences shapes us most.
This book, then, represents much more than you’ll learn from perusing its pages. You won’t read about our year-long journey to discover each other’s perspectives and opinions, about the fascinating places in Seattle we’ve visited, the poetry and prose we’ve written and read, or the experience of working with an engaging teacher who is persistently passionate about her work and her students. But these are all things that led us to this point.
You may see the lingering essence of those experiences in the pieces that follow. We’ve branched out with the same spirit of discovery to bring you Art Reigns: a collection of written portraits, sketches, and scenes all about Seattle’s artists in the field, present and future giants upon whose shoulders we will stand. Through our conversations and connections with each of these people, we’ve taken our first steps toward joining them.
