A response to Seattle’s "Vancouver problem"

The arts scene is electric with debate over Seattle weekly The Stranger’s provocative April 7 cover story, "The Vancouver Problem".

In it, writer Jen Graves basically says Vancouver’s strong visual-art scene is Seattle’s problem: she gushes over the Vancouver Art Gallery’s regionally oriented How Soon Is Now exhibit and turns green with envy over a city that could produce the likes of Jeff Wall, Tim Lee, Mark Soo, and Isabelle Pauwels.

"Vancouver art is better," she writes. "”˜Better’ in this case means (a) Vancouver art is connected to the larger world, and therefore to universses of issues, peculiarities, styles, and ideas that serve the artists as well as the audiences, and (b) Vancouver art is connected to its own art history....Vancouver art is known to itself."

It’s true that Vancouver is home to an incongruent number of international art stars for our city’s size—Ian Wallace, Ken Wallace, Liz Magor, and Rodney Graham are just some of the big names—and that more and more of our artists are spending as much time in Venice and Berlin as they are here on the West Coast.

And it’s equally true that the VAG, under Kathleen Bartels, has put local contemporary artists into a higher-profile spotlight—whether it’s been with exhibits like Baja to Vancouver or How Soon Is Now, or the addition of works by the likes of everyone from Mark Soo to Wall to its permanent collection.

There’s more to come: installation artist and carpenter Reece Terris is almost ready to unveil a massive project in its rotunda, called Ought Apartment, that rolls retro reno elements and comments on Vancouver’s development fever all into a giant, engulfing living space.

But it’s important to note it wasn’t always that way. The October Show in 1983 was an exhibit to protest glaring omissions by the Vancouver Art Gallery’s survey exhibition, Vancouver: Art and Artists, that year. It grew into Artropolis, which happened every few years and continued into the ’90s as one of the only places you could see a major survey of contemporary local art practice.

Things have changed since then. But while our bigger institutions may be thriving, our indie scene has lost many of its DIY spaces due to gentrification. It’s also getting harder and harder for artists who aren’t international art stars to keep a roof over their heads, with a critical shortage in live-work studios.

But back to Seattle. There was a time, in the ’90s, I remember being blown away by a show at the Seattle Art Museum that made this Vancouverite green with envy. In one series of huge rooms, you could walk through a Dale Chihuly installation that found otherworldly glass forms blooming out of the floors or stabbing down from the ceilings; in another, Mary Ellen Mark's black-and-white documentary photos of Indian circus performers and homeless teens were enough to haunt me for months. Across town, the Henry was showing some equally exciting photo art. Chihuly is a mainstream, commercial name now, but Seattle felt like it had a scene happening at that time. And nowhere was that more obvious than in its public art—an area that, it might make residents of the Emerald City feel better to know, still seems engage and excite people more than many of the blend-into-the-environment pieces we have here.

To assuage Seattle-ites, and to keep the debate rolling, here is a story I wrote in 1999. Does it still hold true today?